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triple hope: when utopian longing is a supple changing ideal of
diverse vinues and dreams; where revolution represents a.reformer's
open-eyed recourse to a difficult path of fundamental social reorgan–
ization, without conspiratorial self-delusion and bewitching meta–
phor; and where, whatever the devotion to principles of political
action and ethical aspiration, there is present "the heretic's true
cause"-dissent, tolerance, and a respect for humane reason.
To make his case for these propositions, which will be hauntingly
familiar to readers of Camus, Popper, Orwell,
et at.,
he uses a strategy
at least as old as Burke: pillorying radical intellectuals for the "tragic
turns " of history.
Utopia and Revolution
is a self-proclaimed history of
ideas (or ideologies) which invokes Arthur Lovejoy as its muse and
disdains attempts to approach the issues it raises from a social,
economic, or political vantage point. Unwilling, however, to risk
comparison with the rigorous Lovejoy, Lasky calls his book "less a
formal exercise in intellectual history than a kind of meteorological
report" of the "intellectual climate" of the modern world. It is not clear
if he intends to make some sort of ironic comment on other weather–
men of recent memory, but Lasky is obviously convinced that he knows
which way the wind has been blowing since that fateful moment when
revolution and utopia came together in the mid-seventeenth century.
Although he does allow the healthy development of one counter-trend,
which will be discussed shortly, he believes that ideological attitudes
towards revolution and utopia have followed certain general patterns
that recur in only slightly altered forms. Because of his faith in the
uniformity of this process, he feels safe in mustering evidence willy–
nilly from throughout history to hammer his already well-bludgeoned
points home. This approach leads to an inordinate number of lengthy
citations strung together from a plethora of different sources to serve in
the place of a true historical argument. Although he tries to plead
indulgence in his preface for the "chrestomathic character" of his text,
and in fact does present some very interesting material at times, the
method does not really work. For citation and explanation are not the
same thing and
Utopia and Revolution
'is woefully deficient in
persuasive explanation.
In fact, it is not always easy to determine where Lasky stands on a
number of fundamental issues, and riot only because the organization
of the book lacks any discernable logic. For Lasky is anxious to avoid
leaving any of his bets unhedged. Thus, for example, he tells us that
the well-worn claim that Marxism is a secular religion is "often taken
over in a pejorative manner by anti-Marxist pamphleteers" before he
takes us through a convoluted argument the not very startling conclu-
