Introduction

Catastrophe and Hope

Is there reason to hope today? This is an appropriate question for the final years of the twentieth century because the shadow of death hangs over us all, because revolutionary expectations have been so thwarted, because the century has been a charnel house. Over 100 million human beings have been killed in our century: shot, bombed, starved, gassed, destroyed more slowly by the famine and disease that follow mass killing. Our world is characterized by technology, revolution – and death. The nearly absolute silence about the last is as deafening today as the talk about the others.

In an exceptional book, Gil Elliot remarks: 'The scale of man-made death is the central moral as well as material fact of our time.'¹ We have created a veritable world of the dead in the twentieth century that rivals the world of the living in size and meaning.

In the world of the living, asking about hope is appropriate also because so many of us have lived through the destruction of revolutionary expectations, have seen our faith shattered that human beings could create and dwell in the peaceable kingdom. So much love, so much caring, so much revolutionary fervour have been stirred, and then dashed, by the Soviet Union, then China, then Cuba, then Vietnam, as well as by movements gone awry in the advanced industrial world. It is not just that hope for a better life has repeatedly met defeat, but that defeat has again and again become disaster, encouraging committed and courageous millions to ]et their commitment and courage lapse into cynicism. Certainly the strength and victories of the various powers that be can produce despair; but it is the apparent self-corruption of our inspirations which has led to an even more profound and far-reaching despair among those who might be expected to seek change. What is left to say when good intentions produce great evil? If,

for example, Soviet socialism is the meaning of socialism, then why struggle for it? And if not, then what other inspiring models have emerged in the hundred years since Marx died?

Moreover, so much of what has been humanly positive in our century – the struggles of trade unions for workers' dignity in the capitalist West, for example – seems today inseparable from its own negative side. Unions may indeed protect their workers as never before, but many of them have become vast bureaucracies committed to smoothly managing the process of production, have developed their own stake in economic and social waste and irrationality, and relate to their constituency as clients rather than as members. Even where it is most genuine, progress often seems to bring its own regress, offsetting its own achievements.

It is also appropriate to ask about hope because the advanced industrial societies seem to have reached the end of a historic phase of accelerated economic growth, because the poorest and hungriest countries seem to have become locked into their poverty and hunger, and because the whole world is approaching fundamental ecological limits which must redefine 'the good life' that we expect, covet and defend. As the eighties unfold it becomes depressingly clear to what extent hope has been based on the expectation of ever-expanding economies.

Yet in spite of all these reasons for abandoning hope, the question about reason to hope has an odd ring to almost anyone who has been formed within our dominant culture and is thus committed (even in spite of themselves) to see the world in terms of the march of human progress. It has an unaccustomed ring, indeed, even after the recent chorus of doubts. For example, in the 1970s two established scholars with left-wing orientations created sensations by publishing books whose effect was to doubt the very possibility of hope. Robert Heilbroner, author of The Human Prospect,² and Christopher Lasch, author of The Culture of Narcissism,³ both wrote against their own traditions and argued that basic transformations were creating a dark prospect for the long term. Their books were unusual studies, courageous for thinking against the grain, admirable for following their analyses to pessimistic conclusions, and both were widely read and discussed. Certainly since its beginning there have been profound critics of the modem world who have attacked its 'dark satanic mills'. What distinguished Heilbroner and Lasch from earlier writers like

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Blake and Baudelaire, the Symbolist poets and Nietzsche was that they wrote as scholars of the contemporary world and not as poets and philosophers hostile to 'progress' and determined to voice its dark side. What spoke through them was not an older aesthetic sense and spirit of vitality protesting against the industrial order, but the modern world itself, its very spirit of scientific analysis and anticipation of human betterment. Their writing had the effect of being a reflection by the mainstream on itself, informing us about the end of progress.

As it turned out Heilbroner and Lasch were not lone voices but part of the new dominant chorus as it took shape in the 1970s – including 'neoconservatives' and 'new' philosophers – whose doubts and forebodings about the future, for the first time since the Enlightenment, overwhelmed its hopes. 'Disbelief, doubt, disillusionment and despair have taken over', wrote Robert Nisbet in 1980, '– or so it would seem from our literature, art, philosophy, theology, even our scholarship and science.'⁴ For this historian of progress, our period is 'almost barren of faith in progress'.⁵

