It may be that, despite wars, revolutions, genocides, and jihad, there are still a few trusting souls who believe that modernity, technological progress, and reason move forward together in bright, benign convoy. If so, they cannot have read Heaven on Earth, an ideal tough love gift for any Candides of your acquaintance. In it, Richard Landes describes the past, present, and probable future of millennialism, the umbrella term for a collection of beliefs in a world overturned and remade that has resonated, seductive and destructive, through the ages. It is a bracing and instructive read, if not always an easy one. Landes is an associate professor of history at Boston University, one of today’s academic priesthood. Like most clerics he has a weakness for the mumbo-jumbo that empowers his caste. “Semiotic arousal”? No thanks.
But it’s worth hacking your way through the jargon. The insight and impressive breadth of this book (among its characters are the monotheistic pharaoh Akhenaten, Karl Marx, Adolf Hitler, UFO cultists, cargo cultists, and those nutty Bolsheviks) make it a valuable addition to the study of a way of thinking that extends far beyond street corner, pulpit, and psychiatric ward. Millennialism has shaped religion, politics, and the overlap between the two and yet, it remains, Landes argues, curiously underexamined.
Underexamined, not unexamined: as he clearly accepts, Landes owes a debt to the historian Norman Cohn (1915–2007), and, more specifically, his masterpiece, The Pursuit of the Millennium. In that book, Cohn explored