The politics of blood

The Bullet's Song: Romantic Violence and Utopia, by William Pfaff (Simon & Schuster, 384 pp., $27.95)

THIS ambitious book correctly identifies--and helps the reader better to understand--some of the most important and contentious developments of the past century, including "the conflation of revolutionary commitment with liberating violence," "the ability of secular utopian thought to inspire lethal dogmatic idealism," and "the desire to find a post-religious moral explanation for life." William Pfaff, longtime columnist for the International Herald Tribune and author of other studies in contemporary political history, explores the connections between the pursuit of romantic self-fulfillment and political violence, between secularization and utopia-seeking, and between meaning and meaninglessness in history--all against the background of the fundamentals of human nature.

The book also explores familiar territory, in its lamentations of the ravages of modernity--with a special emphasis on the demise of old-fashioned heroism, and of chivalrous ways of conducting war. The tone is often reminiscent of the writings of George Kennan, as it justifiably, if sometimes exaggeratedly, bemoans the moral and aesthetic decline modernity brings about. The author also shares with Kennan a temptation to see--sometimes questionably--moral equivalence between the misconduct of the United States and that of other political actors around the world.

Pfaff pursues these weighty matters by examining the lives and ideas of a handful of 20th-century intellectuals and artists who "imposed themselves upon the author as living evidence of the history of the modern crisis," most of them "also engaged in re-creating themselves as someone they were not." The best known among them are T. E. Lawrence, Andre Malraux, and Arthur Koestler. Less well known, at least to American readers, are Gabriele D'Annunzio, Ernst Junger, Filippo Marinetti, and Willi Munzenberg. Wholly unknown is Vladimir Peniakoff, "an engineer by training, from a cultivated, assimilated, partly Jewish Belgian family of Russian origin," who is discussed at greater length than some other far more illustrious figures; his claim to the author's attention and sympathy appears to be his attempts to participate in World War II in a humane, moral, and chivalrous fashion. Also discussed (in the more-obscure category) is Charles de Foucauld (1858-1916), "a rich cavalry officer" who, after being enamored of the Tuaregs of North Africa, became a Trappist monk, inspired the founding of a religious sect, and remained an admirer of "primitive people." Che Guevara gets less than two pages; there are many scattered references to Mussolini.

It is not entirely clear what criteria governed the selection of these individuals, and the uneven amount of space devoted to them. To be sure, T. E. Lawrence, Malraux, and D'Annunzio coherently exemplify the intellectual-turned-political-activist flirting with the warrior role. Koestler, Malraux, and Munzenberg have in common their support for and subsequent disillusionment with the Soviet Union and what it represented. Junger, an important German writer in the first half of the 20th century, fought valiantly in World War I and believed in the purifying and ennobling functions of war. Koestler, a political activist, was not drawn to the warrior role; nor was Munzenberg, an accomplished propagandist serving Moscow in the 1930s. Marinetti was a so-called Futurist, a painter and writer who also believed in the redeeming qualities of political violence and was a precursor of Italian Fascism.

If impact and influence had been the criteria of selection, Castro, Lenin, and Trotsky should have been included: All were 20th-century revolutionaries, violence-prone utopia-seekers, and (arguably) intellectuals. For similar reasons, Frantz Fanon and Sartre would also have been good candidates. The disparities in the importance, character, and lifestyle of the figures discussed weaken the coherence of the narrative, as does the alternation of the often lengthy and discursive biographical sections with the more diffuse philosophical reflections, the latter often not closely integrated with the former.

Such difficulties notwithstanding, this is a thoughtful and thought-provoking book devoted to the basic proposition that deserves reaffirmation and further elucidation, namely that ideas drive history. The ideas have often been rather dubious and their attempted realization has had spectacularly disastrous consequences, as shown by the history of 20thcentury totalitarianism and nationalism. Highly distinguished intellectuals often made startlingly bad political judgments and supported unworthy causes. For example, Pfaff's list of those who were enthusiastic about World War I includes Weber, Thomas Mann, Freud, Durkheim, Rilke, Proust, Bergson, Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James; and also scientists such as Rontgen, Planck, and Haldane.