As a call to rectify the existing order, socialism should appeal to us all. But as an attempt to revise human nature, and to conscript us in the pursuit of the millennium, it was a dangerous fantasy, an attempt to realize heaven that would lead inevitably to hell. We can see this clearly now, as the Western world emerges from the Cold War and the communist nightmare. But still the 'totalitarian temptation', as Jean-Francois Revel called it, is there - the temptation to remake society, so that equality is imposed from above by the benign socialist state, whose good intentions can never be questioned since nobody knows what it would be like to achieve them.12