Reading Yack While Pondering the Origins of Totalitarianism

ABSTRACT In The Longing for Total Revolution, Bernard Yack claims not to account for totalitarianism but simply to unearth a new, specifically modern mindset. Still, the problem of totalitarianism, and whatever connection it might have had with that mindset, lurks throughout his book. Yack convincingly posits a relationship between a troubling new sense of historical embeddedness and novel totalist thinking. But his sense of the range of responses to historicity proves too limited to illuminate the connection between the longing for total revolution and the advent of totalitarianism. Another look at Yack’s two culminating figures, Marx and Nietzsche, suggests a more illuminating alternative.