Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology By Daniel J. Mahoney. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. 200p. $65.00 cloth, $21.95 paper.

Extract

This very remarkable and most timely book differs from others on Solzhenitsyn by highlighting his “critique of ideology” and his “recovery of the ‘natural world’” (p. 3). Ideology, for Solzhenitsyn, is the name for the lie characteristic of the twentieth century: Human beings, through historical transformation, can end suffering and so make virtue or the distinction between good and evil superfluous. The state and God can wither away because we will no longer be political and spiritual beings. We know that ideology could not change human nature or what Daniel Mahoney calls “the ontological structure of the world,” but it could magnify human evil to genuinely monstrous dimensions. Solzhenitsyn's contention that communist ideology was responsible for the murder of tens of millions has become much less controversial in recent years. The Black Book of Communism, Mahoney shows, provides abundant evidence for what Solzhenitsyn already knew.