The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War
Johnjamieson, T.
Who reads The American Spectator? Patrick Buchanan. ALSO: Ronald Reagan. Malcolm Muggerldge, Ben Wattenberg, Peregrine Worsthorne. S.I. Hayakawa, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Henry Kissinger,...
...The Will to Power, not Dieu et mon droit, BRIGHT IDEA PUBLISHING introduces THE 80 PROOF COOKBOOK RN INTRODUCTON TO COOHING WITH HIGH SPIRITS by Mary Anastasia & Frank Cullen Every recipe features an 80 Proof Liquor, bringing "liquor to the larder" Represented are SCOTCH, GIN, VODKA, BOURBON and other Liquors A quafity paperback, 8ý89 by 11 spiral-bound to lay flat for easy use in the kitchen...
...The two clashing impulses of romanticism, egoism and humanitarian sympathy, ultimately divided into mutually exclusive philosophies, though both were equally relativistic and antinomian: Communism and the creed of the Superman...
...James R. Schlesinger, Thomas Murphy, Suzanne Garment, Roger Rosenblatt, Anthony Harrigan, Robert L. Bartley, David Stockman, R,chard Allen, Ernest Lefever, Sen...
...The book ~6 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR .JANUARY 1982 is dedicated to the evangel of sixties' campus anarchy, Herbert Marcuse...
...Both were the ugly spawn of the original romantic heresy which he and colleague Irving Babbitt found personified in Rousseau...
...Utter irrelevance...
...Among his abounding absurdities are these: As evidence of the nobility's domination of agriculture through ownership of land, Mayer cites the Duke of Sutherland, whose million Scottish acres were fit for little more than a gigantic hunting p r e s e r v e . Oscar Wilde, dandy manque, appears in Mayer's book as an "aristocratizing" champion of the old order, despite his authorship of an infuriating book called The Soul of Man Under Socialism...
...Those who, over the years, have had cause to regret the fact that Chandler wrote so little will want to add Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler to their shelves at once...
...Christian kings have souls subject to damnation...
...Larry Flynt, M. Stanton Evans...
...Box 1969...
...13.95 Three years after J onestown the Monday morning quarterbacking continues...
...social climbing is actually self-humiliation...
...The voting machine perpetuates a far more pernicious superstition than the Holy Ampulla...
...But the assimilation of American heiresses into the Faubourg St...
...Bloomington, indiana 47402 Please enter a Please Pf m! [~J new Name 7' renewal subscription to The American Spectator for one Address year (12 =ssues) for only $18...
...how "rotten boroughs" mitigated the effects of universal suffrage...
...Charles Peters...
...how the Papacy "feudalized" religion...
...Sometimes the opinions come wrapped inside a patented Chandler simile...
...Name Address City ___State __Zip _ _ Q Check [ ~ Money Order $12.95 plus $1.55 shipping & handling...
...One might choose to consider the extent to which a system based on honors, honorifics, and codes of honorable behavior was actually a rule of honor...
...Edmund Wilson's Memoirs of Hecate County, for example, is dismissed as "indecent e n o u g h . . . and in exactly the most offensive way--without passion, like a phallus made of dough...
...Mayer at once pities and despises the men of wealth aspiring to the prestige of men of birth...
...There Howard Kaplan opportun, ity in America...
...Only romantics believe that the evils can be eradicated, or else revised into virtues...
...then he destroys this thesis by stating that both world wars were really one war with the same cause...
...Mayer/Pantheon Books Inc...
...Ernest van den Haag, Paul McCracken...
...Paul Laxalt...
...how museums discriminated against avant.garde artists...
...but the professor of dialectical materialism has decided in advance that any pretensions which would raise man above the primordial slime are a monstrous joke...
...Alexander Haig, Tom Wolfe, James Jackson Kilpatnck, George Gilder, Jack Paar, Donald H. Rumsfeld, George WilI,J Peter Grace, Maj...
...Alan Abelson, Charlton Heston, Senator Jake Garn, Gertrude Himmelfarb, James Hitchcock, Gen...
...A royal academy condemning bad taste cons t i t u t e s , in Mayer's view, a reactionary political conspiracy and leads to a world war...
