Political Pilgrims: Travels of lUestern Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, Chma, and Cuba

...It is unlikely that probing in so subjective a light would be useful...

...quite the contrary, in fact...

...This may indeed turn out to be the case, but, as so often happens, for the wrong reason: namely, the fuss made by certain reviewers about the a u t h o r ' s presumed attempt to vilify or "scapegoat" the intellectuals...

...And since the major moralpolitical evil of our century is totalitarianism, it is natural that most forms of contemporary political senselessness revolve around the themes of totalitarianism, as manifested in what Jean-Franfois Revel calls the "totalitarian temptation...

...Today's West--pluralistic as it certainly is--continues to be dominated by a diffuse atmosphere of accusatory thought (which is not to be confused with healthy critical and self-critical thought...

...Unhappy to find that the thinkers he has studied were not radicals like himself, Lears rushes to attack and ridicule them...

...It is not merely that idealism or utopianism in politics is bound to fail in our (thank God) imperfect world...

...And if the opportunity of pilgrimages to Utopia is going to be harder and eventually impossible to come by, there remains " t h e leftist nostalgia for a nice Communism that could have materialized"--as Leszek Kolakowski put it in a recent New Republic piece on contemporary Poland--which is responsible for the outpouring of increasingly abstract neo-Marxist, para-Marxist, or semi-Marxist books not only from the continent but, to an even larger degree, from England and America...

...Among other things, Paul Hollander's book contains such a sottisier in its copious selection of political gems produced by Western intellectuals who, in search of Utopia, traveled to the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and other Third World countries between 1928 and 1978...

...Such people readily lend their voices to causes articulated by "professional" intellectuals, who in turn avail themselves of media celebrities in order to have access to a much wider public audience...

...The real concern is that secret political activities might weigh upon the conscience of a justice, forcing him to mysterious and unexplained withdrawals from cases...

...There are emerging trends and "cumulative effects," however, which the sociologist of intellectual life not only has a right but is obliged to consider...

...D e s p i t e Lears's intrusive commentary and his anachronistic evaluations, No Place of Grace is an important and exciting book, perhaps the best study we have of late" nineteenth-century cultural history...

...At first glance it would seem that we have here a source of sorrow...

...Paul Hollander should be congratulated both for providing us with a perceptively commented (if of THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1982 39 necessity incomplete) political sottisier of our troubled century, and for ending his commentary on a note of what I would term disciplined pessimism...

...Lears's conclusion is both obvious and correct: Whatever antimodernist thinkers intended or hoped, their movement did not cause most Americans to make their own furniture or pottery, to imitate the alleged innocence and childishness of medieval folk, to worship at the shrine of either Henry Adams's Virgin or his Dynamo, or to escape into Nirvana...

...These demands will probably be obliged, although some observers on and off the Court will disapprove...

...I say this because the material he examines could easily have lent itself to more alarmist, if not directly' apocalyptic, treatment...

...with a renewed concern for childhood itself and wi~h David Herbert Donald is Chairman of the Graduate Program in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University...

...Julia Kristeva (herself a former radical, largely "deconverted" by the tremendous impact that Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago had on the Parisian intelligentsia) injected some lucidity into the recent Sontag controversy when she observed: It has seemed to me that American intel...

...The doctrine of judicial restraint is not a matter of the psyche but a solidly founded doctrine, carefully formulated in a tradition that reaches from Holmes to Frankfurter and, later, Alexander Bickel...

...POLITICAL PILGRIMS: TRAVELS OF WESTERN INTELLECTUALS TO THE SOVIET UNION, CHINA, AND CUBA Paul Hollander / Oxford University Press / 125.00 Matei Calinescu A p o l i t i c a l century like ours has long been in need of a p o l i t i c a l sottisier, which, according to the standard French definition, is a collection or dictionary of memorable stupidities, particularly those uttered by well-known authors...

...Because Political Pilgrims contains so many thoughtful insights and raises problems of such urgency, I regret that Hollander did not try to emulate one of his acknowledged masters, P e t e r Berger, and write with a wider audience in mind...

...The phallic leader and the feminine crowd is an old story...

