irremediable.......................

 

The guiding notion of the Enlightenment, and later of Marx and Lenin's "scientific" socialism, was that henceforth the alliance between happiness and justice would no longer come about through the individual quest for wisdom, but through the rebuilding of society as a whole.  And before building a new society, the old one first had to be completely destroyed.  It was at the end of the eighteenth century that the idea of revolution took on its modern meaning.  Personal salvation was from then on subordinate to collective salvation. . . . suffice it to say that somewhere between 1965 and 1970 I thought I'd seen the irremediable bankruptcy of this illusion, the progenitor of the great totalitarian movements that have ravaged the twentieth century.

-Jean-François Revel