...Because he follows world politics like 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1982...
...This romantic creed is the slender fiber which supported Nazism--an anti-aristocratic movement setting out to institute national socialism before conquest by international socialism...
...R=chard Perlc., Hugh Kenner, Frank Shakespeare, William Proxmire, Patr,ck Cosgrave...
...Couched in his unreadable style is an account of prewar European society distorted to support his theory...
...and how classical education kept down budding Marxist historians...
...The result...
...His atrocities of language bear witness to the observation that history is no longer a literary discipline: "bourgeoisification," "denoblement," "monumentalization," "artisanal," "associational," "historial," "fin du siecle...
...Different ages have different names for the actors and different ideas for the pretexts...
...Monarchs may be the actors and instruments of evil, but "you would not cure the evil by resolving that there should be no more monarchs...
...Despite its formidable accumulation of detail, Frank MacShane's Chandler biography was oddly unsatisfying...
...The letters tell us much about the life of a troubled, difficult, and uncertain man, and so they will interest anyone curious about the details of Raymond Chandler's career...
...The first literary man to tackle Jonestown, he's turned this readymade horror tale into the occasion for a travel book heavy on the sarcasm...
...which is perhaps just another way of saying that he was a writer, not just an entertainer, and one whose work seems likely to outlast many a contemporary with apparently more serious pretensions...
...but such a word echoes meaninglessly in the hollow dark of Marxism...
...Jude Wannlski, Jack Kemp, William Rusher, Richard M. Nixon, Wilham E. Simon...
...Brock Yates, Ray Price, James Wechsler, James Glassman, John Roche, John Chamberlain, Wdl~am Sabre, Neal Kozodoy, Henry Salvatorl...
...The world might be quite different today, had the place of Wilson and Roosevelt been filled by men who understood the latent virtue of prescriptive institutions...
...It is as though to say Lord Jeffrey's disgust with Wordsworth ("This will never do . . .") was a d i s t a n t cause of the Napoleonic defeat...
...THE AMERICAN SPEC'I'ATOR...
...Liberal American politicians, encouraging social democrats and dictating plebiscites in defeated countries, as well as acquiescing to the captivity of Eastern Europe, seem personally implicated...
...Naipaul, have been bringing us the news from Third World hellholes in their fiction and nonfiction...
...In the end, "making the world safe for democracy" is as absurd a pretext for war as the Will to Power...
...It isn't another The Long Goodbye, but it will do...
...Dawd Meiselman...
...writing to Charles Morton about the reason why Dashiell Hammett stopped writing, Chandler simply suggests that "he may have come to the end of his resources in a certain style and have lacked the intellectual depth to compensate for that by trying something else...
...Professor Mayer, who received his doctorate at Yale, and taught at Columbia, Brandeis, and Harvard before arriving at Princeton, is a Marxist historian...
...in their place are three socialist regimes and eight Communist dictatorships...
...Mayer sets out to prove that monarchy itself was the immediate cause of the Great War...
...For the doctrine of divine right, as T.S...
...the whole adds up to an outstanding piece of work and a highly readable volume in its own right...
...Human ideals are only the pretexts...
...A romantic creed of nationalism which glorified strength for its own sake triumphed over traditional morality, which would have found the Central Powers on the unjust side...
...John Lukacs, Leonard Garment, M=chael Kmsley, Tom Winter, Nathan Glazer...
...Eliot pointed out, is really a doctrine of divine responsibility...
...Journey to Nowhere makes its appearance among a fresh batch o f " as told to" hack works and hard-core investigative accounts...
...Hayakawa, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Henry Kissinger, Clayton Fritchey, Milton Friedman, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Midge Decter, James Q. Wdson, David Brinkley, Woody Allen, Joseph Coors, Irving Kristol, Henry Fairhe...
...the evils remain the same, as does their consequence...
...T. John Jamieson is a Paul Elmer More scholar restding in Livonia, Michtgan...
...R,chard Whalen, Richard Lugar...
...Germain was not a cause of World War I, indirect or otherwise...
