I Must Read This Book
By“Last Exit to Utopia” should be on every bookshelf in America. That was my first thought when I read Bret Stephens’s review in The Wall Street Journal.
‘Last Exit to Utopia” was first published in France nearly a decade ago. It concerns itself primarily with the failure of much of the French left to come to grips with the collapse of communism and the exposure of its innumerable crimes. The events and debates under its review date mainly to the 1990s, and its author died in 2006.
Yet the book, at last available in English in this fine translation, ought to command close attention because it was written by Jean-François Revel, who—unlike such bien-pensant idols as Jean-Paul Sartre (an admirer of Stalin) and Michel Foucault (a cheerleader of the Ayatollah Khomeini)—deserves to be ranked as the pre-eminent French political philosopher of the second half of the 20th century. What’s more, the book’s themes continue to resonate today, when murderous ideologies still compete for legitimacy and “enlightened” understanding by the Western intelligentsia.
Revel’s great subject was totalitarianism, not just its practice but also its intellectual methods, deceits and disturbing psychological attractions. In books such as “The Totalitarian Temptation” (1976) and “How Democracies Perish” (1983), he dissected the mind-set of Western intellectuals who, living in democracies, found much to admire in gulag countries like the Soviet Union and Cuba and much to detest in free ones—the U.S. most of all.
Why was that? “The totalitarian phenomenon,” Revel observed years ago, “is not to be understood without making an allowance for the thesis that some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny: either to exercise it themselves or—much more mysteriously—to submit to it.”
It was a temptation that proved to be remarkably resilient. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the once fellow-traveling European left had no choice but to admit that the god to which it had long rendered faithful service had been an illusion, and incurably dysfunctional to boot. Yet that grudging concession, as Revel observed, did little to chasten the former groupies of totalitar ianism. On the contrary, it served as a springboard for a fresh assault on liberal-democratic principles.
The tipping point, in Revel’s view, was the publication in 1997 of “The Black Book of Communism,” an 800-page compendium of the serial barbarities of communist regimes from China and Ethiopia to Russia and Cambodia. This massive scholarly undertaking, meticulous in its research and incontrovertible in its findings, was instantly greeted with fury by much of the French intelligentsia, which refused to accept that its own eyes-wide-shut apologetics for the likes of Mao, Mengistu, Stalin and Pol Pot were no less a form of complicity in mass murder than Holocaust denial. ….
Read the whole review. I might buy ten copies and hand them out as gifts. I wish books like this were in our school libraries.
You can buy the book here. Please note that if you make a purchase through this link I will earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
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