A characteristic of our age is an all-pervading sense of disorder. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira explains that this disorder stems from a great crisis he calls ‘the Revolution’. The Revolution is an on-going crisis spanning the last five centuries. It effects every aspect of human life. It is a process, with identifiable and distinct stages, and the sum of its parts all head in the same direction with a predictable conclusion.
The origins of this crisis are found in the moral decay of late Medieval Christendom. It deepens in the early modern age; it worsens in the eighteenth century when it coalesces into the French Revolution, which sweeps away the fading Christian social order. The French Revolution inspires socialism, and ultimately, the totalitarian political regimes of the twentieth century. But this is a process, and socialism is but one of its stages. So the process will not stop with socialism. We must therefore ask where will this process take us in the end?
The author doesn’t shrink from these all-important questions. He explains that if we understand the Revolution, its driving force, its strengths and weaknesses, we can halt it. If there is a single book that enables us to make sense of the prevailing post-modern disorder, this is it.