LARRY TAUB, FUTURIST
Larry Taub’s life is worth reflecting on because he was a gifted and creative theorist of history. I want to celebrate his achievement and to take a look at his theory and predictions today, many years after he came up with them. I will also give a brief rundown of Taub’s relation with his times and explore the connection between his life and values besides focusing on his work. It is revealing to see how the ideologies that influenced him pushed his work in certain directions.
A Prophetic Gift
I became close friends with Taub in Tokyo at the start of the 1980s, and we remained close until I left Japan in 1996. The 1980s were the time when Taub was writing The Spiritual Imperative, and he often discussed his ideas with me. His predictions really got my attention. Just a few of the most arresting ones were that Japan, China, and a reunified Korea would form a cultural and economic bloc headed by China while becoming the next center of the world, a new spiritual era would follow the relatively brief period when East Asian nations occupied world leadership, the current age of patriarchy would give way to an androgynous age, and women would be at the forefront of the spiritual revolution that would be led by India, the Islamic world, and Israel.
There were several other bold and fairly concrete predictions about the shape of the world to come. Since nobody at that time was making such predictions, I was very interested in finding out how he could penetrate the future. I was also intrigued by his theory. Popular writers were coming up with stage theories of history, for example, Alvin Toffler in The Third Wave (1980), in which he described three waves, the agricultural, industrial, and postindustrial (information) eras. But Taub used three models based on caste, sex, and age, not just one like Toffler, whose economic approach resembles Taub’s caste model.
I asked Taub how he was able to make his far-reaching predictions. What was his special gift? He gave two types of answers. One was that the predictions came from the theory; the other was that his ability was part intuitive and part analysis and anyone could develop these abilities. But he never gave me a satisfying response to my question as to why very few people had developed such abilities. Was it simply a matter of people not developing that ability because the dominant view was that such abilities do not exist? Or did his experience of living in many parts of the world and his life as a free-floating intellectual uniquely qualify him?
The Three Models Revisited
Many years later, it is easier to evaluate the quality of his theory and the acuity of his predictive skills. His theory of the four castes is unexceptional in the sense that many have offered stage theories in economic terms. Although Taub talks about castes, it is quite simple to translate caste into class. If we take his idea that a worker caste succeeds the merchant caste and we define worker to include knowledge workers, bureaucrats, and managers, then his theory dovetails with standard accounts of a shift from an entrepreneur-based economy to one centered around the managerial class.
More provocative, though, is his prediction that a new spiritual era will succeed the worker caste age we are now entering. This means that motivation for action will change from satisfying survival needs to our highest aspiration, to uncover who we really are. Here his predecessors were Aurobindo, Teilhard, de Chardin, Jean Gebser, and Ken Wilber. He had read Aurobindo but not the others. He was always reluctant to acknowledge predecessors so I didn’t ask him whether Aurobindo’s work on the human cycle had influenced him. But he did refer to Aurobindo’s distinction between religion and spirituality, which appears in his own theory as a key difference between the first spiritual era (religion) and the coming spiritual era. On my recommendation, he read Wilber’s Up from Eden (1981) which he enjoyed, finding Wilber’s ideas about the evolution of consciousness compatible with his own.
There are clear signs that a transition toward a new spiritual era has begun. For example, the World Values Survey has identified the presence of postmaterialist values in industrial societies. Taub also viewed the Iranian Revolution of 1979 as the first major event heralding the new spiritual age. But a shift away from a warrior-age mentality to a truly spiritual rather than conventionally religious outlook is still in its early stages. Among many Islamists there is support for elections, the rule of law, and the separation of power, the indicators of a liberal (merchant) standpoint. But Sufism, which emphasizes the inner awakening above all, has yet to have a large effect. Nevertheless, the high education levels of women in Iran coupled with the recent protests show that a more expansive consciousness can arise among women in the Muslim world.
The main argument in Taub’s favor for believing that the spiritual revolution will be led by India, the Islamic world, and Israel is that religion is strongest in these areas. In addition, at the intellectual level, the way is already being prepared for women’s leadership in a new era, since Islamic feminism has taken root and women in India are raising their consciousness in the face of male violence and extreme patriarchal attitudes. In both India and the Islamic world, what the West calls “fundamentalism” is bringing into being its opposite: women’s desire for freedom and to have a greater say over their own lives and that of the society in which they live.
