The books are not aimed at you, personally, Jim.
The books are part of a very large, world wide political debate that started in the 1920’s … and perhaps even earlier.
The Librarian of Congress, James Billington, wrote an outstanding book, “Fire in the Minds of Men” … tracing the origins of Communism back to the French Revolution.
Fascinating study. You might enjoy it as pure history.
amazon.com/Fire-Minds-Men-James-Billington/dp/0765804719
Actually, the book reviews by readers on Amazon are almost as good as the book itself.
amazon.com/review/product/0765804719/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?%5Fencoding=UTF8&showViewpoints=1
A couple of excerpts from one of the reviews:
The chapter National vs. Social Revolution chronicles the revolutionary fracture that came about in the mid-1800’s. What emerged from this schism were the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century. The heirs of the national revolutionary tradition, “fortified fraternity with equality” and gave birth to Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. National revolutionaries of the twentieth century found their fraternity in the abstractions of Volk (People) or the (Reich) Nation. The social revolutionaries, on the other hand, lofted equality above all but bound it to fraternity. They gave rise to Bolshevism and Communist movements. Ironically, as Billington notes, “The most violent and authoritarian movements in Germany and Russia each intensified one form of the revolutionary faith by adopting signficant elements of the other.” Nazism was abbreviation for “national socialism” while Communism under Stalin came to be defined as “socialism in one country.” Both of these revolutionary faiths whether of the national revolutionary tradition or the social revolutionary tradition were millenarian social religions.
The contagious revolutionary fervor of the French Revolution, which was wrought from 1789 to 1791, had its origin in the utopian Rousseau and German Romanticism. Billington’s sweeping narrative begins amidst this fervor, which beset the eighteenth century.
Further bridging the nineteenth and twentieth century, Billington offers a chapter on ‘Lenin’s Path to Power,’ which traces the revolutionary activities of he and his cohorts in bringing about the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
Billington has created a framework that anyone can use as a reference for further study and reading or just as a stand-alone reference work.
