THE POLITICS OF PERESTROIKA 65 freakish, chance concurrence of all present individuals. From this also follows a certain negativism in all forms of liberalism. This underlies its obsession with non-interference, with a private sphere or an inner enclave which needs utmost protection from all others. It is because of its commitment to this conception of self that liberalism, at heart, is suspicious of the community and indifferent to the form of state power. I think this also explains why it fails as a coherent and complete political ideology. It is flawed because it does not tell us how an authentic social life can be lived, what it is to be a member of an ongoing community, and finally what form of state power is best compatible with social living. To fill this lacuna, a more adequate political ideology tries to combine liberal principles sometimes with a theory that defends a Hobbesian state, sometimes with one which justifies a Lockean constitutional political form and often with a theory of modern representative governments. Since liberalism appears to be compatible with all these forms of state, it follows that democracy is not constitutive of its basic principles. Not for nothing do we use a portmanteau term called liberal-democratic. While democracy is related to liberalism contingently, I believe it to be constitutively related to socialism. For socialism, individuals are intrinsically social beings in the sense that anything we value, including all the desirable features of individuals, presuppose a background of culture and community. Socialists believe that rather than left to chance this large background must as far as possible be subject to human decisions, shaped by human practice. The social or public sphere is believed by the socialist to be collectively produced and reproduced. We take decisions about it collectively and cannot, without leaving ourselves unfulfilled, opt or be forced out of it. We value our status as political beings, find intrinsic worth in it which cannot be reduced to any worth it may have for an individual purely qua an individual. For socialism, the public or political identity of a person is important because it concerns his or her constitutive features. Political man is constitutive of socialism in a way that it is not for liberalism. A democracy allows the fullest possible development of such a man, hence its necessary rather than contingent links with socialism. Liberalism values privacy and leaps over genuinely social and political practices. Socialism sees in this sheer ignorance, an act of bad faith, or a denial of a crucial dimension of man. Seen in this spirit, perestroika which seeks the restructuring of the political domain is a restoration of the political dimension of persons. If this is what underlies Kaviraj*s claims, I cannot see how a socialist could disagree with him.