Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age

3. Edward Bellamy, “Looking Forward,” The Nationalist 2, no. 1 (December, 1889): 4; “Chicago’s Advance,” Nationalist, 3, no. 2 (February, 1890): 98; “A $4,000,000 Lesson” (about a Boston electrical outage and fire) Nationalist, 2, no. 1 (December, 1889): 69. See Arthur Lipow, Authoritarian Socialism in America: Edward Bellamy and the Nationalist Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

4. Condorcet, Tableau historique des progès de l’esprit humain (Paris: G. Steinheil, 1900), p. 189. On Condorcet, see Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge: Harvard, 1979), pp. 487–518.

5. See Daniel P. Resnick, “The Societe des Amis des Noirs and the Abolition of Slavery,” French Historical Studies 7, no. 4. (Autumn 1972): 558–69.

6. See Léon Cahen, “La Société des Amis des Noirs et Condorcet,” La Révolution française 50 (January–June 1906): 480–511; and J. Salwyn Schapiro, Condorcet and the Rise of Liberalism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1934), pp. 148–152.

7. Condorcet, “Rules for the Society of the Friends of Negroes” (1788), in Condorcet: Foundations of Social Choice and Political Theory, ed. I. McLean, F. Hewitt (Hants, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 1994), p. 343. “The practical bent of French abolitionism received more disinterested expression in the writings of Condorcet … the most eminent intellectual sponsor of the Amis”: Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1176–1848 (London: Verso, 1988), pp. 170–71.

8. Zachary Karabell, Parting the Desert: The Creation of the Suez Canal (New York: Knopf, 2003), pp. 28–37.

9. Thomas More, Utopia, intro. P. Turner (1516; New York: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 44.

10. Victor Considerant, The Great West (1854), in Considerant, Au Texas, ed. R. V. Davidson (Philadephia: Porcupine Press, 1975), pp. 54–58.

11. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (1852; New York: Dell, 1962), p. 41.

12. John Humphrey Noyes, History of American Socialisms, intro. Mark Holloway (1870; reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1966), p. 21.

13. Frederick Law Olmsted to Charles Loring Brace, 26 July 1852, in The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted: Volume I: The Formative Years, 1822–1852, ed. C. C. McLaughlin (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 375–387. The North American Phalanx that Olmsted visited was in fact one of the more successful communities, lasting twelve years. See George Kirchmann, “Why Did They Stay: Commmunal Life at the North American Phalanx,” in Planned and Utopian Experiments: Four New Jersey Towns, ed. P. A. Stellhorn (Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1980), pp. 11–27.

14. See my Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

15. Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, ed. N. G. Gelbart (1686; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 33–34.

16. More, Utopia, p. 68.

17. According to Alexandra Aldridge he did so “incorrectly” or at least applied it incorrectly; see her opinionated work, The Scientific World View in Dystopia (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984), p. 11; and for some criticism of Aldridge’s definition, see David W. Sisk, Transformations of Language in Modern Dystopias (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1997), pp. 6–9.

18. Glenn Negley and J. Max Patrick, The Quest for Utopia: An Anthology of Imaginary Societies (New York: Henry Schuman, 1952), p. 298. To be exact, it is not accurate to credit Patrick with “dystopia”; he reinvented or rediscovered it. To John Stuart Mill belongs the honor of first using the term dystopia. In a parliamentary debate about Ireland, Mill objected with characteristic vigor to the conservative government’s proposal not to disestablish the Catholic Church but to establish a Protestant one as well; he pointed out that this was not only a bad idea, it would be rejected by all parties. He stated, “I may be permitted, as one who, in common with many of my betters, have been subjected to the charge of being Utopian, to congratulate the Government on having joined that goodly company. It is, perhaps, too complimentary to call them Utopians, they ought rather to be called dys-topians, or cacotopians. What is commonly called Utopian is something too good to be practicable; but what they appear to favour is too bad to be practicable.” Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, third series, vol. 190, 1867–68 (London: Cornelius Buck, 1868), p. 1517.

19. William Morris, “News from Nowhere,” in Stories in Prose, ed. G. D. H. Colse (London: Nonesuch Press, 1948), p. 5.

20. George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Signet/New American Library, 1950), p. 5.

21. My quotation of Berdyaev begins before that cited by Huxley; Nicholas Berdyaev, The End of Our Time (New York: Seed and Ward, 1933), p. 187.

22. Aldous Huxley, Island (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 103.

23. For a discussion of the impact of Wells on Zamyatin, Huxley, and Orwell, see Mark R. Hillegas, The Future as Nightmare: H. G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).

24. Huxley, Island, p. 167.

25. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited, intro. M. Green (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 93.

26. Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, p. 2.

27. See George Woodcock, Dawn and the Darkest Hour: A Study of Aldous Huxley (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), pp. 173–78.

28. See Alex Zwerdling, Orwell and the Left (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974).

29. Orwell, “Why I Write,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, ed. S. Orwell and I. Angus, vol. 1 (Middlesex, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 28.

30. Orwell, “Author’s Preface to the Ukranian Edition of Animal Farm,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, ed. S. Orwell and I. Angus, vol. 3 (Middlesex, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 458.

31. See Fredric Warburg, All Authors Are Equal (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973), pp. 106–19.

32. Orwell, statement dictated to Warburg, cited in Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1980), p. 395.

33. Orwell, “Letter to Francis A. Henson (extract)” in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, ed. S. Orwell and I. Angus, vol. 4 (Middlesex, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 502.

34. Isaac Deutscher, “1984—the Mysticism of Cruelty,” in his Russia in Transition (New York: Grove Press, 1960), p. 258.

35. George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Signet Books, 1950), pp. 199–203.

36. To what degree? For some aspects of the argument, see Alex M. Shane, The Life and Works of Evgenij Zamjatin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 140. For a discussion of Huxley, Zamyatin, and Orwell, see Peter E. Firchow, The End of Utopia: A Study of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (London: Bucknell University Press, 1984), pp. 121–28.

37. Alexander Voronsky, “Evgeny Zamyatin” (1922), in Zamyatin’s We: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. G. Kern (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1988), pp. 44, 47.

38. Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, trans. and intro. Mirra Ginsburg (New York: Avon Books, 1999), p. 174.

39. Zamyatin, “H. G. Wells,” in Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin, ed. and trans. M. Ginsburg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 286. To be sure, Zamyatin did not use “utopian” consistently. In an essay from the following year, he protested that an increasingly conformist Soviet literature juxtaposed “useful” and “harmful” works. Even if revolutionary commissars approved “useful” literature, it remained conservative. Harmful liteature, on the other hand, challenged “calification, sclerosis, crust, moss, quiescence.” For Zamyatin, literature should be at once “utopian” and “absurd”: Zamyatin, “On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters,” in Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin, ed. and trans. by M. Ginsburg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 109.

40. See Clarence Brown, introduction to We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), p. xxi.

41. Evgeny Zamyatin, The Islanders (Ann Arbor: Trilogy Publishers, 1978), p. 2.

42. Orwell, “Review,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, ed. S. Orwell and I. Angus, vol. 4 (Middlesex, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1970), pp. 74–75.

43. Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), p. 79.

44. As an admirer put it, “He died, almost penniless, of a heart attack in 1959, in shabby one-room apartment … in Manhattan … mourned by very, very few.” Steven L. Jacobs, “The Papers of Raphael Lemkin: A First Look,” Journal of Genocide Research 1, no. 1 (1999): 106.

45. On Lemkin, see Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), pp. 17–60.

46. Ralf Dahrendorf, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (New York: Times Books, 1990), pp. 61–62.

47. Virtually nothing, but something. Obviously all ideas about the future and future society share something, but the question is how decisively the visions converge. Hence some critics have argued that More and Hitler hold kindred ideas. See, for instance, Henner Löffler, Macht und Konsens in den klassischen Staatsutopien: Eine Studie zur Ideengeschichte des Totalitarismus (Cologne: Carl Heymanns, 1972). Löffler limits himself to utopias that sketch out a state—nothing here about Fourier or William Morris. He also includes Orwell, Huxley, and Zamyatin as utopians, which makes a hopeless muddle of his argument that utopians are totalitarians. He makes some good points but generally remains on a formal level. For instance, he writes that utopian states seek to educate their citizens from the earliest ages. Guess what? “Hitler demanded something similar” (p. 86). Conclusion? Utopians equal totalitarians.

48. More, Utopia, pp. 128, 109, 1200; I am using here, as preferable to the Turner edition, some sentences from Robert M. Adams’s translation, Utopia, ed. And trans. R. M. Adams (1516; New York: Norton, 1992), pp. 82, 66, 74.

49. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. R. Manheim (1925–1926; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), pp. 561–62, 679, 300, 296.

50. Hitler, January 1939, cited in Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. 1 (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 310.

51. Hanns Ludwig Rosegger, Der Golfstrom (1913), cited in Jost Hermand, Old Dreams of a New Reich: Volkish Utopias and National Socialism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 37–38.

52. Hans Mommsen, “The Realization of the Unthinkable: The ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’ in the Third Reich,” in From Weimar to Auschwitz, trans. Alan Kramer and Louise Willmot (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 251.

53. Hans Mommsen, “Die Realisierung des Utopischen: Die ‘Endlösung der Judenfrage’ im Dritten Reich,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 9 (1983); 381–420; and “The Realization of the Unthinkable,” pp. 224–253.

54. Frank-Lothar Kroll, Utopie als Ideologie: Geschichtsdenken und politisches Handeln im Dritten Reich (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1998), is perhaps the most serious effort to use utopia as framework for considering Nazism. Kroll resolutely rejects confining the term utopianism to the Marxist tradition, which is fine. Yet his effort to dub the Nazi’s ideas as utopian do not wash. Try as he may, he does not really find utopian themes in Nazi thought. For instance, he writes that Hitler’s “living room” concept has the “theoretical character” of a utopian principle because it has a goal beyond day-to-day politics. The content of that goal is “struggle” driven by “blood” and “soil” (pp. 62–63). Only in the most formal way does this make Hitler a “utopian.” Yet his final conclusion turns on this formal definition. The problem is that Kroll uses “utopia” in a very restricted sense, partly because he follows Mannheim at his most sociological. “Utopia” constitutes a break or transcendence—no matter what it is—of the existing social order. Hence the plans of a maniac to blow up the world in order to end all human life would be termed utopian. With his formalistic approach, Kroll states that efforts to oppress and dispossess are every as bit as utopian as efforts to emancipate. The “inhuman character” of such a project does not “diminish its utopian potential” (pp. 310–311). Rainer Rotermundt’s study, Verkehrete Utopien: Nationalsozialismus, Neonazismus, Neue Barbarei (Frankfurt: Verlag Neue Kritik, 1980), might also be noted, but this is smaller potatoes. Essentially, he considers Nazi ideas on “Volksgemeinschaft,” where German differences are subsumed in nationalist community as the inversion of the Marxist utopian ideas of a classless society.

