Two Cheers For Capitalism, by Irving Kristol
Whalen, Richard J .
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "Two Cheers For Capitalism, by Irving Kristol" bear marks unmistakably analogous to Stalinism." For Kolakowski, any realization of Marxist ideals necessarily involves the creation of a totalitarian polity. His very use of the term...
...and of that reading minority only a small number both comprehend and act upon his instructions...
...would indeed be on the march toward socialism, for in a Kristoline world, the all-powerful state would not only lack effective opposition but also would lack any opposition at all...
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...what he really wants is to destroy the influence of those members of his own class who are giving it a bad name, so that people like himself can exercise that influence instead....Kristol is no Populist...
...In his essays Kristol has been working out a kind of personal dialectic, synthesizing intellectual values and socioeconomic institutions into a new reformist political program which combines the virtues of the free-market system with the advantages of the welfare state...
...BOOK REVIEW Two Cheers For Capitalism Irving Kristol / Basic Books / $10.00 Richard J. Whalen Ihave known Irving Kristol since the early 1960s, and he remains as he was when we first met: slightly bemused, chain-smoking, and almost as pleased with a well-aimed quip as with a tightly reasoned argument...
...sustained force of intellect and style, Kristol has taught a newly aware and activist—and slowly expanding—minority of corporate business leaders that ideas matter decisively, and that they and their giant enterprises are foredoomed if, like so many dinosaurs, they confront their enemies dumb, empty-headed, and mute...
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...Kolakowski believes that this "romantic vision" could easily be transformed into an ideology of totalitarianism...
...So Kristol, in the end, is a sober realist and anti-romantic, yet one who nevertheless is in search of an attainable ideal that will restore legitimacy and vitality to the embattled institutions and values of liberal capitalism...
...His haircut, lapels, and ties attest total indifference to changing fashion...
...He embraces capitalism, not without reservations, for a practical reason...
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...Kristol, the Hubert Humphrey liberal of a decade ago, now finds much to commend in the person and program of Congressman Jack Kemp, the conservative proponent of radical tax cuts as the cure for our worsening economic ills...
...What is more, the "alternatives...
...For he properly insists upon the need for putting the "free society" on a moral foundation...
...For these pieces form, as Kristol acknowledges in a preface, "a kind of intellectual autobiography, explaining how and why someone who was once simply content to regard himself as a 'liberal' has come to be a `neoconservative...
...He is not motivated by a desire to defend a mythical "capitalist cause," for he has met enough real-lifebusiness executives to know that these unpropertied professional managers are often really bureaucrats who belong to the "New Class" without realizing it, and who are seeking that "reasonable" basis of accommodation which Kristol hopes to provide...
...Naturally, those self-consciously stationed on the ideological flanks reject such synthesizing notions out of hand...
...now one is encouraged to satisfy them without delay...
...He rejects the implicit socialist ideal of the "New Class" for a similar con-crete and practical reason: "There is no such thing as socialism—understood as a voluntary cooperative community—in the real world of the 20th century...
...A Marxist in power is likely to promote the development of such a society because his doctrine insists on the inevitability of a "perfect unity of mankind," that is, an order in which all social conflict ceases...
...The American Spectator November 1978 37...
...Only the social and political arrangements of a capitalist society will permit that proper limitation of government activity which ensures individual liberty...
...He contentedly patronizes the same West Side Manhattan restaurants and, for all I know, he continues to order the same dishes that he did decades ago, for the sufficient reason that he still likes them...
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...Still, civil society was virtually destroyed and the massive terror had the effect of atomizing the citizens into isolated and powerless individuals...
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...We know that people continued to think independently, though secretly, and that emotional and sexual relationships could not be fully subjugated by the state...
...They were reduced to a "sack of potatoes," to use the term Marx once applied to French peasants...
...The book also contains superb studies of the social background of Stalinism and of the Marxist growth models developed during the 1920s, as well as new material on Stalin's life...
...He writes: "The transformation of the bourgeois citizen into the bourgeois consumer has dissolved that liberal-individualist framework which held the utopian impulses of modern society under control...
...There are only versions of more or less coercive, more or less bureaucratic collectivism...
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...Kolakowski, however, insists—rightly in my view—that by the 1930s the Sovietsystem had become totalitarian, by which he means that the state sought to control every form of human activity—economic, political, and cultural...
...To express the point differently: Human beings have such divergent interests and propensities that the kind of social harmony Marx envisioned is unrealizable except in a polity where all institutions are tightly controlled by one center, and where the social and political goals for all groups and individuals are defined by that center...
...To be sure, the political leadership did not succeed in regulating the Soviet population as closely as it wished...