...and with the quest for Nirvana in the religions of the Orient...

...Both Brandeis and Frankfurter were singularly free of the vice of judicial activism, in the sense of confusing personal bias with the law...

...Hollander, then, has nothing to apologize for,:at least not here...

...some center on problems of political philosophy (what is Utopia and utopian thought...

...The styles of the two justices in their backstage activities differed sharply...

...what is their place in society...

...Be that as it may, it did not take George Bernard Shaw more than a few years to realize, in The Rationah zation of Russia (1931), that the USSR had come much closer to realizing his socialist dreams than had Mussolini's Italy...

...Of definitions of intellectuals over the last 150 years, from Alexis de Tocque(,iile to Karl Manheim to Edward'Shils, there is no end, and the problem I think is that Hollander has examined too many of these historical definitions without giving sufficient attention to what we should understand by ,he term "intellectual" in t o d a y ' s p o s t i n d u s t r i a l and postmodern world...

...Hollander's sottister here is no less grotesque...

...Indeed, that the political role of both justices was far more extensive than was previously suspected Mr...

...As Hamilton remarks in the Introduction to his study, cited approvingly by Hollander himself: "The barrier between those [intellectuals] who chose Communism and those who preferred Fascism seems to me . . . so slim that we are less than ever entitled to say that a certain type of man, a certain type of psychology tended toward Fascism...

...and others, finally, are questions which escape easy classification but belong to such often overlapping areas as modern history (including intellectual history), descriptive sociology, c u r r e n t politics, and, occasionally, futurological speculation_9 H o l l a n d e r ' s willingness to deal with all these gives his book the high seriousness his subject deserves...

...But however laudable this commitment to thoroughness may be in purely scholarly terms, it results in a discourse that unfolds slowly, at times ponderously, with longeurs and repetitions (some of which could have been easily avoided), and a t t e m p t s to deal with too many questions only remotely or indirectly linked to the immediate topic...

...That the supremely intelligent George Bernard Shaw was a political fool even before discovering the moral appeal of Soviet society is well documented, but this makes his foolishness no less discomforting...

...No one wishes to be an apologist for judicial impropriety...

...I am not opposed to their inclusion per se, but the author should have explained and qualified such choices more persuasively than he does in a brief footnote in which he states that such people may be considered intellectuals if they have some "ability to reflect on _9 . . larger i s s u e s " and " i f they engage in social c r i t i c i s m . " In my view, the case of actors (or singers or other kiAds of e n t e r t a i n e r s ) who involve themselves in our mediadominated politics is just one aspect of a larger phenomenon that I would _9 call "intellectual Bovarysme," i.e., the mere wish to share in the " p r e s t i g e " of membership in the intelligentsia...

...The Fortas and Douglas episodes have certainly chilled the climate for extrajudicial adventure, but that was after the retirement and death of both Brandeis and Frankfurter...

...With the slow but steady erosion of the Soviet myth after World War II, intellectual (and pseudo-intellectual) pilgrimages to Utopia took other directions: China, whose mystique THE AMt:.RICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1982 ~,7 was greatest during the worst years of the Cultural Revolution...

...In other words, political foolishness all too frequently derives from a moral stupidity that coexists with a certain intellectual brilliance, but nevertheless condones, promotes, and even supports--whether wittingly or unwittingly makes little difference--both political and moral evil...

...During these decades, Lea~rs~writes, "many beneficiaries of modern culture began to feel they were its secret victims...

...Being in a Soviet prison, in fact, amounted to nothing less than a "privilege...

...Brandeis, working from his study-apartment on California Street, usually contrived to arrange that those who came to consult with him would formally make the first overture, even when the initiative was his...

...When Freund relayed the message, "Brandeis reacted to Moley's words with general alarm: 'No, Secretary of State Hull wants to see me!' " Brandeis was remote, secretive, austere: "something between Lincoln and Christ in the strange poetical impression he leaves," recalled James Grafton Rogers after attending one of the justice's soire'es, "scarcely of this world at a l l . " Certainly, Brandeis took greater pains than Frankfurter to mute and disguise his political role...

...It is to be hoped that in future books Lears can discipline his energy with self-restraint and will come to recognize that the historian's task is to understand as well as to judge...

