Two Ideas That Shook the World

...Ironically, Marxist-Leninists certainly stand closer in many ways to Bakunin than to Marx...

...But I am convinced the book is entirely worthy of the time and effort one has to devote to it...

...The second category is the Utopian reformer, Lasky's chief example here being Thomas More, who first used Utopia in its modem sense...

...I think Lasky does an injustice to Marx in classifying him, without qualification, as an antiutopian revolutionary...

...Shortly thereafter we move from Voltaire (again), to Malcolm X, to over a page of excerpts from the speeches of Sukarno, whose statements are subsequently interpreted with the aid of citations from F.R...

...His own deepest sympathies most often seem to lie with those who maintained a "moderate" attitude in times of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary turmoil, such as Pierre Bayle in the 17th century, Madame de Stael in the 18th, and Albert Camus in the 20th—all citizens of the nation that is the veritable homeland of the revolutionary impulse...

...Lasky emphasizes that the union of Utopia and revolution as political end and means did not come about until the 17th century...

...Whatever others may have made of such a view, it is not really comparable to the chiliastic nihilism of a Bakunin or to the organizational fetishism of a Lenin...

...But this is essentially a by-product of his Lovejoyan method rather than an indication of a consistent adversary posture on his part...

...Popper's difficulty," he observes, "is that he wishes to hold fast to attractive and humanizing social ideals, to those 'important and far-reaching political reforms' which would combat human misery, and at the same time he prefers to remain unemotionally aloof from Utopian clarity about ultimate aims and the kind of commonwealth we should consider best...

...Re calling his passage from the City College of New York alcoves to the anti-Communist Congress of Cultural Freedom in the '50s to the editorship of Encounter, one might suspeot that his aim is to account for the persistence of error, the evil enohantment of messianic fantasies...

...Such an approach does not make for easy reading: Close to a third of the book consists of direct quotations...

...His objection to utopianism, in short, rested on the conviction that the new society would already be partly formed as a result of gradual evolutionary changes, meaning that the transition to socialism could take place only, as Schumpeter put it, "in the fulness of time...

...Doubtless there is a sense in which "the historian is quoting least when he is quoting most...

...To begin with, there is Lasky's major subject, the Utopian revolutionary from Masaniello to Daniel Cohn-Bendit...

...To Marx, revolutionary violence was the "midwife of history" presiding over the birth of a "new society already formed in the womb of the old...

...They soon were linked to religious notions growing out of Christian eschatology, becoming fully secularized only in the past two centuries...

...Previously, they had been separate concepts with different intellectual pedigrees: Utopia meant an ideal society in post-Platonic theology and philosophy, whereas revolution was no more than an astronomical term describing the movements of celestial bodies...

...If one is moved to complain that many of them might better have been located in the concluding notes, one must report that the notes already cover more than 100 pages of quotation-laden small print...

...While Lasky recognizes that revolutions do not succeed in creating a "world made new" discontinuous with the past and that "all change is piecemeal," he rejects Popper's concept of "piecemeal engineering" as the only purposive kind of change...

...It is, of course, the richness and subtlety of Marx's views that have made possible the many diverse interpretations and contrasting versions of praxis claiming to find warrant in them...

...Utopia and Revolution is demanding to read, let alone to review, and I confess I have missed several editorial deadlines before completing the job...

...Lasky tells us in the Preface that Utopia and Revolution is "a kind of ideological autobiography...

...Inevitably, this note is often struck, yet in uncovering the variety and richness of the Utopian imagination the author says as much in favor of it as against it...

...Breoht and Sartre are good examples of supremely gifted men for whom, as Lasky writes in the last sentence of the book, "the revolution remains their Utopia...

...author, "Skeptical Sociology" The ideas of "utopia" and "revolution" emerged in Western thought at the time of the Renaissance...

...The treatment of contemporary thinkers and political leaders, however, is largely confined to the book's first section...

...Next comes a survey of several European Renaissance thinkers...

...Lovejoy, Lasky pays painstaking attention to what that philosopher called "the actual language of ideas" as revealed by relevant texts displaying the recurring images and metaphors clustering around the main concepts themselves...

...Karl Popper is seen as the prototypical theorist of the third combination, antiutopian reform...

...Leavis, Bronislaw Malinowski and Proudhon...

...Melvin J. Lasky attempts to trace the continuities, combinations and transformations of these two "unit-ideas" in the course of their emotionally-charged history...

...Still, Utopia and Revolution painfully lacks the selectivity and coherent argument of a comparable study like Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium, although Cohn for the most part dealt with an earlier period...

...He even acknowledges the occasional una-voidability of revolution in "tragic circumstances in which no trimming of branohes but only going to the root of the matter will do...

...But the two ideas have not always been in harmony since the 17th century either, and some conceptual order can be imposed on Lasky's rambling discourse by iden tifying four political types who have accepted both, one or neither of them...

...Heavily indebted to A.O...

...Lasky recognizes the "chrestomathic character" of his enterprise, and invokes Lovejoy's method in defense...

...Nearly half the work then concentrates on 17th century England, particularly on the writings inspired by the Civil War?from John Milton to lesser-known tractarians on the Cromwellian far Left...

...Lasky's volume extends from the late Middle Ages to the present?from Tommaso Campanella and Giordano Bruno to Jean-Paul Sartre and Malcolm X. Its density is suggested by his citing and commenting on Rosa Luxemburg, Campanella, More, Erasmus, Spinoza, Voltaire, Georg Lukacs, and several others within a mere five pages...

...Mikhail Bakunin's statement, "the urge to destroy is a creative urge," epitomizes this outlook, but it also represents the limit Utopian revolutionaries tend toward when means displace ends and the organizational instruments for gaining or maintaining power reduce the visions they are supposed to be serving to mere legitimizing rituals...

...Antiutopian revolutionism, the last category, comes across as the most destructive and potentially totalitarian...

...True, Lasky's focus relegates to the background the political and social conditions that Utopia and revolution are a response to, and highlights the extravagant, apocalyptic language they are expressed in...

...The effeot of all this is to persuade us fully of the antiquity of the ideas of Utopia and revolution, and of the relationship of their modern manifestations, notably Marxism, to a traditional world view that owes much to the Book of Revelation...