Communism: a History.

• Author: Yandle, Bruce

By Richard Pipes New York: Modern Library, 2001. Pp. 175. $19.95 cloth.

On perhaps the tenth night that I lay in bed quietly reading Communism: A History by Richard Pipes, my wife asked me why it was taking so long to read such a short book. She had checked it out. It has just 175 pages. Then a week later she peered at me again, frowned, and asked the same question. "This is a powerful book," I explained. "It cannot be read in a hurry."

Why is the book so good and such a slow read? The answer lies in the story the author tells and in his power to tell that story. Harvard historian Richard Pipes is best known among economists for his marvelous 1999 book Property and Freedom (New York: Vintage). During a lifetime devoted to the study of Russian history and culture, he discovered that private-property rights form the linchpin of wealth creation, and this discovery served as the basis for Property and Freedom. The present book, Communism, followed naturally.

Pipes explains why the systematic elimination of private-property rights became the critical first step in the Marxian journey that was to achieve a classless egalitarian society capable of attaining perfection. In this brave new world, wealth would move, as The Communist Manifesto declared, "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs."

Pipes recounts the human slaughter that followed when Marx's ideas were impressed on human communities. The story is at once chilling and inspiring. One is chilled by the horror of communism and for that reason inspired to make some effort, no matter how small, to keep liberty alive.

To present the facts about the implementation of communism in context, Pipes first describes humankind's fascination with utopian dreams. Although Hesiod, Plato, Ovid, Thomas More, and Robert Owen might have believed that, by following their guidance, people could transform human nature and make life more pleasant for all in relatively short order, Marx and Engels had a different vision based in their view on science. Their new order--the elimination of private property and with it the destruction of selfish motivation--was inevitable. Capitalism as seen in the nineteenth century would be destroyed by its own dynamic, and the workers of the world would claim their rightful place in history. For Marx and Engels, the case for communism rested on positive science, not on normative bantering. We know now that they were absolutely wrong.

The takeover of...