THE GOD THAT FAILED

This novel was 130 years ago of franch revolution as a vision of the kingdom of god
an earth. they were not discouraged by the rebuffs of professional revolutionaries.
Conceived "in the heat of argument" between Crossman, a Labour intellectual and
politician, and the leftist author Arthur Koestler, these essays by six intellectuals "describe
the journey into communism, and the return." The only comparable books about the appeals
and delusions of communism on idealists outside the Soviet Union are Raymond Aron's
Opium of the Intellectuals (1957) and Francois Furet's more recent Le pass d'une illusion
(1995). But Aron is more didactic -- superbly so -- and Furet concentrates on the French case.
What makes The God That Failed so powerful is the ardent, bitter, irreplaceable testimony of
men like Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender, Koestler, and Richard Wright -- men of very
different backgrounds and experiences, all attracted by the "glimpse of the Promised Land"
(Koestler), in search of a faith, indeed of "a conversion, a complete dedication" (Silone), of "a
state of historical- materialist grace" (Spender). How the dream of fraternity and social justice
turns into a nightmare of servility to party double talk and sudden turns, how the fellow
traveler drops out and has to return to his own lonely road, is a story that forms a sad, major
part of twentieth -century life, in Western Europe and elsewhere.