Heaven on Earth
Subtitle: The Rise and Fall of Socialism
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: April 25, 2002
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 391
ISBN-13: 9781893554450
Subjects: Socialism & left-of-centre democratic ideologies; Politics / Current Events; History: World; Political Science; Politics/International Relations; Socialism; General; History & Theory - Radical Thought; Political Ideologies - Communism & Socialism; History / General; History
First sentence: EASTEK SUNDAY, 1911, was a glorious spring day in the region of Picardy, with a "superb azure sky" beckoning locals to their gardens and fishing holes, so the newspaper reported.
Description: "Socialism was man's most ambitious attempt to supplant religion with a doctrine claiming to be rational and "scientific." In the century following its birth in the French Revolution, socialism was propounded by writers and organizers until it became the fastest-growing idea in Europe. Then Lenin showed that it could be spread better by the sword than by the word, and soon it spanned the globe. No other political idea, indeed no religion, ever traveled so far so fast.".

"The search for the Promised Land took socialists in diverse directions: revolution, communes and kibbutzim, social democracy, communism, fascism, Third Worldism. But none of these paths led to the prophesied utopia. Nowhere did socialists succeed in creating societies of easy abundance or in midwifing the birth of a "New Man," as their theory promised.

Some socialist governments abandoned their grandiose goals and satisfied themselves with making slight modifications to capitalism, while others plowed ahead doggedly, often inducing staggering human catastrophes. Then, after two hundred years of wishful thinking and fitful governance, socialism suddenly imploded in the 1990s in a fin du siecle drama of falling walls, collapsing regimes and frantic revisions of doctrine."--BOOK JACKET.