55. Frédéric Rouvillois, “Utopia and Totalitarianism,” in Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World, ed. Roland Schaer, Gregory Claeys, and Lyman Tower Sargent (New York: New York Public Library/Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 316.

56. Charles Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements, ed. G. S. Jones (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 167.

57. Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 190.

58. Weitz, Century of Genocide, pp. 195, 199, 110, 114. Some of these sentences are taken from my review of Weitz in the Los Angles Times Book Review, 15 June 2003, p. 11.

59. G. W. F. Hegel, introduction to The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover, 1956), p. 21.

60. David Henige, Numbers from Nowhere: The American Indian Contact Population Debate (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), pp. 23, 315.

61. David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. x, 151. As the historian David White put it in a review, “Stannard’s desire to establish a very large population in 1492 is tied to his intention to show a campaign of calculated genocide greater than any other in human history (including that of the Nazis). The more people alive in 1492, the greater the population decline, and the greater the genocide.” See his incisive review of American Holocaust in The New Republic 208, no. 3 (18 January 1993): 33–37.

62. Peter Martry D’Anghera, “De Orbe Novo,” in The Gold of Ophir: Travels, Myths, and Legends in the New World, ed. E. Dahlberg (New York: Dutton, 1972), p. 73.

63. Hoxie Neale Fairchild, The Noble Savage: A Study in Romantic Naturalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1928), pp. 10. See Christian Marouby, Utopie et primitivisme (Paris: Seuil, 1990).

64. Stannard, American Holocaust, p. 221.

65. Bartolomé de las Casas, The Devastation of the Indies (1552), intro. B. M. Donovan (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 31.

66. Gil Elliot, Twentieth Century Book of the Dead (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972), pp. 1, 215.

67. Stéphane Courtois, “Introduction: The Crimes of Communism” and “Why?” in The Black Book of Communism, ed. S. Courtois et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 9–15, 737. The Black Book of Communism has provoked much discussion. For two very able critiques, see J. Arch Getty, “The Future Did Not Work,” The Atlantic Monthly, March 2000, p. 113 ff., and John Torpey, “What Future for the Future? Reflections on The Black Book of Communism,” Human Rights Review 2, no. 2 (January 2001): 135 ff.

68. Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence (New York: The New Press, 2003), pp. 77–85.

69. François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 19–20.

70. Weitz, Century of Genocide, p. 230.

71. “Wars and Deaths, 1700–1987,” in World Military and Social Expenditures, 1987–88, ed. Ruth Leger Sivard (Washington, D.C.: World Priorities, 1987), p. 28.

72. All figures from Milton Leitenberg, “Deaths in Wars and Conflicts Between 1945 and 2000,” paper prepared for Conference on Data Collection in Armed Conflict, Uppsala, Sweden, 8–9 June 2002, p. 9.

73. See R. J. Rummel, China’s Bloody Century: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1991), pp. 103–36.

74. CIA Research Study, Indonesia—1965: The Coup That Backfired (Washington, D.C.: Central Intelligence Agency, 1968), pp. 70–71.

75. Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell,” p. 303.

76. Leitenberg, “Deaths in Wars,” p. 3.

77. Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (New York: Picador USA, 1998), p. 94.

78. Zamyatin, We, pp. 179–80.

79. To be sure, an increasing number of historical studies deal with “imagined communities” or the “imperial imagination,” but imagination in these usages is a form of ideology or is distant from imagination as utopian fantasy in the individual.

80. Eva T. H. Brann, The World of the Imagination: Sum and Substance (Lanham, Md.: Roman and Littlefield, 1991). J. M. Cocking’s, Imagination: A Study in the History of Ideas (London: Routledge, 1991) uses a historical approach but is only concerned with the idea of imagination among philosophers—and is really not historical, to boot; that is, he offers no explanation for the shift in ideas.

81. See Judith Plotz, “The Perpetual Messiah: Romanticism, Childhood, and the Paradoxes of Human Development,” in Regulated Children/ Liberated Children, ed. B. Finkelstein (New York: Psychohistory Press, 1979), pp. 63–95.

82. Harry Hendrick, “Construction and Reconstruction of British Childhood: An Interpretative Survey, 1800 to the Present,” in Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood, ed. A. James and A. Prout (London: Falmer Press, 1997), p. 38.

83. For a good overview, see Colin M. Heywood, A History of Childhood (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001).

84. Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 10. See also Linda A. Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983): “The results of this study … demonstrate that the main arguments put forward by many historians are incorrect…. Contrary to the belief of such authors as Ariès, there was a concept of childhood in the 16th century” (p. 267).

85. Keith Thomas, “Children in Early Modern England,” in Children and Their Books: A Celebration of the Work of Iona and Peter Opie, ed. G. Avery and J. Briggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 70. For a recent critique that challenges Ariès’s numbers and conclusions, see Robert Woods, “Did Montaigne Love His Children? Demography and the Hypothesis of Parental Indifference,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33, no. 3 (2003): 421–42.

86. For a good survey of nineteenth-century England, see Thomas E. Jordan, Victorian Childhood: Themes and Variations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987).

87. See Katherine A. Lynch, Family, Class, and Ideology in Early Industrial France: Social Policy and the Working-Class Family, 1825–1848 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), pp. 168–241.

88. “By 1930, most children [in the United States] under fourteen were out of the labor market and into schools.” Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York: Basic Books, 1985), p. 97.

89. Harry Hendrick, Children, Childhood, and English Society, 1880–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 18.

90. Max Horkheimer, “Art and Mass Culture,” in Selected Essays (New York: Seabury Press, 1972), p. 277.

91. David Buckingham, After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), p. 32.

92. Buckingham, After the Death of Childhood, pp. 70–71.

93. Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (New York: Delacorte Press, 1982), p. 129.

94. Marie Winn, The Plug-In Drug (1985; revised ed., New York: Penguin Books, 2002), p. 4.

95. See Julie B. Schor, “The Commodification of Childhood: Tales from the Advertising Front Lines,” Hedgehog Review 5, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 7–23. This is drawn from her forthcoming Born to Buy: Marketing and Transformation of Childhood and Culture.

96. Stephen Kline, Out of the Garden: Toys, TV, and Children’s Culture in the Age of Marketing (London: Verso, 1993) p. 146.

97. Robert Abelman and David Atkin, “Evaluating the Impact of Affilia-tion Change on Children’s TV Viewership and Perceptions of Network Branding,” in Advertising to Children: Concepts and Controversies, ed. M. C. Macklin and L. Carlson (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1999), p. 49.

98. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), p. 91. See Barry Sanders, A is for Ox: Violence, Electronic Media, and the Silencing of the Written Word (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), pp. 42–43.

99. Peter Burke, “The Invention of Leisure in Early Modern Europe,” Past and Present, no. 146 (February 1995): 136–51.

100. See generally Ian Irvine, “Acedia, Tristitia, and Sloth: Early Christian Forerunners to Chronic Ennui,” Humanitas 12, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 89 ff.

101. See Reinhard Kuhn, The Demon of Noontime: Ennui in Western Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976). Kuhn is anxious to distinguish ennui from boredom, which he dismisses as a psychological disorder, dependent “entirely on external circumstances” (pp. 6–7). Unfortunately, in his learned survey, he comes to no conclusion except that the forms of ennui have changed. See also George Steiner, “The Great Ennui,” in In Bluebeard’s Castle (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1971), pp. 1–26. Steiner dates ennui from after the French Revolution, the collapse of hopes and change.

102. Patricia M. Spacks, Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 9.

103. Mrs. Humphry Ward, “A Country Dinner-Party,” (1842) cited in Spacks, Boredom, p. 203.

104. Peter N. Stearns, Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America (New York: New York University Press, 2003), p. 196.

105. Robert Paul Smith, “Where Did You Go?” “Out” “What Did You Do?” “Nothing” (New York: Norton, 1957), pp. 98–99.

106. “Robert Paul Smith Dead at 61,” New York Times, 31 January 1977.

107. Peter N. Stearns, Anxious Parents, pp. 199, 170–71, 196.

108. Stephen Kline, Out of the Garden, p. 321.

109. M. C. Macklin and L. Carlson, introduction to Advertising to Children: Concepts and Controversies, ed. Macklin and Carlson (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1999), p. 11.

110. John Holt, How Children Learn, cited in Kline, p. 335.

111. Gary Cross, Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 187. To be sure, Cross himself in this study gives a very upbeat account, which might be called an old-fashioned historicism: things just change over time. To complain about video games or violent toys marketed by vast corporations is to be an old fogy. He also seems to believe that the imagination of children is a static entity, just waiting to be tapped by media giants. Television, he writes, “made possible a constantly changing culture of play that appealed directly to the imaginations of children. Over time this led to the predominance of fantasy-fad toys stimulated and sustained by the media celebrities” (p. 162). Cross’s empiricism gets the better of him. The notion, which he regularly repeats, that mass media directly responds to children, forgets that it also molds them.

112. Iona Opie and Peter Opie, Children’s Games in Street and Playground (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 14. A historian of Catalonia has made a similar argument, although focused on leisure and play in general. “People play draughts in New York’s Bryant Park just as they played them on the square in Baga in the thirteenth century.” Hence the moral: “The historian of leisure, like the historian of sex, should always bear in mind an old Catalan saying: sempre han tingut bec les oques (geese have always had beaks).” Yes, but now their beaks are propped open and mechanically force-fed to produce foie gras. If geese could write history, they might not just quack-quack but register and regret some significant changes in the tending of fowls. Indeed, we need a good history from the point of view of a goose. Nonetheless, this is an informative article. See Joan-Lluis Marfany, “The Invention of Leisure in Early Modern Europe,” Past and Present, no. 156 (August 1997): 174–98.

113. Opie and Opie, Children’s Games, p. 15.

114. Only for a moment. Their later Children’s Game with Things (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) is even more sanguine, although again they qualify that busier roads and smaller families may undermine games (p. 11–12).

115. Smith, “Where Did You Go?” pp. 7–18.

116. For a general critique of Scholem’s interpretations, see Moshe Idel, Messianic Mystics (New Haven: London, 1998).

117. Scholem, “Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism,” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism, trans. Michael A. Meyer (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), p. 21.

118. Tommaso Campanella, The City of the Sun: A Poetical Dialogue, trans. D. J. Donno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), p. 51.

119. Lewis Mumford, preface to The Story of Utopias (1922; second edition, New York: Viking Press, 1962), pp. 4–5.

120. Mumford, Story, p. 5.

121. Hans Kohn, Living in a World Revolution: My Encounters with History (New York: Trident Press, 1964), p. 61.

122. See Paul Mendes-Flohr, From Mysticism to Dialogue: Martin Buber’s Transformation of German Social Thought (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), pp. 54–57.

123. Heinrich Heine, “Concerning the History of Religion and Philosophy,” in Heine, The Romantic School and Other Essays, ed. J. Hermand, R. C. Holub, trans. Helen Mustard (New York: Continuum, 1985), pp. 180–81.

124. T. W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed. R. Tiedemann, trans. Sherry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 81.

