The Politics of Disorder
Will, George
"The Politics of Disorder" the Carnegies, Rockefellers, Fricks, Hills, Huntingtons, of the period. I asked myself whether any amount of wealth would be worth having...
...He's done old Emily proud--reciprocated love letters to a married man, a lawyer and an old friend of the family, thought to be a pillar of staid Boston society...
...But it would hardly constitute the end of liberalism...
...Does Lowi like the result...
...You've come a long way, baby...
...Item: He sets out to examine "tolerance...
...RJM The Politics of Disorder by Dr...
...the society which is only nominally free, the liberal society, promotes dullness as a virtue: A society founded on the premise of bestowing happiness to every man, instead of protecting every man's right to pursue his own happiness, is a society which negates freedom and digs at the roots of order...
...You're right, it wouldn't sell...
...Could it be called a civilized society...
...It would be instructive for Lowi to identify the relevant differences between those matters on which Congress does and does not delegate its power...
...Walsh does with Miss Dickinson's "hidden life" in this puffball of a biography...
...You mean she wasn't up there just writing poems...
...Walsh is looking for a blurb for second edition, he's got it: not since The Passover Plot has a mystery been so fascinatingly unravelled after being based on so blatant a hodgepodge of hypothetical conjecture...
...Weber mused about the awesome power the Council wielda...
...No man with the ingenuity to protect his privacy to that degree could be boring...
...Still, Lowi is sticking to his popguns in his latest book, The Politics of Disorder whicL he says is an "extension" of The E~ld of Liberalism...
...t,~res~ sct~ them...
...Stiould Congress set truck rates...
...He contrasted this with "policy without law" which, he says (plausibly, in my judgment) we have now with the practice of governing "through broad grants of authority to administrators...
...But what lumps and what snickers ! Completely ignoring the poetry with the deftness of a selling biographer, Walsh gets down to the nitty gritty of Miss Dickinson's "~hidden life" and what a life it turns out to be...
...Item: He argues that universities are "biased" because their "output" is not ":mutral...
...Well, seek and ye shall find - - eh, Emily...
...The only known extant portrait was taken at age seventeen and if the daguerreotype doesn't lie {though 'tis cruel to say) one can only wonder what took the retreat to the garret so long...
...The others are especially disappointing...
...Is it not curious, Weber said, that such lean legislation can have such large consequences...
...Coming from the South, seeing Hawaii again, recalling the things over which I have recently marvelled and dispaired, I find in Nock the clearest and most striking description of our departure from the Platonic goal of the good life...
...If all this sounds like the prophecy of a Jeremiah or the rantings of a manic-depressive, it is only because I have culled those selections which demonstrate Neck's rather skeptical outlook...
...Irvi~gtor...
...The indictment was of interest group "'pluralist" government which Lowi said results in a kind of feudalism: government favors bestowed by law, through executive agencies, on groups powerful enough to force a payoff...
...Perhaps that is just as well, considering that he thinks Louis XIV and Huey Long were both conservatives...
...Congress does not delegate the power to set sugar quotas...
...That is a very decorous description of the liberals' search...
...They are searching for explanations that will not threaten the plausibility of liberalism, and for alternatives that are consistent with familiar liberal premises...
...Of the book's eight chapters, half are only tenuously related to Lowi's main theme...
...A direct correlation exists between social democracy and the impulse toward egalitarianism which levels everything to a dull mediocrity...
...Where is Gloria Steinem when we need her...
...Nock was not a man known for walking around with a black cloud over his head...
...Or perhaps there was a prince charming in every way but infidelity...
...If Lowi wants to challenge liberalism he might give some attention to conservatism...
...With juridical democracy, the Supreme Court would declare "invalid and unconstitutional any delegation of power to an administrative agency that is not accompanied by clear standards of implementation...
...It is hard to avoid the suspicion that these changes reflect a reluctance to confront a really radical thought: the conservatives may have a point...
...The power derives from a law containing 406 words, the important ones being "'The President is authorized to issue such orders and regulations as be may deem appropriate to stabilize prices, rents, wages and salaries" and "The President may delegate the performance of any function under this title to such ofricers, departments and agencies of the United States as he may deem appropriate...
...No one treks up to a musty old attic room every night just to write about snakes...
...The Raven, as it turns out, actually being a myna bird purloined from a deranged Russian mystic...
...The nation may be suffering vertigo as a result of the stresses of the 1960s...
...18 The A l t e r n a t i v e J a n u a r y , 1972 sophy, the Carnegies, Rockefellers, Fricks, Hills, Huntingtons, of the period...
...io officers...
...And neither trust nor tolerance can be guaged las he tries to guage it) by the frequency of meet ings by the Old House Committee on Un-American Activities...
