On Freedom: Essays from the Frankfurt Conference
Starr, Richard
power within its own realm, so it had no global aims in foreign policy, no allembracing plan for the world, no overall unifying idea. Neither an ideocracy, nor insurrectionary, its generals...
...Osborne teaches history at Rutgers University, Newark...
...This is not the faceless and often naive Nicholas Jenkins, but instead Kenneth Widmerpool, a creature who could have stepped from the pages of Stendhal or Balzac...
...how and why, Lasky wonders, did influential Americans and Europeans lose faith in the virtue of their civilization...
...In the end, Lobkowicz has far less faith than Johnson in the virtue of unfettered or uninstructed human conscience...
...This concept, he freely admits, is not empirical, it cannot be supported or attacked with evidence...
...The authors, some of whom may be familiar to American Spectator readers, are a mix of American and European academics and journalists...
...As Labour member of Parliament and active supporter of friendly relations with the "people's democracies" of Eastern Europe, Widmerpool eventually sails too close to the wind...
...Though he doesn't say it so bluntly, he is asking if we would take up arms so that our neighbors might indulge a taste for porn videos...
...Neither an ideocracy, nor insurrectionary, its generals brought no plans for revolution in their baggage...
...nor did it feel "insecure" and "provoked" unless all the world should consist of autocracies...
...I forget who it was who said that he lacked the time to write a short book, so he wrote a long one instead...
...Such a defeat is not, in Kolakowski's view, to be taken lightly...
...Widmerpool makes his first appearance as an unappealing schoolmate of Jenkins and goes on to dominate the novels as the embodiment of personal ambition and craving for success in any worldly thing...
...it is defined by the scope of human activities which are not regulated by any law or restricted by violence"), outlines some implications, and suggests that we set the whole on an anthropological foundation: To be human is to demand freedom...
...Lasky's essay, with its focus on the story of his generation (a group of New York intellectuals who immersed themselves in the study of the Soviet Union, fought in World War II, and joined in the ideological battles of the Cold War), leads one to believe that he himself might emphasize the importance of one's age, the nature of the ideological and political struggle when one comes of age...
...He denies, in fact, that such distinctions are proper, and says that freedom is indivisible...
...Erridge is less unpleasant because of his upperclass, left-wing fellow traveling than he is due to his insensitivity to family and other human responsibilities...
...On Freedom is a collection of nine essays that were presented at a recent conference in Frankfurt, West Germany sponsored by the Rockford Institute...
...Its relative importance can be guessed at by imagining how a politician would choose, if he could, between the inarticulate support of a supposed majority and the demonstrable backing of large numbers of journalists, writers, film stars, teachers, and religious leaders...
...Lasky concentrates on intellectual style for the obvious reason that insofar as it sets the tone of political discussion, intellectual style has a more immediate impact on policy than does the personal morality of the populace at large...
...One can answer that something of that thought survives in books like this one...
...he demonstrates as well an awareness of the qualities which are valued in a socialist society when it deals with the Communist bloc...
...To paraphrase the theater critics, if you read only one book on Communism this season, make it this one...
...he resolved to attempt for literature what Poussin had done for painting: John I4I...
...Powell is no ideologue, and he has no patience with system builders of either the political right or the left...
...Left-wingers are treated unsympathetically by him, partly because Powell considers that they hold the wrong views but mainly because of flaws in their character...
...Eliot Award marks one of the few times anyone has recognized the strong conservative viewpoint that runs throughout the work of the man some have called the English Proust...
...I n all w a r s , " he observes, "'freedom' is invariably on both sides...
...it will lack the desire to defend itself...
...It is an agonizing concern for Lasky, both because of the central role his generation played in fostering this faith after World War II, and because of its inability to sustain it...
...Writing, lecturing, teaching, publishing, and holding conferences surely have some effect, though at times the movement they cause may be as imperceptible as continental drift...
...Some of the book's other contributors would no doubt dispute this...
...We see him as a supporter of the "soviet experiment" in the 1930s, but it is in the climate of socialist Britain and the post-World War II Labour government that Widmerpoof' is in his element...
...KUDOS FOR ANTHONY POWELL Anthony Powell's recent selection for the Ingersoll Foundation's T.S...
