Arthur Koestler is a writer of great intelligence and strong convictions, who has for years been carrying on a single-handed fight against that modern mechanical mystery of ingenuity, the Totalitarian State. He fights alone because he is a writer of the Left, even of the extreme Left, who refuses to accept the myths and rationalizations of his party and is just as outspoken in his condemnation of the totalitarianism of the Left as he is of the totalitarianism of the Right. He fights alone, also because he feels acutely the spiritual tragedy of modern man and the need for spiritual reintegration, and yet rejects any positive religious solution of the problem. His diagnosis of the situation is expressed in the title of his book)—the polar opposition of the passive contemplation of the naked Indian ascetic and the ruthless activism of the Communist bureaucrat.

No doubt the opposition is psychologically justifiable in terms of the pure introvert and the pure extravert, but I do not feel that it really fits the modern situation, and particularly that aspect of the situation to which Koestler devotes so much of the present volume. For what he is mainly concerned with is not the opposition of action and contemplation, but rather the frustration of the modern intelligence in a world which it has done so much to create. The revolutionary intelligence created the Marxian ideology, which in turn produced the Communist State. But something has gone wrong in the process. The intellectuals believed and taught that the Dictatorship of the Proletariat would be followed by the “withering away” of the State. In fact, however, what has happened has been the development of a State power more absolute than any absolutism of the past, and it has been the intelligentsia which has “withered away”.