Taub’s sex model appears to be accurate, despite the current phase of reaction in the West against increased gender flexibility and fluidity. There is a move toward androgynous ways of being, catalyzed by the realization that the masculine or yang orientation of domination over nature is leading humanity to ecological destruction. So far, though, in the West, especially the United States, the emphasis has been more on women adopting yang attitudes and going up the ladder in the corporate world and government than on promoting yin ways of thinking and feeling.
In terms of the age model, the development of consciousness is the best way to interpret it. Without a rather quick acceleration of the level of consciousness, humanity may be overwhelmed by the increasing rates of change and technological development. Such a development would allow humanity to gain control over such development rather than having it function almost autonomously or by the will of a small economic and technical elite motivated by the will to power and the desire for profit. Taub was joined by feminists who argued that conditions are ripe for a significant advance in the level of consciousness led by women. But at that time such insights among male thinkers were relatively rare with the notable exception of Fritjof Capra in The Turning Point (1982).
Taub’s achievement, as I see it, is to bring together economics, gender, and matters of the spirit in one package. Usually, historians who focus on the material dimension ignore the spiritual realm and the reverse is also true. Those whose major concern is gender relations do not often give proper acknowledgement to both hard-core economic issues and the sphere of consciousness. Of course, Taub’s combination of the three models of caste, sex, and age adds to complexity and can become difficult to apply to real-world situations but he does remarkably well in this regard, since his models cohere fairly well and his predictions enable him to achieve concreteness and specificity.
How Have Taub’s Predictions Turned Out?
I would say that Taub’s record as a prophet is far better than most. It is particularly impressive because the predictions were audacious and few people expected them to come true. China has gained great power, economic and military, while taking the lead among the BRICS+ nations, and he predicted this when China was very poor and just starting to recover from the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. On the other hand, in recent years, China and Japan have moved farther apart rather than formed an alliance based on economic complementarity and cultural affinities. Since the United States and Russia are at odds with each other as the war in Ukraine rages, Taub’s prediction that they would come together to offset the power of the East Asian and European blocs does not seem likely. Instead, China and Russia have found a common interest in offsetting US and European power.
On a different front, the European Union came together impressively for a few decades but the momentum has slackened and the withdrawal of the United Kingdom is a setback. Taub’s three major cultural-economic blocs are only partially visible. It is also not clear that a Chinese-led East Asian bloc will gain hegemony as the power of the US recedes. And Taub’s prediction that the US and Europe will form separate power blocs isn’t happening as they emphasize their common liberal values and attempt to get the rest of the world to follow them. The current unity over the Ukraine war is a sign of an Atlantic coalition led by the United States.
Taub believed that Israel would participate in a pan-Semitic union that would be part of the religious belt along with India and the Islamic world. But the war between Israel and Hamas is making such a union ever more difficult to achieve. Jewish and Islamic spirituality have continued to lag behind Jewish and Islamic fundamentalism, which serve as outlets for popular frustration in that part of the world. In Israel, the peace movement completely dried up, and in the Arab world, the promise of the Arab spring was dashed, except for Tunisia.
What Taub did foresee around 1980 in addition to the rise of China was the increasing strength of a religious outlook in the Islamic world, India, and Israel, a moving away from materialism among the middle-classes who can meet their basic needs, the increasing cultural and political voice of women in non-Western parts of the world, and the coming into eventual leadership in the second spiritual-religious age of indigenous peoples across the world, especially in Africa.
This last prediction at the time seemed very unlikely to be realized. But now many more people would agree that he got it right. Today there is a wave of indigenous thinkers and artists who are showing both the need for such a lifestyle and the ability of their heritage to fulfill this need; for example, the native Australian writer Tyson Yunkaporta, author of Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World (2020), and Lyla June Johnston, a Navajo musician, poet, scholar, and activist who has written in great detail about the concrete ways in which native knowledge and practices can contribute to a sustainable future.
Taub saw this development coming although his emphasis was different. He thought Africa, in particular, would rise because its people recognized the importance of our physicality and our bodies. Therefore, postmaterialists in the more technologically advanced regions would acknowledge African preeminence in this realm and look to it for guidance. His unique historical insight was that the outlook of the religious belt is flawed. Its anti-body and otherworldly orientation has to give way to indigenous peoples who have preserved a positive relationship with the physical world.
