Picking on Irving

...This was true long before the anti-heroes took over the popular culture...

...Not only that, but it cannot afford to coast along on a view of human nature that flatters it as essentially "good...

...and at all times here it has also been poverty, powerless-ness, and oppressive force (as visited, for example, upon strikers) that have enforced the 'control' of 'appetite' for millions...

...Morgan, Kristol's detached in-house treatment "tells too much" or perhaps is a self-defeating plea-bargaining for a client in bad trouble...

...When reading reviews such as those by Galbraith and Green, one would imagine that the entrepreneurial spirit- which they believe to be shared by only a tiny number of Americans-exercises constant acts of repression...

...His Two Cheers for Capitalism is mainly composed of essays that originally made their debut there, if going unnoticed by persons repulsed by this house organ of Spat-kapitalismus...

...This particular balm of comfort, to be derived from addressing a select audience, is not afforded to people who write books...

...They are non-books as far as the trade is concerned- an economic mystery, like the fabulous unadvertised Hershey bar, that they do so well so inconspicuously...

...the small free enterprises disappear along with the large...

...It's a bit like the deceptive, if shrouded, character of American religion today: For years books with religious themes routinely have outsold most secular bestsellers without being ever mentioned in the usual newspaper bestseller lists...

...A vulgar Marxist might allege that America's hundred families deliberately contrived to conceal their vast influence over the nation, by purchasing anonymity...

...But Alger's heroes never really grew up...

...Now here we have truth about our culture: American capitalism in both prosperity and adversity never has been particularly thought of as noble...

...Social needs do not light such fires...

...As Moynihan put it once, for them the operative slogan is, "The easiest way to feed the sparrows is to feed the horses first," and the real miracle of it, in a trendy time when even nepotism enjoys a renaissance in the form of marital double-dipping in the federal payroll, is how really beneficial it is to be doing good as well as well...

...Morgan, bulbous nose and all, will be totally forgotten...

...Rockefeller Center is immense and conspicuous...

...Narrowing the number of effective enterprises to such a concentrated lot, it easily can be assumed that the age of free enterprise is gone...

...It is indeed an enviable talent to be able to do what Mr...

...Not just any religion, I infer from Kristol's subsequent remarks...

...But meanwhile he, we can be sure, has his substantial "acre*' securely tucked away somewhere [italics mine...

...Why is it that a New Class stomps in, with so much authority, seeking to bring to an end the sovereignty over our civilization exercised by the common man-an onslaught best to be observed in the environmentalist movement, yet apparent in so many other places...

...The Green menace goes right for the groin...

...A he attack on Kristol from the Left is a healthy reminder that the Left these days still writes more deftly than the Right, and thus the sarcastic tirades and rhetorical shell games of Philip Green (the Smith College Wobblie) make for more interesting, if mischievous, reading...

...This can occur slowly or quickly...

...The anxiousness of Kristol about the contemporary state of American culture turns out to be a put-on-the real Kristol underneath a patina of fake Angst is really an "allrightnik...

...This occurs [even] in religions the most false and dangerous...

...Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, and other titans of industry and finance capital were absent from our Post Office hall of fame...

...Here he would appear to join with Tocqueville, who (if I may quote a quotation I made from him in another journal recently, dealing with a related subject) wrote once: There is no religion which does not place the object of man's desires above and beyond the treasures of the earth, and which does not naturally raise his soul to regions far above those of the senses...

...As a result, on some occasions an author can be pecked to death by ducks whilst also being shot at by angry duck hunters...

...But Green, a neo-reactionary, will have it-Tocqueville and others to the contrary-that the entrepreneurial spirit has been repugnant to ordinary Americans all along, and this he proves by resort to Orwellian Newspeak: It's all a matter of the way you phrase the question, as Gallup discovered some years ago, if you want the right response: But are all "ordinary people" attached by the force of real belief (as is Kristol) to the primary institutions of capitalism-the free market for pricing goods, the commodity market in labor, the authoritarian structure of employment, the untrammeled right of corporate property to do what it wishes with itself, and political rule on behalf of corporate wealth...

...But it is corrupted...

...He does not confess this in so many words, but it certainly looks that way...

...The "Irving Kristol problem," which I plan to analyze, arises from the odd phenomenon that a first-rate collection of essays on the state of American society and its economic system could be so uniformly panned from all sides-by a Marxist named Philip Green in the Nation...

...and so forth...

...Several tycoons had slipped through, but only by virtue of having reputations as a humanitarian (Carnegie) or an inventor (Edison...

