'It is not too fanciful to suppose that "posterity", in the year 2032, will be celebrating the events of November 1917 as a happy turning point in the history of human freedom, much as we celebrate the events of July 1789.' Not too fanciful, in 1932, for Carl Becker, the American historian who first cast a quizzical eye over the utopian designs of the Enlightenment in The Heavenly City of the 18th-Century Philosophers. But surely too fanciful now, even for a reconstructed Leninist.

LRB 1 November 2007 | PDF Download