Is Everything We Don’t Like “Apocalyptic?”

Mapping Two Influential Tendencies in the Critical Study of Apocalypticism and Millenarianism

Abstract

This article looks at the scholarship underpinning two dominant clichés about apocalypticism and millenarianism using influential British scholarship from the 1950s as a starting point. The first cliché is that apocalypticism and millenarianism represent recurring, almost ahistorical irrational threats to the social and political order; the second is that apocalypticism and millenarianism belong to the socially and economically exploited and marginalised who are attracted to promises of future emancipation. Getting behind the cliches to the formative scholarly debates in 1950s Britain, the article turns to (among others) the influential and well-known work of Norman Cohn and the influential but less well-known work of A. L. Morton and the Communist Party Historians’ Group of the early postwar years. Their historical and theoretical scholarship on apocalypticism and millenarianism is related to competing Cold War discourses about Marxism, liberalism, capitalism, and totalitarianism. Some attention is also paid to the wider legacies of their arguments and how and why their ideas have since been updated, absorbed, transformed, or simply ignored.