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The God That Failed, edited by Richard Crossman
- Abstract
Mr. Crossman, an editor of the New Statesman and Nation and a Labor MP, explains in his introduction that this symposium developed out of an argument with Arthur Koestler. “When all is said,” Koestler declared, “we ex-Communists are the only people on your side who know what it’s all about.” He went on to describe his own state of mind when he joined the Communist party, and Grossman said, “This should be a book.” “Our concern,” Grossman writes, “was to study the state of mind of the Communist convert, and the atmosphere of the period—from 1917 to 1939—when conversion was so common. For this purpose it was essential that each contributor should be able not to relive the past—that is impossible—but, by an act of imaginative self-analysis, to recreate it, despite the foreknowledge of the present.”
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