Description
The most comprehensive study of ideology and utopia since Karl Mannheim's work of the 1930s, Utopia and Revolution can be understood as turning classical political theory on its head or, perhaps, inside out. Instead of the usual summary of how English radical theologies contributed to the revolutionary process, Lasky shows how such political theology of the mid-seventeenth century became the backbone of the natural history of revolutionary disasters. In a remarkable feat of scholarship in intellectual history, Lasky charts the course of this historic entanglement over some five turbulent centuries of Western history. In so doing, he traces the ideological extension of the human personality through the writings of political theorists, philosophers, poets, and historians.
Table of Contents
1: Ideals; 1: The Utopian Longing; 2: The Revolutionary Commitment; 3: The Heretic’s True Cause; 2: Images and Ideas; 4: Martyrs of Reason and Passion; 5: The Birth of a Metaphor: I; 6: The Birth of a Metaphor: II; 7: The Metaphysics of Doomsday; 8: The Novelty of Revolution; 9: The Great Intelligencers: I; 10: The Great Intelligencers: II; 3: Ideologies; 11: To Armageddon and Back; 12: The Politics of Paradise; 13: The Prometheans; 14: The English Ideology: I; 15: The English Ideology: II; 16: The Sweet Dream
