ABSTRACT
The political theorists of the Enlightenment had imagined that what was happening in the world was clearly for the good in the best of all possible worlds. There are peoples for whom the unit of social organisation was based upon kinship, it is true, and some of these with a low level of technology, but there was also an enormously valuable social and cultural heritage, which was ruthlessly set aside and destroyed. The central institution, through which communism seeks both to subordinate all human activity to the substantively rational goals of the plan, and at the same time to moralise or socialise men, is the disciplined party. This chapter concludes by considering both the limitations and the real importance of this on Utopias. Robin Jenkins's position is probably a Utopian one in Mannheim's sense, however, since he tends to overestimate the extent to which the forces of international class conflict are already organised and the conflict unavoidable.