...This means another reactionary conspiracy to keep bourgeois "class consciousness" from forming, which would lead automatically to the abolition of aristocracy...
...Alan Reynolds...
...And the Third World angle is what Shiva is pushing here part-time--another miracle, since everyone but Sbiva seems to forget that the Jonestown folly occurred in Guyana...
...We understand too that Waugh spoke of "university-nurtured cultural barbarians...
...More often, though, they are delivered straight, and are none the less impressive for it...
...a London resident, he hadn't heard of People's Temple until the cyanide party two weeks before...
...This Eliot meant when he said they " a r e not men enough to be damned...
...Mayer fails even to render a pict u r e s q u e account of the ancien regime's crepuscular splendor...
...THE PERSISTENCE OF THE OLD REGIME: EUROPE TO THE GREAT WAR ArnoJ...
...Never mind that-annoblization has occurred for centuries, even belbre the existence of heraldry, since families do become extinct and are supplanted...
...In the egregious Professor Mayer we observe the representative of one side of the heresy trying to analyze a situation induced by the school of the opposite extreme...
...Mayer maintains that the classics were really "a finely tuned screening mechanism," and a device for the "co-optative integration of the sons of magnates of business and the professions into the ruling class...
...so it is a pleasure to report that the present volume is first-rate, not as good a job of editing as (to cite a model example) Carl Bode's The New Mencken Letters, but infinitely better than, say, Carlos Baker's recent Hemingway collection...
...To this end he furnishes 300 tedious, repetitious pages of generalizations and statistics showing how the ancten re'gt'me conttnued t o own most of the land, thereby controlling the languishing agricultural economy...
...The fault lies in individuals, not institutions...
...Eugene V. Rostow, Michael Novak...
...t~ Payment enclosed C,ty "~ Bill me later State Zip X91 integrated (though not always deftly) into a prose texture so rich and persuasive that Chandler's novels, flaws and all, have earned the standing of minor masterpieces...
...But 20 years later a political establishment that was the ancien r~gime's antithesis harnessed the same doctrine for the same ends...
...Presumably this literary education, which often diverted THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1982 37 the sons of the bourgeoisie into the academy or the arts, also impeded the formation of "a counterelite and counterhegemony" by keeping the scions from piling million upon million through the second generation...
...Mayer mentions the paradox of the aristocracy, which Nietzsche excoriated as " d e c a d e n t , " taking up Nietzscheism as a goad to drive the masses into fighting its war...
...The journey to nowhere is Naipaul's journey...
...Martin Peretz...
...Whenever possible, MacShane has returned to the original letters instead of using the edited versions reprinted in Raymond Chandler Speakmg-a commendable decision...
...Patton, llI, Fred lkl$, Philip Crane...
...Furthermore, for the sake of completeness, Mayer incorporates republican France into his theory of an enduring ancien re'gime, speaking of its society as though an invisible king continued to preside over it...
...JOURNEY TO NOWHERE: A NEW WORLD TRAGEDY Shiva Naipaul / Simon & Schuster Inc...
...Jean-Franqois Revel, Lu=gi Barzini, Tom Charles Huston, Clay La Force...
...Instead he provides a dry report on the process of annoblization (assumption into the nobility of worthy candidates from inferior classes) which he castigates as "co-optation" of the middle class...
...We know that Communism is founded on a lie...
...Democratic politicians, though they promise never to tell a lie, do not claim to have souls...
...we may say that monarchy is based on a myth...
...A more credible Princetonian, Paul Elmer More, wrote an essay in November 1914 called "The Philosophy of the War," in which he cited "Nietzscheism and Treitschkeism" as the paramount excuses for German aggression...
...California residents add 6% sales tax...
...Pius X refused to bless Franz Josef's cause...
...Antonio Martino, Cohn Welch, Robert Bleiberg, Herb Stein...
...but they also provide innumerable glimpses into the mind of an insightful author who knew his craft, and so they will also interest anyone who cares about literature...
...GeorgeS...
...Bismarck's phrase for his kind was "intellectual proletarian," what Paul Elmer More called "a nouveau inte/lec!uel, bearing the same relation to the man of genuine education as the nouveau fiche to the man of inherited manners...