But his understanding of the severity of the ecological crisis was limited so he did not sufficiently appreciate just how much indigenous peoples could contribute. Not only is there a pressing need to return to the body but, even more, an imperative to make ecological thinking central in a society where spirituality includes accepting that we are part of nature, not in flight from it.
My sense is that his predictions have only been partially realized because his conception of history is too schematic, almost deterministic, leaving not enough room for the emergence of new historical trends. There are unanticipated events and developments that even the best planners can’t anticipate. How many writers or leaders foresaw the ecological crisis before the 1960s? Very few.
Taub also gives too little importance to historical contingencies such as the decisions of powerful leaders. Relations among nations are not fully predictable on the basis of the struggle for hegemony alone. For one thing, national leaders make choices: Xi Jinping did not attempt to get closer to Japan when the opportunity presented itself at the beginning of his rule and US leaders provoked Russia to go to war with Ukraine by attempting to extend NATO to Russia’s borders.
The Struggle for Acceptance
The translation of Taub’s The Spiritual Imperative into Japanese sold very well when it came out, unlike the two editions of the English-language original which were self-published. The Korean translation also did fairly well. It is hardly surprising that his book was so much more popular in the region of the world whose continued rise he predicted than in the United States and Europe, whose future loss of centrality in the world he also foresaw. He appealed to the nationalism of countries that had long resented American arrogance, although they felt powerless to move out from under American protection.
When Taub’s book appeared, it did not fit well with the prevailing climate of ideas in the United States and Europe. Part of the problem was that Taub was several decades ahead of most Western people in his ability to envision the world as no longer revolving around the West. What had long been the periphery was starting to take center stage, and while living in Japan in the 1970s, he saw much evidence around him to indicate the direction in which world history was moving.
Significantly, he was open to recognizing such evidence, whereas many Western people were unwilling or unable to do so because of the magnitude of the mental shift required. When it became clear that Japan was rising and that the centrality of the West might not last forever, the first impulse was often either to dismiss the idea or get carried away by a superficial enthusiasm for all things Japanese. Taub was different because he could see the implications of Japan’s rise for world historical development and its relation to larger historical trends such as the coming economic ascendance of East Asia.
Taub was out of step with the time intellectually. Since he came from a working-class background and his father was a socialist, he was receptive to Marxism in its 1950s American version. Then he went to France in the late 1950s and experienced European Marxism which was the dominant political outlook among the intellectuals. His brief but passionate involvement in American feminist circles at the end of the 1960s included a close friendship with Shulamith Firestone, author of The Dialectic of Sex. These engagements with progressive ideas left him with an abiding confidence that thought is up to the task of mapping out the world. As a result, the increasingly skeptical orientation of postmodern philosophy had no effect on him; he simply ignored it. So his interest in coming up with a big-picture account of historical development and the future never wavered.
During a two-year stay in India in the 1960s, Taub became interested in Indian philosophy and his view of the world slowly began to shift toward a more spiritual perspective. He also encountered P.R. Sarkar, a relatively rare example of an Indian spiritual teacher who was also socially and politically engaged. Taub claimed that he went to Sarkar’s ashram to learn tantric practices and did not study Sarkar’s progressive utilization theory during his stay. Unlike many Western enthusiasts for Indian philosophy, he did not give up his curiosity and fascination with the course of events in the world outside him. But his spiritually-based understanding of history left him a rather isolated figure who fit in neither with the declining left movements, the increasingly skeptical intellectuals, or the dreamy mystics floating far above the world.
The 1980s and 1990s were also a time when many Western people were more engaged in conventional lifestyles and pursuing material success than in thinking out of the box or creating visions. The longer Taub lived the expatriate life, the more out of touch he became with the typical concerns of people back home. He remained the kind of maverick you could find in the West during the late 1960s and early 1970s when more people were moving to their own inner beat. But by the 1980s most of them had made their peace with the establishment and discovered careers and family, a path that Taub never took. His unique location outside the structures of power and influence helped his creativity while making it more difficult for him to find communities that could have given his ideas a hearing.
