Statecraft as Soulcraf
Will, George F.
STATECRAFT AS SOULCRAFT: WHAT GOVERNMENT DOES George F. Will/Simon and Schuster/$13.95 Adam M eyerson George Will's first full-length book will greatly disappoint admirers of his newspaper and...
...Will's argument would be stronger had he fortified it with some empirical evidence...
...How to pay for the programs: generally oblivious to economics, he seems to assume that ever-rising entitlements can be paid for without undermining the creation of wealth that income redistribution ultimately depends on...
...How to prevent safety nets, for example, from undermining the responsibility of individuals and families to take cage of themselves as best they can...
...His trademark of citing obscure and often beside-the-point quotations can be quaintly charming in a short column surrounded by matter-of-fact articles on fleeting daily events...
...Please rush me reprints of "Modern Man and the Obsession...
...they can be delightful...
...Burgess frustrates is the manner of Wyndham Lewis, whose.crafts Reid Buckley is a novelist...
...Now, the battle cry is THE AMERICAN SPECTATORReprint DepartmentP.O...
...Most disappointing of all, he fails to use the opportunity afforded by book length to explore more deeply some of his most provocative ideas...
...For example, he calls for distinctions between permissible and impermissible speech, but he gives tta guidelines as to how those distinctions should be made...
...Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does displays little of Mr...
...My introduction was The Wanting Seed Excited, I went out and bought nine of his earlier novels, which I devoured, saying to myself: "One of these days he is going to produce...
...But itis impossible rationally to stipulate a priori limits to the sweep of the law in matters of morality...
...and a master of language...
...STATECRAFT AS SOULCRAFT: WHAT GOVERNMENT DOES George F. Will/Simon and Schuster/$13.95 Adam M eyerson George Will's first full-length book will greatly disappoint admirers of his newspaper and magazine columns...
...A structure of public entitlements can do what private property alone cannot do: it can give everyone a stake in the stability and success of the social system...
...Like Mr...
...Will suggests that the welfare state is indispensable to social cohesion and hence should be dear to conservative hearts...
...With all the recent furor over the Environmental Protection Agency, this report is an essential tool in understanding the anticapitalist mentality behind this the Age of Environmentalism...
...Citing the elimination of obscenity laws, the availability of abortion-on-demand, and the prohibition of compulsory and even voluntary school prayers, he bemoans "the steady withdrawal of the law from concern with the citizen's state of mind...
...Burgess's wit is wicked, he is hilarious, and his characters, when he bothers, are observed, by which I mean that they are so incarnated by the imagination that he seems to be writing biography...
...Will's customary precision in thought and language, and it is only rarely enlivened by the wry wit that makes his columns such a joy to read...
...principles mast be delved from a sense of national purpose and from evidence as to how law can contribute to the fulfillment of these purposes...
...here, however, he carries his quotesman-ship to an extreme that borders on self-parody...
...and the question "What behavior should be mandatory...
...There seems to be almost nothing that he cannot say, and so say it that it sticks to the tastebuds deliciously long after...
...MY check for $ is enclosed...
...He argues that "a limited but clear ethic of common provision" can unify society and strengthen patriotic feelings...
...75 for one S 6.00 far ten S 12.00 for twenty-five S 45.00 for one hundred $200.00 for five hundred PLEASE PRINT Name Address City State Zip 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1983...
...This does not mean that policy shall be unprincipled...
...individuals' moral belies by compelling them to change their behavior...
...Also, of course, a coward...
...So, where does one draw the line...
...Though they are very different, Mr...
...He is unfaithful to his subtitle...
...Will makes no effort to articulate the vision of the welfare state that he chides other conservatives for not articulating...
...Order your copies today-for friends students, businessmen , teachers, and even the local Sierra Club...
...As examples, he urges conservatives to lead "the fight for a welfare state that supports rather than disintegrates families...
...He has so much to teach conservatives and liberals alike, it's a pity he doesn't always follow his arguments through...
...His personae are often zany...
...Dig that blockish grutnol, and who but Burgess (son of Joyce) would have thought of slabberdegullion as a modifier for druggel...
...Today, he goes on, American conservatives must embrace the welfare state both to be consistent with their own principles and to have any practical hope of advancing conservative values...
...Burgess himself, the reader remains at a remove...
...Granted," he concedes, a welfare state can aggravate the centrifugal tendencies of modern society...
...And for all his references to the Founding Fathersincluding a series of gratuitous pot shots of James Madison-Mr...
