Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Extracts from David Martin's review of John Gray's Black Mass: Apocalyptic religion and the death of utopia : Gray acknowledges a clear debt to Norman Cohn's pathbreaking The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957), but obvious precursors like S. N. Eisenstadt, in his Fundamentalism, Sectarianism and Revolution (1999), subtitled The Jacobin dimension of modernity, and J. F. Talmon in his classic Political Messianism: The Romantic phase (1964) are at best buried in the endnotes. * The French may think master-narratives are out, along with belief and morality, but in fact the language of politics, even in secularist France, is saturated in a teleological moralism. Political language is, as Georges Sorel eloquently showed, profoundly mythic. * Our democratic order is not founded on some secular version of Christian Providence but a vulnerable local achievement, only exportable by violence on the mistaken assumption that, once you strike away the chains of history, traditi...