Taub’s outsider status helps us understand some important facets of his thinking. Since he never got entangled with the powers that be, he had no stake in the status quo and could take an independent position on whatever issue was at hand. This is not to say that he had no emotional stake in any of the issues that he was dealing with. Identification with the underdog was the foundation of Taub’s ideological impulses and political enthusiasms during the first half of his life. But his strongest emotional bond with the underdog was with the Jewish people, which is not surprising since he was born into a working-class Jewish family in New Jersey in 1936. To a degree, he was a Jewish intellectual, although his love of conversation and socializing never left him sufficient time to really pursue that path.
He saw the poor as the underdog before discovering the depth of women’s oppression as the second wave of feminism began gaining strength in the United States at the end of the 1960s. These interests led to activism in the late 1970s and early 1980s in Japan, where he energetically promoted feminist causes while maintaining a radical left outlook. For a long time after that, however, his ideological passions were no longer expressed through activism. It was only when he settled in Israel during the last years of his life that his activist inclinations returned; only this time, his orientation was rightwing.
Ideological Influences
In the late 1970s, Taub and the American scholar and translator Chris Drake wrote Multinational Sex under the pen names of Carl Cronstadt and Eli Tov. The theme of Multinational Sex was largely about the structure of economic exploitation of South Korean sex workers. They traced the historical roots of sex tourism and analyzed its contemporary manifestations as group sex tourism organized by companies and large travel agencies. Taub and Drake submitted it to South End Press, a radical left publishing house, where it was narrowly turned down by the board that ran the organization. It was then privately published and distributed.
Drake and Taub pictured a hierarchical world order with three tiers: the top-tier in which the United States was dominant and Europe held up the rear, the middle tier that Japan occupied, and the lower tier made up of what were then called Third World nations, including South Korea. There was a transfer of oppression going on whereby the United States continued to exercise its domination of Japan, while Japan economically exploited Southeast Asia and South Korea.
Taub’s awareness of the purely economic side of the relationship between Japan and Southeast Asia led him to find much significance in the 1974 protests against Japan in first Thailand and then Indonesia. When he turned his gaze on the domestic United States, he made an important connection between the world economic hierarchy and the economic one in the United States. In his view, which he asserted often and with great conviction, American Jews occupied the second tier below the whites and above the blacks. In this regard, they functioned in the same way within the American hierarchy as Japanese did within the world hierarchy.
Taub used the expression “surrogate oppressor” to characterize the function of both the Jews and the Japanese in this system. In the case of the Jews, they were the middlemen in the black ghettos, the shopkeepers, the landlords, and the most visible occupying presence. They were doing white people’s dirty work for them by keeping the system in place, just as the Japanese were doing the dirty work of the United States in Southeast Asia. So black people vented their rage against Jews in the same way as Southeast Asians vented their rage against the Japanese. In both cases these scapegoats deflected whatever anger might have been expressed against the real oppressors, those who set up and maintained the prevailing system for their own advantage. Many people were not aware that Jews were mostly middlemen in the United States, so it was important for Taub to demonstrate that Jews did not control the large corporations and banks and were not heavily represented within the political leadership class.
Actively involved in Japanese feminist circles in Tokyo at this time, Taub put out a few works about Japanese feminism in English through Femintern Press, the small publishing outfit that he and his girlfriend Sawako Takagi had set up. He also formed a group of male feminists that was conducted in English with both Japanese and Western members in order to explore the harmful effects of narrow gender roles on men.
Taub’s feelings about Japan at least during the early 1980s were quite mixed. On the one hand, he took what might be considered the extreme position that the Japanese government made it illegal for women to use birth control because it wanted poor women to have more children. Since wealthier women get abortions, it was mainly poor women that were affected by this policy. He said the government’s thinking was that if poor women had more children, then these disadvantaged and underprivileged kids could be used as cannon fodder for the Japanese military when Japan rearmed. This was part of his strong feminist stance.
On the other hand, as the trade friction with the United States heated up, he asserted that the reason for the trade deficit was not that Japan was an unfair trader. He believed that no matter what actions Japan took to satisfy US demands, the trade deficit would not go down very much. The real cause was the inefficiency of the American political economy when compared to that of Japan.
Based on the political views that Taub expressed during the early 1980s, we can identify three ideologies at work. The first is Marxism, which focused his attention on economic oppression and influenced his three-tiered view of the world hierarchy under capitalism. The second is feminism. His concern was for poor women in Japan who had no access to birth control and found it difficult to get abortions. He was equally concerned about the poor women of Southeast Asia who had to submit to indignities at the hands of Japanese male tourists in order to put food on the table for their families.
