The politics of blood.

The Bullet's Song: Romantic Violence and Utopia, by William Pfaff (Simon & Schuster, 384 pp., $27.95)

THIS ambitious book correctly identifies--and helps the reader better to understand--some of the most important and contentious developments of the past century, including "the conflation of revolutionary commitment with liberating violence," "the ability of secular utopian thought to inspire lethal dogmatic idealism," and "the desire to find a post-religious moral explanation for life." William Pfaff, longtime columnist for the International Herald Tribune and author of other studies in contemporary political history, explores the connections between the pursuit of romantic self-fulfillment and political violence, between secularization and utopia-seeking, and between meaning and meaninglessness in history--all against the background of the fundamentals of human nature.

The book also explores familiar territory, in its lamentations of the ravages of modernity--with a special emphasis on the demise of old-fashioned heroism, and of chivalrous ways of conducting war. The tone is often reminiscent of the writings of George Kennan, as it justifiably, if sometimes exaggeratedly, bemoans the moral and aesthetic decline modernity brings about. The author also shares with Kennan a temptation to see--sometimes questionably--moral equivalence between the misconduct of the United States and that of other political actors around the world.

Pfaff pursues these weighty matters by examining the lives and ideas of a handful of 20th-century intellectuals and artists who "imposed themselves upon the author as living evidence of the history of the modern crisis," most of them "also engaged in re-creating themselves as someone they were not." The best known among them are T. E. Lawrence, Andre Malraux, and Arthur Koestler. Less well known, at least to American readers, are Gabriele D'Annunzio, Ernst Junger, Filippo Marinetti, and Willi Munzenberg. Wholly unknown is Vladimir Peniakoff, "an engineer by training, from a cultivated, assimilated, partly Jewish Belgian family of Russian origin," who is discussed at greater length than some other far more illustrious figures; his claim to the author's attention and sympathy appears to be his attempts to participate in World War II in a humane, moral, and chivalrous fashion. Also discussed (in the more-obscure category) is Charles de Foucauld (1858-1916), "a rich cavalry officer" who, after being enamored of the Tuaregs of North Africa, became a Trappist monk, inspired the founding of a religious sect, and remained an admirer of "primitive people." Che Guevara gets less than two pages; there are many scattered references to Mussolini.

It is not entirely clear what criteria governed the selection of these individuals, and the uneven amount of space devoted to them. To be sure, T. E. Lawrence, Malraux, and D'Annunzio coherently exemplify the intellectual-turned-political-activist flirting with the warrior role. Koestler, Malraux, and Munzenberg have in common their support for and subsequent disillusionment with the Soviet Union and what it represented. Junger, an important German writer in the first half of the 20th century, fought valiantly in World War I and believed in the purifying and ennobling functions of war. Koestler, a political activist, was not drawn to the warrior role; nor was Munzenberg, an accomplished propagandist serving Moscow in the 1930s. Marinetti was a so-called Futurist, a painter and writer who also believed in the redeeming qualities of political violence and was a precursor of Italian Fascism.

If impact and influence had been the criteria of selection, Castro, Lenin, and Trotsky should have been included: All were 20th-century revolutionaries, violence-prone utopia-seekers, and (arguably) intellectuals. For similar reasons, Frantz Fanon and Sartre would also have been good candidates. The disparities in the importance, character, and lifestyle of the figures discussed weaken the coherence of the narrative, as does the alternation of the often lengthy and discursive biographical sections with the more diffuse philosophical reflections, the latter often not closely integrated with the former.

Such difficulties notwithstanding, this is a thoughtful and thought-provoking book devoted to the basic proposition that deserves reaffirmation and further elucidation, namely that ideas drive history. The ideas have often been rather dubious and their attempted realization has had spectacularly disastrous consequences, as shown by the history of 20thcentury totalitarianism and nationalism. Highly distinguished intellectuals often made startlingly bad political judgments and supported unworthy causes. For example, Pfaff's list of those who were enthusiastic about World War I includes Weber, Thomas Mann, Freud, Durkheim, Rilke, Proust, Bergson, Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James; and also scientists such as Rontgen, Planck, and Haldane.

Pfaff contends that World War I was a unique watershed-catastrophe (and also, more questionably, "the most important event of the 20th century"), responsible for the rise of both Communist and Nazi totalitarianism as well as other smaller currents of violent utopia-seeking in recent history:

   The utopian response to the cultural and
   political crisis of 1914-1918 . . . the crisis
   that defined the 20th century and
   potentially the 21st . . . took rightist form
   in Italy and Germany . . . and a successful
   leftist form in Russia. The idea of total
   redemptive transformation of human
   society through political means, the most
   influential myth of modern Western political
   society from 1789 to the present day,
   remains with us.

Pfaff argues persuasively that the persistence of war, and more generally political violence, originates in both a meaning-seeking impulse and an innate aggressive disposition:

   Life ordinarily is experienced as shapeless
   and unmalleable. We make our
   ways through days of random incident
   . . . and rarely are we given an opportunity
   to take determining action that
   gives meaning to our existence. War
   provides such an occasion, not necessarily
   by providing grand causes but in
   presenting small, crystalline, vital, individual
   choices . . . The moral function of
   war is to recall humans to the reality at
   the core of existence: The violence is
   part of our nature and is responsible for
   the fact that human history is a chronicle
   of tragedies.

War is also appealing because it helps to validate "a popular desire for restored community," for "spiritual awakening" and an escape from the "narrowness and pettiness" allegedly more common under more stable and routinized circumstances; it helps to dispel boredom. Revolution, or the pretense of it, performs the same functions--as illustrated by the radical social-political movements in the West during the 1960s.

The importance of political violence in promising to make life more meaningful has increased in modern times owing to the rise of individualism and the associated preoccupation with self-realization (as illustrated by the dispositions of several individuals here discussed) and to the fact that secularization has made the world less meaningful and comprehensible. A subsidiary reason has been the upsurge of nationalistic and ethnic conflicts in recent times--further occasions for joyous and violent collective self-assertion.

Regrettably, this volume sheds little light on the type of violence in the forefront of public concern since 9/11. Pfaff overlooks the uniqueness of much of the recent Islamic violence and equates it with the kind secular terrorist groups such as the Italian Red Brigades and the Baader-Meinhof gang used to perpetrate. But these groups and individuals were not suicidal, and lacked belief in supernatural rewards for their good works. Pfaff is also probably wrong in asserting that "utopian thought rests upon belief in progress"; it seems rather that such ideas rest on belief that change should be induced by willful, violent, and revolutionary deeds. Belief in progress, by contrast, is compatible with moderation because it implies that positive change does not depend on acts of violence or exertions of political will.

Although hopes for secular salvation in the Western world have receded in recent decades, there remain influential subcultures and elite groups, among them many intellectuals, attached to the belief that there is a "collective solution to the human condition." This volume, although somewhat haphazardly assembled, provides powerful and eloquent refutation of such fantasies, and ends with the suggestion that "the only thing we can remake is ourselves." But, as the book also makes clear, there are limits even to that.

Mr. Hollander's books include Political Pilgrims; Anti-Americanism; Political Will and Personal Belief; and Discontents: Postmodern and Postcommunist. He also edited Understanding Anti-Americanism, published last year.