Utopianism is back with a vengeance. We don't understand modern
political passions if we don't grasp the vision that animates Leftist
thinking, at least certain segments of the Left. I am indebted to
Daniel Pipes' review
article pointing me to the subject of his review,
Ernest Sternberg's essay,“Purifying the
World: What the New Radical Ideology Stands For.”
Sternberg, who teaches at the University of Buffalo, writes:
We are in the midst of the worldwide rise of a non-religious chiliastic movement, which preaches global human renewal and predicts apocalypse as its alternative. Like its twentieth century predecessors, the new ideology provides an intellectual formula through which to identify the present world’s depredations, imagines a pure new world that eliminates them, and mobilizes the disaffected and alienated for the sake of radical change. Like the followers of totalitarianisms past, the new ideologues also see themselves as the vanguard for the highest humanitarian ideals. If many of us have failed to recognize the rise of this new movement, the reason may be that we are still trapped in defunct ideological categories.
This promises to be essential reading.