1 THE DEATH OF UTOPIA

1. E. M. Cioran, History and Utopia, London, Quartet Books, 1996, p. 81.

2. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, London, Secker and Warburg, 1957; completely revised edition, London, Paladin, 1970. Cohn’s interpretation of medieval millenarianism has been criticized by David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages, Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1996, pp. 3–4.

3. R. H. Crossman (ed.), The God that Failed, New York and Chichester, Sussex, Columbia University Press, 2001; first published by Hamish Hamilton, London, 1950. The book contained essays by Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Richard Wright, André Gide, Louis Fischer and Stephen Spender.

4. See the brilliant study by Jonathan Spence, God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdomof Hong Xiuquan, London, HarperCollins, 1996, p. xix.

5. ibid., p. xxi.

6. See Michael Barkun, Disaster and Millennium, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1974, for a study of millenarian movements as responses to a breakdown in normal patterns of perception.

7. The literature on Christian origins is vast and highly controversial. However, a profoundly learned and authoritative picture of Jesus as a Jewish charismatic teacher can be found in Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew: A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels, London, William Collins, 1973, republished by the Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1981. For an examination of Jesus’ birth, see Vermes, The Nativity: History and Legend, London, Penguin, 2006. A. N. Wilson presents a view of Jesus similar to that of Vermes in his excellent book, Jesus, London, Pimlico, 2003. The central role of eschatological beliefs in the teaching of Jesus is shown in Norman Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos and World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith, 2nd edn, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1995, Chapter 11.

8. Albert Schweitzer, The Quest for the Historical Jesus, New York, Dover, 2006, p. 369. This passage from Schweitzer is cited by Philip Rieff in his brilliant posthumously published Charisma: The Gift of Grace, and How it Has Been Taken Away from Us, New York, Pantheon Books, 2007, p. 69.

9. For the possibility that Zoroaster may have believed the outcome of the struggle between light and dark to be uncertain, see R. C. Zaehner, The Teachings of the Magi, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1976.

10. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 2nd edn, Boston, Beacon Press, 1963, Chapter 13, pp. 320–40. For other authoritative views of Gnosticism, see Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism, San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1987; and Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, New York, Random House, 1989.

11. For an overview of the heresy of the Free Spirit, see Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, especially Chapters 8 and 9. Cohn’s account of the Free Spirit has been criticized in Robert E. Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1991.

12. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, p. 13.

13. F. Dostoyevsky, ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’, in A Gentle Creature and Other Stories, trans. Alan Myers, Oxford, Oxford University Press World’s Classics, 1995, p. 125.

14. I. Berlin, ‘The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will’, in The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, London, John Murray, 1990, pp. 211–12.

15. David Hume, ‘The Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’, in Henry D. Aitken (ed.), Hume’s Moral and Political Philosophy, London and New York, Macmillan, 1948, p. 374.

16. See Gustavo Goritti, The Shining Path: A History of the Millenarian War in Peru, Chapel Hill NC, University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

17. Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1968, pp. 6–7.

18. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, London, Temple Smith, 1972, p. 77.

19. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, p. 150.

20. David S. Katz and Richard H. Popkin, Messianic Revolution: Radical Religious Politics to the End of the Second Millennium, London, Allen Lane, 1999, p. 71.

21. For a profound analysis of the Russian Revolution as the continuation of a western tradition of religious revolt that included the English Civil War, see Martin Malia, History’s Locomotives: Revolution and the Making of the Modern World, ed. Terence Emmons, New Jersey, Yale University Press, 2006, especially Chapters 6 and 11.

22. E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1959.

23. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, rev. edn, London, Penguin, 1968, p. 52.

24. ibid., pp. 419, 423–4.

25. Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1932, p.123.

26. For a systematic exploration of millenarianism and utopianism, see Ernest Lee Tuveson, Millenniumand Utopia, New York, Harper and Row, 1964.

27. S. N. Eisenstadt, in his Fundamentalism, Sectarianism and Revolution: The Jacobin Dimension of Modernity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000, has presented an illuminating interpretation of modern politics in which Jacobinism is central.

28. Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers: Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War, HarperCollins, London, 2005, p. 101.

29. See Paul Wood, ‘Hunting “Satan” in Falluja hell’, BBC News, 23 November 2004.

30. Claes G. Ryn explores the affinities of neo-conservatism with Jacobinism, in America the Virtuous: The Crisis of Democracy and the Quest for Empire, Somerset NJ, Transaction Publishers, 2003.

31. George W. Bush, Presidential remarks, National Cathedral, 14 September 2002.