...If his book adds little that is new on any one of these developments, it juxtaposes and : connects: these movements in a fresh and illuminating way...

...Like his friends Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the nonconformist Shaw went so far as to express sincere admiration for what Hollander calls the "good works" of the OGPU (a p r e d e c e s s o r of t o d a y ' s KGB): "We cannot afford to give ourselves moral airs when [the USSR] . . . humanely and judiciously liquidates a handful of exploiters and speculators to make the world safe for the honest man...

...what might have been " a n alternative to alienated labor" became "a revivifying hobby for the affluent' t--woodworking tools in every bourgeois garage...

...Intelligent people, of course, can and do say countless foolish things about all sorts of matters...

...Matched against Jerry Brown and other beauties, Vidal will contend for the United States Senate Mitchell S. Ross is author of The Literary Politicians and An Invitation to Our Times...

...how can their generally acknowledged role in handling the symbolic codes of social life be used and abused...

...But must we raise our eyebrows quite as high, or quite as indignantly, as he seems to expect...

...But the "cumulative effect" of their opinions--Communistor Fascist or Communist-Fasc i s t - i s still with us, curiously reinforced by the more sophisticated and more "fantastic" opinions of younger intellectuals...

...Concerning Albania, I cannot resist the temptation to add another gem to the necessarily parsimonious collection presented in these pages...

...The impression was false...

...His purpose is to analyze, explain, and assess the material at hand, and this leads him of course to raise a number of larger questions in regard to which, out of intellectual honesty, he feels compelled to spell out not only his position b u t the reasons for it...

...But it was also not unpredictable, since antimodernists were psychologically ambivalent: " t h e y often idealized premodern thought (especially its 'unconscious' dimension)" but "they remained committed to nineteenthcentury values of autonomous achievement and conscious control...

...This people may be the incarnation of the new civilization of the world...

...Murphy's evidence suggests that neither justice wandered far beyond the norms of Court history and tradition up to their time...

...As political sottisier, therefore, Po/itical Pilgrims is a profoundly disturbing book, its hilarity notwithstanding...

...The shift from a Protestant to a therapeutic basis of capitalist cultural hegemony" was "an unforeseen, unintended result of the efforts of individual men to locate meaning amid cultural confusion...

...Less obvious, and less justifiable, is Lears's judgment that the movement failed because antimodernists sought "moral reform within existing frameworks of bourgeois values and organized capitalism" and n0t--as he clearly would p r e f e r ~ " r o o t and branch institutional change...

...Shaw was positively amazed, for instance, at the admirable conditions prevailing in Soviet jails, so admirable, indeed, that their inmates were reluctant to leave them: "In England," he writes, "a delinquent enters {the jail] as an ordinary man and comes out a 'criminal type,' whereas in Russia he enters as a criminal type and would come out as an ordinary man but for the difficulty of inducing him to come out at all...

...P r o f e s s o r Murphy's case, on occasion mildly overstated, becomes extravagant on.ly once...

...Perhaps I shall be provedwrong-books having t h e i r unpredictable f a t e - - a n d Political Pilgrims will eventually find its way to the general reader...

...I think not...

...No Place of Grace brilliantly depicts the severe cultural crisis of late nineteenthcentury America...

...When Edmund Wilson notes, in his Travels to Two Democracies (1936), that Soviet citizens strolling in a "park do really own it and are careful of what is t h e i r s , " and then adds that " a new kind of public consciousness has come to 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1982 lodge in these c r o w d s . . . [which] move like slow floods of water--not straining, not anxious like our people, not p i t t e d against an alien environment, but as if the whole city belonged to t h e m , " I am embarrassed and disappointed at seeing a fine and discriminating literary critic in such a poignantly silly idyllic mood, a mood attributed to people living under the g r e a t t e r r o r of Stalinism...

...He writes, remarkably: "We must leave it to psychohistorians to comment on whether or not the extreme judicial restraint of Frankfurter's later years on the bench represented an attempt to assuage a guilt over his past extensive political activity...