...How can even Hayek respond to the dilemma that the "self," liberated under conditions of liberal capitalism, "uses its liberty to subvert and abolish a free society...

...Might it just possibly be true, as Kristol mentions in passing, that the "democratic socialists" really are the elitists, and that their abhorrence of bourgeois civilization lies in the fact that it is one in which citizens are to a large extent able to make their consumer choices freely, without a Nader Consumer Czar telling them what to buy...

...One quality of contemporary liberal societies, he argues, is that they have gone to every length to remove religion from the public life of the polity...

...all firms disappear, including the private shops...

...by a conservative on all scores, John Chamberlain, in National Review...

...but this hardly explained the absence of historic figures whose names no longer figured in corporate business-Harriman, Astor, Mellon, etc...

...on the contrary," Green points out, ordinary Americans have been attacking these institutions "since the dawn of capitalism itself...

...In it Kristol addresses the very familiar question, Why is it that, as affluence has taken hold of liberal industrial societies, "the demands upon liberal society in the name of temporal 'happiness' have become ever more urgent and ever more reasonable...

...Kristol here raises a question: Have liberal societies been living off a capital inherited and not created by themselves, namely the accumulated moral capital of traditional religion and moral philosophy...

...Someone unfamiliar with our culture-a visiting mainland Chinese, for instance-might marvel at the extraordinary multiplicity of guises under which the entrepreneurial spirit still manifests itself...

...Wolman nit-picks Kristol for smearing a mutual enemy, fiscal Keynesians, as closet socialists, for bad-mouthing the Republican Party's past record in matters such as aid to the elderly, and for cottoning up to large corporations while offering only "grudging concessions" to small business, and so forth...

...colleague of mine used to try to get invited every year to go down to the Deep South-say, to Mississippi or Alabama, to deliver public lectures...

...Without wishing to sound like a Straussian, for me the decisive chapter of Two Cheers is Chapter 7, "Capitalism, Socialism and Nihilism...

...Chamberlain receives signals emanating from this book that its author, a God-that-failed leftist, now likes capitalism but dislikes capitalists, and furthermore sounds like a Spenglerian defeatist: "There is a forlorn quality to Mr...

...but against this one could reply that corporate firms, advertising elsewhere than in the realm of philately, were not similarly inhibited-Dearborn village in Michigan, after all, is a huge monument to Henry Ford...

...Publish one and you risk being read by all sorts and conditions of men at the same time...

...Matrimony pays...

...Kristol is hardly alone these days in being fair target for such a question...

...which shows of what importance it is for men to preserve their religion as their conditions become more equal...

...Stitch them together, make a book out of them, and they are fair game for reviewers everywhere, including ones who would never dare wrap their garbage in copies of the WSJ, for fear the collectors would spill the beans, so to speak...

...and then, for a gentle coup de grace, by a decent political scientist like Robert Dahl, also in the New Republic...

...Well, that's not altogether true in the case under consideration here...

...My final hypothesis therefore resembles a theme pervasive in Kristol's book: Americans generally have not regarded successful capitalists as heroes...

...Books are not respecters of place...

...A]ny would-be defenders of capitalism," he says, "who take Kristol's work as their text are almost certain to do the cause of free enterprise far more harm than good...

...A thought crossed my mind, when reading all these nasty reviews and referencing them back to their sources, that in an odd way each of them, whether to the Left or to the Right of Kristol, has-deliberately or not- skipped the main point of the book...

...and also, by suppressing vital parts of a thesis to evade the main drift of argument...

...How can it be that such an ill-assorted host of men is raised up against Kristol, a neoconservative...

...Kristors thinking," he argues, in that Kristol has the temerity to suggest that problems of a "capitalist culture" go deeper than mere economics (of which more I shall discuss later...

...Were he to feign attributes of sovereignty, Kristol now could become the pariah state par excellence...

...Let me be tolerably fair to Philip Green...

...For seven years Irving Kristol has been playing in Peoria, if by this is meant the Wall Street Journaleditorial page to which he is a contributing editor...

...by a self-styled "democratic socialist," Irving Howe, in the New Republic...

...Even in America," writes Green, "Kristol's bourgeois citizen was always in a minority...

...My first hypothesis was that deceased tycoons were excluded simply because the inclusion of one would leave the government open to the charge of unfairly providing free advertising to businesses still bearing his name...

...From what I can make of comments from Wolman and Chamberlain, a book such as his damages the Cause more than helps it, Just as Clark Kerr's Multiversity book in the aftermath of the Free Speech Movement was said by some pundit to be like a Das Kapital written by J.P...

