doctrine of Cleopatra’s nose (a phrase coined by Pascal), sincernit was the beauty of a queen of Egvpt that is supposed to haverntoppled Mark Antony and led to the long reign of the Caesars.rnWe are now back, in historical studies, with Cleopatra’s nose,rnif indeed it ever vent ava; and the notion has now becomernpopular among professional historians and analysts who ha crnoutlived a youthful idealism and entered a middle-agedrncynicism governed by the simple conviction that principles arcrnforgotten at the door of the cabinet room and that nice guysrnfinish last. Cleopatra’s nose is partieulady tempting to an agernlike the present, when famous doctrines like fascism and communismrnhave foundered in unexpected and spectacular ways.rnSuch grand notions, in retrospect, look silly as well as wicked.rnHow, it is natural to wonder, can people ever have believed inrnglobal conspiracies of race or in the idea that vou could abolishrncapitalism by making the state, the biggest capitalist therernis, bigger still?rnhere may be arnfurther reason,rnhowever, whyrnthe works of Marx and Engels, Hitlerrnand Rosenberg, are seldom read,rna reason that has nothing to do withrntheir tedium. I mean that there is arnsuspicion that they might say somethingrninconvenient to the easy assumptionsrnof our times.rnBut perhaps, it is now tempting to sa-, people never realUrndid. Perhaps the Bolsheik Rcolution, like the Nazi reolutionrnthat followed it, was impelled less by ideas than by a hunger forrnpower and an inability, on achieving power, to think of anythingrnelse to say or do. It is a iew argued lucidly by Edoardornda Fonseca, an ex-Marxist Brazilian economist, in Beliefs in Actionrn(1991), where ideology is reduced to the role of a merernchorus in the violent drama of history and where general ideasrncount for little more than the mental strategies by which menrnof action like Lenin and Hitler justify themselves, or cheerrnthemselves up. What rules history, in this view, and alwaysrnrules it, is human oddity and the irresistible force of circumstance.rnIdeas do not make history, as we were once told. Theyrnare a sideshow.rnAll that, if it were belieed, would be unlikely to turn anonernback to the dull task of reading the classics of totalitarianism.rnBut the story about ideological convergence that Rosenbergrntells in his diary in January 1940 is interesting, and it would berna pity if it went unremarked. What it suggests is that the Nazisrnexpected their Soviet allies to start a holocaust of their own, tornbe brothers in ideology as well as comrades in arms. Thatrnneeds to be put into a wider context. It is now wideh’ forgottenrnthat for an entire century there was an active theoretical traditionrnof socialist genocide m Europe, starting with an articlernby Engels in Marx’s journal, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (January-rnFebruary 1849)—an article that has nothing to do withrneugenics but much to do with Marx’s theory of history—andrninolving Proudhon, Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, and Stalin. Asrn1 documented in Politics & Literature in Modern Britain (1977),rnsocialism in its first century readily embraced theories of racialrnpurity, and National Socialism is unlikely to have soundedrnlike a paradox to Germans in the years when it was first propounded,rnat least on the grounds of its racial policies. No Cermanrnsocialist of the 1920’s ever publicly said that Hitler had nornright to call himself a socialist because he advocated genocide.rnThe claim, in those days, would have seemed absurd.rnThe point can be made explicit. In the European centuryrnthat began in the 184()’s, everyone who publicly supportedrngenocide, if he belonged to a political party or group at all,rncalled himself a socialist. Genocide was not just a fact ofrnsocialism in that age, but a characteristic fact. It distinguishedrnsocialism from all other party traditions.rnIf that is a surprising conclusion, then it is surprising that itrnshould surprise. All these documents, beginning with Engcls’srn1849 article, are published and even reprinted. But theyrnare simply unread. Tedium has triumphed. Who now readsrnMarx’s Neue Rheinische Zeitung, for 1849 or any other year;rnwho, for that matter, reads his books all the way through?rnWho would willingly read H.G. Wells’s Anticipations (1902),rnwhere his skills as a novelist are abandoned in faor of a drear-rndiagram of a socialist utopia created by genocide where thernwhole vvorid would be clean, efficient, and white? Who wouldrnwillingly read Stalin’s Foundations of Leninism (1924), whichrnopenly applauds Engels’s call for genocide and proposes to inflictrnit, as Stalin later did, on the Soviet Union? It is not therndeath of communism that has made such writings boring.rnThe}’ were always boring. They were largely unread even whenrncommunism ruled a third of mankind.rnThe case, on reflection, looks unic|ue. This is a century thatrnhas published like no century before it, and amassed books inrnlibraries like no century before it. One is forced to concludernthat in the field of political theory, many texts are simply unread.rnThe lost literature of socialism is not lost in the sense thatrnlibrarians cannot find it, but in the sense that readers do not askrnfor it. It is a literature protected b’ a well-earned reputation forrnbeing uninteresting.rnThe most startling case is very recent, or only recently revealed.rnIn 1992, the intellectual left in France was shakenrnout of whatever remained of its certitudes by a posthumouslyrnpublished autobiography. In LAvenir dure longtemps,rnEouis Althusser, one of the most influential academic Marxistsrnin postwar Paris, revealed that he had not only plagiarized thernessays of other students but that, even as a professor, he hadrnhardly read an’ of the philosophical works he had confidentlyrnexpounded to students for decades: not a word of Aristotle orrnKant, and nothing of Karl Marx except his eady writings. Thernautobiography was a sensation. Althusser is best rememberedrnnow, apart from killing of his wife in a delirium, as the authorrnof Lire le Capital (1968); but it now appears that he never readrnit himself. Converted to communism in his youth by meetingrnand marrying a member of the French Communist Party, hernpresumably (like Raymond Williams) thought the talk of partvrncomrades enough.rn16/CHRONICLESrnrnrn