The third ideology is Zionism. As a Jewish American, Taub was very sensitive to the dangers of anti-Semitism, both past and present. He had lived in Israel and worked on a kibbutz for a while in the 1960s and spoke some Hebrew. In addition, he was well-versed in the ideas of Herzl and sympathized with the need of Jews all over the world to have a safe place of refuge in order to escape persecution.
Taub often explained how the Jews of medieval Europe could not own land so they were forced into occupations dealing with money, becoming moneylenders because the Catholic religion forbade lending money with interest payments. Jews were scapegoated as people who were obsessed with money but merchant and trade activities were the only ones open to them due to widespread discrimination. He also emphasized that whenever there are economic problems and people experience frustration due to a worsening of their financial situation, anti-Semitism always increases. It was like a social law because such scapegoating never fails to occur when economic downturns take place.
Over time, Taub began to talk less about current political affairs and more about his big picture vision of historical change. His mind was preoccupied with figuring out the likely configurations of future alliances and power blocs rather than in thinking about present-day injustices against the wretched of the earth, women, and Jews.
There was one other important reason for Taub’s shift away from leftwing politics: the increasing criticism of Israel for its treatment of Palestinians by the left. This led to an ideological split with Drake who found it incomprehensible that Taub could be on the side of Israel in its conflict with the Palestinians. Drake was particularly upset by the declaration that Taub often made to the effect that one’s ethnic identity came before anything else. By this he seemed to mean that it was necessary to support one’s ethnic group regardless of whether or not it had justice on its side.
Zionism Takes Center Stage
How did this tangle of ideological impulses that Taub was experiencing find expression in his writing of The Spiritual Imperative? There is a fascinating chapter filled with commentary called “The Great 21st-Century Exodus.” It follows Taub’s discussion of the Pan-Semitic Federation that he expected to come into being as the last materialist age exhausted itself. The Pan-Semitic Federation would be made up of Israel and its Arab neighbors, and, in the new spiritual-religious age, it would lead to a greater Middle-Eastern Federation, including India, more powerful than the northern cultural-economic blocs that will dominate the world during the first half of the present century. By then, spiritual riches would be the main source of power and influence.
The importance that Taub personally attached to Israel was directly echoed in his elaborate explanations of how American Jews would be motivated to emigrate to Israel and the ways in which Israel’s politics would be affected by this migration. The relevance of developments in Israel for world history was that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could lead to larger wars and even superpower involvement. But it seems that the prospect of Islamic revolutions following the one in Iran has turned out to be at least as important as developments in Israel. Yet, there is almost no analysis of the explosive social and political situations in countries like Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, and Pakistan. Events and trends in the Islamic world from Morocco to Indonesia are sketchily presented, even though together with India, these are the countries that would play the greatest part in ushering in the new spiritual-religious age.
In the chapter which highlights the exodus of Jews from the United States and their settling in Israel, he talks about the likelihood of a crusade against the Jews on the part of both blacks and whites that will be one of the main factors leading to this exodus. Once again, he relies on the notion that American blacks will express their frustration against Jews, the lightning rod, to deflect the discontent of the people below from those actually responsible for their condition. But I wonder if the Jews will continue to play this role to the extent that they did in earlier times. After all, in the 1990s, the upheavals in Los Angeles targeted the Korean shopkeepers, the new middlemen, who had replaced the Jews in the black ghettos. These days, although anti-Semitism has resurfaced among white people on the left, in particular, due to Israel’s bombing Gaza, it doesn’t seem as powerful or significant as anti-immigrant sentiment.
I agree, however, with Taub that it is not unthinkable that Jews could once again be persecuted in the United States. In this regard, European history does offer us reason for caution. From the late 18th century onward, Jews were increasingly integrated into European society, but such progress was abruptly halted during the 1920s in the aftermath of World War I, especially in Germany, as racialist doctrines took hold.
In the last part of his book, Taub does not cover the status of women in any depth. He writes about the new spiritual-religious age, the religious belt, spiritualizing the economy, the ways in which a spiritual economy will make the religious belt more powerful, and finally the role of Africa and indigenous people in enabling spiritual development to reach its highest potential. This lack of attention to the role of women in bringing about crucial historical developments than usher in the new spiritual age perhaps reflects a flagging of his earlier enthusiasm for feminism. Although Islamic feminism was making headway in directions that Taub had predicted, he wrote nothing about such developments in the second edition of his book which appeared in 2002.