...Basic to Widmerpool's advancement, in addition to a sheer opportunism that Powell detests, was his worship of power which took the form of active fellow traveling...
...The jazzman, of course, when asked to define his music, said that if you had to ask, he couldn't tell you...
...The postwar renaissance, Lasky argues, was marked by a consensus in the West that there existed a liberal civilization, not a flawless one but one worth defending...
...Certainly the feeling that some Americans and Europeans are overly critical of their society is a widespread one...
...He is less interested in the condition of being free than in how man behaves when he is allowed to behave as he wishes...
...There is obvious truth in this propOsition, though Lobkowicz rather overstates the threat of widespread decadence...
...Lobkowicz worries that a society of people who are merely free will forget the value of freedom...
...After a spectacular rise in fortune, Widmerpool meets his gruesome end as a life peer and the prisoner of a by John W. Osborne Charles Manson-like cult figure...
...And it is surely to be hoped that he is gregarious and his circle of acquaintances a large one...
...These reservations notwithstanding, however, Professor Roche's study remains a small gem...
...Thus, the splendid characterization of Erridge (Lord Warminster...
...Lasky divides postwar Western THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1984 49 experience into two periods: The first period--the late1940s, the '50s, and the early '60s--is still, I think, not sufficiently appreciated as one of the great periods of European history and Western civilization: the magnificent recovery of the Old World, aided by the New World, out of the rubble of the most fratricidal war in the annals of mankind . . . . For many of us it was symbolized by the phrase of the unforgettable Berliner Oberburgermeister Ernst Reuter: "the Miracle of Berlin" ("das Wunder Berlins...
...Armed with a definition rooted in human destiny, defenders of free society could claim to be "agents of progress"--a claim they once made but which has been ceded in this century to the enemies of freedom...
...in disguise: a victory for the word, a defeat for meaning...
...spawned this book...
...Though it might prefer autocracy in its neighbors, it did not feel impelled to set up a replica of its own regime wherever its armies entered...
...John Roche obviously did have the time to write a short book, and a most important one as well...
...Most telling of Powell's leftist characters, next to Widmerpool, is Erridge, Lord Warminster, scion of an ancient noble house, who lives in squalor in a corner of his home...
...What Lasky is talking about, as he makes clear, is the changing of intellectua ! styles...
...In another sense it is a defeat Richard Starr is assistant editor of the Public Interest...
...He appropriates a definition from the Anglo-American tradition ("freedom is a negative concept...
...Tradition and individual conscience rank high in his scale of values, and, like Evelyn Waugh whose conservatism was more sardonic and bitterly expressed, Powell has a great sense of the fitness of things...
...Powell's handling of Widmerpool shows more than literary sophistication...
...We see Powell's concern with the fitness of things in the chief character in the series of novels...
...One should not be put off by the rather dry title...
...How should we create a new awareness of American and European freedom if everything depends upon a moral renewal...
...In another of the essays, Leszek Kolakowski professes dismay at those who take such a devil-may-care attitude toward the definition o f freedom...
...The closing essay, a memoir by Encounter editor Melvin Lasky, approaches the question indirectly...
...There he describes how he was inspired to write A Dance to the Music o f Time while standing in front of a Nicholas Poussin picture of the same name...
...For how should we, in a world as mentally chaotic as ours, save our liberty if it presupposes a moral change in our innumerable fellow citizens...
...There were some among us, certainly, who ponderedthe Constitution and the American promise, or dream," he writes, "but for most of us the colleqtive improvisation of a Dixieland combo came to mean, if only subliminally, the perfect emblem of freedom and all the necessary energy to defend it...
...Excessive liberty to trade and to move, after all, is hardly a prospect one loses sleep over these days...
...that in fact is why he urges its adoption...
...Treason is mentioned, but a parliamentary inquiry is quashed for national security reasons...
...Of what value is a half-century's anguished thought on 'the Russian question' when all the lessons of the past are so easily overlooked by another generation...
...This period began with the youth movements and rise of the New Left in the mid-1960s, and its distinguishing features are by now familiar...
