BOOKS

...But Taylor too often writes vaguely ("he equates the movement he leads with some kind of agarian social reform") and in cliche (unelaborated phrases like "mysticism of Mexico...

...Hegel on Reason and History GEORGE DENNIS O'BRIEN U. of Chicago Press, $8.50 JOHN E. SMITH The continuing enigma of Hegel is that while all, friends and foes alike, acknowledge the enormous extent of his influence on Western civilization, everyone complains that his thought is almost impossible to understand...

...Not much is said about the lives of farm workers as they experience them, nor about rank-and-file feelings about the union and from the image of farm worker as exploited object to the farm worker as an abstract militant object is not a great enough distance...

...And one can only applaud when the author insists that the real a priorists in the domain of history are those who omit the individuality of events in order to explain them "empirically" as instances of universal laws...

...If there is an optimistic note in The Crucifixion of the Jews, it is that the Jewish Resurrection will force Christianity to come to terms with the full meaning of the Jewish presence in history, and thereby come to terms with the full meaning and mission of Christianity...

...The point is made secure by the excellent example of Condorcet drawn from his Sketch for the Progress of the Human Mind...

...and, once having put down, not easy to pick up again...

...There is far more in this illuminating book than can be treated here...

...it sprawls...

...And more: the irony is that, for all Taylor's sympathies and his experience, Chavez and the Farm Workers treats "the farm workers" as objects, oddly parallel to the "growers" concern for productivity and productivity alone...

...and this precisely because it gave theological assent to the Holocaust...

...Thus Hegel's philosophical treatment of history is not to be set in contrast to a supposedly "critical" approach as represented by the essentially non-historical enterprise of explaining events in terms of causal laws after die pattern of physics...

...The Crucifixion of the Jews FRANKLIN H. LITTELL Harper & Row, $7.95 MICHAEL E. SCHILTZ It is rare to read a book by a Christian who believes in God...

...the negotiator Msgr...

...Devoted readers will not let it...

...BOOKS Cesar Chares: Autobiography of La Causa JACQUES E. LEVY Norton, $12.95 Chavez and the Farm Workers RONALD B. TAYLOR Beacon, $10 TODD GITLIN Ever since "Pastures of Plenty" and The Grapes of Wrath, it has been hard for writers to avoid mystique when they think of farm workers...

...In Chavez' account the struggle to survive passes naturally into the struggles to organize...

...As O'Brien points out, history for Hegel does not include everything that ever happened but is rather a special class of events determined by the working of the historical consciousness itself, so that what Hegel called philosophical history is a history of historical consciousness understood from the standpoint of Reason...

...A trade union, a mass movement of the underclass, and an ethnic revitalization all at once, the UFW unites the gripping symbolisms of the Thirties and the Sixties, and gives us a hero: Cesar Chavez...

...He clarifies some of the points of conflict between UFW and Teamsters, UFW and agribusiness, and also collates quite a lot of evidence of the Teamsters' involvement with the Nixon White House and with agribusiness...

...He does a service to labor history by resurrecting the story of some of the earlier, suppressed organizing efforts...

...When these beliefs confront the Holocaust of European Jewry, the result is a vexatious, troublesome, irritating, demanding, and commanding book...

...Whatever view one takes of Hegel's theory of history, it was an historical theory...

...One is never sure at a given moment whether to be angry with Littell, or dismayed, or assenting...

...By embedding political strategy and tactics in his autobiography, by bringing it-apt metaphor--down to earth, this book becomes a major argument for nonviolent social movement, probably the most persuasive one we have...

...For Littell, the Holocaust has become the central, critical issue for Christianity...

...The hope for a union of the most exploited has animated generations of liberals and radicals, especially organizers, and for the last ten years the United Farm Workers under Cesar Chavez have been, deservedly, a cause cel&bre in the true and usually neglected sense of the term...

...When the time came, they required the Final Solution because they were the Final Witness...

...To have faith is to remember, to recapitulate, to reenact, primordial events...

...Perhaps Hegel himself had some inkling of this outcome when he declared in a not particularly self-effacing moment, "The great man condemns all others to the task of making clear what he says...

...The UFW commands a political symbolism and a continuity no other insurgent organization in America can claim: all the more remarkable in a time when organizations are virtually moribund by the time they are discovered by the mass media...

...but, as O'Brien points out, the teleology invoked is purely natural because based on the conception of the natural man who is all universal, whereas Hegel sought for an historical teleology which can be no simple affair of abstract reason precisely because it must embrace evil and all the irrationalities of society...