Taub’s Zionism clearly had far more staying power than the Marxism and feminism which were so prominent in the first part of his adult life. Not only did he neglect writing about women, but his discussions of struggles between social classes are about the elites; the suffering of those at the bottom is never described except very briefly in the most abstract terms.
The Right Place at the Right Time
Looking back on Taub’s long life, what stands out is his ability to be in the right place at the right time for understanding world trends. He grew up at a time when his native country was maximizing its political power in the world and asserting its economic and cultural dominance. Although the United States was in its full glory in the late 1950s, he decided to leave and go to Europe. There he encountered societies clearly divided on the basis of class. While living in France, he observed a segmented society with a clear ruling elite and well-defined working-class communities with their own culture that reliably voted communist. Unlike his home country, the existence of class boundaries was right out in the open, acknowledged by most, and unambiguously reflected in voting patterns.
Later, when he moved to Sweden, he directly experienced that social democracy produces a far more equal and humane society than laissez-faire capitalism. So his time in Europe demonstrated to him that a socialist economy made some sense. By giving prominence to class struggle and the need for government intervention to reduce the inequalities that capitalism inevitably produced, Marxism had some great advantages over the classical liberalism that was dominant in the United States. He also acquired the insight that in terms of maturity, Europe had already reached young adulthood, whereas Americans still had adolescent concerns such as the desire to stand out and shine, while their government indulged in adolescent behavior like saber rattling and brinkmanship.
His two-year stay in India in the 1960s brought him direct familiarity with spiritual traditions that young people in the United States and Europe were becoming increasingly enthusiastic about. Not only did he get a taste of what Eastern philosophy and spiritual practice had to offer, but he also gained insights while in India about the implications of spirituality for social and political philosophy. insights that he clearly put to good use in writing The Spiritual Imperative.
This spiritual orientation helped him to overcome the limitations of much Marxist thought in which changes in the institutional structure are seen as the key to social progress. He understood that without a raising of consciousness, social transformation would not occur. Of course, feminists had emphasized the need to raise consciousness and the identity of the personal and the political dimensions. His involvement in the radical feminist movement and close friendship with Shulamith Firestone in the late 1960s was a big step in his realizing the importance of inner transformation, but his Indian experience gave this conviction much greater depth and solidity.
Around this same period, he spent time on a kibbutz in Israel which showed him the benefits of cooperative economic life in decentralized communities that were based not on centuries-old traditions but on modern socialist ideals. He incorporated what he learned from this experience into his picture of the societies that would emerge during the new spiritual-religious era: decentralization, voluntary simplicity, and equality consciousness.
And for imagining the future, what better place to be than Japan where he spent almost all of the 1970s and 1980s. He had a ringside seat from which to take notes on Japan’s quest to catch up with and exceed the United States economically. He made financial ends meet by teaching English at Japanese corporations and translating their documents. But most of all, he talked to people and had many friends both Japanese and foreign which helped him keep up with the main trends both inside and outside Japan, even though he did not do a lot of reading on these subjects. But he never became a Japanophile nor wanted to live out the rest of his life in Japan. Although his reading ability of Japanese was quite good, his spoken Japanese never progressed to the point where he could have stimulating intellectual discussions in Japanese. His Japanese friends were usually English-speaking and that was the language he used with them.
This brings us to one of the keys to his life. There was always a tension between his cosmopolitan outlook and his firmly held belief that ethnic identity is primary. Until he was past 65, he did not attempt to become part of a local community and establish a secure and stable position in a particular place. Instead, he moved around frequently, like the proverbial wandering Jew. Only toward the end of his life did he settle in Israel when he embraced his ethnic identity with alacrity, but it was too late for him to live out his days in peace and comfort. It wasn’t easy to culturally assimilate, his Hebrew language ability was not that of a native speaker, and he never made close enough connections with people to banish his loneliness.
Taub kept up his spirits with the hope that The Spiritual Imperative would bring him recognition. He tried to sell the book and promote his ideas, until the lack of success wore him down and alcohol became a way out of his sorrow. Although he ultimately fell short in getting his life together, his unique work on universal history demonstrates that he saw and understood much of the world and took great pleasure in the human drama. Not bad for a working-class kid from Newark, New Jersey!
