Heaven on Earth The Rise and Fall of Socialism by Joshua Muravchik Encounter, 417 pp., $27.95 Holy Madness Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries 1776-1871 by Adam Zamoyski Viking, 512 pp., $34.95 THERE ARE TWO KINDS of radical: the consolable and the inconsolable. The consolables are those whose grievances can–at least in theory–be addressed, while the inconsolables are those whose rage admits no limits. The 1970s terrorist “Carlos the Jackal” is a good example of an inconsolable. Born Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the son of a fervent Communist who named him after Lenin, Carlos has recently converted in his French jail to Islam because “the only people who do a good job” of fighting capitalism “are the Muslims.” In the course of the twentieth century, the Islamic world, its traditional religious identity shaken by its encounter with modernity, has moved with astonishing speed through liberal, radical nationalist, and socialist phases. All have failed, but the nationalism and the socialism–both Western imports–have become thoroughly intertwined with Islam itself, creating the totalitarian political theology known as radical Islam or Islamism. This shouldn’t have come as a complete surprise since the false promise of religious salvation through political means is a staple of European history. Alexis de Tocqueville noted that the French Revolution was “like Islam,” for it “flooded the whole world with its soldiers, its apostles, and its martyrs.” Shaken by its own encounter with modernity in the Enlightenment, Christian Europe, too, would move through nationalist and socialist phases, which culminated in the twentieth century with the rise of fascism and communism. The course of European political theology is chronicled in two strikingly well-written books. Last year, with “Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries 1776-1871,” Adam Zamoyski gave a picaresque, almost novelistic account of the “spiritual and emotional conditions that gave rise to the cult of the nation” in the wake of the French Revolution and Napoleon’s conquests. In the words of a popular French song, “the people is God–the manifestation of the divine principle on earth.” And now, with “Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism,” Joshua Muravchik tells the story of the kinds of socialism that took hold in the late nineteenth century after the “Holy Madness” of radical nationalism had burned itself out. As Muravchik points out, some socialists were consolables: the late-nineteenth-century German Eduard Bernstein, for instance, and the current British prime minister Tony Blair–people open to evidence and capable of responding to changes in capitalism. And then there are the inconsolables: the mild-mannered utopian socialist Robert Owen, for example, and the ferocious Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who were inoculated against doubt and experience. FOR ZAMOYSKI in “Holy Madness,” a key figure is Giuseppe Mazzini: the great conspirator who, inspired by the French Revolution, devoted his life to freeing Italy from the control of the Austrian Empire. Raised a Catholic, he transmuted the images of the French Revolution into symbols of a substitute faith. The French tricolor replaced the Cross and the “Marseillaise” became the romantic nationalists’ “Te Deum.” Preaching to a peasant population that identified with local villages rather than with an Italian nation, he insisted that “without Nationality neither liberty or equality is possible, and we believe in the Holy Fatherland.” After one of his many failed uprisings, he dressed in black for the rest of his life in mourning for an Italy he described as “the people messiah” whose suffering was, like Christ’s, destined to free all the captive peoples of Europe. Mazzini spoke, says Zamoyski, of one master (God), one law (progress), and one earthly interpreter (the people). His was a generous, if naive, liberal nationalism, which assumed that when men of good will labored for their own freedom through national liberation, they were also working for the freedom of all nations. The great Russian liberal socialist Alexander Herzen best summarized Mazzini when he described him as a man of “grandeur, and, if you like, something of madness.” Mazzini’s path to freedom was a poetic war, a holy war directed against the divine-right monarchs who wanted to stifle the inner creative spirit of the individual nations in their cradle. If Mazzini was the mind of romantic nationalism, Giuseppe Garibaldi was the muscle. The very model of a swashbuckling hero, Garibaldi was the most widely admired man of his era (so much so that Lincoln offered him a command in the Civil War). He is said to have shot disobedient followers dead “without stopping to take the cigar from his mouth.” When the revolutions of 1848 broke out, Garibaldi, who had been in Latin America leading guerrilla rebellions, returned on his boat Speranza, his gorgeous Brazilian wife by his side, and rushed onstage like an operatic lead. In 1862, when Count Camillo di Cavour was ready “to set fire to the whole of Europe” if necessary to expel Austria from Italy, he turned to Garibaldi. The guerrilla leader gathered 1,000 men in backward Sicily, most of them from the advanced North of Italy as well as a Polish legion, German nationalists, former Confederate officers, and Alexandre Dumas (author of “The Count of Monte Cristo”), and began to march toward Rome. Garibaldi’s men were “living in a world of poetry.” When he marched through, said one observer quoted by Zamoyski, “you