...Post Office never to that time had issued a stamp commemorating an American for having been a famous businessman (capitalist...

...While this oversight has been righted a little in the prolific outpouring of recent postal issues, it struck me as odd at the time that such persons as John Jacob Astor, Andrew Mellon, J.P...

...Possibly it makes them all a bit uncomfortable...

...But Kristol's work, he says, "by contrast, is an amalgam of innuendo and banality that could easily do damage to the capitalist cause...

...no Yellow Pages exist in the phone directories of Moscow, Peking, Ho Chi Minh City, or Phnom Penh...

...Yet even such persons as Moina Michael (a woman who invented the "memorial poppy" which is hawked by disabled veterans on national holidays) were commemorated on stamps...

...In the end, Kristol notes, Friedman and other descendants of Mande-ville and Hume are in big trouble, "[Y]ou can maintain the belief that private vices, freely exercised, will lead to public benefits only if you are further persuaded that human nature can never be utterly corrupted by these vices, but will always transcend them...

...Much like Sherlock Holmes' discovery that the solution to a crime consisted of a dog that did not bark, I discovered while working on my stamp collection that the U.S...

...Kristol a bit for his backsliding and for insufficient enthusiasm...

...yet I suspect that Harold Gray, his creator, flaunted Warbucks perversely, in order to enrage the muckrakers of his time (else why the name Warbucks?-obviously, a merchant of death, as they used to say...

...But "it is becoming clear that religion, and moral philosophy associated with religion, is far more important politically than the philosophy of liberal individualism...

...The point could be amplified: The consequence of a call for religious revival certainly depends on whether those who make it do so for reasons of public policy, or because they really mean it...

...Nor is there any which does not impose on man some sort of duties to his kind, and thus draws him at times from the contemplations of himself...

...Why, Irving Kristol does...

...Green succeeds admirably...

...I have just finished reading a remarkable book, After Reason, by a young Anglo-Greek writer, Ananna Stassinopolous...

...The therapeutic benefits of such chautauqua circuit rides for him were akin to annual visits of Victorian businessmen to spas like Saratoga or Karlsbad...

...Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt-their stone faces permanently chiseled out of a South Dakota mountain by Gutzon Borglum-will be reverently gazed upon (and perhaps worshipped) in future times...

...a Chicago School monetary economist like William Wolman in Business Week...

...Is it again the question of the dog that did not bark...

...Paul Seabury is professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley...

...It is presumably a gnawing anxiety about this that has finally awakened an overwhelming number of citizens, not only in California but elsewhere, to the fact that the kinds of things Kristol talks about do have some meaning, even if we are not on the General Motors board of directors...

...He always returned from these visits refreshed and inspired...

...This is what the marketplace of ideas means...

...With such enemies, who needs friends...

...The mention of capitalism (read also "free enterprise") thus to Green inspires images of the 100 biggest, or the 1,000 biggest, firms- organizations which, as Kristol or any other knowledgeable person knows, account for a sizable part of our collective affluence...

...What sort of man is this Kristol-a vestry Augustinian...

...otherwise, nothing to report...

...economic aspects of repression in America, upon a government TNEC monograph published in 1938...

...Thus the only capitalist hero in our folk culture is the late Daddy Warbucks...

...While he does not come right out and say so, Kristol is calling for a restoration of what-in our particular culture-is called the Puritan or Protestant ethic (elsewhere called Catholicism or even Confucianism), for only this can offer a civic legitimacy which free enterprise and socialism never can possibly provide...

...Why was this so...

...In every society," he says, "the overwhelming majority of the people lead lives of considerable frustration, and if society is to endure, it needs to be able to rely upon a goodly measure of stoical resignation...

...I.say this hesitantly, since the diffuse and multi-topical nature of Two Cheers is such that the "point" which I see in it may not be that which Kristol intended...

...Green does: namely, by sleight-of-hand to make an author's thesis exactly the opposite of what he actually says...

...by an ex-closet socialist like J.K Galbraith in the haute monde New York Review of Books...

...Now, one could make a case that Kristol's target, the New Class, is not all the scapegoat he makes it out to be...

...These thoughts apparently displease those critics whose specialty it usually is to write economic criticisms of economic tracts, "No doubt," to repeat John Chamberlain, "it is the part of a realist to be forlorn...

...Several years ago, I stumbled on a fact which on the surface would seem partly to substantiate his views...

...The enemy," he writes in his own italics, " of liberal capitalism today is not so much socialism as nihilism.'' Self-realization, a whim of the current Zeitgeist, leads to nihilism when uninformed with a sense of self-restraint and moral virtue...

