Lost dreams
It was only after I'd posted the Eric Hobsbawm quotation that I realized that the latest instalment of Norm Geras's "Writer's Choice" deals with the very same theme. Norm's guest, academic Jeffrey Herf, discusses "The Passing of an Illusion" by François Furet:
It stands in a tradition with Albert Camus' "The Rebel" and Raymond Aron's, '"The Opium of the Intellectuals", two previous works by French liberals who cast a sceptical eye on the Jacobin tradition and its Communist successors."I hadn't even heard of Furet before, I must admit. The Hobsbawm is very readable, btw. I didn't catch it when it first came out.