You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The Revolutionary Ascetic is Professor Bruce Mazlish's third major attempt at psychoanalytically-informed historical exegesis. The first, In Search of Nixon, was straight psychobiography, clear in focus, but limited by the lack of data about Nixon's formative years. The second, James and John Stewart Mill, benefited from access to considerable biographical data about both father and son, as well as
information about their interaction. In that work, however, his extrapolations from the psychobiographical findings to broader historical trends, including speculations about the shape of the industrial revolution and the rise of nineteenth century liberalism, are less convincing. In his third book Mazlish's focus is primarily psychohistorical rather than psychobiographical; although Emerson's dictum about the understanding of man leading to the understanding of events is an appealing and perhaps theoretically incontrovertible principle, Mazlish's attempt to explain the revolutionary process by generalizing about the personalities of those who make revolutions requires great logical leaps to achieve credulity.
The historical theses of the book are: 1) that asceticism is a central dynamic of the two major modern revolutions, namely, the Russian and the Chinese; 2) that there is a link between revolution and puritanism; and 3) that there is a developmental line from a) religious asceticism to b) worldly asceticism to c) nineteenth century capitalism and industrialization to d) the revolutionary ideologies which transformed the Chinese and Russian societies in the twentieth century. Mazlish defines a "revolutionary ascetism" that links Mao's and Lenin's applications of Marxism to nineteenth century liberalism and utilitarianism. He makes the point, which I think is well taken, that both the Chinese and Russian revolutions were essentially modernizing upheavals in which fostering industrialization was at least as important as eliminating an oppressive regime. The mos