If this 'mood of the 1970s' was the most pessimistic trend of sophisticated opinion in over two centuries, its great notoriety stemmed from the fact that the chorus both voiced a widespread public mood and attacked dominant assumptions. But it is notable that this scepticism has not been absorbed and transmuted into a compelling philosophy. Dominant social and characterological structures and values remain officially organized around progress. No matter how widespread, the doubt remains a personal one, never directly challenging the prevailing faith. Today our societies, and whatever oppositions they continue to generate, remain overwhelmingly committed to the old assumptions. For all our doubts we are unable to shed these assumptions easily – whether they are nourished by a continuing commitment to the steady advance of technology, the spread of modernization and enlightenment, the slow victory of democracy or the struggle for socialism. They structure our very perceptions. We possess no equally compelling alternative vision. Yet such rose-coloured lenses make it remarkably difficult to sustain appropriate perspectives for viewing the present, and thus to live in our minds the real life our century has forced us to live in fact.

The Dialectics of Hope

Is there reason to hope? Hope Itself is not a given, but an attitude with its own history. As A. O. Lovejoy described it, the hope embodied in the idea of progress sees, 'a tendency inherent in nature or man to pass through a regular sequence of stages of development in the past, the present and the future, the latter stages being – with perhaps occasional retardations or regressions – superior to the earlier.'⁶ Nisbet explains 'superior' as meaning improvement in knowledge and in 'man's moral or spiritual condition on earth, his happiness, his freedom from torments of nature and society, and above all his serenity or tranquility.'⁷ Today this means that, as Heilbroner points out, industrial societies and all those whose orientation is influenced by them – meaning, today, every society – share the bourgeois or Marxist commitment to a steadily bettering life based on industrialization and modernization. They place their hopes in the growth of the industrial system and the concomitant development of human powers. In the Marxist variant the working class, limited and exploited by the narrow class relations within which the growth of productive and human powers takes place, slowly struggles to consciousness of its vital need to abolish class society. In Ernst Bloch's formulation, humanity becomes the material of hope.

As the foremost philosophy of hope of the industrial era Marxism anticipates both more than the bourgeois hope, and a qualitatively different kind of hope. As Bloch put it: 'Once man has comprehended himself and has established his own domain in real democracy, without depersonalization and alienation, something arises in the world which all men have glimpsed in childhood: a place and a state in which no one has yet been. And the name of this something is home or homeland.'⁸

Marxism takes account of the pain and struggle of the present. It analyses present trends, both positive and negative, and presents a path for action towards future goals. As such, Marxism captured the dialectics of hope for an earlier period both by expressing the age-old human longing for an alternative to a life of pain and suffering, and by showing this alternative to be a realistic tendency issuing from the present. For the first time in history Marxism made the other world of dreams and longings into a project to be struggled for in this world. Yet if Marxism was a philosophy of hope, Marx a fortiori never had

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to inquire about whether there was reason to hope. Given his Hegelian, progress-oriented cast of mind and the earth-shaking developments of his time, he simply looked at industrializing Manchester and revolutionary Paris to see the dialectics of hope at work.

To ask, today, about reason to hope is to confess to the crisis of our world and to underscore the inability of the Marxian or any other readily available vision to point the way to hope in the final decades of the twentieth century. To search in theory is to assume an absence in reality. The seemingly short-range detours of history, its many aporias, its catastrophes, its modulations of good into evil, have accumulated to a point beyond being 'accommodated', as new astronomical discoveries once were by the Ptolemaic world-view – i.e, by yet another ingenious effort to 'save the phenomena' and preserve the original construct with another epicycle. Yet the widespread doubts of today undermine hope itself without sweeping away the old reflexes. It is necessary, then, to ask about reasons to hope, meeting all the burdens that the question implies.

A dialectics of hope today must not accept as given the assumptions of an earlier period; it must ask, rather, whether and how far there has been human progress. What positive directions, if any, can we conclude and project, and can these be separated from the negative? The positive and negative tendencies of the present must be placed in an analysis which comprehends them and, where possible, suggests alternative paths. And finally, today's dialectics of hope must suggest lines of possibility as well, in the process exploring the present and future meaning of the major path of hope, socialism. But (this several volume programme notwithstanding) the dialectics of hope needs to begin above all at the beginning, with the beleaguered tone of the question itself. Is there reason to hope today? This implies something so deeply askew, so fundamentally troubling, as to acknowledge how flimsy have become our previous hopeful assumptions. And no wonder. The very first step, the preface to hope, demands coming to terms with the inferno of our century. It must be based on a dialectics of disaster.

