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Last Exit to Utopia: The Survival of Socialism in a Post-Soviet Era
Here is a tasty paradox: How did the Leftist legions regroup after history delivered its fatal blow to the Soviet system? Simple, argues Jean-Francois Revel: the Left retreated to the impregnable fortress of the Utopian ideal. After all, socialism incarnate was always vulnerable to criticism. Utopia, on the other hand, lies by definition beyond reproach. With the demise of the Soviet system, there is no longer a vast and flailing embodiment of their vision, and Utopia’s haughty champions can again rage boundlessly.
In Last Exit to Utopia, the latest English language translation of one of Europe’s most controversial intellectuals, Jean-Francois Revel takes aim at socialist apologists who have attempted to erase or invert the manifest failures of socialist ideology. As the tide of Big Government rises in America, Revel’s forewarnings here are as prescient as they are frightening.
300 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2000
14 people are currently reading
332 people want to read
About the author
Jean-François Revel
81 books104 followersJean-François Revel was a French politician, journalist, author, prolific philosopher and member of the Académie française since June 1998.
He was best known for his books Without Marx or Jesus: The New American Revolution Has Begun, The Flight from Truth : The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information and his 2002 book Anti-Americanism, one year after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. In the latter book, Revel criticised those Europeans who argued that the United States had brought about the terrorist attacks upon itself through misguided foreign policies. He wrote thus: "Obsessed by their hatred and floundering in illogicality, these dupes forget that the United States, acting in her own self-interest, is also acting in the interest of us Europeans and in the interests of many other countries, threatened, or already subverted and ruined, by terrorism." In 1975 he delivered the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden, The Netherlands, under the title: La tentation totalitaire (The Totalitarian Temptation).
He was best known for his books Without Marx or Jesus: The New American Revolution Has Begun, The Flight from Truth : The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information and his 2002 book Anti-Americanism, one year after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. In the latter book, Revel criticised those Europeans who argued that the United States had brought about the terrorist attacks upon itself through misguided foreign policies. He wrote thus: "Obsessed by their hatred and floundering in illogicality, these dupes forget that the United States, acting in her own self-interest, is also acting in the interest of us Europeans and in the interests of many other countries, threatened, or already subverted and ruined, by terrorism." In 1975 he delivered the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden, The Netherlands, under the title: La tentation totalitaire (The Totalitarian Temptation).
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
February 12, 2012
If you tend to roll your eyes at the thought of reading tracts by French political intellectuals, well, who can blame you? The odd thing is that, in my experience, France's marginalized classical liberal intellectuals--such as Jean-François Revel--are just brilliant and rhetorically savage. Revel's book, written shortly before he died, is worth a place on the shelf of anyone who hopes that the left's utopian collectivist schemes don't end up killing another 100 million people in this century.
December 11, 2010
Revel studies the logic of the European Left in its manifestations over the last 50 years or so. I'm not sure I've ever read such surgically precise analysis. The book would deserve five stars had it moved beyond the limits of the European arena, which seems too easy for the author. A key Revel understanding pops up here several times: "The totalitarian phenomenon is not to be understood without making an allowance for the thesis that some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny: either to exercise it themselves or—-much more mysteriously—-to submit to it."
If you are sympathetic to Leftist politics, get your armor on. Or stay far away from this guy -- he will give you major trouble.
If you are sympathetic to Leftist politics, get your armor on. Or stay far away from this guy -- he will give you major trouble.
January 28, 2013
Amazing read...Revel documents the way Communists' justifications for their failed economic system can be summed up by the old Marx Brothers line: "Who you gonna believe? Me,or your own eyes?"
February 28, 2017
I am a huge fan of Revel and this is one of his best works. Revel is one of the greatest societal/political commentators of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He doesnt get the credit he deserves as he is a gadfly poking at the foibles and issues on the Left, being from and on the Left he is succinctly qualified to do so. Unfortunately the left doesn't like being poked and reminded of ideological contradictions and rectifications so he never got the credit he deserved.
April 29, 2019
3'5
Repetitivo en ocasiones, no es el mejor libro de este hombre pero sí una sensata descripción de las paradojas y amnesias selectivas de la izquierda ideológica y su contumaz resistencia a bañarse en las aguas de la realidad.
Repetitivo en ocasiones, no es el mejor libro de este hombre pero sí una sensata descripción de las paradojas y amnesias selectivas de la izquierda ideológica y su contumaz resistencia a bañarse en las aguas de la realidad.
December 24, 2012
Nobody talks about Utopias any more, do they? They used to of course and not so very long ago. We still talk about revolutions, all the time, and some people can get quite poetic and significant about the French revolution. The Russian revolution, acording to this line of thought, somhow went wrong and while they dont dream of a return to the cold war and having Reagan back they do get a bit dewy eyed about the 'idea' of communism. Which is what utopia used to be called before it was tried.