125. Ernst Bloch, afterword to The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony A. Nasser (1963; reprint, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 279. Perhaps something more should be said of Bloch, who will make several appearances in this book. From The Spirit of Utopia to the three-volume The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (English ed., Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), no one is more identified with iconoclastic utopianism than Bloch. Yet for a chapter of his long life, he was an orthodox Marxist, a Stalinist, a defender of the Moscow Trials, and a champion of the DDR (East Germany). To complicate matters, in republishing earlier essays and books, Bloch regularly altered and excised passages; for instance, the first and second edition of the Spirit of Utopia differ significantly, which Bloch only alludes to. This habit seems less innocent with his political writings. He drops phrases and whole essays in republishing collections of political essays; for instance, he variously substitutes “Lenin” for “Stalin.”

The evidence is clear that Bloch defended the Moscow Trials and, for some years, DDR practices. In 1937 he argued that the Soviet Union needed “to rid itself” of many enemies. “In today’s situation it should be clearly evident that anti-bolshevik statements serve only the devil himself … there can be no struggle, there can be nothing good without Russia”: Ernst Bloch, “A Jubilee for Renegades [1937]” New German Critique 4 (Winter 1975): 18, 24. Much has been written about Bloch’s complicated relationship to orthodox Marxism; see for instance, Oskar Negt, “Ernst Bloch—the German Philosopher of the October Revolution,” New German Critique 4 (Winter 1975): 3–16. Essential is the memoir of a student, Ruth Römer, “Erinnerungen an Ernst Bloch,” Bloch-Almanach 10 (1990): 107–62, which is both very critical and very laudatory; and the biography by Peter Zudeick, Der Hintern des Teufels: Ernst Bloch–Leben und Werk (Bühl-Moos: Elster Verlag, 1985), esp. pp. 153–63. See also Edgar Weiss, “Ernst Bloch und das Problem der konkreten Utopie,” in “Ich bin. Aber ich habe mich nicht. Darum werden wir erst.” Perspectiven der Philosophie Ernst Blochs, ed. J. R. Bloch (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), pp. 327–43. It was due to his Stalinism that Frankfurt School people such as Horkheimer kept a distance from Bloch.

The question for sympathizers and critics is similar to that provoked by Heidegger: What is the relationship between Bloch’s philosophy and explicit political pronouncements? Unlike Heidegger, Bloch at least had the excuse of his life situation; as a refugee with little means and no secure home he looked to the Soviet Union as the bulwark against Nazism. Nor did Bloch’s eleven years in the United States prove successful or undermine his rigid Marxism. As his son recalls, “he did not find a helping hand: no university and no institution, no publisher and no foundation”: Jan Robert Bloch, “Dreams of a Better Life: Zum Exil Ernst Blochs in den USA,” Bloch-Almanach 18 (1999): 130. When the DDR offered him a position in 1948, Bloch who barely had learned English, accepted it with great hope and optimism. In his mid-sixties, it was his first academic appointment and first regular salary. During his years in the DDR, he defended its policies, but eventually he and his followers were harassed, arrested, and sidelined. One might say that the Bloch story is roughly similar to the that of his friend, Bertolt Brecht. See Erdmut Wizisla, “Ernst Bloch und Bertold Brecht,” Bloch-Almanach 10 (1990):87–106. Both expressed orthodox Marxist and Stalinist sentiments. After less than happy experiences in the United States, both settled in the DDR; and with both, it can be argued, the thrust of their contribution undermined their explicit political pronouncements.

In 1961 as the Berlin Wall was being erected, Bloch accepted a position in West Germany, which opened the final chapter of his long life as a very active teacher, writer, and now as a friend of the German New Left. (For an overview in English of Bloch’s life, see Vincent Geoghegan, Ernst Bloch [New York: Routledge, 1996]). He died in 1977, reconciled with some earlier critics. A 1965 volume in honor of Bloch for his eightieth birthday includes contributions from Adorno, Paul Tillich, and George Steiner. See Ernst Bloch zu Ehren, ed. S. Unseld (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1965). For a careful presentation of Adorno’s up-and-down relationship with Bloch, see the excellent study by Detlev Claussen, Theodor W. Adorno: Ein Letztes Genie (Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag, 2003), pp. 320–57. In 1980, Gershom Scholem, a man not easy to please, and a lifelong anti-Stalinist and anti-Marxist, wrote that “my present regard for Bloch, after so many years and much more extensive attention to the entirety of his production, does not correspond to what I impetuously put to paper in the twenties and thirties”: Gershom Scholem, preface to The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932–1940, ed. G. Scholem, trans. Gary Smith and Andre Lefevere (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), p. 7. In 1992, Leszek Kolakowsi, a bitter critic of Marxism, accepted the Ernst Bloch Prize.

Nevertheless biography can explain and illuminate, but not justify philosophy. Negt asks the right question, although his answer is a bit too pat: “Is Bloch’s behavior vis-à-vis the Stalinist trials an expression of the inner nature of his thought or is it a product of the need for identity and reality of a revolutionary intellectual?” His answer: “Just as we cannot stamp Hegel as the philosopher of the Prussian state because he lets the development of the moral idea end in the Prussian state, we cannot reduce Bloch’s thought, the philosopher in combat, to statements he made about the Moscow trials, for these statements clearly contradict his entire philosophy” (Negt, “Ernst Bloch,” p. 9). I hope so.

126. Michael Löwy, Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992).

127. Gershom Scholem, “Reflections on Jewish Theology,” in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, ed. and trans. Werner J. Dannhauser (New York: Schocken, 1976), p. 286.

128. Moses Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, trans. M. Friedländer (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), p. 85.

129. Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafa,” in Illuminations, ed. H. Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), p. 139.

130. Gershom Scholem, “Walter Benjamin,” in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, ed. and trans. Werner J. Dannhauser (New York: Schocken, 1976), p. 196.

131. Michael Löwy, “‘Theologia negativa’ and ‘Utopia negativa’: Franz Kafka,” in Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 71–94.

1. To be sure, this is the claim about Plato advanced by Karl Popper (whom I discuss below) in his Open Society and Its Enemies, 2 vols., (1945; rev. ed. New York: The Free Press, 1962). Certainly authoritarianism and even militarism saturate Plato’s ideal state as presented in the Republic. In any event, I am mainly concerned with the literary utopian tradition, where Plato has played a smaller role than might be expected. As Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel point out in their encyclopedic Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), in the rediscovery of Greek and Roman thought in the Renaissance, most attention was paid to the satiric utopians. “The jocular so far outstrips the grave that allegiance to Aristophanes submerges any admiration for Plato” (p. 99). To the extent that the Republic is utopian, it is strictly in service of how to build the harmonious state or city; it is almost a practical guide for Greek cities and colonies. “And so long as your city is governed soberly in the order just laid down,” states Socrates, “it will be the greatest of cities. I do not mean in repute, but in reality, even though it have only a thousand defenders.” (The Republic, in Plato: The Complete Dialogues, ed. E. Hamiliton and H. Cairns [New York: Pantheon/Bollinger, 1963], p. 664). A recent and fair-minded study concludes that “the Republic was always rooted in Greek politics. It was always meant to provide a new ideological basis for an aristocratic and oligarchic society. Its most practical political lesson, and the lesson probably of greatest interest to contemporaries, was its defence of hierarchy.” (Doyne Dawson, Cities of the Gods: Communist Utopias in Greek Thought [New York: Oxford University Press, 1992], p. 93).

2. See H. C. Baldry, “Who Invented the Golden Age,” Classical Quarterly 2 (1952): 83–92, for a statement that Hesiod originated the idea of the “golden age” for Greek thought; see also Baldry, Ancient Utopias (London: Camelot Press/University of Southampton, 1956), p. 9.

3. Hesiod, Works and Days, in Theogony, Works and Days, Shield, ed. and trans. A. N. Athanassakis (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), pp. 70–72.

4. Hesiod, Works and Days, p. 77, lines 410–13.

5. Joseph Fontenrose, “Work, Justice, and Hesiod’s Five Ages,” Classical Philology 49, no. 1 (January 1974): 12. See also A. S. Brown, “From the Golden Age to the Isles of the Blest,” Mnemosyne 51, no. 4 (1998): 385–410; Juha Sihvola, Decay, Progress, the Good Life? Hesiod and Protagoras on the Development of Culture (Helsinki: Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters, 1989).

6. See M. I. Finley, “Utopianism Ancient and Modern,” in The Critical Spirit: Essays in Honor of Herbert Marcuse, ed. K. H. Wolff and B. Moore Jr. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), pp. 3–20.

7. Aristophanes, The Birds in Four Comedies, ed. and trans. Dudley Fits (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962), pp. 163–243.

8. See the discussion of this phrase in the annotated text, Nan Dunbar, Aristophanes, Birds (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1995), p. 151.

9. Victor Ehrenberg, The People of Aristophanes: A Sociology of Old Attic Comedy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1951), p. 57.

10. See Douglas M. MacDowell, Aristophanes and Athens: An Introduction to the Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 199–228.

11. A. M. Bowie, Aristophanes: Myth, Ritual, and Comedy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 177.

12. See Friedrich Solmsen, Intellectual Experiments of the Greek Enlightenment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 76–78.

13. Lucian, The True History, in Satirical Sketches, ed. and trans. P. Turner (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 249–94. For a discussion of Aristophanes and Lucian and a full scale commentary on “The True History,” see Aristoula Georgiadou and David H. J. Larmour, Lucian’s Science Fiction Novel True Histories: Interpretation and Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 1998).

14. Richard Marius, Thomas More: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1984), p. 83.

15. See David Marsh, Lucian and the Latins: Humor and Humanism in the Early Renaissance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), pp. 167–76.

16. Erasmus, “Prefatory Letter: Erasmus of Rotterdam to his friend Thomas More,” in Praise of Folly, ed. A. H. T. Levi, trans. Betty Radice (Penguin Books: New York, 1993), pp. 6–7.

17. See Paul Turner, introduction to his translation of Utopia, by Thomas More (New York: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 8.

18. More, Utopia, Turner ed., p. 100.

19. Marsh, Lucian and the Latins, p. 193. See Christopher Robinson, Lucian and His Influence in Europe (London: Duckworth, 1979), pp. 130–33.

20. T. S. Dorsch, “Sir Thomas More and Lucian: An Interpretation of Utopia,” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 203 (1966–1967): 350.

21. M. A. Screech, Rabelais (London: Duckworth, 1979), p. 8. For the role of Lucian in Rabelais, see generally, Marsh, Lucian and the Latins.

22. For a consideration of Rabelais’s links to More, see V. L. Saulnier, “L’Utopie en France: Morus et Rabelais,” in Les Utopies à la renaissance, ed. J. Lameere (Brussels: Presse Universitaires de Bruxelles, 1963): pp. 135–62. Cf. Michaël Baraz, Rabelais et la joie de la liberté (Paris: José Cort, 1983), pp. 241–82.

23. François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel,, trans. and intro. J. M. Cohen (New York: Penguin Books, 1955), pp. 150–59.

24. Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons (1960; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1990), p. 160.