Inferno

For 100 million people, perhaps one out of every hundred people

who have lived in this century, Doomsday has happened. Death – untimely, violent, human-made death on a scale never before possible – has become one of the keys to our civilization.

Ten million people died in the First World War, with the indecisive battle of Verdun alone costing 700,000 casualties and the Somme a million. The Turks massacred nearly a million Armenians. In the early 1930s the building of socialism in the Soviet Union involved the death of perhaps 10 million peasants; as many as another 10 million died during the Purges, mostly in forced labour camps. The Second World War in Europe killed more than 40 million, including 6 million Jews. The Asian Second World War killed perhaps 20 million in the twenty years from the Japanese invasion of China through to the victory of the Chinese Revolution.⁹

Doomsday has its own history in our century. Most of the dead in the First World War were soldiers at the battlefield: to the degree that All Quiet on the Western Front reflects their experience, it describes a turning point in human history. Launched on every side as a noble and heroic cause, the war quickly became a purposeless machine of mass death seemingly beyond the control of those caught up in it. It ground on relentlessly, killing six thousand soldiers a day for four years. The Russian Civil War added two features to the century of mass slaughter. It was an explicitly ideological war: social systems were at stake, not nations or national groups. Not only did both sides shoot prisoners, consequently, but civilians became partisans and victims in vast numbers. If, as Elliot says, 'the foundations of massive military attrition were laid in the First World War', the Russian Civil War did the same for massive civilian attrition, 'and on precisely the same scale'.¹⁰ This included the 'bread war' of 1918, in which the peasants settled old resentments toward many of those who had abused them; starvation caused by the large-scale breakdown of social life during the war; influenza and typhus epidemics; and the famine caused by peasants who reduced by one-half the areas sown with grain. The Soviets, and later the Nazis, introduced a new mass-death instrument: forced-labour camps in which people worked to death on skimpy rations and without adequate clothing or shelter. The Nazis took another step into the inferno by deliberately gassing and shooting millions, creating a world of death as an end in itself. During the war the British and Americans added massive aerial firebombing to the twentieth-century techniques of mass killing. The

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United States went further by using atomic bombs and later (in Vietnam) by developing and using defoliants and anticivilian weapons such as napalm and cbus, and by perfecting automated air warfare.

If 100 million people have been killed, more than half of those have died directly at the hands of their adversaries, while the remainder have died by the increase in famine and disease emanating from mass killing (unanticipated at first, now quite predictable). If perhaps one of every hundred people alive in this century has been thus killed, we can only be awestruck by the possible total number who have experienced the inferno: the diseased but not dead, the wounded survivors, the comrades and relatives of the living, the surviving inhabitants of the ghettos, concentration camps, battlefields, and cities under siege. Do the afflicted survivors outnumber the dead by ten, or by twenty-five to one? Whatever the number, an astoundingly high proportion of peopie have experienced Doomsday – not just death, but the destruction of their immediate world and the permanent affliction of their memories.

Achieving this on such a colossal scale has required both human and technical preparation. The First World War began the process of brutalization that would make mass murder humanly thinkable. It is in the decades since that the technical and organizational capability for mass murder has reached its full flowering. Mass murders presuppose a mood of total warfare, a brutalized population which accepts the need to 'save' itseff, suitable weaponry, and organizational procedures to rapidly identify, process, and kill enormous numbers of enemy peopie, And so, today, we are prepared. We hover on the edge of oblivion, waiting – perhaps protesting – as total warfare is brought to perfection. The many Doomsdays point towards an ultimate one as the refinement, production and deployment of nuclear weapons continues and the strategists lay plans for their use in combat.

Inferno and Hope

Can we speak of hope today, then, without allowing these facts into our speech? If not, we lie, our optimism trivialized by denial. Its landscape reminds us that we live in a historical period for which we have not been prepared, where hope itseff appears more as an unquestioned reflex than a meaningful anticipation, a period characterized as

much by mass murder as by progress, which demands we describe it using terms like evil and madness. If it is to be authentic today hope can no longer remain an unquestioned term, an assumption. It must rather be restored, if this is indeed possible, by first wrestling with the Devil of the holocausts – the Nazi, the Communist, the bourgeois-democratic¹¹ and the universal holocaust. The paradox of this study reflects the reality – beleaguered, hope calls for a contemporary statement which cannot even be begun until we have come to grips with our century's disasters. If a preface to hope is possible, its site can only be in the Valley of Death.

