Utopia & revolution

There is a fateful moment in human history when the vision of the perfect society confronts the movement toward violent social change. In a remarkable feat of scholarship in intellectual history, Melvin J. Lasky charts the course of this confrontation over some five centuries. In so doing he traces the ideological extension of the human personality through the writings of political theorists, philosophers, poets, and historians from Dante to More, from More to Marx.

Revolutionary vocabulary, Mr. Lasky finds, was born in archetypal metaphors of spark and fire, storm and whirlwind, and, above all, the circles of time and the progressions of the very planets. The utopian vision has its origins in the image of a human formicary-the noble ant hill that is repeatedly celebrated from Plato's Republic to Skinner's Walden Two. As the idea of "revolution" moved from astronomy to social theory, the idea of utopia moved from theology to politics. However, Lasky argues, progressive secularization of these attitudes is accompanied by the "eschatologization" of the new ideologies. As a result, the realization of social ideals becomes inseparable from the great incendiary cliché of "revolution." Lasky traces a recurring transformation that turns utopian longing into revolutionary com mitment and then to dogmatic control. This, in turn, encourages doubt and heresy and finally a return to a new utopian vision. In this historical spiral Lasky laments a threefold error which views utopia as a sterile, monolithic harmony; revolution as a rigid commitment to violence; and hope as an orthodoxy incompatible with doubt.

But the history of utopia and revolution is not solely a history of extremism. Lasky also points to attempts to articulate what Dryden called a "high middle ground" between dogmatic commitment to violent social upheavel and degrading compromise of moral principle. It is in this middle ground that Lasky finds a threefold hope-a changing, adaptive social ideal; social reorganization without bewitching metaphor; and respect for a humane reason unconfounded by nostalgia for paradise.