ABSTRACT
Mr. Gorbachev in Russia, and Mr. Deng and his successors in China, may succeed in maintaining their party's monopolyof power or even in reviving the economy. But one thing they cannot restore is the belief in salvation by society whether through communism or any other 'ism'. The belief in salvation by society is equally gone in non-communist countries. The void created by the disappearance of the belief in salvation through faith was filled in the mid 1700s by the emergence of the belief in salvation by society, that is, by a temporal social order, embodied in an equally temporal government. The death of the belief in salvation by society, which for 200 years had been the most dynamic force in the politics of the West and increasingly in politics world-wide, creates a void. The emergence of fundamentalist Islam is an attempt to fill this void.