Hope is a way of acting. It implies more than faith, need or dream. As action it is objective claim and subjective anticipation: referring always to real possibilities whose roots are planted here, in this ground, even if it be the Valley of Death. In his study of the subjective terrain of hope, Ernst Bloch never permitted himself to unlearn his Marxism: in the deepest sense hope always depends on events.¹² Humans may irrepressibly project a field of images, dreams, desires – but the real-world prospects for realizing them are decisive.

Yet to call our century one of revolution, technology and death is to acknowledge the cloud that has stolen over all political analysis and action. That Doomsday cloud casts a shadow of absurdity on our efforts to live, work and struggle as before, as if life could be so easily normalized after the catastrophes. We continue unmindful, ritualistically – seeking out prospects and tendencies for the betterment of life, looking for ways to intervene positively, treating the world as if it were not grotesquely skewed. The same course after the Holocaust as before? Yet what alternative is there (except withdrawal) to continuing as usual, resting on accustomed but petrified premisses, and using accustomed but blunted tools?

The purpose of this study is to begin to construct an alternative. Yet we cannot help but begin rather like Serenus Zeitblom in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus: a witness of catastrophe, trying to reflect on it even as he shakes and trembles, trying to return the world to its normal categories even as he describes its falling apart. The catastrophe is morally, politically, emotionally and intellectually too much to grasp; yet he wrestles with his own corner of it, driven by a desperate need to tell the story. Indeed, the first lesson of the catastrophes should be to let ourselves be derailed, rather like Serenus. Just let the facts sink in: what seemed to be the world's most advanced country – with its highly

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developed capitalism and equally developed working class – under great stress created the monster-movement of Nazism with its paroxysms of power and degradation; in its isolation the revolution which was truly the hope of humanity made its people into the enemy of the people, accordingly killing and enslaving one in every six of them on its great path to industrial and military progress; and the world's richest, freest, most powerful postwar society, out of the success of its normal functioning as a bourgeois democracy, saw fit to virtually destroy a small, backward Asian society while trying to remake it in its own image. These catastrophic events demand to be noticed, and their impact felt. Then, their lessons may be learned.

Why?

These three examples – the Holocaust, Stalinism, and the American war in Vietnam – command the stage of this study. There are, alas, other candidates but these three have dominated the consciousness of our century for good reason: one by its colossal barbarity and all-but unspeakable results; another by its murder of hope along with humanity in a process of construction: and the third because of its David-Goliath encounter.

A preface to hope which leads us through this Valley of Death must paint its evil as evil. On the twisted trees, the bombed-out buildings, the heaps of rubble, the piles of bones and teeth, is written everywhere the question found and scratched all over the Gulag by Old Bolsheviks: Zachto – Why?

Why? is the appropriate question for a humanity caught up in the ruins without knowing it, dominated by past Doomsdays yet unable to tear itself away from the path to the next and final one. We must sift in the ashes and understand why these events happened, because otherwise we will be little wiser about which paths to follow and which to avoid, which dynamics poison societies and which liberate them.

To ask why means to avoid both the demonizers – who would raise Doomsday beyond the human – and the trivializers, who would integrate it as one more fact into the network of facts amidst which we make our way. It is to look for the human beings who are responsible for these heinous human acts. Again and again in our century, evil has been a praxis – the conscious, deliberate project of human collec-

tivities. Understanding it means studying the social structures and dynamics out of which humans acted to destroy other humans by the millions. What kinds of societies, what social stresses and contradictions, produced mass murder?

This study will ask then, to what extent a shared history, social process, set of attitudes generated all three disasters. I will focus in turn on the striking impotence, the madness, and the choice of evil of those holding state power.

We must return to our starting point: in spite of everything, is there reason to hope? Can anyone any longer retain faith in the progress of democracy, socialism, modernity? In humanity? And if not, what lessons of hope can be drawn from the century? Certainly we may each preserve our own images – of the Kronstadt rebels fighting and dying for the proletarian revolution, say; of Trotsky resisting Stalin until his last breath; of the insurrection at Treblinka which destroyed that death camp; of the stars of David with which Jewish soldiers decorated Hitler's looted and bombed-out retreat at Berchtesgaden; of the Vietnamese fighting from tunnels to withstand B-52 bombings. But do such images stand for any more than a subjective and Sisyphean commitment to keep on, no matter what? Or are they irreducible acts of resistance from which any future hope begins?