...lo dues...
...To me, at least, decidedly it would not...
...He does not treat it at all...
...That explains the poetry...
...Legislators are not shrinking violets...
...After wealth, science, invention had done all for such a society that they could do, it would remain without savour, without depth, uninteresting, and withal horrifying...
...For more literature by Albert J. Nock, contact the Nockia~l Society of 30 South Broadway...
...Does Lowi wonder why they delegate the power to set truck freight rates...
...If the Court made Congress take real responsibility for all the programs it so half-heartedly and half-way undertakes, Congress might become very judicious about sticking its thumbs in new pies...
...Browning's soon forgotten Aurora Leigh...
...It is already here, we are in it, for in what does barbarism consist, if not in the failure to appreciate what is excellent...
...Broken mirror or lost lover -they are the two more popular hypotheses set forth by biographers in explaining the sudden turning away from the world...
...James Bennett James Bennett is a graduate student in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University...
...all standards of value abolished or reversed...
...But somehow, in between darting behind the moment's most accessible piece of furniture or blending in with the drapes at the tiniest tinkle of the front doorbell, this wildly eccentric recluse managed to jot down some of the finest lines ever written by an American female poet...
...Miss Dickinson was telling it like it was...
...Lowi does not understand the most interesting possibility of his "'jurdiclal The Alternative January, 1972 19 democracy...
...But then Mr...
...And there it sat all those years just begging attention - - much as our little wallflower poet must have done...
...A far greater portion of the book is devoted to sparkling observations on the foibles and conceits of the haman animal and a cheerful recollection of a life well spent...
...Item : Lowi laments what he considers the paucity of "leaders" in the Senate, a paucity he attempts to demonstrate with this astonishing observation: ' Note that only one thin volume was required to record all our Profiles in Courage...
...If so, what does he propose...
...But one suspects the ad-men would have to do a bit of pruning with that one, much as Mr...
...These groups include every major economic interest...
...Always good for a snicker or two, poor old Emily has taken her biographical lumps, for if there's anything one recalls from that stone-dry high school literature text sophomores lugged around, it was the innuendo-studded section on the virgin hermit from Amherst...
...Purse-lipped, boxer-nosed, walnut-jowelled, she is the archetypal spinster librarian at the Circulation Desk, herself destined 'to circulate no farther than the desk...
...We know,, for instance, Who will have the last word on The Passover Plot but who will run the gauntlet for a fallen poet...
...He agreed with his old friend, Ralph Adams Cram, that this was an age "...in which all sense of direction had been lost, all consistency of motive in action...
...Well, then, could a society built to a complete realization of every ideal of the economism they represented be permanently satisfactory to the best reason and spirit of man...
...That quote has gained authority with me, if only because Albert Jay Nock has shown to my satisfaction the immense irony of history: that the ' f r e e " society corrodes and corrupts the capacity of free men to reach beyond themselves to touch the stars...
...Without explaining what a 'aeutral output" would he, he says that universities have "policies" and therefore are politicized...
...I asked myself whether any amount of wealth would be worth having if - - as one most evidently must ---one had to become just like these men in oder to get it...
...With no lucid motive for doing anything in particular, self-appointed arbiters in almost every field of human activity from painting to politics were starting the first thing that came into their heads, tiring of it in a week, and lightly starting something else...
...Neck's slow conversion to Conservatism became more pronounced as he began to identify the rule of economism with social democracy and the rise of Ortega y Gasset's mass-man...
...That would eliminate "all vagueness in legislative delegation of power...
...With The Hidden Life of Emily Dickinson author John Evangelist Walsh gets in a few more lumps and an occasional snicker or two at his subject's expense...
...But Lowi does not even treat conservatism with disdain...
...If Mr...
...So count on the next installment, the one with all the compromising daguerreotypes the family couldn't suppress...
...If so, is this an example of an unfortunate exercise of discretionary power that should not be delegated by the legislature...
...o meeti~igs...
...The first book was The End of L~beralism, a stern indictment with a timid solution appended...
...Walsh adds a third plagiarism...
...It's been eighty-five years now since the fragile woman dressed in white was lowered in obscurity into her coffin...
...Walsh is the author of a highly praised book on Edgar Allan Poe which I have not read...
...I shall always remain the same old six pence...
...At a recent briefing for Senate staff, Dr...
...What does Lowi think causes legislators to grant discretionary power to the executive branch...
...In fact, if the District of Columbia ever does g e t " home rule" it will not be because the arguments in favor of it are especially compelling (which they are not) but rather because Senators and Congressmen are too busy to bother with supervising the District's affairs...
...The rhetoric is hotter, the argument less rigorous, and the attention to concrete policies, which was the strength of the last book, is gone...
