The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History [Hardcover]

Robert Conquest (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0393059332 | ISBN-13: 978-0393059335 | Publication Date: December 2004

FROM THE AUTHOR OF "The Harvest of Sorrow and one of the world's most respected humanists comes this long-awaited work of history and philosophy. "The Dragons of Expectation--in the tradition of Isaiah Berlin's "The Crooked Timber of Humanity and George Orwell's "Essays--brilliantly traces how seductive ideas have come to corrupt modern minds, to often-disastrous effects. From the onset of the Enlightenment to the excesses of democracy, Stalinism, and liberalism. Robert 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 analyses of Russia's October Revolution, World War II, and the Cold War that challenge common historical views. "The Dragons of Expectation is one of the most important contributions to modern thought in recent years.

Editorial Reviews

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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Review

Robert Conquest is our greatest living modern historian. -- Paul Johnson

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (December 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393059332
• ISBN-13: 978-0393059335
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #239,253 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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126 of 134 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Historian's Analysis of Delusion in History, January 30, 2005

By 

Ted Smith "Reviewer from Utah" (Salt Lake City) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History (Hardcover)

One of the earlier reviewers apparently believes, as many supporters of aberrational ideologies always do, that the ad hominem argument (attack and label your opponent instead of confronting his arguments) somehow replaces rational debate.

Robert Conquest is one of the great historians of the past 50 years and perhaps the greatest scholar of Stalinism, some of which he observed first hand in WWII. He wrote the seminal work on the terror of Stalinism, "The Great Terror." He is also a keen observor of totalitarian regimes and of the the pseudo-intellectuals (usually, but not always, on the left) who attempt, in the guise of objectivity, to present totalitarians and Western democracies as morally neutral. No value judgments for them--Leonid Brezhnev is just as good to them as Ronald Reagan.

While it may offend those with such leanings to hear what Mr. Conquest has to say, the fact is that, in regard particularly to the Soviet Union, many so-called public intellectuals were far from objective (indeed delusional) about the communist regime in Russia.

This book is a review of many of these delusions and of those who foisted them on the public. Mr. Conquest is unafraid to name names and to directly confont their gullibility and/or stupidity. Mr. Conquest makes a compelling case for governments that pay more than lip service to justice and freedom over the totalitarians. In other words, he IS willing to make a value judgment.

A few years ago, the great historian Barbara Tuchman said this about leadership in the 20th century: "When it comes to leaders we have, if anything a superabundance. . . They are scurrying around, collecting consensus, gathering as wide an acceptance as possible. But what they are not doing, very notably, is standing still and saying, 'This is what I believe. This is what I will do and what I will not do. This is my code of behavior and this is outside it. This is excellent and that is trash.' There is an abdication of moral leadership in the sense of a general unwillingness to state standards."

The same can be said of historians. But Mr. Conquest is not one of the historians for whom all acts are equal and all ideologies morally neutral. In the world of historical analysis, Robert Conquest is a man who is willing to define a standard and then judge regimes against that standard. No moral equivocations for him. He has strong beliefs (backed by compelling facts) and is unafraid to state them--and while doing so to take on the equivocators.

This is a fine book by an honest and encyclopedically well-informed man. He will undoubtedly offend many, but the offense he gives is based on truth and his willingess to state it in its unvarnished state. More power to him.

This book should be widely read and given deep consideration.

127 of 139 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dragon slayer of left, right, center, January 5, 2005

By 

Wayne Lusvardi "Wayne Lusvardi" (Pasadena, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History (Hardcover)