Conclusions

One inescapable conclusion is that our century's catastrophes have transformed the field of possibilities. Every positive possibility, every progressive tendency, now has an explicit alternative – the abyss. And the abyss now contains familiar paths and shapes, not merely the ominous, imponderable threat of I-know-not-what. We need not imagine or guess at the results of nuclear war; as Jonathan Schell has pointed out, we have information and testimony about it. We know what the worst is like – at Auschwitz, at Hiroshima, at Kolyma, at My Lai.

Another conclusion is that the worst can be done in the name of socialism and democracy as well as in the name of the Master Race, that it can be done, indeed, in the name of survival and revolution as well as of racist oppression. Claiming universal human improvement, Stalinism destroyed differently from Nazism, but on such a colossal scale that it is the destruction and not the difference which stands out.

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Events have proved the negative currents of history to be no less real than the positive, and sometimes more so. Jewish ex-Communist survivors on Israeli kibbutzim overlooked by the now-silent bunkers of the Golan Heights speak of the death of internationalism at Auschwitz, of the need to protect 'our own' even if against all of humanity. The main task today may therefore be particular survival rather than universal justice, in a world where barbarism is so palpably real. Isn't this the meaning of a 'Never Again' which, in addition to genuine self-defence, justifies to the continued repression of Palestinians by Jews?

I remain convinced of the force of Rosa Luxemburg's prediction that the future paths of humanity are socialism or barbarism; but alas, our world is not so simple. We cannot avoid the question Luxemburg could only begin to conceive: what if socialism itself develops in ways that are barbaric? Marx articulated perhaps the most sophisticated notion of progress – one which included the sense of contradiction and bitter conflict as the very motor of advancement, the negative as a source of human social growth. But our history shows even this view to be overly sanguine, shows social reality to be more obstinate and explosive than anyone formed in the Enlightenment tradition could ever have imagined.

The Death of Progress

'But in contemplating history as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed, a question necessarily arises: To what principle, to what final purpose, have these monstrous sacrifices been offered?'¹³ Hegel's answer rested on Progress: 'The events which make up this picture of gloomy emotion and thoughtful reflection are only the means for realizing the essential destiny, the absolute and final purpose, or, what amounts to the same thing, the true result of world history.'¹⁴ Today, the Holocaust has cancelled Progress. It has put human beings in a new situation, one which allows no faith in a transcendent and saving law. Progress was a kind of secular religion, a congenial faith for those who had abandoned God as well as for those who had not.¹⁵ Progress capitalized implies that there are great forces at work improving the world despite our own limited consciousness or our destructive acts, be those forces divine or human in nature. As

they eventually draw all of humanity along with them, suffering becomes redeemed as sacrifice en route to a better world.

To capitalize Progress reflects well its reified, hypostatized status, severing it from its human agents and raising it beyond them. Even while claiming to base itself on human beings, Marxism accommodates their relapses, reversions and resistances – all of which ultimately point forward again – but not their mad, wanton destruction. Germany, the Jews and the world did not move forward because of Hitler. The Soviet Union's modernization under Stalin could by no standard be said to require the massacres and brutalization accompanying it. Neither set of events can be described as a temporary regression along the basically positive human path: so great is their scale, their sheer weight on the conscience and consciousness of the survivors, that they must annul forever any laws of human advancement.

Such events demand that we abandon what we now know were the illusions of hope – which made one tendency into the dominant and permanent one, and projected laws and trends as independent of actual human beings. Alongside genuine human improvement, the century forces us to give at least equal weight to human destructiveness. Without the lenses of Progress we can see that the world indeed displays many and contrary tendencies. If any new notions of progress are possible they should be rooted not in reified concepts and passive hopes but in concrete human beings who act in history, and will have to accommodate the full range of their past and potential actions. In some respects humanity and human life may indeed improve over time. But can we any longer deny that both may also worsen?

The Reasons of Unreason

We are, it will become clear, pursuing the reasons of unreason. We all know, spontaneously, before turning to reflect on it, that much of life and death in this century has been mad. The intuitive sense – expressed for example in countless daily conversations about the madness of planning for nuclear war – becomes violated and repressed by 'serious discourse which presumes catastrophic events to be guided by rational' and functionally minded political intelligence. Yet Enlightenment categories and their Marxist progeny are mocked by the Valley of Death – where normal sense has been drastically ruptured, mental

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constructions substituted for attention to the real world, and human reality systematically bent into a caricature of itself.

