3 Review(s)

In the philosophical tradition of George Orwell and Isaiah Berlin, Robert Conquest presents a brilliant work of history and meditation, one that examines the political ideologies that have corrupted the twentieth century and, in the process, sent millions to the slaughterhouse. The main responsibility for our century's cataclysms, Conquest maintains, lies not in impersonal economic or social forces--like revolutionary Marxism or German National Socialism--but in the distortions that polluted human minds with the detritus of absolutist ideas. Conquest finds the failure to understand these phenomena as epidemic in Western civic culture, which has so far--barely--prevailed. Whether discussing Kierkegaard or Koestler or the disasters posed by the new European Economic Union, Conquest has a remarkable ability to fuse literature and history, philosophy and prognostication, and presents here a grand synthesis of our century, seen through its most deeply flawed ideologies.