...Political foolishness, after all, very often goes hand in hand with tenacious wishful thinking, with what Hollander calls " s e l e c t i v e perception" and " s e l e c t i v e tolera n c e , " with a strange kind of " p r o v i s i o n a l " dishonesty in the name of "absolute" honesty, with a will to self-delusion that Czeslaw Milosz has illuminated in The Captive Mind...

...Bloomington, Indiana norities the extent of whose influence is always problematical...

...The principal worry is not that justices may be corrupt, or may allow their political sympathies to infringe on judgment...

...As for Castro, Norman Mailer, in a fit of hero worship, had welcomed him as a sort of fairy tale prince of Revolution riding an inevitably white horse: "So, Fidel Castro, I announce to the City of New York that you gave all of us who are alone in this country . . . some sense that there were heroes in the world...

...seat now occupied by S.I...

...That seldom happened with either Brandeis o r Frankfurter...

...As a professional sociologist, Hollander would not have been content to present a rich sampling of political foolishness simply for the amusement of the reader...

...Since justices of the U.S...

...Cioran calls "posthistory...

...Frankfurter, he writes, "relied on strong arguments, indignantly put, to stifle any suggestion that any impropriety had taken p l a c e . " This was the source of the . . \ prevailing impression that Frankfurter took a "sacerdotal" view of the judge's role, so consecrated to abstention that it often forbade even harmless unofficial comment...

...As individuals, most of the people discussed in Hollander's Political Pilgrims sooner or later changed their minds and some (one need only think of Richard Crossman's The God That Faded) underwent a deep crisis of conscience whose authenticity cannot be doubted...

...Murphy is safe enough in supposing that the climate is more restrictive now...

...The most that Mr...

...The arts and crafts movement, for instance, resulted in no change in the system of American mass-production...

...While Simone de Beauvoir found life in China " e x c e p t i o n a l l y p l e a s a n t " (1958), Alberto Moravia discovered the uplifting virtues of poverty, as opposed to the degrading consumerism of the West...

...One might even argue that to be constantly intelligent is to be socially ill-mannered, if not intellectually unbearable...

...Murphy can say is that since Brandeis did not write a dissent, but joined Justice Stone's, he might have been inhibited by informal discussion of the AAA...

...Such sheer political-intellectual kitsch aside, conventional Utopias in our limited world are slowly being squeezed out as they reveal without exception (without exception) the nightmarish side of the dream of socio-political perfection: despotism, the cruel cult of naked power, untold desperation of entire nations, brutal exploitation and ideological manipulation, widespread cynicism, and ultimately what I once called, summing up Igor Shafarevich's view of Communism, "thanatocracy" or the "rule of death...

...What makes a difference in the long run is the cumulative impact of the denigration intellectuals direct at their own society . . . . The long.range impact of the intellectuals' r e j e c t t o n o f t h e i r s o c i e t y , t h e i r a l m o s t instinctive, reflexive disparagement of its major values . . . may contribute not only to popular bewilderment but also to the low morale and loss of will of p o l i t i c a l elites--possibly, in the long run, to the erosion of both popular and elite support for t h e s u r v i v a l of Western p o l i t i c a l institutions...

...with a search for form and meaningful ritual in Catholicism and Anglo-Catholicism...

...In 1927, when endorsing the dictatorship of Mussolini in the name of socialism, was Shaw's wish simply to shock his fellow Fabians...

...His intent is to "connect psychic with social change," to show "a link between Freud and Gramsci," but the two approaches are never fully integrated...

...tellectuals who were popping champagne bottles to boot Reality escapes them[ Hollander's book is among the few lucid works that can help us understand some of the complex cultural forces which have led us to where we are: closer than ever to what the philosopher E.M...

...Similarly, other antimodernist movements "preserved an eloquent edge of prot e s t " even while they "promoted accommodation to new modes of cultural hegemony," so that, in the end, antimodernism "eased adjustment to a streamlined modern culture even as it sustained protest against that culture...

...what is e s t r a n g e m e n t , or alienation, and in what ways does it affect the intelligentsia...

...A biographical appendix listing sixtysix antimodernist leaders, with basic facts about their lives, leads to the judgment that they were mostly from " t h e better educated strata of the old-stock ruling class...

