Utopia and Revolution by Melvin Lasky (9780765805737)

Description - Utopia and Revolution by Melvin Lasky

There is a fateful moment in human history when the vision of a perfect society finds itself wedded to the idea of a perfect revolution. Utopians are no longer escapists but get entangled with movements for violent social change. In a remarkable feat of scholarship in intellectual history, Melvin J. Lasky charts the course of this historic entanglement over some five turbulent centuries of Western history. In so doing, he traces the ideological extension of the human personality through the writings of political theorists, philosophers, poets, and historians. The most comprehensive study of ideology and utopia since Karl Mannheim's work of the 1930s, Utopia and Revolution can be understood as turning classical political theory on its head or, perhaps, inside out. Instead of the usual summary of how English radical theologies contributed to the revolutionary process, Lasky shows how such political theology of the mid-seventeenth century became the backbone of the natural history of revolutionary disasters.
With a new introduction by Irving Louis Horowitz that analyzes the book's continuing relevance, Utopia and Revolution will be fascinating and challenging reading for anyone interested in political philosophy and intellectual history.

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