Routledge Utopia and Revolution: On the Origins of a Metaphor

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. Review Melvin. J Lasky provides an elongated mirror in which to see those who have engaged in utopian and revolutionary thought and action, going back to the Hellenic-Hellenistic periods and forward to the time of the book's first publication by the University of Chicago Press in 1976. For those who have turned into utopian and revolutonary mindsets, Lasky Provides an encyclopedic overview and commentary.... This book is a classic.... Students of utopian thought and action, and students of revolutionary movements, who want to grasp the global intellectual underpinnings of historical thought about those contrasting visions of how to alter the direction of human history will find no more learned teacherapologist than Melvin Lasky. And for those who wish to refresh their memories of what they have already learned and half-forgotten, they will gain new insights with which they will or will not agree. For this refresher course in intellectual history of social thought, there is no better mind teaser than this superb book. Every page produces another memorable quotation from Lasky's numerous sources, and more grist for the utopian and revolutionary mill.- - Utopian Studies