...In Chavez account, and in those of Richard Chavez and Fred Ross (who "found" Cesar in a San Jose barrio in 1952) there are discussions of the actual texture and process of organizing, the mistakes as well as the successes, the chaos as well as the purposes, from Chavez' first door-to-door activities to the secret ballot law passed this last May...

...there is a fetish of authenticity...

...Hegel has a special place within his category of reflective history for "critical" history which deals with historiography and "higher criticism," but this form of history certainly does not represent an alternative approach to the task of interpreting history philosophically...

...What Jacques Levy has done is to record hours and hours of Cesar Chavez' recollections over five years, to organize it-along with material from Chavez speeches-in life sequence, and to present, in counterpoint, the voices of others who have loomed large in Chavez' life and in the life of the union: relatives, organizers...

...And one is also taken by Chavez as a brilliant leader and fallible tactician, above all a man irrepressible in his moral authority, a man able to say of any defeat, "this may be a blessing in disguise"-and to build a radically democratic union infused with that spirit...

...He has a firm grasp on Hegel's claim that history has ultimately to do with what is individual and therefore that the Reason which is in nature cannot be the proper model for understanding history because nature is repetitive while history is creative and presents ever new situations...

...Hegel's emphasis on the realization of freedom means that freedom can become actual only in and through institutions and not merely constitutions...

...It is a book not easy to put down...

...Such a neat distinction, however, will do no justice to Hegel...

...But the Jews did not go away...

...he refused to interpret history on non-historical grounds, Since Hegel's theory of the individual is a three-fold affair based on the model of self-consciousness, it must include the abstract universal or kind, its particularization under specific conditions, and the togetherness of the two in the individual which is a unified and self-determining reality...

...especially the 1933 cotton strike, when deputized farmers opened fire on strikers in Pixley and killed two of them...

...Nor about the relations of rural and urban Chicanos, nor the actual or potential relations of the UFW to other insurgent forces in America...

...Despite the textual difficulties surrounding Reason in History, the book serves as an excellent point of departure...

...Only the Jews remained as a real presence...

...When this is more clearly understood, partisan journalism will produce more illuminating books still...

...His theory is based on the idea that there is an inner connection between the events regarded as historical and their transformation into representative thought on the three levels of original, reflective, and philosophical history which he recognized...

...and it is riddled with melodramatic meanwhile-back-at-the-ranch writing...

...The force of oppression is as burdensome as the force of resistance is luminous...

...The book is, unfortunately, flawed...

...So the book has the authenticity and authority of Chavez1 voice, and the illuminating context that sit-uates his struggle in the whole of society...

...It is a dramatic metamorphosis to trace: from "F to "we...

...The excitement of the story, especially as the Teamsters join the growers against the Chavistas (and there is good circumstantial evidence, at least, of Nixon's intervention on the side of the Teamsters, probably in return for their support in 1972), does not need to be dribbled away in verbosity...

...The result is grand political literature in the tradition of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, though less intimate, less confessional-perhaps there is less to confess-and more concerned with the rarely described stuff of organizing...

...Although O'Brien is somewhat too concerned to make Hegel intelligible primarily to philosophers of the dominant logico-analytic standpoint, his effort is novel as an attempt to sing Hegel's song, as it were, in a strange land...

...How does a dream become an insurgency, and an insurgency become a living organization...

...On the other hand, O'Brien's interpretation of Hegel should be considered on its own account regardless of the intended audience...

...George Dennis O'Brien in Hegel on Reason and History has taken up the challenge and in a carefully documented and well-argued volume he seeks to explain Hegel's conception of the historical process, its pattern and aim...

...And Taylor is able to withstand Chavez' enormous magnetism enough to criticize his failings as a leader...

...George Higgins, the AFL-CIO liaison William Kircher, a liberal "grower," the president of the California farm bureau, Governor Jerry Brown...

...and probably the sharpest insight in contemporary literature into that languid state of suspended animation which is contemporary Christianity...

...Such an enterprise, however, is not without its irony because it seems clear that if those at the opposite end of the philosophical spectrum from Hegel were to enter sympathetically into his thought they would tie Ie4 to abandon their positions...

...As I write, there are reports of vigilante violence against UFW organizers in the fields, and arrests, though the recent election law is supposed to have guaranteed free elections and open campaigning...

...The future of farm workers will be produced not only at UFW headquarters but in the vast valley fields, in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Sacramento, New York, Washington . . . in banks and boardrooms...

...The analysis of insurgency requires that victims be seen both as suffering, resisting persons and as objects of vast impersonal forces...

...In the process it has become increasingly less capable of understanding the reality of the Jewish experience in history and thus, by necessary implication, incapable of understanding the meaning of Christianity...

...But the Jews survived...

