The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History FROM THE PUBLISHER
"Aware of the "primitive delusions" that have attracted people to rogue ideologies over the past century, Robert Conquest has devoted a lifetime to exposing the political and mental distortions that have spawned or appeased implacable regimes and led, all too often, to death and destruction." "Here, in The Dragons of Expectation, whether discussing the political thinking of ancient Greece, the corrosive effect of ideological socialism, or the inanities of the European Union, Conquest assesses the ravages of our past, the absurdities of our present, and the pitfalls that lie in our future." As Conquest observes, the early part of the sixteenth century "saw what appeared to be, or foreshadow, the rise of a tolerant order on the Continent." Yet it was not the heirs of Montaigne or Erasmus who prevailed, but the fanatics and dogmatists, whose ideas plunged Europe into a downward track with a series of internecine programs the likes of which had never been seen before.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
This occasionally brilliant and at times idiosyncratic book is a frontal assault on the pieties of the left. At its heart is Conquest's critique of a deluded idealization of the Soviet Union and the underestimation of the danger it posed to the West-the focus of Conquest's long and distinguished career (The Great Terror, etc.). But his targets here are far broader: if dreamy-eyed socialism has died, its ghost lives on, he says, in a mishmash of icons and fetishes ("democracy," "liberty," "progress"), held together by uncritical utopianism and reducing our intellectual culture to cerebral jelly. The original nursery of dragons, he suggests, was the French Enlightenment; today, these beasts dwell in academic corridors, where professors speak in jargon and channel the repressive spirit of the medieval Inquisition. His St. George, bearing the banner of the "Law-and-Liberty" tradition, is English-speaking: the United States and the United Kingdom. Responding to the war against Islamist barbarians, Conquest assails veneration of the U.N., the EU, the International Criminal Court, a knee-jerk intellectual anti-Westernism and the presumption that benevolent colonial intervention is necessarily bad. This pithy book, which concludes with a strange, poetic composition masquerading as an epilogue, will infuriate as many readers as it gladdens. But Conquest has thrown down a gauntlet to which we should all respond. 3 b&w illus. (Jan. 24) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
The cranky elder statesman of international politics is back with another terse and reasoned jeremiad. As in his earlier Reflections on a Ravaged Century, Conquest presents a series of case studies to make his point that we continue to live in dangerous times while liberals are generally deluded by the realities of the modern world. Conquest devoted most of his scholarship in the 1960s and 1970s to the Soviet Union under Stalin. Thus, it is not surprising that he draws on familiar Cold War situations in this book. Conquest, however, is wide-ranging in his critique of misguided assumptions and accommodations to an "intellectual anti-Westernism." He injects learned doses of political theory, human psychology, and social history into his essays as he cautiously ponders the future. He argues for the development of stronger "law and liberty cultures" in the world but fears that our current ideological delusions may prevent this. Conquest is always provocative and worth reading, regardless of one's political position. Recommended for most academic libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 8/04.]-Thomas A. Karel, Franklin & Marshall Coll. Lib., Lancaster, PA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Essays by distinguished historian and humanist Conquest (Hoover Institute/Stanford) blame faulty worldviews for a wide variety of missteps and miscalculations. Following up on Reflections on a Ravaged Century (1999), the author continues to reassess the effects of Western misguidance and its contributions to a protracted and costly Cold War with a Soviet Union that was itself cloaked in self-deception and political fallacies. He still holds to the general notion that the European Union is a utopian failure in its own right, and that some form of "Anglosphere," an interdependent union of English-speaking nations sharing fundaments in law and human rights, offers the best hope for shoring up and preserving the Western tradition against all who come against it. Although he frustratingly does not elaborate, Conquest includes terrorism among the "isms" that tend to feed on imperfect research and misinterpretations of history that amount to nothing more than so much bad intelligence. He finds "fashionable academics" behind decades of terrorist recruiting worldwide, from the IRA to India, noting that "the September 11 bombers were almost all comfortably off young men, some having been to Western universities and there adopted the extreme anti-Western mindset." The bombing itself, Conquest further notes, was celebrated by both extreme rightists (e.g., American Nazi Party) and leftists here and in Europe. In an entertaining diatribe on bureaucratic muddling that has the effect of promoting barbarism in our culture, the author rails against a "half-educated or diseducated class that puts vast wealth into purchasing objects they believe to be 'art.' " While he claims America is more infected withthis syndrome, Conquest's ultimate example is London's Tate Gallery, which acquired from the late Italian artist Piero Manzoni cans of his own excrement, artifacts created specifically to expose gullibility in art buyers. Insightful, cantankerous pursuit of lingering lessons.
Home
