BOOKS
317
TWO CHEERS FOR THE STATUS QUO
UTOPIA AND REVOLUTION: ON THE ORIGINS OF A METAPHOR,
OR SOME ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE PROBLEM OF POLITICAL
TEMPERAMENT AND INTELLECTUAL CLIMATE AND HOW IDEAS,
IDEALS, AND IDEOLOGIES HAVE BEEN HISTORICALLY RELATED.
By Melvin
J.
Lasky. University of Chicago Press. $35.00.
It is difficult to approach a book by Melvin Lasky on the
subjects of utopia and revolution without certain expectations. He has,
after all, long been associated with the English intellectual journal
Encounter,
which in numerous essays both written and solicited by
Lasky, has frequently made its views known on these matters. More–
over, if one recalls that Lasky was the only one of its editors to remain
with
Encounter
when its links to the C.I.A. through the Congress for
Cultural Freedom were revealed in 1967, these expectations are bound
to be reinforced: automatically, one anticipates yet another Cold War
diatribe against the follies and crimes of radical elitists. And yet, a
small voice of hope cautions, a university press of the stature of
Chicago is not likely to print 600 pages of text and another 100 of
densely-written notes without good reason. Nor do suspicions of
possible C.I.A. sponsorship last very long in the face of a $35.00 price
tag ($29.95, if one was clever enough to buy before Christmas). Surely,
Lasky has come up with arguments, ideas, and evidence that take us
beyond the narrow world of the partisan political journalist. Or at least
that is what one wants to believe before making a commitment to this
formidable tome.
But alas, the reader is not very far into the book when it becomes
readily apparent that it is the University of Chicago Press rather than
Lasky who has let us down. For
Utopia and Revolution
is not the
record of a scholarly discovery or intellectual journey into fresh
insights. It is instead an unabashed polemic, far longer and more self–
indulgent than it need be, in favor of the very views we knew Lasky
held all along. He spells them out for us in his preface:
Where history has taken, I feel, a profound tragic turn is in the triple
error: utopia conceived as a sterile monolithic harmony; revolution
as a dogmatic commitment to total change and violent reconstruc–
tion; principles of hope and belief transmogrified into an orthodoxy
incompatible with heretical dissent or critical opposition. Where
history provides consolation (and I, at least, feel so consoled) is in the
