Utopia and Revolution

Download or read book Utopia and Revolution written by Melvin Lasky and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 1253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most comprehensive study of ideology and utopia since Karl Mannheim's work of the 1930s, Utopia and Revolution can be understood as turning classical political theory on its head or, perhaps, inside out. Instead of the usual summary of how English radical theologies contributed to the revolutionary process, Lasky shows how such political theology of the mid-seventeenth century became the backbone of the natural history of revolutionary disasters. In a remarkable feat of scholarship in intellectual history, Lasky charts the course of this historic entanglement over some five turbulent centuries of Western history. In so doing, he traces the ideological extension of the human personality through the writings of political theorists, philosophers, poets, and historians.