Books, Arts & Manners: The Statist Temptation

Democracy against Itself: The Future of the Democratic Impulse, by Jean-François Revel (Free Press, 263 pp., $24.95)

JEAN-FRANÇOIS REVEL is theFrench political theorist who took on and vanquished, with a little help from history, the Marxist tribes of Paris. In The Totalitarian Temptation (1976), he asked why so many in the West took a positively obsequious attitude toward the deceit and depravity of Communist regimes. In How Democracies Perish (1983) he attacked vigorous Western democracies for feebleness in the face of a corrupt totalitarianism. Democracy against Itself carries these themes one stage further.

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Kenneth Minogue

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Democracy against Itself: The Future of the Democratic Impulse, by Jean-François Revel (Free Press, 263 pp., $24.95)

JEAN-FRANÇOIS REVEL is theFrench political theorist who took on and vanquished, with a little help from history, the Marxist tribes of Paris. In The Totalitarian Temptation (1976), he asked why so many in the West took a positively obsequious attitude toward the deceit and depravity of Communist regimes. In How Democracies Perish (1983) he attacked vigorous Western democracies for feebleness in the face of a corrupt totalitarianism. Democracy against Itself carries these themes one stage further.