...Nock believed that "'Western society had everywhere lost is stability and that is collapse was nearer than one might think...
...Even as a high school sophomore you suspected as much...
...The implication that courage" and "'leadership" are the same thing is as in]plausible as the implication that author Kennedy considered his book a comprehensive record of the former...
...Arnold Weber Basic Books, $6.95 S omething disconcerting happened to Arnold Weber on his way back to the University of Chicago...
...Walsh is not the first, and no doubt will not be the last, to have the hussy swinging from the chandelier after another lost weekend out at the parson's lakeside retreat...
...George F. Will The Hidden Life of Emily Dickinson By John Evangelist Walsh Simon & Schuster, $7.95 E very happy household harbors at least one skeleton in its closet and the Dickinson's had a whopper - - daughter Emily...
...Yes, you see while her evenings were pretty much given over to adultery (a time-consuming passion, you understand), Miss Dickinson did manage a few afternoons in which to cull from Mrs...
...Neibuhr was right," said Goethe, "when he saw a barbarous age coming...
...Judging by this book, one must conclude that the criticism of liberalism is too vital to be entrusted to liberals...
...Theodore J. Lowi, who has written two books (one and a half, really) on the problems, practical and philosophical, arising from massive delegations of authority to Government agencies...
...Only a society contained by prescriptive values can comfortably accomodate variety...
...Does Lowi believe that (say) the Interstate Commerce Commission does an unsatisfactory job of regulating truck freight rates...
...I should be a superfluous man in the scuffle for riches...
...Called the "Myth" by the local townspeople and known to dress only in white, she would occasionally be glimpsed flitting by her window or heard scurrying down a darkened hallway at the first threat o f visitors...
...Lowi's proposed solution was "juridical democracy," which he equated with a restored rule-of-law...
...Can he envision what would happen if 100 Senators set out to promote their constituents interests, in a floor, fight over freight rates...
...Does he like the effect of such activity on the legislative process...
...He was leaving a position at the Office of Management and Budget when he was waylaid and installed as Executive Director of the Cost of Living Council...
...Professor Crunden relates one instance which gives us an insight into the capriciousness of Nock's mind: during the height of his career when he was editing the Freeman and contributing heavily to popular periodicals, it was widely circulated among New York intellectual and literary circles that the only way to contact him was to leave a note under a certain rock in Central Park...
...If Weber makes it back to the University, he should walk down the Midway to the political science department for a chat with Prof...
...Simply because she was painfully unattractive...
...Still, one may honestly ask the question: Why the attic assumption...
...The thing seemed preposterous, absurd...
...One can imagine the prospective doctoral candidate in English beating his head against the blackboard at having missed so golden a literary coup...
...Maybe there are somethings that governmen t just should not do at all because it will always turn them over to agencies that are literally irresponsible...
...The futile philosophies, the curious religions, and the unearthly superstitions of the last days of Rome were matched and beaten by a fantastic farrago of auto-intoxication, while manners and morals lay under a dark eclipse...
...Until someone really does do Emily proud, Dickinson admirers will have to endure this sort of cocktail talk mini-opus that flings the attic door wide open on the man hungry virgin hermit that stalked the anterooms of Amherst...
...They do not make a habit of giving up power...
...L. Brent Bozell had said, 'The story of how the free society has come to take priority over the good society is the story of the decline of the West...
...The moment is ripe for a scholarly attempt at treating Emily Dickinson as simply a common girl with an uncommon genius for poetry who just didn't mix well...
...My face has not changed," Emily writes as a teenager, nor will it in time to come...
...You see, perhaps, why I love Nock and why I return to him in an attempt to understand the Holiday-Inn-mentality of my fellow countrymen...
...Enough...
...I observed their qualities and practices closely, considered the furniture of their minds, remarked their scale of values, and could come to no other conclusion...
...New York...
...But those places--like the Federal government, New York City, universities - - where liberalism enjoyed clearest sway are suffering something akin to demoralization and desperation...
...Lowi is a liberal and he says the purpose o f his book is to appeal "'to those liberals who are desparately searching for explanations and alternatives for this present plight...
...How would that improve things...
...10533...
...Such non sequiturs have derailed many universities in the last decade...
...The man of excellence is democracy's casualty...
...But he winds up talking about "'trust," which is not the same thing...
...Now that might be a good thing...
...If Congress had to fuss with the tiresome application of all the power is distributes, it would reduce that distribution faster than you can s a y , "'Senate, please legislate freight rates for scrap steel...
...Lowi wants to save liberalism from any reall painful admissions - - like the admission that conservatives may be right about the limited uses of government...
Vol. 5 • January 1972 • No. 4