25. R. S. Sylvester and G. P. Marc’hadour, eds., Essential Articles for the Study of Thomas More (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1977).

26. J. H. Hexter, More’s Utopia: The Biography of an Idea (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 3.

27. George Steiner, “The Book,” in Language and Silence (New York: Atheneum, 1967), pp. 189–90.

28. Brian Moynahan, If God Spare My Life: William Tyndale, the English Bible, and Sir Thomas More—a Story of Martyrdom and Betrayal (London: Little, Brown, 2002), pp. 387, 173.

29. Thomas More, Utopia, ed. and trans. R. M. Adams (New York: Norton, 1992), p. 74.

30. Thomas More, “More’s Epitaph,” in Utopia and Other Essential Writings, ed. J. J. Greene and J. P. Dolan (New York: New American Library, 1984), p. 285.

31. John Guy, Thomas More (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 106.

32. Russell Ames, Citizen Thomas More and his Utopia (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1949), p. 21.

33. Guy, Thomas More, p. 121.

34. More, The Dialogue Concerning Heresies, in Utopia and Other Essential Writings, ed. J. J. Greene and J. P. Dolan (New York: New American Library, 1984), p. 208.

35. More, Responsio ad Lutherum, cited in David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 258–59.

36. More, “Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer,” in Utopia and Other Essential Writings, ed. J. J. Greene and J. P. Dolan (New York: New American Library, 1984), p. 223.

37. Guy, More, p. 122.

38. Marius, Thomas More, p. 406.

39. Jasper Ridley, The Statesman and the Fanatic: Thomas Wolsey and Thomas More (London: Constable, 1982), p. 293.

40. Cited in Ridley, The Statesman and the Fanatic, p. 238.

41. C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), pp. 169–70. Lewis’s few pages on More are outstanding.

42. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and Its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements (1957; second edition, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961), pp. xiv, 308–9.

43. See Thomas Nipperdey, Reformation, Revolution, Utopie: Studien zum 16. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1975), pp. 38–84.

44. Abraham Friesen, Reformation and Utopia: The Marxist Interpretation of the Reformation and its Antecedents (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1974), p. 14.

45. On Müntzer and Luther, see generally Abraham Friesen, Thomas Muentzer, A Destroyer of the Godless: The Making of a Sixteenth-Century Religious Revolutionary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). On Müntzer and his links to Christian humanism, including Erasmus, see Ulrich Bubenheimer, Thomas Müntzer: Herkunft und Bildung (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1989), pp. 194–229.

46. Biographical information about Norman Cohn derived from personal communication.

47. They also appear when the American government and scholarly community registered a sharp hike in a demand for experts on Germany and Europe. See Alfons Söllner, Deutsche Politikwissenschaftler in der Emigration: Studien zu ihrer Akkulturation und Wirkungsgeschichte (Opladen: Westdeutsche Verlag, 1996), p. 250.

48. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 294.

49. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian/World Publishing, 1958), p. vii.

50. Karl Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1976), p. 105.

51. See generally Malachi Haim Hacohen, Karl Popper—the Formative Years, 1902–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

52. Popper, Unended Quest, p. 13.

53. Popper, Unended Quest, p. 33.

54. See Karl Popper, “Die ‘politische’ Biographie,” in Herbert Marcuse and Karl Popper, Revolution oder Reform? ed. F. Stark (Munich: Kösel-Verlag, 1971), p. 9.

55. Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (New York: Basic Books, 1960), pp. 84, 45, 51.

56. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism, pp. 66–67, 78–79.

57. Popper, Open Society, vol. 1, pp. viii, 22–23

58. Popper, Open Society, vol. 1, pp. 159, 165.

59. Popper, “Utopia and Violence,” in Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), pp. 355–63.

60. See Talmon’s obituary, New York Times, 18 June 1980.

61. J. L. Talmon, The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution: The Origins of Ideological Polarisation in the Twentieth Century (London: Secker and Warburg, 1981), p. 535.

62. J. L. Talmon, Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase (New York: Praeger, 1960), p. 30.

63. J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1951; reprint, New York: Norton, 1970), pp. 2–3, 253.

64. J. L. Talmon, Utopianism and Politics (London: Conservative Political Centre, 1957), p. 12.

65. Talmon, Political Messianism, pp. 15, viii.

66. “In its eclecticism,” writes Irving Louis Horowitz of The Myth of the Nation, “it seems less concerned with establishing a thesis than the earlier volumes,” Horowitz, “Introduction to the Transaction Edition,” in J. L. Talmon, Myth of the Nation and Vision of Revolution (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1991), p. xvi.

67. Talmon, Myth of the Nation, pp. 535–554.

68. This is George L. Mosse writing in “Political Style and Political Theory—Totalitarian Democracy Revisited,” in Totalitarian Democracy and After: International Colloquium in Memory of Jacob L. Talmon (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1984), p. 167. It may illustrate Talmon’s declining impact that a subsequent volume in his honor only mentions him in passing; see The Intellectual Revolt against Liberal Democracy, 1870–1945: International Conference in Memory of Jacob L. Talmon, ed. Z. Sternhell (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1996).

69. David Luban, review of The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, Ethics 113, no. 3 (April 2003): 724.

70. Walter Laqueur, “The Arendt Cult,” in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, ed. S. E. Aschheim (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 47–48.

71. Ian Harris, “Berlin and His Critics,” in Liberty, ed. H. Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.), p. 351; Henry Hardy, “The Editor’s Tale,” in Liberty, ed. H. Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. xxviii. Berlin’s story is in the same volume, “The Purpose Justifies the Ways,” pp. 332–35.

72. Steven Lukes, “Isaiah Berlin in Conversation with Steven Lukes,” Salmagundi, no. 120 (Fall 1998): 62.

73. Lukes, “Isaiah Berlin in Conversation,” p. 76.

74. Hacohen, Karl Popper, p. 524

75. Berlin, “The Sense of Reality,” in The Sense of Reality, ed. H. Hardy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), p. 1.

76. Isaiah Berlin, “Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century,” Foreign Affairs 28 no. 3 (April 1950): 385.

77. A. Arblaster, “Vision and Revision: A Note on the Text of Isaiah Berlin’s Four Essays on Liberty,” Political Studies 19, no. 1 (March 1971): 81–86.

78. Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, ed. H. Hardy (New York: Vintage Books, 1992).

79. Isaiah Berlin, “Political Ideas,” pp. 384–85.

80. Perry Andeson, A Zone of Engagement (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 232–35.

81. Manuel and Manuel, Utopian Thought, p. 519.

82. Cited by Ted Humphrey in his edition of “Idea for a Universal History,” in Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), p. 40.

83. Kant, “Idea for a Universal History,” ed. Humphrey, p. 33; and “Idee zu einer Allgemeinen Geschichte in Weltbürgerlicher Absicht,” in I. Kant, Werke in Zehn Banden, ed. W. Weischedel, vol. 9, part 1 (Wiesebaden: Insel Verlag, 1964), p. 40.

84. Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 123,

85. Berlin, Four Essays, pp. 131, 144.

86. Isaiah Berlin, Freedom and its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 52, 54, 70–71.

87. Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays, pp. 132, 166.

88. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, ed. S. Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 83.

89. Matthew Arnold, “My Countrymen,” in Selected Prose, ed. P. J. Keating (Penguin: New York, 1987), pp. 192–93.

90. Berlin, Freedom and its Betrayal, p. 103.

91. Berlin, “The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West,” in The Crooked Timber of Humanity, ed. H. Hardy (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), pp. 46–47.

92. Berlin, “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” in The Proper Study of Mankind, ed. H. Hardy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), p. 11.

93. Berlin, “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” p. 15.

94. Stefan Collini, English Pasts: Essays in History and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 203–4.

95. Berlin also indicated that Popper’s Open Society and its Enemies influenced him considerably. (See Lukes, “Isaiah Berlin in Conversation,” p. 92.)

96. Of course, there are some minor exceptions; for instance, Berlin reviewed Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy at length in Mind 56, no. 222 (April 1947): 151–66. The other exceptions are his brief, invariably laudatory memoirs of twentieth-century acquaintances, collected in Berlin, Personal Impressions, ed. H. Hardy (New York: Viking, 1980).

97. Berlin, “Philosophy and Government Repression,” in The Sense of Reality, ed. H. Hardy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), p. 64.

98. Christopher Hitchens, “Goodbye to Berlin,” in Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere (London: Verso, 2000), p. 144.

99. Hitchens, “Goodbye to Berlin,” p. 151.

100. For a different take on these final remarks, see Avishai Margalit, “The Crooked Timber of Nationalism,” in The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin, ed. M. Lilla et al. (New York: New York Review Books, 2001). “What was so surprising was not the content of the letter, but the very fact that he wrote it … In his last statement he [Berlin] wanted to stand up and be counted” (p. 158).

101. Norman Podhoretz, “A Dissent on Isaiah Berlin,” Commentary 107, no. 2 (February 1999): 25.

102. Benjamin Constant, “The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation and Their Relation to European Civilization,” in Political Writings, ed. B. Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 104.

103. Constant, “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns,” in Political Writings, ed. B. Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 316.

104. See Constant, “De la Perfectibilité de l’espèce humaine,” in Écrit politiques, ed. M. Gauchet (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), pp. 700–730.

105. Berlin, Four Essays, p. 129.

106. Constant, “The Liberty of the Ancients,” pp. 314–16.

107. Constant, “The Liberty of the Ancients,” p. 326.

108. B. Constant to Claude Hochet, 5 October 1812, in Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël, Lettres à un ami: Cent onze lettres inédites à Claude Hochet, ed. J. Mistler (Neuchatel: Baconnière, 1949), p. 225.

109. See B. Constant, “Ecrits sur la liberté de la presse,” in Oeuvre completes, vol. 9, part 1(Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2001), pp. 31–190.

110. See Kurt Kloocke, Benjamin Constant: Une biographie intellectuelle (Geneva: Librarie Droz, 1984), p. 235.

111. Stephen Holmes, Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 44.

112. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1959), p. 6.

113. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 1 vol. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1978).

114. Gershom Scholem, “Letter to Hannah Arendt,” in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, ed. W. J. Dannhauser (New York: Schocken, 1976), p. 302.

115. Of course this has been extensively discussed; see Richard Wolin’s Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001).

116. Arendt, Life of the Mind, p. 1. See Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York: NYRB, 2001), pp. 38–39.

117. Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman, rev. ed. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), p. 3. The book was begun in 1930 but not published until 1956.

118. Arendt, The Jew as Pariah, ed. R. H. Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978), p. 245.

119. In an interview Arendt stated as much: “My mother … came out of the Social Democratic movement … as did my father.” Arendt, “‘What Remains? The Language Remains’: A Conversation with Günter Gaus,” in The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. P. Baehr (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), p. 8.

120. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, pp. 8–9, 28.

121. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd ed. (New York: World Publishing, 1958), pp. 475, 468–69. For instance, out of vast literature on ideology, see George Lichtheim, The Concept of Ideology and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1967); and Brian William Head, Ideology and Social Science: Destutt de Tracy and French Liberalism (Dordrecht: Maartinus Nijhoff, 1985). To be sure, Arendt knew Mannheim’s book, since she reviewed it in 1930; see H. Arendt, “Philosophie und Soziologie: Anlässlich Karl Mannheim, Ideologie und Utopie,” Die Gesellschaft 1 (1930): 163–76.

122. Arendt, Origins, 2nd ed., pp. 443, 458.

123. Hannah Arendt, “Approaches to the ‘German Problem,’” Partisan Review 12 (1945): 95–96.

124. Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 1st ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951), pp. 431–32. This conclusion was dropped from later editions.

125. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd ed., pp. 470–72.

126. See Roy T. Tsao, “The Three Phases of Arendt’s Theory of Totalitarianism,” Social Research 69, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 579–621. For an overview, see Steven E. Aschheim, “Nazism, Culture, and The Origins of Totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt and the Discourse of Evil,” in In Times of Crisis: Essays on European Culture, Germans, and Jews (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), pp. 122–36.

127. Arendt, Origins, 2nd ed., p. 470.

128. Arendt, Origins, 2nd ed., p. 459.

129. Arendt to Jaspers, 4 March 1951, in Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence, 1926–1969, ed. L. Kohler and H. Saner (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: New York, 1992), p. 166.

130. Arendt to Scholem, 24 July 1963, in The Jew as Pariah, ed. Feldman, p. 250.

131. Arendt to McCarthy, 20 September 1963, in Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949–1975, ed. C. Brightman (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995), pp. 147–48.

132. Arendt, The Life of the Mind, p. 4.

133. Stephen J. Whitfield, Into the Dark: Hannah Arendt and Totalitarianism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), p. 225. See Barry Sharpe, Modesty and Arrogance in Judgment: Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1999.)

134. Richard J. Bernstein, “Did Hannah Arendt Change Her Mind? From Radical Evil to the Banality of Evil,” in Hannah Arendt Twenty Years Later, ed. L. May and J. Kohn (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), p. 142.

135. Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 24. This book is a learned airbrushing of Arendt’s thought. Faced with the obscurities, contradictions, and illogic of Arendt, Canovan offers statements like the following: “As so often when reading Arendt, it is easy to underestimate the complexity of her thinking” (p. 171).

136. Dana R. Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 56. Oddly, Villa himself has changed his mind—in this very same volume: “The criticism I make of Arendt here departs from the more sympathetic reading I give of her notion of radical evil in that essay [chapter 1]” (p. 231). Adi Ophir tries to reconcile her notions of evil; see Adi Ophir, “Between Eichmann and Kant: Thinking on Evil After Arendt,” in History and Memory 8, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 89–136.

137. Ernst Gellner, Culture, Identity, and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 84–85. Also see Raul Hilberg, The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), pp. 147–57.

138. Richard Crossman, introduction to The God That Failed, by André Gide et al., (New York: Bantam Books, 1952), p. 10. Crossman is citing Ignazio Silone.

139. See Dan Diner, “Hannah Arendt Reconsidered: Über das Banale and das Böse in ihrer Holocaust-Erzählung,” in Hannah Arendt Revisited: ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’ und die Folgen, ed. G. Smith (Frankfurt: Surhamp, 2000), pp. 131–32; and William David Jones, The Lost Debate: German Socialist Intellectuals and Totalitarianism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), pp. 202–3.

1. Isaac Goldberg, Major Noah: American-Jewish Pioneer (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1936), p. 189.

2. Mordecai Noah, “The Ararat Proclamation and Speech,” in The Selected Writings of Mordecai Noah, ed. M. Schuldiner and D. J. Kleinfeld (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999), p. 114.

3. See Amos Elon, The Pity of It All: A History of Jews in Germany, 1743–1933 (New York: Henry Holt, 2002), p. 115.

4. Ben Katchor, The Jew of New York (New York: Pantheon Books, 1999), p. 11.

5. Almost as the same time, another plan was hatched for a community in Florida; see Jacob Toury, “M. E. Levy’s Plan for a Jewish Colony in Florida—1825,” Michael 3 (1975): 23–33. See generally, on American Jewish utopian ventures, Uri D. Herscher, Jewish Agricultural Utopias in America, 1880–1910 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1981).

6. See Bernard W. Weinryb, “Noah’s Ararat Jewish State in Its Historical Setting,” Publication of the American Jewish Historical Society 43 (1953–54): 170–91.

7. Jonathan D. Sarna, Jacksonian Jew: The Two Worlds of Mordecai Noah (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981), p. 68.

8. Journal des Débats, 18 November 1825, pp. 2–3. The last phrase reads “défendue comme crime de lèse-authorité divine” (p. 3).

9. Robert S. Wistrich, Revolutionary Jews from Marx to Trotsky (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), pp. 2–3.

10. Ernest Renan, Histoire du peuple d’Israël, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 6, ed. H. Psichari (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1953), p. 12.

11. K. Marx, “Postface to the Second Edition,” in Capital, intro. E. Mandel, vol. 1, (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), p. 99.

12. For a discussion of the utopianism of The Jewish State, see David Herman, “Zionism as Utopian Discourse,” Clio 23, no. 3 (Spring 1994): 235–47.

13. Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 1988), pp. 69–72, 102, 105.

14. Theodor Herzl, The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, ed. R. Patai, vol. 3 (New York: Herzl Press/Thomas Yoseloff, 1960), p. 1071.

15. Theodor Herzl, Altneuland: Old-New Land, trans. P. Arnold (Haifa: Haifa Publishing Co., 1960), pp. 62, 70, 114–15.

16. Miriam Eliav-Feldon, “‘If you will it, it is no fairy tale’: The First Jewish Utopias,” Jewish Journal of Sociology 25, no. 2 (December 1983): 85.

17. Max Osterberg-Verakoff, Das Reiche Judäa im Jahr 6000 (2241 christlicher Zeitrechnung) (Stuttgart: Foerster and Sie, 1893), pp. 233–34.

18. H. Pereira Mendes, Looking Ahead: Twentieth-Century Happenings (1899; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1971), pp. 374, 377–78, 381,

19. N.A. (Edmund Eisler), Ein Zukunftsbild. Romantisches Gemälde (Vienna: J. H. Holzwarth, 1885).

20. For a discussion of the utopianism of Altneuland, see Jeremy Stolow, “Utopia and Geopolitics in Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland,” Utopian Studies 8, no. 1 (Winter 1997): p. 55; see also David Herman, “Zionism as Utopian Discourse,” 235.

21. Herzl, Altneuland, p. 192.

22. Herzl, Altneuland, p. 64.

23. Muhammad Ali Khalidi, “Utopian Zionism or Zionist Proselytism? A Reading of Herzl’s Altneuland” Journal of Palestine Studies 30, no. 4 (Summer 2001): 55 ff.

24. Ahad Ha’am, “The Jewish State and the Jewish Problem” (1897), in The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader, ed. A. Hertzberg (New York: Atheneum, 1977), pp. 262–69.

25. Achad Haam (Ahad Ha’am), “Altneuland,” Ost und West 3 (1903): 227–43.

26. Ahad Ha-Am (Ahad Ha’am) to M. Levin, cited in Jacque Kornberg, “Ahad Ha-Am and Herzl,” in At the Crossroads: Essays on Ahad Ha-Am, ed. J. Kornberg (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), p. 116.

27. “Nordau’s emphatic diatribe [against Ahad Ha’am] was by far the clearest précis of the synthesis between fin-de-siècle cosmopolitanism and Zionism … as Herzl … conceived it.” Michael Stanislawsi, Zionism and the Fin de Siècle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), p. 18.

28. Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), p. 133. Also see David Vital, Zionism: The Formative Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), pp. 348–63.

29. Max Nordau, “Achad-Haam über ‘Altneuland,’” Die Welt 7, no. 7 (13 March 1903): 1–5.

30. Of course there are many issues. For instance, the Ahad Ha’am, tradition of Zionism was much more alert to the issues of the indigenous Palestinians. See Hans Kohn, Living in a World Revolution: My Encounters with History (New York: Trident, 1964), pp. 50–52.

31. For a critique of Zionism, see Karl Landauer and Herbert Weil, Die Zionistische Utopie (Munich: Hugo Schmidt, 1914).

32. Steven J. Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. xxii.

33. Martin Buber, “Die Wägende,” in Die jüdische Bewegung. Gesammelte Aufsätze. Zweite Folge (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1920), p. 71. This piece was dedicated to Ahad Ha-Am on his sixtieth birthday.

34. See Jehuda Reinharz, Fatherland or Promised Land: The Dilemma of the German Jew, 1893–1914 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1975), pp. 146–53.

35. Martin Buber, “Herzl and History,” in The First Buber, ed. G. C. Schmidt (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1999), p. 160. See Maurice Friedman, Martin Buber’s Life and Word: The Early Years, 1878–1923 (London: Search Press, 1982), pp. 65–66.

36. Friedman, Buber’s Life and Work, pp. 61–62.

37. Kohn, Living in a World Revolution, p. 67, 65.

38. Paul Mendes-Flohr, Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), pp. 84–85.

39. Gershom Scholem, “Martin Buber’s Conception of Judaism,” in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), p. 138.

40. Martin Buber, “Renewal of Judaism,” in On Judaism, ed. H. N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), pp. 37–39.

41. See the exemplary discussion in Ritchie Robertson, Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1985), pp. 141–84.

42. Scholem, “Martin Buber’s Conception of Judaism,” pp. 126–27, 169.

43. Paul Mendes-Flohr, From Mysticism to Dialogue: Martin Buber’s Transformation of German Social Thought (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989).

44. For Landauer’s attraction to and break from “Neue Gemeinschaft,” see Getrude Cepl-Kaufmann, “Gustav Landauer and the Literary Trends of his Time,” in Gustav Landauer: Anarchist and Jew, ed. P. Mendes-Flohr et al. (forthcoming); and Eugene Lunn, Prophet of Community: The Romantic Socialism of Gustav Landauer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), pp. 142–54.

45. Hans Kohn, Martin Buber: Sein Werk und Seine Zeit (Köln: Joseph Melzer Verlag, 1961), p. 29. See Michael Löwy, “Romantic Prophets of Utopia: Gustav Landauer and Martin Buber,” in Gustav Landauer: Anarchist and Jew, ed. P. Mendes-Flohr et al. (forthcoming).

46. Martin Buber, “Alte und neue Gemeinschaft: An Unpublished Buber Manuscript,” ed. P. R. Flohr and B. Susser, AJS Review 1 (1976): 41–56.

47. Martin Buber, “The Holy Way,” in On Judaism, ed. H. N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), pp. 140–41.

48. Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1996; first English edition: 1949; first Hebrew: 1946), pp. 6, 9, 15, 136.

