“Robert Jay Lifton offers a new conceptual framework for our understanding not only of Chinese convulsion, its causes, its surprising potency and its consequences, but of evolution in general and the strange urgency, which can become paramount, of revolution never to proclaim itself successful, never to say its job is done and its goals attained. . . . [Dr. Lifton] has made a signal contribution to the understanding of the relationship of individual psychology to historical change, and especially of the vicissitudes of human continuity . . . .Revolutionary Immortality is, I would judge, an essential study of Communist China; more than that, it is an original, intellectually exciting, gracefully written and wholly accessible essay on an aspect of human individual and mass psychology as it operates in contemporary revolutionary circumstances around the world.” —Eliot Fremont-Smith, New York Times This new edition of Revolutionary Immortality coincides with two interesting rediscoveries in American intellectual life—that of China and that of death. The book happens to be about both.
