One of the most important yet frequently overlooked books of the 20th century is The Pursuit of the Millennium, written by the great British historian Norman Cohn and first published in 1952. Part of the reason The Pursuit’s significance is overlooked is that its subtitle—Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages—belies its real scope and relevance. In truth, Cohn’s book is about a great deal more than the Middle Ages. It is, indeed, about the entire history of post-Roman Western Civilization, about the perpetually recurring urge in the West to fantasize about ending the unfairness and suffering of human existence through the temporal redemption of society, through a supernaturally induced revolution against the existing order and the establishment of “heaven on earth.” Cohn himself recognized this widespread Western urge and understood full well that its recurrences were not confined to the Middle Ages and that they did not end with the Renaissance, the Reformation, or even the Enlightenment. If anything, these events added an even greater sense of urgency and a more widespread and, thus, enduring character to man’s endeavors to establish an earthly utopia. Cohn put it this way in his conclusion(emphasis added):
One may also reflect on the left-wing revolutions and revolutionary movements of this century . . . during the half-century since 1917 there has been a constant repetition, and on an ever-increasing scale, of the socio-psychological process which once joined the Taborite priests or Thomas Müntzer with the most disoriented and desperate of the poor, in phantasies of a final, exterminatory struggle against “the great ones”; and of a perfect world from which self-seeking would be for ever banished. . . . The old religious idiom has been replaced by a secular one, and this tends to obscure what otherwise would be obvious. For it is the simple truth that, stripped of their original supernatural sanction, revolutionary millenarianism and mystical anarchism are with us still.
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