The Road To Unfreedom

The Road to Unfreedom is one of those tomes that American academia can produce - the outpourings of a suave professor (in this case Yale no less) that can knock on the door of the bestseller lists. And, as it happens, quite right too. Enticingly written it ranges over Trump, Putin, Brexit and much else and has serious things to say about serious subjects.

Snyder and I would disagree over Brexit (like most Americans he doesn't get it) but we can park that because my enemy's enemy is my friend. And Snyder clearly loathes Putin and the man he regards as that rogue's Manchurian candidate, our old mate Donald Trump.

We are in the realms of Right Hegelians (Lenin) and Left Hegelians (Ilyin and latterly Putin). We are in the danger zone where an inevitablist view of history disappears up its own behind and abandons the field to the eternalists. We are in the death-zone for individualism.

The politics of eternity cannot make Putin or any other man immortal. But it can make other ideas unthinkable. And that is what eternity means: the same thing over and over again, a tedium exciting to believers because of the illusion that it is particularly theirs.