For one thing everybodies idea of utopia would be a bit different and for another organising every facet of human life on scientific lines pre-supposes that human beings are logical creatures- and if i can presume to speak for all of mankind -we're not. We're very fond of it of course when it comes to putting up a fence or balancing the houshold spending but we're not slaves to it. Golf, surfing and falling in love to give just 3 examples of things that we would willingly do that defy logic.
There was a time though, long ago, when clever people or rather people with too much time on their hands made some pretty big plans, or plans to do planning- some sketchy ideas based on principals. Well not so much principals as asperations; with things like peace, brotherhood/sisterhood, fairness and the wholesale extermination of all those who disagreed.
Blinded by the ideology of the former there were those who excused the latter despite the fact that those carrying out the latter turned out not to mean the former.
In this boofk JFR storms around the quiet reading rooms,the reference libraries, the thoughtful discussion programmes, the smoky left wing enclaves and coffee shops looking for these folks like Cyrano de Bergerac after that chap who was foolish enough to mention his nose. He cares not one jot for the fragile sensitivity of 'intellectuals' who batted radical 'spirit of 68' eyelashes through the iron curtain. He wants the arguement had, he wants it had now, and it resembles nothing so much as a tornado ripping through a half built shed. Loved it!
For one thing everybodies idea of utopia would be a bit different and for another organising every facet of human life on scientific lines pre-supposes that human beings are logical creatures- and if i can presume to speak for all of mankind -we're not. We're very fond of it of course when it comes to putting up a fence or balancing the houshold spending but we're not slaves to it. Golf, surfing and falling in love to give just 3 examples of things that we would willingly do that defy logic.
There was a time though, long ago, when clever people or rather people with too much time on their hands made some pretty big plans, or plans to do planning- some sketchy ideas based on principals. Well not so much principals as asperations; with things like peace, brotherhood/sisterhood, fairness and the wholesale extermination of all those who disagreed.
Blinded by the ideology of the former there were those who excused the latter despite the fact that those carrying out the latter turned out not to mean the former.
In this boofk JFR storms around the quiet reading rooms,the reference libraries, the thoughtful discussion programmes, the smoky left wing enclaves and coffee shops looking for these folks like Cyrano de Bergerac after that chap who was foolish enough to mention his nose. He cares not one jot for the fragile sensitivity of 'intellectuals' who batted radical 'spirit of 68' eyelashes through the iron curtain. He wants the arguement had, he wants it had now, and it resembles nothing so much as a tornado ripping through a half built shed. Loved it!
October 23, 2023
One of the best political theory books I've ever read. Though written at the turn of the century, "Last Exit to Utopia" is terrifying in how what Revel describes and dissects is *exactly* what we see happening all around us today in the United States, as socialism is but the seed of Communism. The road collectivists travel is everywhere and always paved with death, misery, scarcity, terror and the cheers of the intelligentsia.
Astonishing in its spot-on, withering look at basically Western intellectual thought. Revel defines and illuminates the great fault line in Western thinking: the failure to make Communism and Nazism - which are the *same thing* - recognized as such. It’s a tragedy they had no Nuremberg-like trials in Moscow after the Communists fell there. They should have hanged several of them and stamped them for history as the equivalent they were/are to the Nazi leadership. They are monstrous criminals and identical in their politics and methods, but through the careful work of socialists this reckoning has never happened.
Rarely is a book more packed with insight; practically every page has wisdom. Here are some of the brilliant passages:
"Communism's stroke of genius was to authorize the destruction of liberty in the name of liberty. It allowed liberty's enemies to carry out their work of annihilation, or to exonerate those who carried out the work, under a 'progressive' rationale."
"Communism always and necessarily engenders criminality, and in this respect it is indistinguishable from Nazism."
Yet people see Lenin or Mao, Stalin or Che Guevera or the Shining Path - mass murderers all on and some on a scale Hitler can't match - in a heroic light. Seattle puts a statue of Lenin in a park; Mao on Park Avenue. We are supposedly "all socialists now," the sirens of collectivism are the most powerful people in government, business and education. Their lies of "equity" will spell ruin and death because they always have, invariably. "Their principal obsession would be the complete annihilation of the individual."
"Communism was something worse than an 'illusion.' It was a crime. To have been a Communist was to have been an active participant or accomplice in a colossal crime against humanity. Since 1917, none of the arguments advanced in favor of actually existing Communism have stood up to reality and none of its vaunted objectives have been attained: not liberty, not prosperity, not equality, not peace. And so it sank under the weight of its own vices rather than the blows of its adversaries. Yet perhaps never before has it found so many ferocious defenders willing to twist the facts so unscrupulously...What self-abrogation, to take up arms valiantly for a political and ideological system devoid of a future, even a present, and with a past so sterile, bloody and grotesque."
