Reader's Report #1
Report on the Landes Ms
How would you describe the rationale, purpose or thesis of the work?
This book is about the urgent temperament of those who expect the grandest events of history and the cosmos to occur soon and suddently, whether as a religious dénouement with the coming of the Last Days or as a final social solution to solve the human predicament forever. Landes, through a judicious collection of cases, demonstrates just how significant the millenarian factor is in history, and shows how this element has been deliberately downplayed by historians (who often do not seek to understand it any case). Revolutionary urges (in France before and after 1800, in the Marxist movement, in Bolshevik takeover of Russia 1917, for examples) have typically been read as secular, but Landes challenges us not only to see their religious dimensions but their millenarist force as well. The explicit millenarian thrust of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, in any case, has made us all realize that the assumption of secularization always accompanying modernity simply does not wash any more, and it is fitting for Landes to finish by looking at the Islamic world and the appearance of the “enraged millennialism” of extremists.
Do you approve of the scholarship, the writing style, and organization?
This mammoth effort of worthy scholarship, backed up all the way by a wealth of sources, amounts to wonderfully stimulating scholarship. I would describe Landes attempt as a great wrestle with the past, and when at times you think he is going to be beaten by the evidence, he gets up again to show he is master and commander, leading you where you thought you would not go! The writing is very lively and engaging (though for problems with colloquialisms, se below). The organization is well done, with useful interlacing between chapters (though Landes needs to show greater and stated caution about drawing parallels between ethnographic and ‘ordinary historical’ materials. The purpose of his selection of materials for each chapter should be justified in some preliminary way, and clearly, in his introduction.
Does the work make a significant contribution to the field?
If I am right the work is mainly a response and application of Norman Cohn’s masterwork The Pursuit of the Millennium, which is a highly prized text among history teachers for inspiring interest in millennialist trajectories. No one else has followed up Cohn’s suggestions about the possible implications of his mediaeval and early modern researches for more recent Western history and for non-Western cultural complexes so thoroughly and forcefully.
