Dragons of Expectation - Hardcover

CONQUEST. Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0715634267 ISBN 13: 9780715634264

Publisher: DUCKWORTH, 2005

Synopsis

A landmark defense of civilization that illuminates the political degradations and intellectual fetishisms of our world.

The publication of The Dragons of Expectation in 2005 reaffirmed Robert Conquest's stature as a leading intellectual and one of the world's great humanists. In the tradition of Isaiah Berlin's The Crooked Timber of Humanity and George Orwell's Essays, this book brilliantly traces how seductive ideas have come to corrupt modern minds; to often disastrous effects. In what Publishers Weekly called "a frontal assault on the pieties of the left," Conquest masterfully examines how false nostrums have infected academia, politicians, and the public, showing how their reliance on "isms" and the destructive concepts of "People, Nation, and Masses" have resulted in a ruinous cycle of turbulence and war. Including fresh analyses of Russia's October Revolution, World War II, and the Cold War, The Dragons of Expectation is one of the most important contributions to modern thought in recent years. 3 illustrations

About this title

About the Author:

Robert Conquest (1917―2015), author of Reflections on a Ravaged Century and The Great Terror, was a Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution.

From 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.
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About this edition

• Publisher: DUCKWORTH
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0715634267
• ISBN 13: 9780715634264
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256