FAITH IN AMERICAN DEMOCRACY JEROME FRANK DEVELOPS HIS PHILOSOPHY
Fries, Horace S.
Faith In American Democracy Jerome Frank Develops His Philosophy FATE AND FREEDOM, A Philosophy for Free Americans, by Jerome Frank. Simon and Schuster. $3. Revieived by Horace S. Fries FATE...
...The author is one of the leaders in pioneering American jurisprudence, he has been an administrator of note, and we may now add his name to a growing list of distinguished American philosophers...
...It is this mood which feeds our desire to steer away from universal leisure, and thus unwittingly lands us in the clutches of a totalitarian compulsion of life...
...In this book Judge Frank does not take up specifically the ways and means of developing successful planning techniques...
...With its heartening and critical faith in the future of America, the book is opposed to purely historical thinking...
...But it is founded on the most enlightened kind of historical study and on a critical and sympathetic understanding of science...
...This leisure can be employed for significant participation in democratic processes and in the fine arts and creative pleasures and sports of life...
...Within this vision the contours of a new and richer purpose of human life begin to emerge, and the reader comes to share a genuine sense of what it can mean to have the privilege of living in a time which rocks in social revolutionary changes...
...To this end we must outgrow the "ascetic mood...
...But there is reason enough to believe that these can be achieved only out of the kind of scientific and historical material presented here...
...In the face of the growing collectivization of our economy, how can the common man find functional significance and freedom ? Two ways are suggested...
...In the course of performing this task the book leads the reader to a clearer view of his own place and function in this strange new world of mass production of plenty...
...This is a hangover in our cultural inheritance from otherworldly theologies but one which has been buttressed in a modern naturalistic world by misconceptions of science, especially in its relation to "inevitability" and freedom...
...A brief and adequate digest of the book is out of the question...
...It is this mood, according to the author, which underlies our fear of the universal leisure that is now possible...
...and one of these, which has been sadly neglected in recent war years, is developed at length...
...There is no condescension to the reader as the lessons of science and history are uncovered before him...
...Revieived by Horace S. Fries FATE and Freedom affords a rare and refreshing treat in these days of pessimism, cynicism, and dispiriting fear about the postwar world...
...Let us take one typical example to serve as an hors d'oeuvre...
...In this book the chaos of our time is profoundly read so as to reveal the potential foundations of a progressive and enriched American democracy...
...It seems also to have been born from a love of the human creature, and out of a deep conviction of his potential dignity...
...The book is not easy to read, but it is surely rewarding...
...To this end we must plan far broader uses of our industrial set-up and its products than mere profit...
...In the first place, in spite of collectivization and mass production, it is possible to develop social techniques which will aid the worker to participation in what he can sense to be a significant and liberating social undertaking...
...THE book is devoted to the double task of helping the reader to trace the complicated historical sources of the misconceptions which under-gird the ascetic mood, and to showing that we have a scientific right, if not a humanistic obligation, to put our faith in basic conceptions which are in harmony with the progressive aspects of the renaissance and of the age of reason and with the distinctive, non-ascetic, and democratic side of American life...
...Planning is not incompatible with freedom—for "regimentation springs up after planning has failed...
...The second way of winning freedom and significance is through the extensive leisure which the planning of the uses of the machine makes possible...
Vol. 9 • June 1945 • No. 25
