"This book offers a reevaluation of the twentieth century. It argues that the disintegration of Soviet socialism marked the abandonment of the idea of mass utopia by both sides in the Cold War. One of the casualties of the end of that war was the shattering of dreamworlds of industrialization, mass culture, and historical progress that gave meaning to collective social life in East and West.".

"Dreamworld and Catastrophe is an experiment in visual culture, using images as philosophy, presenting, literally, a way of seeing the past. Its pictorial narrative rescues historical data that with the end of the Cold War are threatened with oblivion, and challenges common conceptions of what the century was about. The book is written for the general public but will be of special interest to critical theorists, historians, philosophers, and artists."--BOOK JACKET.