The Catastrophist 
Malcolm Bull
- Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia by John Gray Buy this book
‘It is not too fanciful to suppose that “posterity”, in the year 2032, will be celebrating the events of November 1917 as a happy turning point in the history of human freedom, much as we celebrate the events of July 1789.’ Not too fanciful, in 1932, for Carl Becker, the American historian who first cast a quizzical eye over the utopian designs of the Enlightenment in The Heavenly City of the 18th-Century Philosophers. But surely too fanciful now, even for a reconstructed Leninist.
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Malcolm Bull is the head of art history and theory at the Ruskin in Oxford. His books include Seeing Things Hidden: Apocalypse, Vision and Totality.
Other articles by this contributor:
Ultimate Choice · Thoughts of Genocide
You can’t build a new society with a Stanley knife · Hardt and Negri’s Empire
Hate is the new love · Slavoj Žižek
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