At the root of our own commitment to Progress has been a sense of history as the steady, if halting and contradictory, realization of Reason and Freedom. The class struggle, the progression from lower to higher forms of social life, the initiation of History as a self-conscious undertaking with the advent of socialism – these Marxist expressions reflect the dominant mood no less than the bourgeois-democratic hope of human advance through 'Enlightenment' – democracy, education and technology. Modern, secular hope has been fundamentally tied to various nuances of belief in the progress of Reason in history.

Perhaps the most unanimous and deeply felt moment of such hope was immediately prior to the First World War when nearly all voices in the West, official and oppositional, spoke as if the advent of a truly rational world was at hand. And indeed the war employed the tools of modernity, of reason and progress, as never before – but to explode its own hopes, in the process sounding the opening chords of the history of unreason in our century. 'Henceforth', wrote Georges Sorel, 'everything is given into disorder; nothing is necessary any longer; no predictions are possible.'¹⁶

If I avoid capitals for unreason to emphasize that it is not a force beyond human beings, we must also insist that it has a history in our century, just as Hegel insisted on speaking of a history of Reason and Marx of a history of class struggle in relation to the development of productive powers. The history of Doomsday is the history of unreason. I avoid 'Unreason' to emphasize that its history is no more, and no less, than the story of human beings who choose, under whatever pressures and within whatever structures, to act madly.

In the chapters that follow I will sketch some key moments of that history in order to trace their logic. I will explore societies that have organized themselves against phantoms, murdered systematically those who threatened no one, and plunged masses of people to their death for no comprehensible purpose. After drawing the conclusions from our meditation on past disasters we will be better able to confront two of the greatest threats of the present – the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the growing spectre of nuclear war. With an eye toward avoiding yet greater disasters, we will seek to understand their sources, and their links with the history of unreason.

The history? We shall see not only that the catastrophes have their

own internal histories, but also that they absorb, and are generated by, each other. Is there then a movement, a historical progression of humans acting madly in our century? Yes, just as surely as there is a movement of liberation, of class struggle. If so, its human sources, its logic must be traced back into their social roots. Must because its unchecked progress leads us towards the final burst of unreason, the flash of ultimate madness in which everything will be destroyed. Of our century's tendencies, possibilities and experiences, this choice of total destruction remains with us today as one of the most present and real.

Such a threat – palpable, present at every moment – gives a special urgency to this study, making a work of the philosophical and historical imagination into a work of politics. No book can save the earth, however. This study, like any other, is only a work of thought – action lies elsewhere, beyond the intellectual experience of these pages. Politics is the appropriate response to this history of unreason.

Authentic political analysis today searches for the people who will make it real, and such a lack of self-sufficiency puts a hole at its centre. I have mentioned Lasch and Heilbroner – I would fault them for a false objectivism and self-sufficiency, for writing at too great a distance from this search, for ignoring the hole. Neither remembers or anticipates the power of people acting collectively to transform our history. Any reason to hope must lie there, not on the level of reified forces of Progress, Reason, or class struggle, but among concrete human beings who oppose this war, demand the end of that injustice, or seek to overturn this social system and take it into their hands. Lasch wrote in the 1970s as if the 'narcissistic' 1960s had not also witnessed committed mass movements which helped to end the war in Vietnam, to improve the position of blacks in America, and to reopen the space for political opposition. Heilbroner, likewise, ignores the only possible solution to the problems he raises – that human beings have again and again moved to the centre of the historical stage on which he seems inclined to see only their managers, rulers and analysts. Political writing which does not grope for this subject and see itself as lost without it, both arrogates to itself too much importance and condemns itself to melancholy.

This is a political study, then, first because hope is action, and a reason to hope would lead there. Also because this century has made it unthinkable to wait on the relentless unfolding of History – next time

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the world itself may be destroyed as its people rest secure in its relentless Progress, while its rulers again go insane. And also because, (as we shall see) after Auschwitz, the Gulag and Vietnam, human struggle – politics – is the only possible antidote to social madness. As I shall argue, the mad destructiveness of the last two at least, as well as of the nuclear threat, began in a politics which sought to repress politics. The struggle against such madness begins the very way the American Civil Rights movement began, with human beings saying 'No' – themselves deciding to resist. By way of a philosophical and historical conclusion, after exploring the dialectics of disaster, I shall argue that resistance is one of the fundamental lessons of hope. Today, hope is indeed a different hope, one with a different meaning and focus, from that with which the century began. It is chastened, diminished, without transcendent support, yet nonetheless firm and strengthened by having survived this horrible reality. In this spirit, let me give away the ending before we begin: I will conclude that the last word is action.