...NO PLACE OF GRACE: ANTIMODERNISM AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE, 1880-1920 Jackson Lears / Pantheon Books / $18.50 David Herbert Donald What do Henry Adams, G. Stanley Hall, Ralph Adams Cram, Elbert Hubbard, Jane Addams, and Frank Norris have in common...

...Murphy's disclosure that Brandeis occasionally seemed to issue veiled threats that he would use his judicial powers to reinforce his political advice, if disregarded...

...How then explain that the insidious "totalitarian temptation," having taken refuge in a world of pure fantasy, has strangely.become stronger and perhaps more dangerous than ever...

...Similarly, Lears labels G. Stanley Hall's studies of adolescence and his call for "healthy personality" as "fatuities," which "anticipated those of William Reich, Hugh Hefner, and the more deluded among the countercultural radicals of the 1960s...

...Indeed, with the exception of Henry Adams, the antimodernists, in Lears's view, were much like the youthful protesters of the past decade, "whose 'revolution' was rapidly transformed into a consumer bonanza of stereos, designer jeans, and sex aids...

...As for other e n t r i e s from the Soviet part of H o l l a n d e r ' s sottisier, my favorite remains the appreciation of Lavrenti Beria, Stalin's head of the NKVD and chief executioner, by a Yale Divinity School professor, Jerome Davis, as a "somewhat inaccessible" but fully " s u c c e s s f u l a d m i n i s t r a t o r . " (The statement was made in 1946...

...As our century draws to a close, there will be fewer and fewer intellectual or pseudo-intellectual pilgrimages to Utopia...

...others are plainly questions of ethics...

...All, according to Jackson Lears, were part of the broad movement of antimodernism that surfaced in America during the 1880s and that by the 1920s had transformed American culture...

...THE SECOND AMERICAN REVOLUTION Gore Vidal / Random House / $15.00 Mitchell S. Ross Word comes from the great state of California that Gore Vidal, literary politician, has once again transmogrified into Gore Vidal, professional politician...

...Lears argues that the antimodernist movement brought about a transformation of American Culture--but not the transformation that the antimodernists consciously hoped for or expected...

...So far, what we haven't known--including the revelations of this book--has done no demonstrable harm to the Court or to the country...

...Psychohistorians tempted by this invitation would probably make even greater fools of themselves than usual...

...and Mr...

...There is a kind of unreality about American intellectuals . . I remember being scorned after a meeting at an American university because I declared that people in the United States had more freedom than in the Soviet Union--and by in...

...Advocating "dropping out" of the "cancerous society' '+ of America and rejoicing over the v e r i t a b l e " m i r a c l e " (her word) "that l've begun to use some elements of Marxist or Neo-Marxist language," Susan Sontag was struck in Hanoi by the fact that " t h e phenomenon of existential agony, of alienation just d o n ' t [sict] appear among the Vietnamese" and that "the Vietnamese are 'whole' human beings, not 'split' as we are...

...And so, while imbecilic political statements might make us laugh, their final effect is disquieting...

...L ears seeks the sources of antimodernism through a combination of psychoanalytical and Marxist analyses...

...They came to think that faith in progress was stultifying, that American culture was thin and impoverished, that dominant Protestantism was vague and unhelpful, and that nineteenth-century positivists' conceptions of reality were narrow...

...He thus appears to have caused himself a problem, in that some of the people he cites do not qualify as intellectuals under any of these definitions--activist actresses like Jane Fonda or Shirley Maclaine, or radical militants like Tom Hayden or Abbie Hoffman...

...In the case of radical political figures the question is somewhat more complicated: But insofar as such figures tend to be perceived as heroic spokesmen of the radical intelligentsia, what they say may be considered repr e s e n t a t i v e . Thus, I am not really bothered by the way Hollander introduces the following quotation from Revolution for the Hell of lt by Abbie Hoffman: "For Abbie Hoffman, as for Mailer and Sartre, C a s t r o ' s appeal had to do much with the macho image: 'Fidel . . . is like a mighty penis coming to life, and when he is tall and s t r a i g h t , the crowd immediately is transformed.'" We note in passing that the New Left's eroticization of politics is not without a certain precedent in historical Fascism, a p r e c e d e n t strongly emphasized in the newest cultural (re)interpretations of Nazism, as Saul 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1982 Friedl~inder has convincingly pointed out in his recent book, Reflets du nazisme...

