Heaven on earth : the rise and fall of socialism / Joshua Muravchik.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Prologue: Changing Faiths -- 1. Conspiracy of Equals: Babeuf plots a revolution -- 2. New Harmony: Owen conducts an experiment -- 3. Scientific Socialism: Engels interprets the oracle -- 4. What Is to Be Done? Bernstein develops doubts -- 5. Real Existing Socialism: Lenin seizes power -- 6. Fascism: Mussolini becomes a heretic -- 7. Social Democracy: Attlee takes the slow road -- 8. Ujamaa: Nyerere forges a synthesis -- 9. Union Card: Gompers and Meany hear a different drummer -- 10. Perestroika and Modernization: Deng and Gorbachev repeal communism -- The Party of Business: Blair redefines social democracy -- Epilogue: The kibbutz goes to market.

"Socialism was man's most ambitious attempt to supplant religion with a doctrine claiming to be rational and "scientific." In the century following its birth in the French Revolution, socialism was propounded by writers and organizers until it became the fastest-growing idea in Europe. Then Lenin showed that it could be spread better by the sword than by the word, and soon it spanned the globe. No other political idea, indeed no religion, ever traveled so far so fast.".

"The search for the Promised Land took socialists in diverse directions: revolution, communes and kibbutzim, social democracy, communism, fascism, Third Worldism. But none of these paths led to the prophesied utopia. Nowhere did socialists succeed in creating societies of easy abundance or in midwifing the birth of a "New Man," as their theory promised.

Some socialist governments abandoned their grandiose goals and satisfied themselves with making slight modifications to capitalism, while others plowed ahead doggedly, often inducing staggering human catastrophes. Then, after two hundred years of wishful thinking and fitful governance, socialism suddenly imploded in the 1990s in a fin du siecle drama of falling walls, collapsing regimes and frantic revisions of doctrine."--BOOK JACKET.