Socialism was man’s most ambitious attempt to supplant religious beliefs with a doctrine claiming to ground itself in ‘research.’ Each failure to create societies of abundance or give birth to ‘the New Guy’ inspired even more searching for the path to the promised land: trend, communes, social democracy, communism, fascism, Arab socialism, African socialism. non-e worked, plus some exacted a staggering human toll. After that, after two hundreds of years of wishful considering and bitter disappointment, socialism imploded about Heaven on Earth: The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of Socialism within a fin de siecle theatre of falling wall space and collapsing regimes. It was an astonishing denouement but what implemented was no less astonishing. After the hiatus of a couple of decades, new voices were raised, as if innocent of all that had come before, proposing to try it all over again.

Joshua Muravchik traces the quest for this phantasm, presenting sketches from the thinkers and market leaders who developed the idea, led it to power, and presided over its collapse, aswell as those who find themselves trying to regenerate it today. Heaven on the planet is a story filled with personality and event which at the same time provides us an epic chronicle of the movement that attempted to turn the world upside down-and for a while succeeded.