Robert Conquest is more than an eminent historian of totalitarianism and fascism, novelist and poet, he is a dragon slayer of myths, manias, and political delusions. He exposes the delusions of: word-smyths of totalitarianism who twist Left into being cast as Right; about the utopianism that there is a solution to all problems; about a United Nations that Conquest describes as more like a hockey field than a nice family picnic; about the regulationist superstate of the European Union and its bureau-osophy; about the neglect of how Marxist-Leninist communism was financed in Europe and the U.S.; about the uselessness of a planned economy; about a gaggle of misleaders such as CNN with their documentary and book on the Cold War which they characterized as merely an anti-communist witch hunt and Red Scare by the U.S. The reason that Conquest can write with such depth and wisdom about such topics is not that he is a great historian (which he is) but that he lived it. He tells us he was a British military officer in the Balkans in WWII where he witnessed political hangings and torture by the Soviets and fascists. He wrote the first books that foretold of the mass famines and gulags in the USSR before they were well known in the West, he was the first to accurately quantify the massive loss of life, as well as foretelling the collapse of the Soviet Empire. This is a quirky almost eccentric book which Conquest writes is not about history but an understanding of the totalitarian. The last third of the book deals with art, poetry, and a proposal for an Anglo-American consortium of nations rather than the U.N. or E.U. The book is dotted with thought-provoking sayings such as: "The world that Americans and other Westerners want to mount and ride, feed and pat, is not a sweet-tempered little pony, but a huge, vile-tempered mule." Conquest has a penetrating moral acuity such as when he points out that CNN and Hollywood tried to morally equate the U.S. Cold War as a Red Scare, calling it "torture by inquisition;" while ignoring real Soviet torture such as Russian movie producer Vsevolod Meyerhold who was interrogated for months by Stalin's apparatchiks by making him drink human waste, breaking his legs and plunging him into hot water for months before shooting him. Ironically, Conquest was educated at the socialist London School of Economics and even was the recipient of the socialist-communist Sydney and Beatric Webb Fellowship as a student. Conquest's apparent revulsion against totalitarianism is thus liberal, which he defines as furthering political liberty, freedom of thought, and social justice by a rule of law. Conquest's book is timely because the political Left has all but abandoned its former repugnance of totalitarianism that is currently manifesting itself in various parts of the world under the guise of fanatical fundamentalist religion. I will close this review with a common Russian joke Conquest recites in his book: "A Russian-Jewish, too-once said to me that the best outcome of the war would have been a German victory over the Soviet regime, followed by a Western nuclear destruction of Nazism. 'But you would have been dead.' 'Yes, there IS that." Highly recommended.

44 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Challenging the dragons of nihilism, September 3, 2005

By 

Pieter "Toypom" (Johannesburg) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History (Hardcover)

This masterpiece is an eloquent defence of all that is good in Western Civilization, and an identification of the toxic utopian ideas that infest our culture. Conquest analyses the erroneous myths of past and present that have caused so much suffering and destruction. He identifies a certain vague and abstract idea of righteousness with its own peculiar speech, that leads to a mindset of dislocation from reality. In this vein, he looks at the way terms like Democracy, Progress and Liberty are abused to distort reality. For example, democracy is meaningless without the rule of law and the acceptance of the rules of the political game.

In the chapter After Utopia, Conquest points out that the New Utopianism is primarily a rejection of reason and an embrace of nihilism. He brilliantly contrasts the French Enlightenment that led to the negative utopianism of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, with the British Enlightenment of Adam Smith, David Hume, James Madison and Edmund Burke, one that bore good fruits.

Western academia and the mass media are still dominated by negative utopianism and most of the intellectual elites are impervious to fact or argument. In the chapter Slouching Towards Byzantium the author dissects the idea of the European Superstate with a swift, sharp sword, demonstrating its non-representative nature as a bureaucratic monstrosity ruled by self-perpetuating elites.

Chapter 10 explores the massive deception practiced by the Soviet Union and how that propaganda was swallowed by a gullible Western media and even enthusiastically embraced by opinion-shapers. Quite appropriately, Conquest alerts us to the fact that there are deeper problems than terrorism or war. From the West came the blessings of individual liberty, economic prosperity and democracy under law, but also monstrous totalitarian ideologies.

The frightening fact is that the notions of this seductive nihilism are alive and well amongst the leftist intelligentsia. Since the collapse of the Soviet Empire, this mindset has taken an even more disturbing turn. The true believers had to either give up the utopian dream or deny reality. They chose the latter. In other words, postmodernism is the result of employing a skeptical epistemology to justify the leap of faith that is necessary to continue believing in the failed god of collectivism. The author performs a remarkable feat in exposing the historical falsity and the risible bankruptcy of the arguments of moral equivalence and relativism.

Dragons Of Expectation is a work of great profundity and originality. Other books that complement this illuminating work include Our Culture, What's Left of It by Theodore Dalrymple, The West And The Rest by Roger Scruton, Defending the West by Ibn Warraq, Fashionable Nonsense by Alan Sokal, The Death Of Right And Wrong by Tammy Bruce, Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg, The Force Of Reason by Oriana Fallaci, Surrender by Bruce Bawer and United in Hate by Jamie Glazov.