Furet sets the stage for the rise of the Communist idea by returning to the French Revolution and describing the tension between the bourgeois world it created in economics and politics and the antibourgeois passions it bred in the human heart....[W]hat remains? In Furet's view, less than nothing: "All that remains of the regimes born" of the October Revolution "is what they sought to destroy."
— The New York Times Book Review
...Furet's book is not quite about an illusion whose time has passed. Its real subject is an illusion that refuses to die....It should be said at once that this is a great book: passionate yet Olympian mordant yet humane. It is not a history of communism, but of communism's central illusions..... The moral of his story, surely, is humility.
—New Republic
[The Passing of an Illusion] is an important book....It is about the self-serving myths of our century and the illusions we still harbour concerning them...it is the first stab at a twenty-first-century history of our time.
— Times Literary Supplement (French edition)
An English translation of a work originally published in France in 1995, this volume discusses the reality and the myth of Communism in the 20th Century. Furet, a recipient of France's highest intellectual honor, shows how support for the idea of Communism, as well as for the Soviet Union as its embodiment, came to be seen as synonymous with "anti-Fascism," despite the common nationalist origins of both Fascism and Communism. He discusses the ramifications of this confusion for both the East and West. The author's personal experience as a Communist himself during the years 1949 to 1956 lends a personal aspect to his investigation. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknew.com)
"Communism," Foret observes, "is completely contained within its past." There are few better starting points to understanding that past than this study.
— WQ: The Wilson Quarterly
The publication of [this] American edition makes accessible to the general reader the most thought-provoking historical assessment of communism in Europe to appear since its collapse. Thanks to a splendid translation—a labor of love and insight by Furet's widow, Deborah—we now have an English edition that captures the literary elegance and sharp historical reasoning of the French original.
— The Wall Street Journal
A subtle, nuanced, but gripping study of the most pervasive and destructive illusion of the 20th century, that of the virtues of communism. This book by the late Furet, a member of the Académie Française, and scholar of the French Revolution, and himself a former Communist, has already been translated into more than a dozen languages. In it he tries to grapple with the paradox of the wide admiration for a regime like that of the Soviet Union, manifestly unfree, economically unsuccessful, and unprecedentedly brutal toward its people. He finds the basis for its appeal in its seeming promise of human equality but even more in the disillusionment created by the First World War, from which National Socialism also received its impetus. Indeed, he finds that communism and Nazism fed off each other and even suggests that Stalin, who admired Hitler's ruthlessness, learnt a lesson from the "Night of the Long Knives," during which Hitler purged the stormtroopers. Most of all, communism benefited from being seen as the sole anticapitalist, antifascist force. Its universality can be understood by its appeal even to the reformist British intelligentsia. Most surprising of all was the bland indifference of Western intellectuals to the monstrous cruelty of the terror. It was only when the terror had largely subsided, and when the Pasternaks and the Solzhenitsyns were merely being gagged and harassed rather than executed, that intellectuals protested. The end came, in Furet's view, when Khrushchev denounced Stalin's crimes, which brought into question the two wellsprings of the Soviet regime: ideology and terror. Most ironic of all, Furet suggests, is the paucity of interest shown byEuropean intellectuals in the virtues of the American system of government. Furet devotes himself almost entirely to Europe, and the book, for all its vitality, is not easy reading. But there are few books that deal so well or with such subtlety with the opiate of the closing century's intellectuals.