...It was as if the ghost of Cortez appeared in our century riding Zapata's white horse...

...Are we witnessing, especially in this country's academic circles, a new trahison des clefts, to refer to Julien Benda's famous phrase...

...But the unwritten rule is that war or some other extraordinary national emergency licenses Presidents to demand of justices more expansive unofficial roles, both public and private: Not only the advisory roles taken on by Brandeis and Frankfurter, under Wilson and FDR, but Justice Robert's chairmanship of the Pearl Harbor inquiry or Robert Jackson's participation in the Nuremberg war crimes trials...

...No Place of Grace examines and judges numerous aspects of this antimodernist impulse, Lears deals with the arts and crafts movement, which followed the inspiration of John Ruskin and William Morris in rejecting the impersonal perfection of assembly-line products...

...Whatever the case, his views demonstrated how cleverness, in its willingness to surprise, can readily lead to demonstrations of political stupidity (that such stupidity can be highly unpopular does not change its nature one bit): "Some of the things Mussolini has done," wrote Shaw, "and some that he is threatening to do go f a r t h e r in the direction of socialism than the English Labour Party could yet venture if they were in power...

...and Cuba...

...And Tirana, which once was a secluded Balkan city, is becoming a meeting place for discussing and exchanging experiences...

...Instead of examining~ for example, what advocates of physical fitness, the strenuous life, and militai'y discipline sought to accomplish,: he announces that Theodore Roose.velt's "cant anticipated Nixon's,~' which in turn led to " t h e 'nuclear superiority' cant of Reaganite Republicans" and of"George Will and other present-day militarists...

...Although Lears repeatedly warns his reader--and perhaps himself--that "antimodern dissent was too complex to be fully explained by invoking class and cultural determinants," "in the end his Marxism wins Over his Freudianism and he concludes flatly that antimodernism reflected " a particular class and power position" "of its advocates...

...You were the first and greatest hero to appear in the world a f t e r the Second World War...

...What links American interest in Oriental religions, the "invention" of adolescence, the rise of militarism, an obsession with genealogy, and the revival of arts and crafts...

...After all, it is likely that a victorious Vidal would proceed to dissipate his energies in debates over tax cuts, anti-abortion legislation, and sub40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1982...

...Against the "evasive banality" of "official modern culture in industrial America," these antimodernists took 'up arms...

...Matei Calinescu is Professor of Comparative Literature and West European Studies at Indiana University and author of Faces of Modernity (Indiana University Press...

...what are the justifications of utopian as well as of anti-utopian a t t i t u d e s ? what is revolution...

...In the thought-provoking concluding chapter, Hollander writes: It seems to me that what has been consequential is not the perception or praise of particular countries and their political systems at any given time...

...But for the most part, Mr...

...nor was either too busy advising to carry a full case load...

...Supreme Court are notoriously, and I think properly, the jealous guardians of their personal ethics, they will undoubtedly continue to set their own standards and keep their own counsel about what they do and why...

...with the revival of interest in physical fitness and military discipline as antidotes to racial and class impotence, an impulse best illustrated by the career of Theodore Roosevelt, with the awakened interest in medieval art and culture, as products o f " t h e childhood of the race...

...North Vietnam, whose "heroic" image was enhanced by the growing antiwar movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s...

...It would be quite difficult to establish, however, that he did so...

...Under such circumstances, Hollander's calm pessimism has the paradoxical quality of being--at least intellectually--reassuring...

...In fact, Hollander pointedly refuses to make any clear-cut distinction between the intellectuals and "most other people" regarding such a t t i t u d e s or practices as the use of double s t a n d a r d s , selective tolerance, political misperception, estrangement from society, sensitivity to flattery or to other inducements of the "techniques of hospitality...

...The result was not intended, Lears insists...

...At the height of the Cultural Revolution, Maria Antonietta Macciocchi saw " a people . . . marching with a light step and with fervor toward the future...

