Creating the "New Man": From Enlightenment Ideals to Socialist Realities

Creating the "New Man": From Enlightenment Ideals to Socialist Realities. By YINGHONG CHENG. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2009. 280 pp. $60.00 (cloth).

For a variety of reasons, the core of world history as a field has focused largely on the economic and political history of the world before 1900. The strength of Yinghong Cheng's Creating the "New Man" lies in the author's attempt to contribute to a world history of twentieth-century ideas. Like the concept of the New Man itself, this book is a bold experiment based on an old idea that never quite realizes its ambitious goals.

Cheng's main goal is to revive "world communism" as an object of comparative world historical study through the example of the idea of the New Man. He traces the concept (understood as "New Human," he points out, in most languages except English) from its theoretical origins in the Enlightenment to its praxis in the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and Castro's Cuba. The New Man, in Cheng's definition, is the "idea of remaking people" combined "with a belief in human malleability facilitated by environmental determinism" (p. 46). Twentieth-century communists hoped to build a new society through the cultivation of a new human being whose consciousness would be oriented toward socialist values rather than old values of materialism and individuality. Cheng believes that this effort was a major aspect of communist ideology, culture, and policy across the globe.

The main empirical conclusions of Cheng's work are convincing. Communists in different countries interpreted the New Man idea slightly differently to achieve larger ideological and practical tasks. The Soviets weakened it in the narrow context of increasing efficiency in a technical and bureaucratic socialist economy, while the Maoists, mindful of the Soviet experience, sought to uphold the broader vision of remaking human nature to...