...Meanwhile, over on the left, reviewer Philip Green, who teaches political science at Smith College, warns the readers of the Nation that "the main impetus [of Kristol's book] is nothing more than smugness...
...His very use of the term "totalitarianism" is arresting because most contributors to this volume, and many other historians and political scientists, have in recent years come to reject it as far too imprecise and misleading...
...Yet this mild-mannered, almost diffident man is, quite simply, one of the most influential social and political commentators in America, an eminence won in part through a seemingly impossible feat: He has managed to impress at least some American business leaders with the power and importance of ideas...
...For so eloquently expressing that honorable hope, on which the future of our civilization depends, and for striving so tirelessly for its fulfillment, Irving Kristol has won a special place in the intellectual history of our time...
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...Rather than make the institutions more powerful and overweening, the prescription of the "New Class," Kristol hopes for a renewing synthesis within the individual citizen: "If our private and public worlds are ever again, in our lifetimes, to have a congenial relationship—if virtue is to regain her lost loveliness—then some...
...Although Tucker's volume highlights the question of the relationships among Stalinism, Leninist Bolshevism, and Marxism, it would be misleading to leave the impression that no other issues are explored...
...combination of the reforming spirit with the conservative ideal seems to me to be what is most desperately wanted...
...This and other themes in Kristol's writing are not unfamiliar, especially as neo-conservatism has enjoyed a kind of celebrity of late...
...he's defending the same privileges that conservatives always defend: theirs...
...It is no exaggeration to say that the book raises so many fundamental questions about the interpretation of Soviet history that it will exert a major influence on the course of scholarship for years to come...
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...For example, the author of the article on totalitarianism in the second edition (1968) of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences claimed, among other things, that several of the most important traits usually associated with totalitarianism are found in a wide range of societies, and that consequently the term does not denote a polity that is sui generis . He concluded with the hope that "a third encyclopedia of the social sciences, like the first one, will not list 'totalitarianism.' " At the 1967 meetings of the American Political Science Association, he and another scholar contended that the concept gained currency in the 1950s only because it was the "foundation of [the) American counter-ideology in the cold war...
...But even those who have read some of the thirty-one essays gathered here when they originally appeared inthe Wall Street Journal, the Public Interest, and Commentary will find fresh insights and abundant rewards on rereading them consecutively...
...Of course, many more businessmen skip Kristol's essays in the Wall Street Journal than read them...
...As he writes, "the institutions of our society have lost their vital connection with the values which are supposed to govern the private lives of our citizenry...
...range from the hideous to the merely squalid...
...In fact, because he has a keen nose for fraud, he refuses to believe in large abstractions, such as "Free Enterprise" or "The People...
...In fact, in the Soviet Union the transformation occurred not because Marx deliberately intended it, but because the "basic values" of his notion of a "perfectly unified mankind[could] hardly be materialized otherwise...
...For example, conservative economic journalist William Wolman, reviewing Kristol's book 36 The American Spectator November 1978 in Business Week, condemns it as "an amalgam of innuendo and banality that could easily do damage to the capitalist cause," and he is shocked to report that the author counsels "the natural opponents of socialism to accept the premises of the liberals....If his program were to be adopted, the U.S...
...Quite so...
...In common with other reasonable men, Kristol seeks simultaneously to limit the scope and influence of government in daily life and to bring its goals as close as possible to the grasp of ordinary, unheroic men and women...
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...A one-time Marxist who became an early and singularly effective anti-Communist, Kristol in these essays subjects the present conflict between the private and public sectors to rigorous class-interest analysis, and identifies its source, not in benign "misunderstanding" (as some naive executives suppose), but in a struggle for power and moral influence between corporate business and the "New Class"—that educated elite which has carried the anti-capitalist and anti-bourgeois values of the campus-based adversary culture into our society's dominant bureaucratic power centers...
...One used to be encouraged to control one's appetites...
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...The key word in Kristol's vocabulary, it seems to me, is "reasonableness...
...The common thread in such complaints, from right and left, is that Kristol is not sufficiently idealistic or romantic...
...Even so, by Richard J. Whalen is a Washington-based writer whose most recent book is Taking Sides (Houghton Mifflin...
...As for the "ordinary people," Kristol is a resolute small-d democrat, but he has a well-founded distrust of the mob's passions, whether excited by manipulative leftist intellectuals or manipulative capitalist marketers...
...Tucker himself contributes a brilliant article, "Stalinism as Revolution from Above," in which he places the events of the 1930s and 1940s in the broad context of Russian history dating back to the fifteenth century...
...Enclosed is $12 per jacket, three for $30...
Vol. 11 • November 1978 • No. 11
