4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST The Soviet socialist ideal presented itself differently to different believers in it, but it included, for all of us, the following elements, and it was, consequently, prodigiously demanding: instead of the class exploitation of capitalism, economic equality; instead of the illusory democracy of class-based bourgeois politics, a real and complete democracy; instead of the alienation from one another of economic agents driven by greed and fear, an economy characterized by willing mutual service. People have reacted in different ways when they have concluded that no progress towards the ideal which they once thought the Soviet Union was realising will occur there in the foreseeable future. Their reactions have depended on how they are disposed to explain the Soviet failure, on how they conceive the relationship, in general, between political ideals and political practice, and on aspects of their emotional make-up, such as how robust they are. These variations generate a ramified taxonomy, and, without trying to depict all of it, I want to describe some of its salient branches. First, there are those who both preserve their belief in the ideal and sustain their commitment to pursuing it, with a fresh view about how and/or where and/or when it is to be achieved. Others repudiate the unachieved ideal, sometimes after careful reconsideration of its claims, and sometimes through a form of self-deception in which they let those claims fade from their minds. In either case, a new ideal is adopted and a new politics elected, but those who pass on to them without reflection and in recoil from their loss are practising what has been called adaptive preference formation. Adaptive preference formation is an irrational process in which a person comes to prefer A to B just because A is available and B is not. That A is more accessible than B is not a reason for thinking that A is better than B, but A's greater availability can nevertheless cause a person to think that A is better. The fox who tries and fails to reach the grapes has no reason to conclude that they are sour, but his failure causes him to fall into that conviction. Still others among the politically bereaved form a mixed collection of types who have it in common that they turn away altogether from politics. Some of them still acknowledge the authority of the original ideal, but they are convinced that it is impossible to realise, or virtually impossible, or anyway something they can no longer summon the energy to fight for: perhaps, when they let the baton fall, they hope that somebody else will pick it up. Others reject the ideal and are unable to embrace a different one. To all of these nothing now achievable seems worth achieving, or worth the effort of their own depleted power. When they look at the political world, 'Vanity of Vanities' is what they are inclined to say. In what follows, I shall endorse sustained pursuit of something like the original ideal, but first I want to say a word about tKe Vanity of