The book takes its name from
Dostoevsky's
The Possessed, and it attempts to investigate the passion for revolutionary change which developed strongly in
Central Europe and Russia starting with the
French Revolution of 1789. Unlike many other histories of revolutions and revolutionaries Billington does not focus on events and social causes leading to popular uprisings. Instead he follows a sometimes almost invisible thread of incendiary ideas sometimes transferred via occult societies, but all having common genesis in the motto of the French Revolution: "
Liberté, égalité, fraternité". In Billington's historiography he presents the second and third terms as reactions to and expansions of the more rudimentary (and susceptible to egoism) concept of
liberty. He describes how the idea of
brotherhood was inherited from
secret and
occult societies such as the
freemasons and became an inflammatory idea which led to the
Paris Commune but then was extinguished as far as popular revolutions went (until it resurfaced as
national socialism in 1920s' Germany). Instead the idea of
equality would become the fuel for
socialism and
communism. Billington equates the two schools of thought, claiming that though socially opposed in outside appearance, in their own respective way (one promoting individualism, the other collectivism), each is striving toward establishing these mutual goals, viz. a secular humanist society that is both
egalitarian and
utilitarian. These two social power factions were founded by the two thinkers
Proudhon and
Marx, the former being the social and secularist republican (anti-monarchist) individualist, and the latter the socialist anarchist (communism) collectivist. ==External links==