Monarchs

Abstract

In his personal philosophy, John Fowles claims that a collective overturning of Pascal’s wager would benefit everybody: “The driver of a lorry carrying high explosives drives more carefully than the driver of one loaded with bricks; and the driver of a high-explosives lorry who does not believe in a life after death drives more carefully than one who does. We are all in this nitro-glycerine truck.”¹ Possibly reflecting familiarity with Henri-Georges Clouzet’s Salaire de la Peur, Fowles’s concluding remark certainly invokes the specter of a Cold War once thought unlikely to end except through nuclear holocaust. Though Ronald Reagan sometimes receives credit for concluding the Cold War on very different terms, such an evaluation oversimplifies a complex process and exaggerates the influence wielded even by leaders of super powers. A lone politician, however great the resources at his or her disposal, would be no more capable of accomplishing so profound a change than would a world of unbelievers harmonized by the same existential crisis: neither the one nor the all has ever carried the day on such terms. But many have still dreamed of the global transformations potentially achieved by sufficiently puissant individuals or groups.