History and Utopia
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
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.
Customer Reviews
Paradise lost
Born in a country of Islamist Utopian. I came across Cioran and felt as we were some lost brothers. I can compare this book to Miltons paradise lost epic poem sharing the same age old dream of man to go back to that everlasting happy golden age with no disease, pain and sufferings. Is it possible for man to go back to paradise? Cioran doesn’t provide any answers and why would he? Same as Dostoevsky never answers whether man can live in paradise again after getting obsessed with all the vices of bloodshed, hatred and greed and power. The book leaves you with more curiosity as to venture upon the most important heiddegerian phenomena of being towards death? What to expect after death? The books is an effort to prove man’s inability to live with peace and love and further leaves us with the same nostalgia for the lost paradise.