...Religious nations are therefore naturally strong on the very point on which democratic nations are most weak...

...she comes to conclusions remarkably similar to those of Kristol on the subject of religion and society, and with the same odd reticence with respect to personal belief...

...By coincidence, I have just come across a review of her book in the Daily Telegraph, by Colin Welch...

...It is not accidental, as Soviet propaganda writers would phrase it, that it is no longer Scarsdale that is the bedroom suburb that should be most reported for its wealth, but Georgetown, Chevy Chase, and the northern counties of Virginia-not noted for adding one iota to the gross national product but rather, for immensely depleting it...

...With books, moreover, you can't play in Peoria before you play on Broadway...

...Evidently, such people did not even have to read Kristol's book to know that these things were going on...

...It is possible to come to this conclusion historically, perhaps: Traditional societies and even Rome itself were hostile to the principles of a market economy...

...Wolman, for instance, correctly points out, in his review article "A Dubious Defense of Free Enterprise," that other notables like Schumpeter much earlier made the same ironic points about capitalism that Kristol now advances...

...An the bygone days of what we Berkeleyans now recall as The Troubles, a U.C...

...Certainly he is not pushing Unitarianism or Pelagianism...

...But if that is inferred, then why is the Yellow Pages section of the phone book so large...

...a fake Kristol, who pretends to be taking on the McGovern-type elitists, camouflages a slave driver who really is out to corral the masses and whip them into their stalls...

...He does not, for instance, feel at all at home with the belief-fostered by Friedman and Galbraith-that man is essentially good and corrupted only by bad institutions...

...But now, under the socialism we elsewhere know in the world, it is not only the 100 biggest firms that disappear...

...Before Mississippi audiences he found himself being yelled at as a dangerous radical, instead of experiencing the usual attention he got in Berkeley-reviled as he normally was as a loathsome reactionary...

...Thus, the statement of a student radical of the 1960s: "You don't know what hell is like unless you were raised in Scarsdale...

...But I fancy the reason for this popular unwillingness to honor businessmen-Green to the contrary-arises not from a dislike of them but from a wholly commonsensical "bourgeois" notion that, well, business is just business...

...Kristol's quotation of Macaulay's retort to Francis Bacon, "An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia," gives Green a delicious chance for innuendo: As long as capitalism, whether declining or somehow rejuvenated, remains in the saddle in industrial societies, then for most people leading a less privileged way of life than Kristol's, Macaulay's vision must remain the only kind of Utopia that Kristol admires: a dream...

...He is extremely complimentary, but he concludes: By emphasizing the desirable public effects rather than the inner effects of a spiritual rebirth, Miss Stassinopolous comes uncomfortably near to offering an unintended affront to what she commends...

...anyone can read them, anywhere, in free societies...

...But the question-is Kristol, a neoconservative, forlorn?-cannot be answered unless we know the answer to a deeper and personal question: Is Kristol's call for a revival of religion merely a practical sociological one, or does he really mean it...

...There is a cheery tone in Green's announcement that-Kristol to the contrary-"ordinary" Americans hate the institutions from which most of them derive high affluence...

...Herbert Marcuse's little book, One Dimensional Man, a bestseller of the 1960s, relied exclusively, to make his point on the * But as Kristol correctly points out, Scarsdale still remains the whipping-town in the terminology of the New Left...

...The educated classes of liberal-bourgeois society simply [cannot] bring themselves to believe that religion or philosophy was that important to a polity...

...but certainly large parts of it are, notably those large and small Califanos who preside over redistributionist and regulatory systems at every level of our polity...

...But-could it possibly be that his critics all share a common assumption which Kristol does not...

...our literature presents us with almost no capitalist role-models, the sole outstanding exception being the works of Horatio Alger...

...Liberal economists, for example, unhappily observe their free-market philosophy held in contempt by decent persons when confronted with the splendid gross earnings of Hustler, and with the fact that contemporary pornography and other outrageous vices legally flourish in the hands of profit-making large corporations...

...Chamberlain and Wolman merely drub Mr...

...On the contrary In all of this deft, callid name-calling and tergiversation, Green manages to evade one purport of Kristol's thesis, which in fact constitutes much of his book, namely, that the principal thief of American pocketbooks today is not the corporation but a government whose legislatively assigned tendency has been, at enormous cost to us all, to enlarge its control over ever wider reaches of the institutional life of America-a tendency which paradoxically and happily coexists with a new libertinism and self-indulgence...