1. Isaiah Berlin, cited in Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (London 1998), 301.

2. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, translated by Maurice Cranston (London 1968), 64.

3. This said, unfortunately there is a more-or-less persistent tension in Political Thought from Machiavelli to Stalin with regard to whether its primary objective is to say something definitive about Stalinism or, somewhat differently, to say something about Machiavelli’s political thought and, more specifically, about ‘Machiavellism’ in politics.

4. This is Stalin’s alleged statement of 5 May 1941 that the future Bulgarian Communist leader, Georgi Dimitrov, recorded in his private diary. See Ivo Banac (ed.), The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933-1949 (New Haven, CT 2003), 160.

5. Machiavelli, Selected Political Writings, edited by David Wootton (Cambridge 1994), 30-1. In truth Machiavelli’s advice here has greater application to Lenin. While Leninism was in many ways ‘the Machiavellization of Marx’, as Rees points out, under Stalin (and contra Machiavelli) ‘methods of force and compulsion were translated from temporary expedients into a permanent system of rule’ (244, 239).

6. Erik van Ree, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin: A Study in Twentieth Century Revolutionary Patriotism (London 2002).

7. Ibid., 17.

8. See Neil Harding, Theory and Practice in the Socialist Revolution (London 1981), Vol. 2 (Lenin’s Political Thought).

9. Van Ree, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin, 270.

10. For Aron on Machiavellism, see Daniel J. Mahoney (ed.), In Defence of Political Reason: Essays by Raymond Aron (London 1994). On secular religions, see R. Aron, ‘The Future of Secular Religions’ and ‘From Marxism to Stalinism’, in Yair Reiner (ed.), The Dawn of Universal History: Selected Essays from a Witness of the Twentieth Century, translated by Barbara Bray (New York 2002), 177-203; and R. Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals (New York 1957).

11. Cited in Kenneth McDermott, Stalin: Revolutionary in an Era of War (Basingstoke 2006), 13.

12. A similar point, for instance, is made in Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps (London 2004), 13.

13. Steven Lukes, ‘Epilogue: The Grand Dichotomy of the Twentieth Century’, in Terence Ball and Richard Bellamy (eds), Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge 2003), 602-26.

14. Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers (New Haven, CT 1932).

The Ambiguities of Antecedents and Legacies: Political Ideas and Political Extremes in the Twentieth Century

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