cover image The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century

The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century

Francois Furet. University of Chicago Press, $35 (600pp) ISBN 978-0-226-27340-2

A bestseller in France translated into 13 languages, this lucid ""interpretive essay"" is a particularly Eurocentric ""history of the illusion of Communism during the time in which the USSR lent it consistency and vitality."" Despite the broad promise of the title, Furet (1927-1997), a noted historian of the French Revolution (Revolutionary France, etc.), limits his study to Europe, especially France, and barely addresses the post-Khrushchev years. Both European fascism and communism, he argues, were antibourgeois passions fueled by mass politicization and post-WWI social fracturing. Quite interesting for American readers are his portraits of European intellectuals who, despite evidence of Soviet depredations, remained loyal to the revolutionary ideal. Also valuable is his close study of antifascism in France, where antifascist communists gained prominence. In one of the few allusions to the American scene, he notes that European intellectuals lacked a Hannah Arendt to conceptualize both the fascism they had opposed and the communism they embraced under the heading of totalitarianism. While he claims, a bit sweepingly, that the communist idea has now been liquidated, he astutely notes that the problems communism professed to solve--the tensions inherent in bourgeois democracy between the needs of humanity and the needs of the market--remain. That insight is a fitting coda to this solemn and measured obituary of the communist idea. (June)