Trouble in paradise
Christopher Booker
Utopia and Revolution: On the Origins of A Metaphor Melvin J. Lasky (Macmillan £15.00)
Once long ago men lived in innocence and brotherhood. Today all is corrupted. Injustice and tyranny reign. The times are terrible and intolerable. But soon, very soon, a cataclysmic change will take place. The men and institutions which symbolise corruption and oppression will be swept away, in ade'lige of chaos, fire, blood and destruction. Eventually a new society will emerge, purlfied, just and wholesome. Paradise will have been regained. To anyone alive in England in the 1640s, France in 1790, Russia in 1917, or even Paris in 1968, such imagery would have been only too familiar. For of course these are the outlines of the great revolutionary archetype which, six or seven centuries ago, emerged from the womb of JudaeoChristian eschatology on to the secular Plane, and has haunted Western civilisation in. countless ways ever since. From time to time indeed it has gripped men and societies so forcibly, like a kind of madness, that theY have attempted to put their vision into Dr.actice. The results have invariably been disillusioning, often hideous—but still the inestnerising pattern recurs. The theme is both fascinating and important. It is extraordinary that until now no °Ile has ever attempted to survey it on the grand historical scale that it deserves. But trbat is what Melvin Lasky, the editor of ,cmcourrier, has set out to do in this massive ‘,7°9 Pages) and long-awaited work—and qn itripressive achievement it is.
er Lasky's book, which originated in a of lectures at Chicago in 1965, might
nbl. of
be described as a cross between a
s LgiltY anthology (it must contain over
quotations) and a prolonged medita
. It is not a political study of revoluinons, so much as an account of the endlessly iicurring ideas, imagery and language which ,,ave inspired men to carry them out—and ‘ev'so of the ideas and language which in oferY age have accompanied the dying away d. .1:evolutionary fervour, as the inevitable niislilusionment and the desire for quieter, re moderate times have reasserted them the Emperor Frederick II ('Stupor di') who first asked the question 'where Paradise ?', with the implication that it il.inst be here on earth to be regained. ShorttYli before, at the end of the twelfth century, pie Mad Calabrian monk, Joachim of v.i:ra. had produced the first recognisable Would of the forthcoming cataclysm that 'uld usher in a 'reign of die faithful' on earth (like many of his millennial successors he made the fatal mistake of giving a precise date to his prediction, 1260). Dante in his De Monarchia argued that by defying the Pope the Emperor could preside over a secular paradise; Columbus thought when he discovered America that he had found it; and shortly after that, Thomas More described the just and harmonious state of Utopia.
But of course More never envisaged that his Utopia, based on such humanist virtues as toleration, might actually be brought into being—certainly not by first plunging society into a maelstrom of chaos. And one of Lasky's most important themes is how, as the centuries passed, the ideas of Revolution and Utopia became in a sense ever more estranged from one another, as those who wanted the former became so preoccupied with the imagery of the act of revolution itself, the liberation through destruction, the purging of corruption by blood and fire (Turn, Baby, Burn'), that they were no longer interested in describing the perfect state that would arise afterwards. 'We have no intention,' said Marx, 'of composing menus for the cafés of the future,' and in 1877 he was enraged by 'a new outbreak of Utopian Socialism,' radicals 'playing with fancy pictures of the future structure of society.'
From the widening horizons of the Renaissance, Lasky takes us through a study of Philip Sidney's Arcadia (with its curious revolutionary undertones) to the
strange figure of Giordano Bruno, the latesixteenth-century heretic who believed that, following the 'Copernican revolution' in the heavens, an entirely new kind of man and society might emerge on earth. In the seventeenth century, as the word 'revolution' gradually took on its modern meaning, we come to one of Lasky's two big historical set-pieces: his detailed discussion of the great revolutionary explosion in England of the 1640s and 1650s, the ideas of Hartlib and Comenius, the wild apocalyptic visions of the Fifth Monarchy Men, the appalling disillusionment of the Levellers, one of whose letters ('we have sown the wind, and we have reaped a whirlwind . . when we looked for liberty, behold slavery !') might have served as the epitaph to a million revolutionary hopes since.
The English seemed to be immunised by their experience of the mid-sixteenth century. The shrewd arguments for moderation of such men as Dryden, and even more Locke, in the sadder and wiser years after 1660, provide the nucleus of a new antirevolutionary critique (of a kind More would have approved). By the time we come to Lasky's second big set-piece, the French Revolution, we are seeing it to a great extent through the eyes of those few Englishmen, Henry Yorke, Sir James Mackintosh, who despite their initial enthusiastic involvement in the great drama across the Channel, soon moved (like Wordsworth) right to the opposite extreme.
If it is difficult to do justice to Lasky's work in a short review, this is partly because of its extraordinary richness as an anthology it abounds in memorable quotations and incidents—a long and fascinating footnote on the painter David's highly dubious involvement as a member of the Committee of Public Safety; Marx at a dinner at the Devonshire Club in 1879 envisaging 'a great and not distant crash in Russia' ; Bakunin jumping from his coach to instruct some German peasants as to how to burn down their landlord's castle; Wagner proclaiming 'I am the Revolution' and basing Siegfried on his memories of the heroic Bakunin in the Dresden revolt of 1848; three almost identical passages of revolutionary incantation, from Proudhon, Malcolm X and President Sukarno; Rosa Luxemburg arguing that, unless there is complete freedom after the revolution, 'bureaucracy alone remains active'; and hundreds more.
But summary is also difficult because, to a certain extent, the author himself has become submerged in his own wealth of research. On occasion coherence in the argument is supplied more by the consistency of the evidence than by the style with which it is presented. I would also have liked to see a more rigorous exploration of the psychic origins of the great archetypal idea of 'rebirth' and revolution—with perhaps a reference or two to the work ofJung. Nevertheless. despite its vast price, this is a book which no future study of revolution will be able to ignore.
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