/lit/ - Literature

>>10541560

>>10541582 is a good summary. If you want to understand why it failed (also Fascism, Nazism, and now Neoliberalism), I think without a shred of irony that the best book is The Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Cohn. It is an uncompromising look into the impulses that lead people to believe that they will bring a new world into existence in which everything will be different, and why they always fail. It's a notion that's pervasive -- and may be an irrevocable part of -- modern thinking.

I am a Catholic, and this book is HARD on the Church. It sent me into a very bad state for a while, until I realized that the Church is one of the few Western institutions of any import that seems to have internalized the lesson.