Browsing The New Left Reader.
The unhealthy concoctions so many of our fellow boomers imbibed in youth continue to do them and us lasting harm.
The title of Furet's magnum opus was mistranslated into English as The Passing of an Illusion.
It's better taken as The Past of an Illusion.
The publisher's title both misses the allusion to Freud and falsely suggests the book maintains the illusion has passed.
That it's all over for the anti-capitalist radicalism intellectually and politically inspired by the thought and history of revolutionary Marxism.
It's not.
Neither for its chiliastic illusion of a classless utopia nor for the hatred of actually existing civilization it inspires, sanctions, and feeds on - though the former nowadays as in the past seems often no more than a plastic idol whose worship is perfunctory, infrequent, and of doubtful sincerity.
Nor for its hatred of the natural egoism of mankind, expressed on the one hand as the rejection of politics for private life and, in our age, on the other in the institutions of bourgeois society.
Nor for its own institutional expressions as, at best, social democracy and, at worst and far more commonly, democidal chaos and terror.
Think of a cook breaking sixty dozens of eggs and producing only a twelve ounce quiche.
And the pilgrims continue to arrive in Havana.
Since 1917, utopian dreams, obtuse faith in benevolent dictatorship, and irresponsible hatred of the rule of the haves have drained off the support of hundreds of millions from the practical and efficacious left and squandered it on horrors that have done vastly more harm than the most vicious capitalism they opposed.
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