Marx in '71: The Heavenly City of the 20th-century Philosophers

Extract

My title comes, of course, from Carl Becker's poignant and ironic book on the Utopian thinkers of the Enlightenment. The poignancy in Becker's work came from his sympathy for their ideal of a society transformed, a mankind fulfilled. The irony came from his pained perception that these eighteenth-century thinkers had made things absurdly easy for themselves, by supposing that the order of nature—correctly understood—contained the code for a benign society, without ancient tyrannies and traditional terrors. The optimism and self-confidence of the Enlightenment have long since vanished. Anguish, even desperation, mark the writings of the contemporary heirs of the Enlightenment, the Western European Marxists. The revolution seems always to recede over the historical hbrizon. It is far too early for another Becker to record their chronicle. History may, in the end, show them to be at least as successful as their spiritual ancestors and perhaps more so. I wonder, however, whether they may be imitating the eighteenth-century in one important respect.