I was captivated by this book as, I guess, an antidote for the sorry
state of the world. So much of the history of the idealism behind
revolutionary movements has been conveniently overlooked in light of
the ghastly history of the Soviet Empire. The equally ghastly
conditions spawned by capitalistic empires run amok have been
eclipsed by it. It may be that the urge to revolution is just a
component of the human spirit, maybe even an infantile one (in the
sense that it is not all providential and no less morally ruthless in
practice than the order it challenges), yet it was undeniably also a
response to unchecked power and the history of suffering that it
caused. The fervor, the ascetism, the sense of mission all of course
bring to mind the profile of the terrorist in today’s world, and this
is perhaps why the goal of governments has been to rob terrorist
groups of even their claim to ideologies (the war is against
terrorism, not even something remotely salvageable, like “the
communist menace” of 50 years ago.) Any opposition is “terrorist”,
the raison d’etre of such groups being death, chaos and ruination.
There is some mention made of radical Islam of course behind much of
it, but a pointed avoidance underlies it of ever trying to enter into
the mindset of the terrorist. This is a book about such a mindset,
only it provides a good look at the conditions of 19th century
capitalism that gave rise revolutionaries like Babeuf, Saint-Simon,
LaSalle, Marx & Engels, Bakunin and utopians like Owen and Fourier–
and the way rebellious thought converged into disciplined thought,
and that into the course of action eventually adopted by Lenin and
Trotsky. Written in 1938, and prefaced with something of an apology
by Wilson in light of the Stalinist nightmare, it nonetheless does
credit to the hopes and dreams of those who would not allow their
lives to bear passive witness to the decadence of a world order that
was destroying human dignity. Is there a similar way out of the
predicament today? It brings to mind the success too of early
Christianity in the late Roman Empire; as it offered a pure and
ascetic moral alternative to the abuses reigning over the human
population, co-opted though it was to be by those very forces.