...But the assumptions beneath democracy are historically, philosophically, and theologically, at best questionable...
...At first he feels like backing out, not because he has to "solve" 900 deaths, but because he has to set foot into the Cooperative Socialist Republic (Guyana's tag since 1970...
...The idealism of democracy is a poor thing beside the idealism of monarchy, and this fact should humble us...
...Malcolm S. Forbes, Jr., Thomas J. Lescher, Norman Mailer, Clare Boothe Luce, Gerald R. Ford, Melvin Lasky, Nelson Polsby, Roger Mdhken, Randolph Richardson, Thomas Sowell, S~dney Hook, J~m Fallows, Edith Efron, Gen...
...but creators of havoc in the world of ideas must not be tolerated...
...Henry Regnery...
...Wedemeyer, James L. Buckley, Elhott Abrams, Lewis Lehrman...
...They bear, therefore, no responsibility, only "accountability" before what Coriolanus called the beast of many heads...
...Charles Homer, Edward Banf~eld, Victor Lasky, Raymond Aron, Roy Cohn, Joseph Hazan...
...In his 1914 essay, More notes that the nation which gave the world Nietzsche also gave it Marx...
...78) BRIGHT IDEA PUBLISHING 2210 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 702 Santa Monica, California 90403 (213) 479-3044 justified the war to its promoters...
...His only plans are to see what he can see...
...16.95 T. JohnJamieson Protessor Mayer wishes to establish that World War I, the "war of the mas~es," was not a venture in capitalist expansion, but an attempt by the ancient feudal aristocracy of Europe to recover its ebbing political and economic hold...
...Burke observed that human vices are the cause of great public evils...
...Somehow, Mayer implies, kings and lords would have been more honest in their contempt of inferiors to have kept the u p s t a r t s down completely...
...Q Compared with the competition, Naipaul's effort is a miracle of imagination...
...Fred Sdverman, John Lofton...
...Mayer nods to the notion that studying Aristotle, Virgil, and Horace instilled ideals of honor...
...Professor Mayer's existence is evidence of the persistence of another regime...
...What Mayer calls the "Thirty Years War of the twentieth century" resulted in the fall of nine European thrones...
...Correspondents and references are identified carefully, and the index is thorough...
...Joseph A. Califano, Garry Trudeau, and many others...
...And, curiously, the Marxist who values art only as " s o c i a l criticism" seems to take the side of modern a b s t r a c t a r t i s t s (decadent aestheticists condemned by Soviet academicians) against the taste of the ancien regime s academies...
...William Randolph Hearst, Jr , Shmuel Moyal, Huntington Ca=ms, Eric Holler, Anne Armstrong, Norman Podhoretz, Jeff MacNelly, Dor.s Grumbach...
...Few will care if Mayer's kind seek academic tenure by beating dead horses...
...Over the years he and his big brother, V.S...
...As a writer," Miriam Gross has said, " h e owes everything to his style...
...C handler's virtues as a writer are equally apparent in the letters Frank MacShane has chosen for his new collection, and they are joined by something not found in the novels: the literary opinions of a widely read, unusually perceptive correspondent...
...Original illustrations by Claudia Meyer ORDER NOW FOR HOLIDAY CHEER...
...These royal scoundrels even had the audacity to grant h e r e d i t a r y titles to Jews...
...Dana Andrews...
...Howard Kaplan is a free-lance writer living in Minneapolis...
...Roger Starr, Walter Goodman, Harry Jaffa, Jeffrey Hart, David Packard, Robert N,sbeI...
...We begin with the apprehensive author zooming into Georgetown in late 1978...
...Yet the Trinidadian-born Naipaul wasn't really starting from scratch...
...George W. Ball, Tom Stoppard, William F. Buckley, Jr., Joseph E. Coberly, Jr., Albert Shanker, Lewis Lapham, Rowland Evans, Robert Novak...
...To the Marxist mind, classical education was also a reactionary conspiracy, therefore a cause of the war...
...how successful businessmen were assimilated into the aristocracy, ostensibly to keep them from conspiring to overthrow it...
Vol. 15 • January 1982 • No. 1
