Volume 43, Number 16 · October 17, 1996
Dream Time
By Alan Ryan
A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968
by Paul Berman
Norton, 351 pp., $24.00
The reader who glances at the title of Paul Berman's vivid and interesting new book might wonder which were the two utopias whose tale he is telling. Reading further will bring as much bafflement as enlightenment. For what Paul Berman has written is not exactly a tale of two utopias. The book consists of four long essays: on the student radicals of the 1960s, on gay liberation, on Václav Havel's enthusiasm for Frank Zappa, and—an appropriate finale—on the 'end of history' thesis as understood by Francis Fukuyama and the French writer André Glucksmann. A suspicious critic might complain that accounts of the end of history in all their various forms, from Hegel onward, have always had as their purpose the suppression of whatever utopian aspirations their audience is supposed to have, and wonder what Berman is up to.
Review, 4976 words
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