49. Buber, Paths, pp. 142–43. Most accounts agree with Buber that the kibbutzim neither saw themselves nor were seen as utopian communities with blueprints and definite structures. For instance, one earlier study stated that it is “an error” to classify the kibbutzim “in the same category” as utopian communities. “Unlike the Utopian communities,” the kibbutzim “did not originate in a deliberate attempt to mold a new form of social organization on the foundations of a preconceived theory … what shaped its character was the necessity for adaption to the unusual conditions obtaining in Palestine.” Henrik F. Infield, Cooperative Living in Palestine (New York: Dryden Press, 1944), p. 25.

50. Buber, Paths in Utopia, pp. 46–57.

51. Gustav Landauer, “Durch Absonderung zur Gemeinschaft,” in Zeit und Geist. Kulturkritische Schriften 1890–1919, ed. R. Kauffeldt and M. Matzigkeit (n.p.: Klaus Voer Verlag, 1997), p. 99.

52. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, n.d)., pp. 197–98. This American edition fundamentally differs from the first German edition of 1929.

53. Charles B. Maurer, Call to Revolution: The Mystical Anarchism of Gustav Landauer (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1971), p. 199.

54. See Adam Weisberger, “Gustav Landauers mystischer Messianismus,” Aschkenas 5 (1995): 425–39; and Lunn, Prophet of Community; Heinz-Joachim Heydorn, foreword to Aufruf zum Sozialismus, by G. Landauer, ed. H.-J. Heydorn (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1967), esp. pp. 23–33.

55. Fritz Kahn, Die Juden als Rasse und Kulturvolk (Berlin: Welt-Verlag, 1921), pp. 201–3.

56. Arthur A. Cohen, editor’s introduction to “The Maturing of Man and the Maturing of the Jew” [on Landauer], by Ernst Simon, in The Jew: Essays from Martin Buber’s Journal, Der Jude, 1916–1928, ed. A. A. Cohen (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1980), p. 128.

57. See Norbert Altenhofer, “Martin Buber und Gustav Landauer,” in Martin Buber (1878–1965). Internationales Symposium zum 20. Todestag, ed. W. Licharz and H. Schmidt, vol. 2 (Frankfurt: Haag and Herchen, 1989), pp. 150–77.

58. See generally, Norbert Altenhofer, “Tradition als Revolution: Gustav Landauers ‘geworden-werdendes’ Judentum,’” in Jews and Germans from 1860 to 1933: The Problematic Symbiosis, ed. D. Bronsen (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1979), esp. pp. 180–85.

59. Gustav Landauer, Die Revolution (Frankfurt: Literarische Anstalt Rütten and Loening, 1919), pp. 80–81.

60. See Paul Breines, “The Jew as Revolutionary: The Case of Gustav Landauer,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book XII (1967): 75–84.

61. Gustav Landauer, “Sind das Ketzergedanken?” in Der werdende Mensch (Telgte-Westbevern: Verlag Büchse der Pandora, 1977), pp. 120–28.

62. Landauer, “Judentum und Sozialismus,” in Landauer, Dichter, Ketzer, Aussenseiter, ed. H. Delf, Werkausgabe, vol. 3 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997), pp. 160–61.

63. Landauer, Skepsis und Mystik: Versuche im Anschluss an Mauthners Sprachkritik (Berlin: Egon Fleischel, 1903), pp. 69–79.

64. Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony A. Nasser (1963; reprint, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 7, 168.

65. Ernst Bloch, Geist der Utopie (Berlin: Paul Cassirer, 1923), pp. 247–48. Bloch kept revising this work. For instance the section on Jews in the 1923 edition (pp. 287–299) was dropped from later editions.

66. Landauer to Susman, 31 January 1919, in Gustav Landauer: Sein Lebensgang in Briefen, ed. M. Buber, vol. 2 (Frankfurt: Rütten und Loening, 1929), pp. 371–73. See for a discussion of Landauer and Bloch, Bernhard Braun, Die Utopie des Geistes. Zur Funktion der Utopie in der politischen Theorie Gustav Landauers (Idstein: Schulz-Kirchner, 1991), pp. 127–140. Scholem concurred in his sharp criticism of Bloch, although he later revised his judgement; see Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), pp. 88–89 and Scholem, preface to The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932–1940, ed. G. Scholem, trans. Gary Smith and Andre Lefevere (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), p. 7.

67. See Karin Bruns, “Politische Utopie und ästhetisches Programm. Die Neue Gemeinschaft: Vorläufer oder Gegenentwurf zum Forte-Kreis?” in Der Potsdamer Forte-Kreis, ed. R. Faber and C. Holste (Würzburg: Königshausen und Newmann, 2001), pp. 69–84; and generally, Christine Holste, Der Forte-Kreis (1910–1915). Rekonstruktion eines utopischen Versuchs (Stuttgart: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Forschung, 1992). The name of the group derived from the location of their proposed founding meeting in an Italian fishing port, Forte dei Marmi; plus the name carried the connotation of strong or courageous (Holste, Der Forte-Kreis, p. 1).

68. “An den Forte-Kreis Ende November 1914,” in Gustav Landauer. Sein Lebensgang in Briefen, vol. 2, ed. M. Buber with I. Britschgi-Schimmer (Frankfurt: Rütten und Loening, 1929), p. 15. This appeal to the Forte circle is signed by both Landauer and Buber. On the sad story of Britschgi-Schimmer, who devoted herself to Landauer’s letters, see Wolf von Wolzogen, “Ina Britsgi-Schimmer: Co-Editor of Gustav Landauer’s Letters,” in Gustav Landauer: Anarchist and Jew, ed. by Paul Mendes-Flohr et al. (forthcoming).

69. Martin Buber, “Thesen von Martin Buber,” reprinted in Holste, Der Forte-Kreis, pp. 280–81.

70. Maurice Friedman, Martin’s Buber’s Life and Work, p. 182.

71. Gershom Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of my Youth (New York: Schocken Books, 1980), p. 81.

72. See generally, Christine Holste, “‘Die grausigste Ideenlosigkeit in ihren Dienst zwingen’: Gustav Landauers Entwicklung zum utopischen Denken,” in Gustav Landauer (1870–1919), ed. L. M. Fiedler (Frankfurt: Capmus Verlag, 1995), pp. 98–117.

73. Gustav Landauer, For Socialism, trans. D. J. Parent (1911; St. Louis: Telos Press, 1978), p. 38; Landauer, Aufruf zum Sozialismus, ed. H.-J. Heydorn (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1967), p. 68.

74. Landauer, For Socialism, pp. 65, 54, 74.

75. Gustav Landauer, “Der Musik der Welt” (1905), in Der werdende Mensch: Aufsätze über Leben und Schrifttum (Telgte-Westbevern: Verlag Büchse der Pandora, 1977), p. 5.

76. Gustav Landauer, “Gott und der Sozialismus” (1911), in Der werdende Mensch: Aufsätze über Leben und Schrifttum (Telgte-Westbevern: Verlag Büchse der Pandora, 1977), p. 33.

77. Ahad Ha’am, “Judaism and the Gospels,” in Nationalism and the Jewish Ethic: Basic Writings of Ahad Ha’am, ed. H. Kohn, trans. Leon Simon (New York: Schocken, 1962), pp. 295–99.

78. Jörg Asseyer, “Nachwort zur Neu-Herausgabe,” in Gustav Landauer, Skepsis und Mystik (Telgte-Westbevern: Verlag Büchse der Pandora, 1978), p. 86.

79. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 60.

80. Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), pp. 122–23.

81. Mauthner, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (Suttgart: J. G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung, 1906), p. 118. See Elisabeth Leinfellner, “Fritz Mauthner im historischen Kontext der empiristischen, analytischen und sprachkritischen Philosophie,” in Fritz Mauthner: Das Werk eines kritischen Denkers, ed. E. Leinfellner and H. Schleichert (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag 1995), pp. 145–63.

82. Fritz Mauthner, Erinnerungen. Prager Jugendjahre (München: Georg Müller, 1918), pp. 32–33.

83. See Elizabeth Bredeck, Metaphors of Knowledge: Language and Thought in Mauthner’s Critique (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992).

84. Fritz Mauthner, “Aus dem Märchenbuch der Wahrheit,” in Ausgewählte Schriften, vol. 5 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1919), pp. 123–24. See Katherine Arens, Empire in Decline: Fritz Mauthner’s Critique of Wilhelmian Germany (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), pp. 1–30.

85. Fritz Mauthner, in Die Philosophie der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen, ed. R. Schmidt (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1922), pp. 128–29.

86. Fritz Mauthner, Die Sprache (Frankfurt: Literarische Anstalt/ Rütten und Loening, n.d.), p. 102.

87. Fritz Mauthner, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, 2nd ed., vol. 1, pp. 2–3.

88. Landauer, Skepsis und Mystik. Also see Thomas Regehly, “‘Die Welt is ohne Sprache.’ Bemerkungen zur Sprachkritik Gustav Landauers,” in Gustav Landauer (1870–1919) Eine Bestandsaufnahme zur Rezeptions seines Werkes, ed. L.M. Fielder, R. Heuer, and A. Taeger-Altenhofer (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1995), pp. 220–24.

89. Landauer to Mauthner, 9 July 1907, in Gustav Landauer–Fritz Mauthner Briefwechsel 1890–1919, ed. H. Delf (München: Velag C. H. Beck, 1994), pp. 162–63. I’m taking the translation from Letters to Fritz Mauthner, trans. Eleanor Alexander, http://www.mauthnergesellschaft.de/mauthner/fm/land3.html.

90. He never wrote that book. See Hanah Delf, “Einleitung,” in Gustav Landauer–Fritz Mauthner Briefwechsel 1890–1919, p. xiv.

91. Fritz Mauthner, Wörterbuch der Philosophie, 3d ed. (Leipzig 1910–11). Available from www.mauthner-gesellschaft.de/mauthner.

92. Fritz Mauthner, Der Atheismus und seine Geschichte im Abendlande (Stuttgart: Deutsch Verlagsanstelt, 1920–23).

93. Cited in and see, Peter Kampits, Zwischen Schein und Wirklichkeit: Eine kleine Geschichte der österreichischen Philosophie (Vienna, 1984). Available from: www:mauthner-gesellschaft.de/vereindersprachkritiker. See Bredeck, Metaphors of Knowledge, pp. 116–17.

94. Landauer to Mauthner, 17 May, 1911, in Briefwechsel 1890–1919, p. 232.

95. Landauer, Skepsis und Mystik, p. 3–4. See generally Uwe Spörl, “Gustav Landauers Wege von der Skepsis zur Mystik,” in Gottlose Mystik in der deutsche Literatur um die Jahrundertwende (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöning, 1997).

96. Landauer, “Sind das Ketzergedanken?” p. 126.

97. Mauthner to Landauer, 10 October 1913, Briefwechsel 1890–1919, p. 282.

98. Mauthner, Erinnerungen, pp. 49–53.

99. Mauthner, Erinnerungen, p. 33.

100. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Mannheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), p. 245.

101. Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 226–43.

102. Mauthner considered himself an atheist; see Gershom Weiler, “Fritz Mauthner: A Study in Jewish Self-Rejection,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 8 (1963): 136–48

103. Fritz Mauthner, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, 3rd ed., vol.1 (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1923), pp. 169–70.

104. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, p. 231.

105. Fritz Mauthner, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, vol. 1, p. 1.

106. Landauer to Kesternberg, 13 December 1917, in Gustav Landauer. Sein Lebensgang in Briefen, vol. 2, p. 201.

107. Kurt Eisner, cited in footnote of letter to Adolf Otto, 15 November 1918, in Gustav Landauer. Sein Lebensgang in Briefen, vol. 2, p. 296; Landauer to Buber, 15 November 1918, in Gustav Landauer. Sein Lebensgang in Briefen, vol. 2, p. 298.

108. Landauer to Mauthner, 7 April 1919, in Gustav Landauer. Sein Lebensgang in Briefen, vol. 2, pp. 413–14.

109. For Landauer’s last months see, Eugen Lunn, Prophet of Community, pp. 291–342; and Charles B. Maurer, Call to Revolution, pp. 169–200.

110. Ben Hecht, A Child of the Century (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954), pp. 306, 310.

111. Landauer, “An den Aktionsausschuss,” in Gustav Landauer. Sein Lebensgang in Briefen, vol. 2, p. 420.

112. “Munich Victors Kill Another Red Chief,” New York Times, 6 May 1919.

113. Landauer, in Gustav Landauer. Sein Lebensgang in Briefen, vol. 2, p. 423.

114. Ernst Niekisch, Erinnerungen eines deutschen Revolutionärs, vol. 1, Gewagtes Leben 1889–1945 (Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1974), p. 79. In fact, Niekisch himself was a somewhat problematic figure, an extreme rightist and so-called National Bolshevik.

115. Landauer, For Socialism, p. 26; Aufruf, p. 55.

116. Maurer, Call to Revolution, p. 200. In 1933 the Nazis apparently had the monument destroyed and the grave moved. See Braun, Die Utopie des Geistes, p. 114.

117. Landauer, For Socialism, p. 44.

1. Carmel Konikoff, The Second Commandment and Its Interpretation in the Art of Ancient Israel (Geneva: Imprimerie du Journal de Genève, 1973), p. 26.

2. Christoph Dohmen, Das Bilderverbot. Seine Entstehung und seine Entwicklung im Alten Testament (Königstein: Peter Hanstein Verlag, 1985), pp. 15–16. See Tryggve Mettinger, “The Veto on Images and the Aniconic God in Ancient Israel,” in Religious Symbols and Their Functions, ed. H. Biezais (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1979), pp. 15–29.

3. This is the first line of Ernst Cohn-Wiener’s Jewish Art: Its History from the Beginning to the Presesnt Day (1929; reprint, Northamptonshire, U.K.: Pilkington Press, 2001), p. 7. How the prohibition on graven images played out in the Christian and Muslim traditions is a separate story that is not the issue here.

4. Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 9, s.v. “painting,” p. 465 and http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com.

5. Jüdisches Lexikon, vol. 3 (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1929), s.v. “Kunst, Jüdische,” pp. 934–35.

6. See Katman P. Bland, “Anti-Semitism and Aniconism: The Germanophone Requiem for Jewish Visual Art,” in Jewish Identity in Modern Art History, ed. C. M. Soussloff (Berkeley: University of California Press 1999), p. 44.

7. On Renan and his interpretation of Judaism, see David C. J. Lee, Ernest Renan: In the Shadow of Faith (London: Duckworth, 1996), pp. 207–33.

8. Yaacov Shavit, “Have Jews Imagination?” in Athens in Jerusalem: Classical Antiquity and Hellenism in the Making of the Modern Secular Jew (London: Littman Library, 1997), pp. 220–77.

9. See Bland, “Anti-Semitism and Aniconism,” pp. 41–66.

10. Gabrielle Sed-Rajna, L’Art juif orient et occident (Paris: Arts and Métiers Graphiques, 1975), pp. 10–11. See also Pierre Prigent, Le Judaïsme et l’image (Tübingen: J. C. Mohr/Paul Siebeck, 1990); Gabrielle Sed-Rajna, “L’Argument de l’iconophobie juive,” in Nicée II, 787–1987: Douze Siècles D’Images Religeuses, ed. F. Boesflug and N. Lossky (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1987), pp. 81–88. The more recent study by Sed-Rajna notes that past work on the Jewish art has been “defensive.” See the preface to her Jewish Art, with essays by A. Amishai-Maisels et al. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997), p. 9. For a summary of an older discussion, see Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, “Defining ‘Jewish Art’ in Ost and West, 1901–1908,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 1994 39 (1994): 83–110.

11. Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 10, s.v. “Pictorial Art,” p. 32. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. and trans. Robert Hallot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

12. Avram Kampf, “In the Quest of the Jewish Style in the Era of the Russian Revolution,” Journal of Jewish Art 5 (1978): 64.

13. El Lissitzky, “The Synagogue of Mohilev, Reminiscences,” cited in Avram Kampf, Chagall to Kitaj: Jewish Experience in Twentieth Century Art (New York: Praeger, 1990), p. 19.

14. See Rachel Wischnitzer, The Architecture of the European Synagogue (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1964), pp. 141–44; and her “The Wise Men of Worms,” Reconstructionist 25, no. 9 (June 1959): 10–12.

15. S. Yudovin and M. Malkin, Yiddischer Folksornament (1920), cited in Kampf, “In the Quest,” p. 55.

16. The temple was later destroyed by the Soviets.

17. Of course, controversy about Jewish art continues. For an argument that Lissitzky’s later work owes much to his Judaism, see Alan B. Birnholz, “El Lissitzky and the Jewish Tradition,” Studio International 186, no. 959 (October, 1973): 130–136. In Chagall to Kitaj, Kampf finds a Jewish art in the abstract expressionists of the New York School like Barnett Newman: “Newman worked in the classic ‘no graven image’ tradition of Judaism not because images are forbidden, but because the absolute cannot be rendered by an image. It is a purely abstract conception, imageless, like the Jewish God” (p. 161). On the other hand, Anthony Julius in his book on Jewish art, Idolizing Pictures: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Jewish Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2001), pp. 42–48, challenges Kampf. Do Jewish motifs constitute Jewish art? According to Julius, the Jewish Abstract Expressionists largely ignored their origins, and their art lacked anything especially Jewish.

18. Edward Rothstein, Herbert Muschamp, and Martin E. Marty, Visions of Utopia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

19. J. A. Etzler, The Paradise within the Reach of All Men, Without Labor, By Power of Nature and Machinery, 2 parts (Pittsburgh: Etzler and Reinhold, 1833), part 1, pp. 71–74.

20. A partial exception: the more recent anthology includes two pages from Karl Marx, his Communist Manifesto—hardly a utopian text. See G. Negley and J. Max Patrick, eds., The Quest for Utopia: An Anthology of Imaginary Societies (1952; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday/Anchor, 1962); and G. Claeys and L. T. Sargent, eds. The Utopia Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1999).

21. See Ronald S. Hendel, “The Social Origins of the Aniconic Tradition in Early Israel,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 50, no. 3(July 1988): 365–82.

22. Hermann Vorländer, “Der Monotheismus Israels als Antwort auf die Krise des Exils,” in Der einzige Gott: Die Geburt des biblischen Monotheismus, ed. B. Land (Munich: Kösel, 1981), pp. 84–113.

23. Joseph Gutmann, “The ‘Second Commandment’ and the Image of Judaism,” in No Graven Images: Studies in Art and the Hebrew Bible, ed. J. Gutmann (New York: Ktav Publishing, 1971), p. 3.

24. Alain Besançon, The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 69.

25. For a good discussion of the literature, see Robert Karl Gnuse, No Other Gods: Emergent Monotheism in Israel (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997): “The romantic ideas of yore that monotheism should be connected to the desert … have been thoroughly discredited…. Monotheistic Yahwism more likely arose in the urban centers of Mesopotamia during the Babylonian exile” (p. 131).

26. See a fragment from Sibylline Oracles cited in John R. Bartlett, Jews in the Hellenistic World: Josephus, Aristeas, the Sibylline Oracles, Eupolemus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 39; and The Sibylline Oracles, trans. M. S. Terry (New York: Easton and Mains, 1899), p. 261. See also Erich S. Gruen, Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 268–91.

27. See generally Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit, Idolatry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).

28. Max Weber, Ancient Judaism, trans. H. H. Gerth, D. Martindale (New York: Free Press, 1967), pp. 222–25.

29. Josephus “Flavius Josephus Against Apion,” in The Works of Josephus, ed. W. Whiston (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1987), p. 786. Erich S. Gruen dubs this tale “a neat illustration of the sardonic humor” of Jewish-Hellenistic writers; see his Heritage and Hellenism, p. 205.

30. Moses Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, trans. M. Friedländer (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), pp. 317. See Ehud Z. Benor, “Meaning and Reference in Maimonides’ Negative Theology” Harvard Theological Review 88, no. 3 (July 1995): 339 ff.

31. Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, p. 81.

32. Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, p. 87.

33. Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Judaism, intro. A. Altmann (Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis University Press, 1983), p. 116.

34. Leo Strauss, “Introductory Essay,” in Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism, trans. S. Kaplan, 2nd ed. (Atlanta: Scholar’s Press, 1995), p. xxiii.

35. Cohen, Religion of Reason, pp. 53–57.

36. For the twentieth century perhaps the most salient exemplar of this was Oskar Goldberg, an acquaintance of both Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, who writes about him in his memoirs and generally dismissed his “extravagant notions.” See Manfred Voigts, Oskar Goldberg. Der mythische Experimentalwissenschaftler. Ein verdrängtes Kapitel jüdischer Geschichte (Berlin: Agora Verlag, 1992.)

37. Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, p. 117–19.

38. Leo Baeck, God and Man in Judaism (New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1958), p. 19.

39. Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbala and Its Symbolism (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 44–45, 39.

40. Scholem, On the Kabbala, pp. 49–50.

41. Scholem, On the Kabbala, p. 42.

42. See M. Reisel, The Myserious Name of Y.H.W.H. (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1957).

43. David Biale, “Gershom Scholem’s Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on Kabbalah: Text and Commentary,” Modern Judaism 5 (1985): 86. This includes Scholem’s text in German with commentary by David Biale.

44. See Louis Jacobs, “Excursus: The Names of God,” in A Jewish Theology (New York: Behrman House, 1973), pp. 136–51.

45. Judah Halevi, The Kuzari, intro. H. Slonimsky (New York: Schocken, 1964), p. 203.

46. A. Marmorstein, The Old Rabbinic Doctrine of God: I. The Names and Attributes of God (London: Oxford University Press, 1927), pp. 55, 26. The literature on this topic is vast. See Oskar Grether, Name und Wort Gottes im Alten Testament (Giessen: Alfred Töpelmann, 1934).

47. Cited in and see George F. Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950), p. 426.

48. Louis Jacobs, The Jewish Religion: A Companion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 545. See Reisel, Mysterious Name, pp. 66–68.