...Perhaps because he already subscribes to the belief that history is on the side of greater freedom, Paul Johnson is less worried by despots' routinely speaking the language of freedom...
...It was a period characterized by the self-confidence of democratic nations, which expressed itself in alliances and agreements between those nations--NATO and the Common Market, to name the two most obvious examples...
...That the genuflection to freedom is considered necessary even by tyrannies," he writes, "is progress of a kind, an acknowledgement even by those who in practice deny it that freedom is a social good...
...He even delights in this fact...
...This line of questioning brings Lobkowicz to doubt the utility of the forum in which he announces it: "One can lecture about [freedom], organize conferences around it, preach it, but the only real way to carry it on, to maintain, to save it, is through our personal example, through the conduct of our own lives in the circle of the few with whom we are personally acquainted...
...Though suggestive, Tyrmand's metaphor unfortunately provides little help when one tries to define freedom...
...the intent of its enemies less so...
...In other words, anticommunism in a most surprising and heartening way w o n . . , its new democratic, libertarian credentials . . . . Out of the Cold War came a European renaissance...
...Johnson's application of this principle in defense of free markets and free movement across political boundaries, however, should not ruffle their feathers overmuch...
...The question he asks--how to create a new awareness of American and European freedom--is nevertheless a bothersome one and one uppermost in the minds of those who underwrote the conference that...
...he asks...
...The optimistic view of individual conscience that underlies Johnson's argument is nonetheless at odds with the ideas of Nikolaus Lobkowicz...
...In that goal, there was a subtly stated but firm conservatism, as Powell makes clear in the recently released fourth (and final) volume of his memoirs, The Strangers AreAll Gone...
...And by that he meant that a city and a population that had been battered, corrupted and humiliated by the catastrophe of the Third Reich still was able to find enough inner resources to hold out against the Soviet Blockade in 1948-49, despite all the seductive offers of pe~ce with coal and extra rations...
...This is an important part of his psychology, and his most sympathetic characters are men and women of common sense who work hard to get things done right in their own little corners of the universe...
...This reminds the r~ader of Evelyn Waugh's hero, Tony Last, who, in A Handful o f Dust, ended his days as the captive of a Dickens-loving lunatic in the jungles of South America...
...His argument can be sensed in the pithy formulation he gives it" " I f freedom were our highest value, a dungeon would be the only real e v i l . " He wishes, then, to remind us of the "older political philosophers," who maintained "that the ultimate end of all political order consists in helping man to be virtuous...
...It had no fifth column as its servant, no world to bury, and no world to win...
...Johnson's concern is that some freedoms are less valued than others, specifically the two he discusses--freedom of markets and freedom of movement...
...Did Lobkowicz meet anyone at this conference...
...Leopold Tyrmand opens the book, for example, with a story about members of the Polish underground listening to American jazz records during World War II and drawing moral sustenance from the music...
...The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure: stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognizable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance...
...The antitotalitarian consensus has disappeared: The virtues of liberal civilization have become more suspect...
...Erridge is the quintessential rich parlor pink of the thirties, an enthusiastic adherent of every fashionable left-wing 50 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1984...
...This message may sound hopeless," he says...
...The average citizen may, like Lobkowicz, worry about the license he sees about him, but on the whole it doesn't seem that the bulk of Western citizenry is consumed with doubt about the bonafides of its way of life...
...Powell's principal accomplishment-his great series of twelve novels A Dance to the Music o f Time that traced Nicholas Jenkins from an early 1920s schoolboy to old age over a period of fifty years--endeavored to show "the gentle disintegration of society in its traditional form...
...One can only guess why and how intellectual style changes...
...Powell's conservatism is an intuitive type--what Clinton Rossiter called "temperamental conservatism...
...Being a politician, he would of course choose both...
...Because of his putting everything in a proper perspective, Powell is one of the most important moral influences in contemporary English letters...
...All the varieties of genocide, terror, persecution, of whatever hue, are being committed for the sake of 'freedom.' In a sense, we may think that this is a victory for the idea of freedom: nobody dares attack it under its name...
...Lasky's second period, the one we are living through, is marked by a loss of confidence in, if not outright hostility toward, Western civilization...
Vol. 17 • December 1984 • No. 12
