[...] the tendency to interpret his biography as an illustration of the classic dilemma, in the quest for the common good, between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa-between the politician grappling with the constraints and trappings of power and the intellectual whose role is precisely to question power. [...] these regimes were not democracies, but dictatorships; they were eminently unpopular, as the rebellions in Budapest, Prague, and Gdansk demonstrated; and they were not even in Eastern Europe, but in Central Europe. The dissident intellectual catapulted to power also presides over the demise of the intellectual and the declining status of culture in democratic societies. (résumé de l'éditeur)