49. Rabbi Israel of Rizhin, cited in Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), p. 34–35.

50. See Anson Rabinbach, “Between Apocalypse and Enlightenment: Benjamin, Bloch, and Modern German-Jewish Messianism,” in In the Shadow of Catastrophe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 27–65. For a bracing critique of Benjamin on language, see Robert Alter, Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 45–46.

51. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William W. Hallo from the 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), p. 77. See Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: NLB, 1977), pp. 107–8.

52. David Biale, “Gershom Scholem’s Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms,” 86.

53. Leo Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 272.

54. See Verenz Lenzen, Jüdisches Leben und Sterben im Namen Gottes (Munich: Piper, 1995), pp. 111–29.

55. See generally Elizabeth A. Pritchard, “Bilderverbot Meets Body in Theodor W. Adorno’s Inverse Theology” Harvard Theological Review 95, no. 3 (July 2002): 291–319; and René Buchholz, Zwischen Mythos und Bilderverbot. Die Philosophie Adornos als Anstoss zu einer kritischen Fundamentaltheologie im Kontext der späten Moderne (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1991).

56. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (London: NLB, 1974), p. 80.

57. T. W Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), p. 207.

58. Cited in and see Buchholz, Zwischen Mythos, pp. 112–14.

59. T. W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. J. Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), p. 23.

60. Horkheimer to Otto O. Herz, 1 September 1969, in Detlev Claussen, Theodor W. Adorno. Ein Leztes Genie (Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 2003), p. 429. This is an outstanding study of Adorno.

61. Of course, the ethic of silence is not exclusively Jewish; see George Steiner, Language and Silence (New York: Antheneum, 1967): “This revaluation of silence … is one of the most original, characteristic acts of the modern spirit…. In much modern poetry silence represents the claims of the ideal; to speak is to say less” (p. 48).

62. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (1921; London: Routledge, 1961), p. 74.

63. G. H. von Wright, cited in Allan Janik, Essays on Wittgenstein and Weininger (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1985), p. 64.

64. See David Stern, “Was Wittgenstein a Jew?” and Brian McGuinness, “Wittgenstein and the Idea of Jewishness,” both in Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy, ed. J. C. Klagge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 221–71.

65. Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of a Genius (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), pp. 19–25, 312–18. See Allan Janik, Essays on Wittgenstein and Weininger.

66. On Engelmann, see J. Bakacsy, A. V. Munch, and A.-L. Sommer, eds. Architecture Language Critique: Around Paul Engelmann (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000).

67. Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973). See also Allan Janik, “Paul Engelmann’s Role in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Development,” in Architecture Language Critique: Around Paul Engelmann, ed. J. Bakacsy, A. V. Munch, and A.-L. Sommer (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 40–58; and Jacques Le Rider, Modernity and Crises of Identity: Culture and Society in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (New York: Continuum, 1993), pp. 52–55.

68. The poet was Ludwig Uhland. A recent book on him opens, “even a knowledgeable reader will not be blamed for asking: Ludwig Who? For a poet who several generations ago was a standard figure of the literary canon Ludwig Uhland has fallen upon hard times.” Victor G. Doerksen, Ludwig Uhland and the Critics (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1994), p. xi.

69. Wittgenstein to Engelmann, 9 April 1917, in Paul Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir (New York: Horizon Press, 1967), p. 7.

70. Engelmann, Letters, p. 97; emphasis in original.

71. Cited in the editor’s appendix in Engelmann, Letters, p. 143.

72. Leo Strauss, “Literary Character of the Guide for the Perplexed” (1941), in Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 73.

73. Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, pp. 24–25.

74. David Biale, “Gershom Scholem’s Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms,” pp. 72–73. Here again in Scholem we find an anarchist note, what David N. Myers has called Scholem’s “pervasive religious anarchism.” Scholem once stated, “we are perhaps anarchists, but we are opposed to anarchy”: Scholem, from the protocol of the Ha-‘ol study circle in the Judah Leib Magnes Papers, cited in Paul Mendes-Flohr, Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), p. 400. In this regard it is worth noting (following Myers who is following Barukh Kurzweil) that Scholem in his essay on Buber had identified the philosopher of Hasidism as a religious anarchist. Scholem had a sentence that he dropped from later versions of the Buber essay: “I am an anarchist myself, though not one of Buber’s persuasion.” See David N. Myers, Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), generally pp. 151–176. David Biale notes that Scholem identified himself as a “theological anarchist.” See Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 22.

75. Max Horkheimer, “Art and Mass Culture” (1941) in Selected Essays (New York: Seabury Press, 1972), pp. 273–90.

76. See Susan A. Handelman, The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), chap. 2, pp. 27–50.

77. Barry Sanders, A is for Ox (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), pp. 56–57.

78. José Faur, Golden Doves with Silver Dots: Semiotics and Textuality in Rabbinic Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 9–10. Faur uses these ideas to draw parallels with modern literary theory. See the critical review by Robert Alter, The New Republic, 5 January 1987, 27 ff.

79. Baruch Spinoza, Hebrew Grammar, ed. M. J. Bloom (1677; New York: Philosophical Library, 1962), p. 7.

80. For an argument that the Rabbinic method informs modern literary criticism, see Susan A. Handelman, The Slayers of Moses.

81. Besançon, The Forbidden Image, p. 71.

82. Cohen, Religion of Reason, p. 37.

83. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. W. W. Hallo, from 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), pp. 245–46. While Rosenzweig is here defending poetry, he was hardly a critic of the image; see the discussion in Leora Batnitzky, Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 83–90.

84. See David N. Myers, Resisting History: Historicism and is Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 74.

85. Heinrich Gratz, “Judaism Can Be Understood Only Through Its History,” in Ideas of Jewish History, ed. M. A. Meyer (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), pp. 222–23

86. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 543–60.

87. Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony A. Nasser (1963; reprint, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 144. The category of “noch nicht,” which he may have borrowed from Landauer, assumes great importance in Bloch’s work.

88. Hans Jonas, “The Nobility of Sight,” in The Phenomenon of Life: Towards a Philosophical Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 136–39.

89. For a dissenting interpretation, see the learned and strange book by Elliot R. Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994). “A distinctive feature of the ocularcentrism in medieval Jewish mysticism is a phallocentrism…. The specularized figure that provides the foundational condition for the visionary experience is the disclosure of the phallus … it becomes evident … the Kabbalist is visually contemplating the divine phallus” (pp. 395–97). A meshugener.

90. Israel Eldad, cited in Shavit, Athens in Jerusalem, p. 200.

91. Lionel Kochan, Beyond the Graven Image: A Jewish View (New York: New York University Press, 1997), pp. 164–65.

92. Jacques Ellul, The Humiliation of the Word (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1985), pp. 13–14.

93. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. H. Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), p. 266.

94. Moses Hess, Rome and Jerusalem: A Study in Jewish Nationalism, intro. M. Waxman (New York: Bloch Publishing, 1943), pp. 108–9.

95. Yaacov Shavit’s Athens in Jerusalem opens with this quote from Tertullian (p. 1). See Louis H. Feldman, Studies in Hellenistic Judaism (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), pp. 487–503.

96. Heinrich Heine, “Ludwig Börne,” in Heinrich Heines Sämtliche Werke, vol. 8 (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1913), p. 360.

97. Heinrich Heine, cited in Bluma Goldstein, Reinscribing Moses: Heine, Kafka, Freud, and Schoenberg in a European Wilderness (Cambridge:, Mass. Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 25.

98. See generally Goldstein, Reinscribing Moses, pp. 21–39.

99. Heinrich Heine, “Geständnisse,” Heinrich Heines Sämtliche Werke, vol. 10 (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1913), pp. 183–84; and Heine, “Moses” (1854), in The Poetry and Prose of Heinrich Heine, ed. F. Ewen (New York: Citadel Press, 1948), pp. 661–62.

100. For a good discussion of Arnold’s shift, see Donald D. Stone, “Matthew Arnold and the Pragmatics of Hebraism and Hellenism,” Poetics Today 19, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 179–98.

101. Mathew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, ed. S. Collini (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), chaps. 4 and 5.

102. While educing many examples of this polarity, Shavit believes that the notion the Greeks excelled in the visual is “unfounded” (Shavit, Athens in Jerusalem, p. 201).

103. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 90–91.

104. Plato, The Republic, book 10, in Collected Dialogues, ed. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns (New York: Bollingen/Pantheon, 1963), p. 832.

105. Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 43–47.

106. See generally Eugene H. Reed, “Herder, Primitivism, and the Age of Poetry,” Modern Language Review 60, no. 4 (October, 1965): 550–67

107. J. G. Herder, The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, vol. 2 (German, 1782; Eng. trans., 1833; Naperville, Ill.: Aleph Press, 1971), p. 10.

108. Thorleif Boman, Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek (London: SCM Press, 1960), p. 27.

109. Boman, Hebrew Thought, pp. 206, 205.

110. Mathew Arnold, “Heinrich Heine” (1863) in Essays in Criticism: First Series, ed. Sister T. M. Hoctor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 113. The editors of the University of Michigan Press scholarly edition of Arnold’s works (The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, vol. 3, Lectures and Essays in Criticism, ed. R. H. Super [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962], p. 439], footnote Romans 8:26 as the sources of Arnold’s quotation. “Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.”

111. For a compilation, see Michael Higger, The Jewish Utopia (Baltimore, Md.: Lord Baltimore Press, 1932).

112. I. Epstein, ed., The Babylonian Talmud seder zera’im, Berakoth 57b, (London: Soncino Press, 1948), part 5, vol. 1, p. 356.

113. Gustav Landauer, For Socialism, trans. D. J. Parent (1911; St. Louis: Telos Press, 1978), p. 44.

114. Arnold, “Heinrich Heine,” p. 113; Heinrich Heine, Pictures of Travel, trans. C. G. Leland (New York: D. Appleton, 1904), p. 301. Translation slightly altered. See Heine, Reisebilder, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2 (Munich: Winkler-Verlag, 1969), pp. 268–69.

115. Heine, Pictures of Travel, p. 259.

116. Kurt Wilhelm, “The Idea of Humanity in Judaism,” in Studies in Rationalism, Judaism, and Universalism, ed. R. Loewe (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), p. 297.

1. Lewis Mumford, The Story of Utopias (1922; rev. ed., New York: Viking Press, 1962), p. 2.

2. Thomas More, Utopia, intro. P. Turner (1516; New York: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 49.

3. Max Horkheimer, “Beginnings of the Bourgeois Philosophy of History,” in Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings, intro. G. F. Hunter (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), p. 369.

4. “Ironically,” writes Robert Wojtowicz in his study of Mumford, “the root cause of Mumford’s later pessimism was ‘utopia.’” Robert Wojtowicz, Lewis Mumford and American Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 162.

5. T. W. Adorno, in “Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing,” in Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literaturre, ed. J. Zipes and F. Mecklenburg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), p. 11–12. For a comparison of Adorno’s and Bloch’s ideas on utopia, see Inge Münz-Koenen, Konstruktion des Nirgendwo. Die Diskursivität des Utopischen bei Bloch, Adorno, Habermas (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997).