08-27-2007, 06:03 PM
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Contributor
Join Date: Jun 2000
Location: Los Angeles area
Posts: 40,549
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Historian Norman Cohn dies at 92
One of my google alerts turned this up: Norman Cohn, Historian, Dies at 92
Quote:
The Times Literary Supplement included his seminal 1957 book, "The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (or via: amazon.co.uk)," in a 1995 list of the 100 nonfiction works with the greatest influence on how postwar Europeans perceive themselves. Other books on the list were by Camus, Sartre and Foucault.
Beginning with the Crusades and concluding with 16th-century Anabaptists, Mr. Cohn showed in this book how the desire of the poor to improve their lot merged with prophecies of a final struggle between Christ and Antichrist, to be followed by the emergence of a new paradise.
“In situations of mass disorientation and anxiety, traditional beliefs about a future golden age or messianic kingdom came to serve as vehicles for social aspirations and animosities,” he wrote.
This vision, he suggested, passed among cultures and languages and from religious to secular discourse without losing its coherence or power to jolt the downtrodden to rise up. Messianic leaders like Stalin and Hitler appealed to the deep, biblically inspired belief that after intense struggle history would end, and an elect of believers would inherit paradise.
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