The Totalitarian Temptation

The inhabitants of the Iron Curtain countries have no love for the totalitarian systems under which they live. The enormous number of defectors to the West is proof enough of this. Then why do many socialist and other liberal-minded men in the countries of Western Europe, and indeed in Africa, South East Asia and Latin America, lend their support to communist activities all over the world? This is the question posed and answered in this brilliantly polemical new book by the author of "Without Marx or Jesus". The answer, M. Revel maintains, is that well meaning but misguided people, out of their hatred for the existing capitalist system equate true communism with the socialist system they hope to see established. How can the spread all over the world of communist regimes, imbued as they are, as well as the Western democracies, with the idea of the nation state, be averted? Can the capitalist democracies so reform themselves that they can survive the Trojan Horse tactics now being employed against them? Only, M. Revel maintains, by the withering away of the nation state and its replacement, so far as the West is concerned, by a real world order. --- Jean-François Revel was born in 1924 in Marseilles, and studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. Later he taught at the French Institutes in Mexico and Florence, and then at Lille and in Paris. He has written widely for many journals and is currently [1977] editorial writer for L'Express.