To achieve this, of course, only totalitarian systems will suffice and those *require* terror.
"Pro-Nazi revisionists are few in number; the Communist variety are legion. In France, there is a law that provides for sanctions against the lies of Holocaust deniers. Yet Communists are permitted to lie with impunity about the crimes of their chosen camp."
Modern universities: "Individual autonomy must be eradicated in favor of collective indoctrination." The American press: "Instead of helping the public understand what is going on, they persist under the pretext of helping the most powerless among us, clinging to their calamitous prejudices."
Ask yourself, why is the language of the left so filled with "smash" and "dismantle" and "crush" and the like? Because they are only about destruction; they have no constructive ideas or alternative to offer. Instead, they are in their fortress of ideas.
"The central role of the 'revolutionary passion' that was ignited by the 1789 Revolution in France and swept across other European countries...and then across the entire world. The idea that it is impossible to improve societies through a process of gradual reform, that progress requires all existing societies to be completely swept away and replaced by clean slates, as it were - this redemptive political vision allows us to understand the proud thought of placing oneself in the service of a 'radiant future' has been able to strangle the critical spirit and the moral sense of so many people."
Look at the censorship the modern left embraces, or the horrible lies they told about Covid. "It strives to suppress - and it must in order to survive - all thinking that is opposed to or outside this official party line, not only in politics and economics, but in every domain: philosophy, arts and literature, even science."
Just a great book. Everyone should read this book, and yet no one even knows about it. Deliberately, the regime must keep books like this in the dark.
Astonishing in its spot-on, withering look at basically Western intellectual thought. Revel defines and illuminates the great fault line in Western thinking: the failure to make Communism and Nazism - which are the *same thing* - recognized as such. It’s a tragedy they had no Nuremberg-like trials in Moscow after the Communists fell there. They should have hanged several of them and stamped them for history as the equivalent they were/are to the Nazi leadership. They are monstrous criminals and identical in their politics and methods, but through the careful work of socialists this reckoning has never happened.
Rarely is a book more packed with insight; practically every page has wisdom. Here are some of the brilliant passages:
"Communism's stroke of genius was to authorize the destruction of liberty in the name of liberty. It allowed liberty's enemies to carry out their work of annihilation, or to exonerate those who carried out the work, under a 'progressive' rationale."
"Communism always and necessarily engenders criminality, and in this respect it is indistinguishable from Nazism."
Yet people see Lenin or Mao, Stalin or Che Guevera or the Shining Path - mass murderers all on and some on a scale Hitler can't match - in a heroic light. Seattle puts a statue of Lenin in a park; Mao on Park Avenue. We are supposedly "all socialists now," the sirens of collectivism are the most powerful people in government, business and education. Their lies of "equity" will spell ruin and death because they always have, invariably. "Their principal obsession would be the complete annihilation of the individual."
"Communism was something worse than an 'illusion.' It was a crime. To have been a Communist was to have been an active participant or accomplice in a colossal crime against humanity. Since 1917, none of the arguments advanced in favor of actually existing Communism have stood up to reality and none of its vaunted objectives have been attained: not liberty, not prosperity, not equality, not peace. And so it sank under the weight of its own vices rather than the blows of its adversaries. Yet perhaps never before has it found so many ferocious defenders willing to twist the facts so unscrupulously...What self-abrogation, to take up arms valiantly for a political and ideological system devoid of a future, even a present, and with a past so sterile, bloody and grotesque."
To achieve this, of course, only totalitarian systems will suffice and those *require* terror.
"Pro-Nazi revisionists are few in number; the Communist variety are legion. In France, there is a law that provides for sanctions against the lies of Holocaust deniers. Yet Communists are permitted to lie with impunity about the crimes of their chosen camp."
Modern universities: "Individual autonomy must be eradicated in favor of collective indoctrination." The American press: "Instead of helping the public understand what is going on, they persist under the pretext of helping the most powerless among us, clinging to their calamitous prejudices."
Ask yourself, why is the language of the left so filled with "smash" and "dismantle" and "crush" and the like? Because they are only about destruction; they have no constructive ideas or alternative to offer. Instead, they are in their fortress of ideas.
"The central role of the 'revolutionary passion' that was ignited by the 1789 Revolution in France and swept across other European countries...and then across the entire world. The idea that it is impossible to improve societies through a process of gradual reform, that progress requires all existing societies to be completely swept away and replaced by clean slates, as it were - this redemptive political vision allows us to understand the proud thought of placing oneself in the service of a 'radiant future' has been able to strangle the critical spirit and the moral sense of so many people."