...He also hopes that "a conservative welfare state will use government to combat the tendency of the modern, bureaucratic state to standardize and suffocate diversity" -for instance by tuition- tax credits for private schools...
...Box 1969Bloomington, Indiana 47402 Environmentalist hysteria is spreading-from your neighbor the college prof sniffing in his backyard for PCBs to the Friends of the Earth whose passionate tracts depict Secretary James Watt as the anti-Christ...
...Characteristically, he declines to elaborate ways of avoiding this danger...
...T lie- second major argument of Statecraft as Soulcraft, aimed mainly at liberals, is that law must somehow concern itself with the moral character of the citizenry...
...He writes that "[t] wo conservatives (Disraeli and Bismarck) pioneered the welfare state, and did so for impeccably con-servatiye reasons: to reconcile the masses ttf a . . . dynamic and hierarchical industrial economy...
...On grounds of prudence, Mr...
...yet, somehow, there's the wanting love that he dramatizes so eloquently in The Wanting Seed, one's emotions are rarely engaged, one is rarely brought to feel about the characters or truly care for them, so that their predicaments (and their -lot) scarcely ever entail more than our amused attention...
...In this reprint of his May 1983 Spectator article, Robert Nisbet argues that environmentalism has lost all perspective and taken on the aura and enthusiasm of a religion...
...occasion not so deliciously, as in "there was a rich seintillancy of maggots in the belly hole...
...D manship was also superior to his product...
...Can't you see it...
...The Rabetaisian Courtland Willett of the current opus pours scorn on the andermanager of a department store (who stood by while Willett was being attacked by street' hoodlums), calling him "a slab berdegullion druggel [ooh!], a doddipol jolthead, a blockish grutnol, and a turdgut...
...The first is his call for "a conservative doctrine of Adam Meyerson, an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal, is the forthcoming editor of Policy Review...
...He had been at the writer's trade a few years only, so there were but a thousand and sixty of his works to choose from...
...but those that I've read of his dozen novels since continue to disappoint...
...Will doesn't spelt out what he means...
...With Nothing Like the Sun, his marvelous invention of a life of Will Shakespeare, he came close...
...Such limits must be set by prudential, not theoretical, reasoning...
...Do welfare state entitlements in fact provide the social stability he claims they do...
...There are two potentially important arguments in Statecraft as Soulcraft, both familiar to readers of Mr...
...among other things, they were "successful attempts to change...
...It's an intriguing and potentially powerful argument, but Mr...
...Will's columns...
...When Willett is fired for his insults, he takes his Santa cap (he has been working as a storefront Saint Nicholas) and thrusts it onto the undermanager's head, "dousing him like a candle...
...But otherwise he shrinks from saying what the state should do to encourage virtue: No reasonable society wants to erase the distinction between the question "How man should live...
...I do not know...
...THE END OF THE WORLD NEWS Anthony Burgess / McGraw-Hill Book Co: / $15.95 Reid Buckley First there was the noble snail darter.Then came the whales...
...On grounds of principle, Mr...
...Not another brilliant novel, but a wholly satisfactory one...
...Will come to grips with the contrary claim-that ever-fiising expectations of public entitlements encourage a proliferation of interest groups, each seeking its own special handouts...
...Will will venture an answer to such questions before publishing his neat book...
...Apart from brief mentions of public support for education, laws against racial discrimination, the interstate highway system, food stamps, and tax deductions for medical insurance, he gives no inkling of what he thinks government ought to do...
...The argument would be more convincing had Mr...
...It means that its I was first steered to Anthony Burgess back in the 1960s...
...In like fashion, he ignores most of the nettlesome questions confronting policy makers in the welfare state...
...By enlarging the political allocation of wealth and opportunity, it can raise the stakes, and the temperature, of politics, making the state itself much more a focus of contention than a force of cohesion...
...Will avoids what one might expect would be a central question for any conservative doctrine of the welfare state in America: the proper division of responsibilities between national and local governments...
...Will contends that like it or not the welfare state is here to stay, and conservatives should therefore accept it and shape it to conservative values...
...Burgess, one would swear, has it all...
...He is fecund and prolific (dear God, is he...
...Nor, for all his criticism of American conservatives, does he show how his list of programs differs from what other conservatives propose...
...He praises desegregation and the civil rights laws of the 1960s as "the most admirable achievement of modern liberalism...
...One hopes Mr...
...Did Bismarck's welfare state really save Germany from class war and totalitarianism-at least until Hitler...
...the welfare state," an affirmative vision among conservatives of what government should do...
...Again, Mr...
Vol. 16 • August 1983 • No. 8
