socialized to believe in, and because the intellectual apparatus they have been
trained in is only efficient given such assumptions. There is no ultimate
solution, and perhaps it does not really matter. What is important is not so
much that values do not enter into the choice of theory or research method,
but that they be explicit and open, so that those who oppose them can criticize
the work. Some political theories ofliberalism, likeutilitarianism, seek for
value freedom in a different sense; they seek to create a constitutional frame-
work in which as wide a variety of human values as possible can be achieved.
This sense of value freedom could be said to pervade most justifications for
democracy.
Vanguard of the Proletariat
The vanguard of the proletariat is aMarxistnotion made more famous, and
relied upon heavily, byLeninism. It refers to thecommunistparty in any
society, and especially in arevolutionor a post-revolutionary period. The
basic Leninist thesis is that the ordinary mass of the industrialproletariat
cannot come to a true consciousness of their situation, and cannot develop a
fully revolutionary spirit, spontaneously and without leadership. Consequently
a party of professional revolutionaries must be formed from those who do have
the capacity to escape fromfalse consciousnessand ideological manipula-
tion. This party will raise the revolutionary consciousness of the masses, and
lead them in the revolution, hence being the ‘vanguard’. The more important
extension of this doctrine, in itself plausible, is that, after the revolution, there
will still be a need for direction and control of the efforts of the proletariat in
building the truly socialist society. Thus the initial revolutionary leadership
becomes institutionalized into adictatorship of the proletariatvia the rule
of a single dominant communist party. Here there is a considerable strain
between the original thought ofMarxandEngelsand the subsequent
interpretation of how a post-revolutionary society should be run, as developed
by Lenin and taken to extremes byStalin. Inside the Marxist tradition
Trotsky’stheory of ‘permanent revolution’ avoids at least this institutionaliza-
tion, as didMao Zedong’sdoctrine of how communism should develop in
China, as best exemplified by hiscultural revolutionin the 1960s.
Vatican II
The second Vatican Council in the modern history of the Roman Catholic
Church sat from 1961–65, involving nearly 3,000 delegates from all sectors and
regions of the church. It was called for largely spiritual reasons, to help find the
church a stance in an increasinglysecularizedand politically divided world,
and it differed enormously in tone from much of the Roman Catholic
Vatican II