/lit/ - Literature

>>13346524
But upon closer reflection, it becomes clear why Sorokin is not given a prominent role in this work—much of Sorokin’s analysis is so similar to Jones’s, and so much better documented and argued, that Jones can’t help suffer by comparison. For example, Sorokin actually delves into the state of marriage laws at the beginning of the French Revolution and elsewhere. From the perspective of a scholar, Jones’s elision of this topic is unforgivable. Marriage laws provide an excellent barometer of a society’s opinions about sex and the family. But again, Jones’s scant bibliography leaves his general theory with nothing but interconnected anecdotes as support.

Bad writing, poor scholarship. But how does Jones’s thesis as a whole stand up? Not all that well. Jones, in his salutary hatred for the Enlightenment, cannot draw a distinction between the Behaviorist who was truly a product of Enlightenment ideology, and Sadism, which was not.

Take the Bolshevik Revolution, the Enlightenment’s crowning achievement. In the early 20s, the Bolsheviks used sexual liberation as a cudgel against the ruling elite, and the Soviets liberalized marriage laws, decriminalized homosexuality, and in general made the nation a hotbed of sexual decadence (Jones dedicates a whole chapter to this). But as Sorokin notes (as does Jones—a credit to his honesty though not his ability to follow through with a thought), by the time Stalin came to power, sexual liberation had been condemned by the ruling Communists, with sexual immorality being seen as harmful to the nascent socialist state. In other words, insofar as sexuality had played a role in the initial overthrow of the Romanovs, the powers of sex had been curtailed by the time the Communists were solidifying their power. Most good Marxists will claim that Stalin’s plans were a betrayal of the Old Master’s conception of socialism, and that by the time of Stalin’s reforms in the 20s and 30s, the “revolution” was over. But this is self-serving; Lenin and the NEP were far more conservative, insofar that it slowed the progress of state ownership to the benefit of wealthy landowners and peasants, than Stalin’s massive land redistribution and industrialization. The revolution (tainted or not) continued into the 20s and 30s. But in readopting marriage norms and recriminalizing the perverse, by the time of Stalin’s purges, the sexual revolution in the USSR had ended.