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The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History Paperback – February 17, 2006


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Product Details

  • Paperback: 272 pages
  • Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (February 17, 2006)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 9780393327595
  • ISBN-13: 978-0393327595
  • ASIN: 0393327590
  • Product Dimensions: 0.6 x 0.1 x 0.8 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #327,960 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

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

Customer Reviews

I would like to give a glowing review to this book - but I can't.
Terence C Brennan
Mr. Conquest makes a compelling case for governments that pay more than lip service to justice and freedom over the totalitarians.
Ted Smith
The frightening fact is that the notions of this seductive nihilism are alive and well amongst the leftist intelligentsia.
Pieter Uys

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

132 of 140 people found the following review helpful By Ted Smith on January 30, 2005
Format: 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.
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49 of 50 people found the following review helpful By Pieter Uys HALL OF FAMETOP 1000 REVIEWER on September 3, 2005
Format: 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.
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131 of 143 people found the following review helpful By Wayne Lusvardi on January 5, 2005
Format: 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.Read more ›
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