Russell Jacoby has a good line in gloomy titles. Social Amnesia and Dialectic of Defeat were followed by The Last Intellectuals, which has now been joined by The End of Utopia. There is, of course, a good deal for the left to be gloomy about, despite the comrade who sanguinely announced at the Socialist Workers Party summer school last year that there had ‘never been more revolutionary opportunities’. Quite what it is the left should be glum about, however, needs closer specification. Has utopia come to an end because of apathy, as the book’s sub­title suggests, or because the left is in retreat, or because history is going downhill, or because it has slithered to a halt? These grounds are not mutually exclusive, but the relations between them need examining. Is the left in retreat, for example, because history is going downhill, or is it the other way round?

Apathy would seem a dubious reason for pessimism. People may not currently think much of political elections or theories of surplus value, but if you try to drive a motorway through their back gardens, throw them on the breadline or close down their children’s schools, they are likely to protest swiftly enough. It is irrational not to resist an unjust power if one may do so without too much risk and with a reasonable chance of success. Such protests may not be effective, but that is a different matter. People are also likely to be up in arms if you dump refugees on them or deprive them of their right to defend their property, which is hardly enlightened but certainly not apathetic. The evidence does not in general indicate that the citizenry is torpid or complacent. On the contrary, it suggests that they are considerably alarmed about a number of key political issues, even if most of them would be about as likely to turn to socialism for solutions as they would to Theosophy. Moreover, the penitent ex-socialist intellectuals whom this book rightly upbraids for their adaptation to capitalism are not necessarily apathetic. In fact some of them are far too little so, pushing their reformist panaceas with exasperating zeal.