would not have said he was a general, but the head of a new religion followed by a crowd of fanatics.” He was hailed as “the messiah” by some local priests, but the peasants had little idea of what he was up to. “They barely spoke the same language, when he shouted Viva l’Italia they replied Viva la Talia which they assumed to be the name of the Dictator’s mistress.” The problem for Garibaldi was that he was an Italian nationalist in a land of illiterate peasants who barely recognized Italy as a country, let alone shared a common consciousness. Garibaldi proclaimed himself dictator of Sicily. “Liberty,” he explained, “must sometimes be forced upon the people for their own good.” He had little use for the prose of everyday politics and was bitterly disappointed by the results of Italian unification. “Give us battle, not liberties,” he said and retired to the Isle of Caprera. Garibaldi, the man on the white horse, was both a throwback to the worship of Napoleon and an anticipation of an operatic Italian dictator to come. In 1863 Nikolay Chernyshevsky wrote “What Is To Be Done?” He dismissed the romantic radicals, calling for a new, hard breed of relentless revolutionaries who would achieve salvation through the terrorism that Herzen called the “syphilis of our revolutionary lusts.” The energies that had once gone into liberal if not militant nationalism were transmuted into a call for ceaseless violence. Four years later in 1867, Herzen eulogized the ending of the romantic era: “And you Mazzini, Garibaldi, last of the saints, you have done your part. . . . Make room now for the madness, for the frenzy of blood in which Europe will slay herself or the Reaction will. . . . Now there will be lakes of blood, seas of blood, mountains of corpses.” FOR MURAVCHIK in “Heaven on Earth,” the seminal figure is Gracchus Babeuf, one of the links between the Terror of the French Revolution and the terrors of twentieth-century totalitarianism. In 1789 after he watched the mob that had seized the Bastille parade the head of a soldier on a pike, Babeuf wrote home to his wife, “This is exciting me to the point of madness.” The people want to be happy, and “I don’t think it impossible that within a year . . . we shall succeed in ensuring general happiness on earth.” Disappointed by the defeat of the Jacobins after the Terror, he conceived of a new and total revolution in which “all opposition shall be suppressed immediately by force. Those opposing shall be exterminated.” “Society,” he insisted, “must be made to operate in such a way that it eradicates once and for all the desire of a man to become richer or wiser or more powerful than others.” Babeuf was executed after a failed coup, but his Italian disciple Fillipo Buonarroti carried on the tradition. But he soon came up against the fact that there was no popular support for such a revolution–and he stumbled upon what Marxists would later call the problem of “false consciousness.” Anticipating Lenin, Buonarroti proposed that socialist revolution would have to be imposed by a vanguard of professional revolutionaries. ROBERT OWEN represented a very different strain in socialism. He was the first of the professional reformers, an enemy of violence and a leading utopian socialist. Originally a paternalistic British factory owner who improved both the conditions of his workers and his company’s profits, Owen came to the United States in 1825 to found the utopian community of New Harmony. (He was so well regarded that on his arrival he addressed Congress twice and met with newly elected President John Quincy Adams.) Owen believed that no man “is responsible for his will and his own actions” because “his whole character–physical, mental and moral–is formed independently of himself.” Passionately anti-religious, he argued that, once properly educated, men will have the opportunity to create “a terrestrial paradise,” for “there will be no cruelty in man’s nature.” In what is perhaps the best chapter of “Heaven on Earth,” Muravchik shows the significance of Owen’s New Harmony experiment: Early on, it demonstrated that socialism, despite the virtues of its intentions, simply does not work. New Harmony went through five reorganizations before it collapsed. It couldn’t attract skilled workers, but it did appeal to people even Owen called “perfect drones.” The industrious citizens complained that “instead of striving who should do the most, the most industry was manifested in accusing others of doing little.” Owen responded to lagging production with what was mockingly referred to as the “reign of reports,” designed to explain the deficiency. Distribution did little better. Each member, explains Muravchik, had “a passbook in which their hours of labor were credited and supplies taken from the store debited.” But as a neighbor noted, it was “an expensive system! Plenty of storekeepers, clerks, committeemen and rangers–few smiths, artisans, and farmers.” The cockeyed rationalism of New Harmony is best expressed in its perfectly logical naming scheme. It was “a system of geographic notation in which each degree of longitude or latitude received an alphabetic designation that described its location.” London became “Lafa Vovutu,” and one area of New Harmony was “Feiba Peveli.” Owen blamed the failure of New Harmony on the fact that “families trained in the individual system have not acquired those moral characteristics of forbearance and charity necessary for confidence and harmony.” A fellow Owenite pointed out the circular nature of the argument: “We set out to overcome Ignorance, Poverty and Vice. It would