History and Utopia
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Publisher Description
“Only a monster can allow himself the luxury of seeing things as they are,” writes E. M. Cioran, the Romanian-born philosopher who has rightly been compared to Samuel Beckett.
In History and Utopia, Cioran the monster writes of politics in its broadest sense, of history, and of the utopian dream. His views are, to say the least, provocative. In one essay he casts a scathing look at democracy, that “festival of mediocrity”; in another he turns his uncompromising gaze on Russia, its history, its evolution, and what he calls “the virtues of liberty.” In the dark shadow of Stalin and Hitler, he writes of tyrants and tyranny with rare lucidity and convincing logic. In “Odyssey of Rancor,” he examines the deep-rooted dream in all of us to “hate our neighbors,” to take immediate and irremediable revenge. And, in the final essay, he analyzes the notion of the “golden age,” the biblical Eden, the utopia of so many poets and thinkers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Human beings, in Cioran's dark vision, are intolerant creatures driven by an appetite for glory; creativity implies self-expansion, hence aggression toward others. "Every conviction consists chiefly of hate, and only secondly of love,'' broods the Rumanian-born philosopher whose home is Paris. Moving from the personal to the political, he argues that tyrants, though abominable, constitute ``the warp of history'' and function as engines of change. He maintains that liberalization would destroy the Soviet Union, but he defines the political destiny of the West as the humanizing and broadening of socialist principles, a goal in which we have failed miserably. The heartfelt existentialist anguish of Cioran's previous books, The Trouble With Being Born and The Temptation to Exist, have yielded here to fashionable despair and questionable generalizations.
