Chiliastic

The social anthropologist can recognise in the millenarian sentiments of the Interregnum a parallel phenomenon to the chiliastic movements which still occur in the underdeveloped countries of today.

The evanescent quality of Debord's later writing, his chiliastic serenity, is patent here: a voice speaking from a world one might want to make and then to live in, but also the voice of the mad professor in Eric Ambler's spy thriller Cause for Alarm.

Yet, as Gary Weiss shows in his new book, Ayn Rand Nation, she has become to the new right what Karl Marx once was to the left: a demigod at the head of a chiliastic cult.

In his pioneering study The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957), Norman Cohn showed how Nazism was also a chiliastic movement.