Look at the censorship the modern left embraces, or the horrible lies they told about Covid. "It strives to suppress - and it must in order to survive - all thinking that is opposed to or outside this official party line, not only in politics and economics, but in every domain: philosophy, arts and literature, even science."
Just a great book. Everyone should read this book, and yet no one even knows about it. Deliberately, the regime must keep books like this in the dark.
April 23, 2017
Me sorprende que hoy en día no se lea tanto ni se encuentren libros de Revel en las librerías. En medio de la dictadura de lo políticamente correcto, la voz del pensador francés es necesaria para dar un justo equilibrio. Me encantó cada palabra, cada crítica, cada revelación de mitos. Destaco algunos: el totalitarismo y su origen en Rousseau –en un giro que recuerda el que sugirió Camille Paglia en Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson–, cómo la teoría francesa contemporánea es totalitaria per se (la destrucción del pensamiento de Bourdieu es imperdible; lástima que no hubiera hecho eso con Michel Foucault o Jacques Derrida), su reivindicación de El Libro Negro Del Comunismo y la necesidad permanente de, así como justamente reivindicamos la historia y el sufrimiento bajo el nazismo, necesitamos investigar más los crímenes del comunismo y cómo, en una especie de trauma freudiano (lo llama Revel "de miembro ausente" y pienso, inevitablemente, en el David de Miguel Ángel Rojas), la izquierda no ha hecho nada para criticar los desvíos y las consecuencias de sus acciones o de los más extremistas (incluso aquellos que se desmarcaron de la línea oficial comunista tras hechos como Praga o Budapest terminaron reivindicando el pasado). Es vital leerlo, entenderlo y conectarlo con muchos, con tantos hechos que suceden hoy en día.
September 3, 2016
Jean-François Revel, member of the French Academy and former leftist and speechwriter for French President François Mitterrand of the social-democratic Socialist Party, saw the intellectual conflict between socialism and classical liberalism as a conflict between a set of a priori assumptions and a set of principles derived from observation, respectively. Revel writes:
"Ideology [..] has the singular property of causing zealots to project the structural features of their own mentality onto others. Ideologues cannot imagine that an objection to their abstract systems could come from any source other than a competing system."
Revel's novel claim is that that capitalism is more of an application of observation and analysis to the production of useful economic principles than an ideology. The thinkers who described capitalism made no assumptions about how the world should work. Revel notes this, and declares socialism an ideology because it starts off with a set of assumptions and notions derived from introspection, not experience.
"Ideology [..] has the singular property of causing zealots to project the structural features of their own mentality onto others. Ideologues cannot imagine that an objection to their abstract systems could come from any source other than a competing system."
Revel's novel claim is that that capitalism is more of an application of observation and analysis to the production of useful economic principles than an ideology. The thinkers who described capitalism made no assumptions about how the world should work. Revel notes this, and declares socialism an ideology because it starts off with a set of assumptions and notions derived from introspection, not experience.
February 5, 2014
O livro se trata exatamente do que reza o seu subtítulo: "Um ensaio acerca da sobrevivência da utopia socialista". Para o autor, uma das explicações para isso, a despeito derrocada dos regimes comunistas mundo afora, é a sua elevação ao "império sublime das intenções, onde nenhum ideólogo jamais estará errado" (p. 20). Revel, então, vai proceder a uma demolição das principais mentiras inventadas pela esquerda, incluindo a de que "o comunismo é bom por natureza". Certamente, uma das leituras do ano para mim, e uma das melhores que já fiz sobre o assunto.
April 21, 2017
Mr. Revel did a fantastic job exposing the situation with the "ultra-left" in France relative to Europe. The history was very revealing for someone like myself who knows nothing about the political situation in France. If you've heard of some of the terrible political situations in France such as high youth unemployment, 35 hour work weeks, crippling strikes, I suggest you read this book to add depth to your understanding of the discourse there.
On the other hand the book had a few downsides in my opinion. I struggled to continue reading the book after Chapter 1 because I didn't feel that chapter was informative enough. Revel also would occasionally speak approvingly of things such as the American intervention in Iraq, which was a complete disaster. The other big thing I noticed was the optimistic way in which he referred to Democracy (I'd recommend everyone read Democracy: The God That Failed by Hans Hermann Hoppe for a more thorough treatment of Democracy)
On the other hand the book had a few downsides in my opinion. I struggled to continue reading the book after Chapter 1 because I didn't feel that chapter was informative enough. Revel also would occasionally speak approvingly of things such as the American intervention in Iraq, which was a complete disaster. The other big thing I noticed was the optimistic way in which he referred to Democracy (I'd recommend everyone read Democracy: The God That Failed by Hans Hermann Hoppe for a more thorough treatment of Democracy)
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews