Socialism and Capitalism, Left and Right

I effrey Goldfarb asks a very challenging questionor rather two: "Are there any longer significant differences between left and right, and between socialism and capitalism?" He rightly sees these questions as having been raised, or rendered more acute, by the revolutions of 1989 and the current transformations taking place in the Soviet Union, and by the collapse of communism and anticommunism. I shall first comment on his way of posing the questions and his answers to them; and then I shall try to offer some answers of my own. Goldfarb offers a "new end-of-ideology thesis," which records, welcomes, and supports the rejection of "a totalitarian culture, with ideological politics, scientistic Utopias, and complete resolutions to complex societal problems," of "veils of ignorance and illusion" which "rationalized political actions, but had little to do with solving human problems or promoting human creativity." Essential to ideology, thus understood, were its "easy dichotomies" that have "defined a great deal of our political, economic, and sociological expert opinion and common sense." We must, says Goldfarb, "struggle to overcome them" and discard the old "either/or ideological map" according to which "a country is either free or it is totalitarian; it is either a democracy or a dictatorship; it is either capitalist or socialist (or 'communistic')." Now, it is striking that, for Goldfarb, these are the dichotomies characteristic of the now-anachronistic ideologies