...At a time when intellectual history in the United States seems moribund, work with such range, power, and enthusiasm is especially welcome...

...Probably only the sheer overabundance of material has prevented Hollander from considering post-World War II Eastern Europe...

...Notwithstanding a distaste for the policies of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (which had prompted Brandeis to hint to its chief counsel, Gardner Jackson, that he might "declare war" on the New Deal) the justice voted in the test case to uphold the act...

...rq Sarkes Tarzian Inc...

...G. Stanley Hall's identification of _9 adolescence as a distinct period in human life...

...At times, this pretense went to comic lengths...

...and it is certainly not my business, nor that of any socialist, to weaken him in view of such a c o n f l i c t . " I have taken this quotation from Alastair Hamilton's The Appeal of Fascism: A Study of Intellectuals- and Fascism, 1919-1945 (1971), a work that complements Hollander's Political Pilgrims in that it investigates the other major direction of the modern " t o t a l i t a r i a n temptation"--but is that direction really other...

...Hayakawa, who is retiring in order to devote more time to his naps...

...Wittgenstein once complained that a colleague of his, an English philosopher, had one major defect: He was " i n t e l l i g e n t all the t i m e . " Certainly there are types and degrees of foolishness, and they range from the innocuous to the truly harmful...

...Is this good news or bad for fans of Vidal's writing, among whom I count myself...

...lectuals, especially those in university circles, have been reacting like backward M a r x i s t s , r i v a l i n g the Soviets in t h e i r dogma...

...When Prof...

...Murphy shows conclusively...

...The questions are quite diverse: Some involve sociological theory (what are the intellectuals...

...Even over the period studied by Hollander, utopian lands have begun to manifest a tendency to shrink in size dramatically: from huge countI:es like the USSR or China to middle-sized or small countries like (North) Vietnam or Cuba, to such tiny places as Albania...

...Paul Freund was clerking for Brandeis, he received a message from Raymond Moley that "the justice asked to see [Cordell] Hull and I've been able to set it up...

...What is much worse is that it refuses to recognize this failure and, when the opportunity is there, it dogmatically proclaims this very failure a success...

...As for the statements that constitute the focus of his study, Hollander points out that they were made by a "minority of those who may be called 'Western intellectuals,'" albeit an " i m p o r t a n t and vocal m i n o r i t y . " Though intellectuals as manipulators of cultural symbols have at times a disproportionate influence in society, they never act as a "bloc," but are divided into several competing miThere i s ' :ity ca...

...But Political Pilgrims is more (though in quantitative terms, certainly less) than just a sottisier...

...Political stupidity usually falls within the latter category, particularly if associated with high-minded idealism...

...No one can be comfortable with Mr...

...Such quotations constitute about o n e - q u a r t e r of H o l l a n d e r ' s book and nearly all deserve to be included in the disquieting political sottisier of our century that the author unintentionally has managed to produce...

...A West European intellectual, Jan Myrdal, wrote in 1976 with a stupendous lack of foresight: "Due to its principled struggle, the small Albanian people have become the focus of interest for militant trade union activists in the Swedish mining districts, Polish dockers fighting for socialism against their new bosses [apparently the Poles wound up imitating the Albanian model too slavishly!], students from Africa, leaders of the underground resistance to the Fascist generals in Chile, and many others...

...Over this broad range of cultural and intellectual developments Lears, who teaches history at the University of Missouri, moves with knowledge and assurance...

...They will bring him presently into serious conflict with capitalism...

...Gregarious and far from reclusive, Frankfurter functioned in Murphy's phrase as the "double Felix," a political activist who protested that he was in reality a judicial monk...

...Of the more informal ventures into politics, .'we are unlikely to know much while they occur...

...It would be preposterous to imagine, for instance, that it was some "compensatory feeling" that moved Felix Frankfurter to his embittered personal dissent in the second flag salute case (when, speaking as a member of "one of the most persecuted religious minorities in h i s t o r y , " he upheld a s t a t e ' s prerogative to force observance of a p~itriotic gesture upon the children of Jehovah's Witnesses...

...Those standards will vary in strictness with the climate of the age...