Four Paths to Utopia

In Gray’s telling, the doctrines of Soviet Communism, Nazi racism, Al Qaeda’s technophile fundamentalism and the Bushian “war on terror” are various forms (however incompatible) of an essentially utopian impulse derived from an Enlightenment notion of progress. That notion is misguided: scientific knowledge and technological power increase over time, but there is no reason to think that politics or morality can progress in the same way. The belief in progress is just a secularized form of Christian theodicy, infecting even those minds that otherwise seem combatively atheistic. Apocalyptic impulses are coded into every ideological genome.

(Scott McLemee: What Price Utopia?)

That "Black Mass" book by John Gray sounds interesting. But perhaps I should read Norman Cohn's "Pursuit of the Millenium" first. It has been sitting in my "to read" pile for a long time.