...The central idea is that in fragmentary history a universal viewpoint is required since one is dealing with a people as a whole, but unless one goes on to the philosophical vantage point where all histories are seen as the expression of the one universal Spirit which guides the course of world events, the art or religion of a people will be seen as no more than an accidental characteristic...

...Littell traces the origin of the "Displacement Myth"-the notion that the meaning of the Jews ended with the coming of Christ-in the post-Testament literature of the Fathers, and postulates it as a persistent and convenient heresy that set the theological stage for the Holocaust...

...by their stubborn insistence on their identity as the Chosen People they effected an irritating counterculture and an embarrassing reminder to Christians that what they were called to do was give witness to God...

...Of the greatest importance is the message contained in the summary of Hegel's belief about the goal of history as the freedom of all men...

...Littell's style is intense, overwhelming the reader with barely-controlled rage, surrounding him with a repetitious rhetoric that often makes more sense on the intuitive than on the merely logical plane...

...A reader can get a sense of the way an organizer comes to think, weigh, decide, change his mind, look, see-and overlook...

...O'Brien begins, rightly I believe, by questioning the validity of the commonly accepted distinction between "speculative" and "critical" philosophy of history...

...Taylor is passionately committed to the UFW, he has interviewed the principals, and he covers the organizational history thoroughly, including clashes in the leadership and the troubles with the AFL-CIO...

...Two new books by California journalists are enlightening...

...The book is quite disorganized...

...And he believes that both live...

...It is enough that he aims to bring Hegel's ideas within the compass of the contemporary climate of opinion and much can be learned from the comparisons...

...Although it is well organized, it goes on too long and in too much detail...

...Much of its information about specific struggles, specific conversations, belongs in a labor history archive for scholars, not in a book that should get a wide popular leadership...

...The tendency of the Western democracies has too often been to suppose that if freedoms are guaranteed by constitutional provisions, the institutions through which alone freedom becomes more than a word will somehow produce themselves...

...Ronald B. Taylor's book is also thick with information (Taylor has covered the UFW for the Fresno Bee from the beginning) but it is undermined by journalistic convention...

...The arguments are, of course, richer and more complex...

...The first hundred pages, farm worker's Chavez growing up, testify very powerfully to the struggle to grow up "between the dirt and the sky...

...And since the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Cesar Chavez is the major exponent of nonviolence in American life: nonviolence in action, as Gandhi meant it, that is, not the nonviolence of the lecture hall and die coffee table...

...The speculative, as the term suggests, is supposed to involve large-scale and undisciplined prophecies about the entire course of human events, whereas the critical approach is to concentrate on the record of events, historiography and the work of the historian as someone who explains what has happened and why...

...Hegel would tell us that this is not so...

...The work is short and has been widely read, and one can derive from it Hegel's basic philosophical vision...

...O'Brien nicely shows how many modern empiricists fail to appreciate Hegel's analysis because they think exclusively in two-fold structures involving universals (logic) and particulars (sense perception) and thus fail to reach the individual...

...Franklin Littell not only believes in God, he believes in the real, historic people called The Jews...

...it is glutted with facts without interpretation (we learn which staff members did what in specific campaigns, but not the political-economic meaning of the agribusiness-Teamster alliance...

...Since at least the Enlightenment, Western Christianity has progressively succumbed to an intellectual style that crowds out mystery, ritual, oral tradition, and the historical, non-"rational" data of faith...

...In his efforts to explain what Hegel meant by Reason both as subjective in human consciousness and as objective in the structures of human society and history, O'Brien is most successful...

...Condorcet held that history inevitably progresses in the direction of enlightenment, freedom and .the reign of reason...

...O'Brien has an illuminating conception of the dialectical advance represented by Hegel's three kinds of history which is on its soundest ground in the transition between what Hegel called "fragmentary" history-the history of art, religion or law-and the properly philosophical type...

...Here is a union that celebrates religion and ethnicity, waves a distinct flag, consorts with political radicalism, and pushes its middle-class allies into active support...

...Yet writing about Chavez has tended to center on his mythic qualities, leaving readers to wonder how the UFW was built, and built tough enough to survive-though damaged-years of Teamster raids and agribusiness despotism...

...As the account goes on there is less and less of Chavez the man with a personal history, and more and more of the union and its battles...

...But when a man of deep Christian faith and impeccable credentials as scholar and pastor asks whether Christianity is not obsolete, one listens.er Christianity is not obsolete, one listens...

...Nor is there much, in either book, about the agribusiness and political-economic forces -especially the push of technological innovation-that in the long run will force the fate of farm workers...

...Christianity stood by, morally disarmed and, in the final irony, too weak even to realize that its own God was at the stake...

...By their continued existence as a people, the Jews reaffirmed the reality of God...