Millenarians, Totalitarians, Utopians

Each generation sees history through lenses ground by its own experience. In these days of recoil from radical involvement it is hardly surprising that reinterpretations of just those phases of Western history in which the radical impulse was strongest have become a fashion. What Richard Hofstadter recently did for Populism and the Progressive movement in his The Age of Reform, Norman Cohn, an English historian, has done in his The Pursuit of the Millennium for the chiliastic and messianic movements which arose in Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth century and which played so crucial a part in the peasant and artisan revolts in Germany, France, Bohemia and the Lowlands.

Hofstadter challenged the current liberal and radical interpretations of American Populism by focusing attention on the paranoid, distorted and irrational anti-Semitic elements in the motivations of its leaders and followers; Cohn now contends that those very movements which Karl Kautsky discussed under...