xenia’s Reviews > The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages > Status Update

there would be no liberal state without the violent revolutions of the past you liberals detest so much. defenders of serfdom and slavery.

I hear only bad things about this book, along the lines of what you're saying, but I liked his "Europe's Inner Demons" fwiw

i have some sympathy for the author, because he's clearly been traumatised by ww2, and i can't imagine how awful it would be to live through nazism and stalinism, but he's soooo emblematic of a liberal who cherry picks the worst parts of history to go 'look, this is where ur socialism leads to!!'

also, it's just chapter after chapter of millenarian cults with little analysis ._. idk how this guy was a scholar. he shouldve be writing exposition dumps in ps2 jrpgs

what's his thesis in euro's inner demons?

its interesting, anarchists and anti-state communists tend to see some of the heretical groups I believe Cohn talks about here as part of their lineage. Fredy Perlman did at least.

Europe's Inner Demons is basically Cohn attacking the idea that an underground witchcraft religion existed throughout European society despite Christianity's hegemony. He also attacks the concept of a witch itself, arguing that it was basically just the church creating those ideas as something-like shadow versions of their own constructs. I think that book is like the main one that historically attacked the ideas that Neopaganism/Wicca posited, about a perennial, underground pagan religion. It's very informative, and he critically reads Church documents in a way that I hear he failed to do in this book you're review