Norman Cohn has died

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Marshall
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Aug 9 2007 16:20
Norman Cohn has died

http://education.guardian.co.uk/obituary/story/0,,2144599,00.html

Seems he died last week (31st of July).

Did anyone else ever read his book The Pursuit of the Millennium?

Barry

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Bill Bunting
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Aug 9 2007 16:33
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The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (1957), demonstrated convincingly that the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century, chiefly Marxism and nazism, shared a "common stock of European social mythology" with apocalyptic medieval movements such as the Flagellants and the Anabaptists.

So who's into whips and who's into water?

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nastyned
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Aug 9 2007 16:33

Yes, good stuff. I like the chapter title 'Anarcho-communism in Bohemia'!

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Marshall
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Aug 9 2007 16:47

The book actually shows the reverse of what Cohn concludes - that the communistic, anti-work ideas of the medieval heretics don't have to become like Stalinism or Nazism, when in fact the stumbling blocks then faced by the mystical anarchists and revolutionary millenarians could be overcome at the present time.

Plus he shows it wasn't just all shit and rain in the Middle Ages ...

B

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Bill Bunting
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Aug 9 2007 16:53

Tom Hodgkinson's 'How to be Free' and 'How to be Idle' draws the same conclusions, but funnier.