Post-war Europeans could rationally hold communism a plausible project despite its acknowledged difficulty

Evidence

We are here talking about the events of just seven decades ago — a modest human lifespan — yet it has already become difficult to think ourselves sufficiently into that time to understand how this ideal swayed so many intelligent, sophisticated people in the West. Now, the conventional wisdom has become that Communism would never have worked in any possible world, and therefore that those who failed to see it as futile from the start were fools. Yet, to people who had been through the hardships of the 1930s and the Second World War, it could seem an idea worth believing in despite its acknowledged unlikeliness. People did not see it as a mere dream, of the kind you wake from with a vague impression that you’ve seen something marvellous but impossible. They thought it a practical goal, albeit one to which the path would be long and difficult, with many pitfalls along the way. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 768

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the historical-empathy problem central to philosophy of history — how later generations reconstruct the plausible beliefs of an earlier one; echoes Robert Darnton’s ‘great Cat Massacre’ social-history premise. — connects to: After World War I most Europeans regarded capitalism’s abolition as imminent — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 31
• DEEPTHINKING: This is a genuinely hard-historical-empathy passage: it refuses both retrospective smugness and excuse-making, asking what it means to understand why intelligent people believed an ideal that, ex post, looks futile — a subtle but real cognitive discipline.