ABSTRACT
The radical dream is the dream of human liberty, to be achieved by tearing inequality and injustice out by the roots and planting the seeds of a new order deep in social relations and institutions. To be a radical, as to be a reactionary, is therefore to be a fundamentalist, and if this involves a drastic quality that touches the imagination, it also often involves an inflexible quality that fetters the intellect and shoes the sensibilities in seven-league boots. Marxian doctrine, like liberal doctrine, is a historical development, with a genealogy and a life history. But this does not strip it of its validity. Marxism had the enormous advantage over liberalism in being hammered out when the world of capitalist industrialism was already full-fledged, with all its principal features delineated. Radical hopes the world over reached their peak in the decade and a half between the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the triumph of Hitler in 1933.