be a poor excuse for failure to [argue] that the subjects of our experiment were ignorant, poor, and vicious.” A benevolent dogmatist, the gracious Owen never learned from his experience at New Harmony. (As his friend Harriet Martineau put it: “Robert Owen is not the man to think differently of a book for having read it.”) But Owen’s sons did learn. When their father went back to England to become “The Rational Social Father” of “The Rational Religionists,” they remained in America. The two sons who became geologists helped create the Smithsonian, another became president of Purdue University, and another a congressman and secretary of the Freedmen’s Bureau after the Civil War. In the last stages of his life, while his sons fulfilled the promise of America, Owen drifted off into spiritualism. OWEN’S ETHICAL APPROACH to socialism was eclipsed in the last part of the nineteenth century by the hard men who were inspired by Marx and Engels. Marxism, a faith which masked itself as science, left no room for ethics. Marx replaced utopian idealism with the claim that he had scientifically proven the inevitability of socialism. But, Muravchik notes, “the claim of inevitability was not an intellectual weapon but a religious one.” It was a version of Protestant predestination designed to embolden the believers. Eduard Bernstein, a German socialist whom Muravchik happily rescues from obscurity, began as one of the believers. Bernstein, born in poverty, became Engels’s prot g and intellectual heir. But his experiences living in England, where workers were making economic and political progress through trade unions, gradually turned him into an apostate. Revolution, it turned out, might not be necessary to improve the conditions of the working class. Further, Bernstein, who was able to think with his eyes as well as his mind, doubted that an “abrupt leap” from capitalism to socialism would produce the “miracle” of an ideal society. His critique of Marx, based on his studies of changes in pay and working conditions, was doubly damning. It applied empirical criteria to a canon that was “a slave to doctrine.” And it robbed socialism of its “religious mystique.” No longer would it plausibly offer a “kingdom of god” on earth. Bernstein’s “revisionism” produced furious responses from Mussolini and Lenin, both of which would drive the ideological course of much of the twentieth century. Benito Mussolini (named, like Carlos the Jackal, after a revolutionary hero, in this case the Mexican Benito Juarez) first achieved notoriety as Italy’s leading left socialist. But when he saw that changes in Italy had muted worker anger, while World War I had ignited the nationalist fervor for which Garibaldi had yearned, he switched horses. He began to speak of backward Italy, shortchanged by its allies in the war, as “the proletarian nation” exploited by the liberal capitalist powers of France and England. “Nationalism,” explained one of his allies, “is our socialism.” Keenly aware of the parallels between himself and Lenin, Mussolini wrote of the Italian left: “I realize that though there are no political affinities between us, there are intellectual affinities,…but with the difference that they reach their conclusions through the idea of class, we through the idea of the nation.” Lenin faced two conceptual problems. First, if Bernstein was right, there was no possibility of a Marxist revolution in Western Europe producing a new Russia. Second, Russian peasant society was as uninterested in Marxism as the Italian peasants had been in Garibaldi’s nationalism. Lenin’s solution was to insist that a group of leaders could–like Buonarroti’s old vanguard–supply the Marxist consciousness absent in the masses. With his success in seizing power, Lenin seemed to have created a magic formula for modernity that still has enormous appeal today. To recognize that appeal, one has only to look at Muslim intellectuals. In the 1930s the Arab world was enthusiastic about fascism and Nazism, seemingly the winning paths to modernity. In the 1950s, they retained the Nazi anti-Semitism but turned to socialism once they saw the seeming success of the Soviet Union. With the rise of the Asian Tigers and the collapse of the Soviet Empire, most of the world realized that the Western liberal model was the only path to modernity. But Islamic intellectuals continue to believe that ideology is, as France’s Olivier Roy explains, “the key to the West’s technical development.” Revealingly, notes Daniel Pipes, “militants compare Islam not to other religions but to other ideologies.” These are Lenin’s true heirs in the world today, the inconsolables whose rage has been fueled by the unbreachable gap between the assumed superiority of Islam and its economic and military inferiority. Inspired by the German Baader-Meinhof terror gang and “educated” by French Third Worldists who see the events of September 11 as acts of anti-imperial bravery, the Islamists–just like the nineteenth-century Marxists–are convinced that capitalism is a trick, a conspiracy against all that is holy. The radicalism of the nineteenth century, it turns out, is merely the prologue to our own time–and the place to begin in understanding that is with Adam Zamoyski’s spellbinding account of romantics and revolutionaries, “Holy Madness,” and Joshua Muravchik’s compelling account of the history of socialism, “Heaven on Earth.” Fred Siegel is a professor at the Cooper Union for Science and Art in New York and the author of “The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A. and the Fate of America’s Big Cities.”
