Sophisticated Rebels/The Company of Critics

...After the first brush with the brute realities of power, dissenters learned to be more patient, cautious, sensitive to the tenacity of mass opinion and the structural impediments to change-a stance that often defied.conventional categories of both the left and right...

...Hughes offers a valuable discussion of the "self-limiting" revolution inspired by the discharged electrician Lech Walesa and sustained by the writings of the historian Adam Michnik...

...Pfessured from both sides, the pope once exclaimed to a visiting papal'diplomat: "Now I understand St...

...Walzer is less enamored of Herbert Mar-cuse, who excoriated Americans as ' 'one-dimensional" simply because they took pleasure in acquisition and consumption...

...The "miracle" of Gdansk saw a rare alliance of workers, intellectuals, and the church...

...Their treatment of Michel Foucault reveals much about their political priorities...

...JOHN P. DIGGINS, a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, is the author of the The Proud Decades...

...martin green's books include The Challenge of the Mahatmas, Dreams of Adventure, Dreams of Empire, and The Origins of Non-Violence: Tolstoy and Gandhi in their Historical Settings (Pennsylvania State...

...Ultimately Walzer faces the same problem as Antonio Gramsci, the brilliant Sardinian Marxist who also exhorted intellectuals to return home to native grounds...

...The exception, of course, was Alexander Sol-zhenitsyn, who saw Marxism as the sin of Western liberalism and called for a return to Russia's Slavophile traditions...

...Hughes suggests that Foucault, Jacques LaCan, Jacques Derrida, and other Parisians who wrote within the structuralist and post-structuralist idioms charmed their avid readers with "wordplay" but had little to say about the real world of events other than to uncover the deceptions of power and the plight of marginal misfits...

...THE COMPANY OF CRITICS Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century Michael Walzer Basic...

...Along with other voices of the Greenwich Village rebellion, Bourne looked to a "transnational" America based upon the liberating values of...

...Michael Walzer's The Company of Critics spans a wider chronological range and deals with intellectuals trying to establish the values upon which criticism of the existing social order can be legitimately made...

...That land would witness, a year after his elevation to the papacy, the birth of Solidarity...

...a corresponding notion of a special role for women, modeled on the shining example of Mary...

...Both Tournier and Kundera call for the restoration of Europe's cultural unity while finding solace in laughter...

...George Orwell, who combined "radicalism" and "rootedness" by embracing such homespun virtues as patriotism, decency, and even consumer comforts...

...JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN is the Centennial Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University...

...He and his wife practice labor law in Youngs-town, Ohio...

...H. Stuart Hughes's Sophisticated Rebels involves stances taken by dissident intellectuals since the dramatic events in 1968 in Paris and Prague...

...REVIEWERS DON LUCE worked in Vietnam for thirteen years with International Voluntary Services and the World Council of Churches...

...We can begin to understand why if we think of the pope too as a rebel, a rebel against the evil he saw in the soulless world of contemporary urban existence...

...No matter how conservative Solzhenit-syn's sentiments, he too, like Kundera and other dissidents, wanted "to restore unity to his divided and suffering people...

...and Randolph Bourne (the one American thinker), who debated John Dewey over American intervention in World War I and denounced American politics to better defend the "American promise...

...Readers of Commonweal may be surprised to see Pope John Paul II included among the "sophisticated rebels...

...Walzer's heroes are Ignazio Silone, who tried to revitalize an inherited tradition rather : than a created conception in order to render compatible simple Christian morality with modern socialism...

...He is presently director of the Asia Resource Center in Washington, D.C...

...staughton lynd is a Quaker...

...cosmopolitanism...

...19.95...

...Nativism, in contrast, signified everything reactionary: Puritanism and repression, the frontier and escapist individualism, capitalism and the commercialization of life...

...He was chairperson of the first march on Washington against the war in Vietnam in April, 1965...

...In two previous works, Spheres of Justice and Theory and Social...

...Born Paris, raised a Catholic, and steeped in German culture and philosophy, Tournier writes of characters who transcended the stereotypes of virility and femininity...

...Hughes believes that a surer guide to political culture, as opposed to academic paradigms, may be found in the novels of Michel Tournier and Milan Kundera...

...Hughes shares that sentiment, and it is not a little curious that both authors, though writing from a left perspective, seem more devoted to restoration than revolution...

...a revulsion from tampering with procreation...

...He is the author of Nonviolence in America: A Documentary History and (together with Michael Ferber) The Resistance...

...Consider his a voice crying in the wilderness, one whose rebelliousness took forms difficult for the Western mind to comprehend: a stern, self-denying notion of the priesthood...

...But I am not sure Walzer would want to be in the "company" of such critics...

...Perhaps the only American intellectuals who could agree with the notion of the ' 'connected critic" would have been "the Southern Agrarians" of the thirties...

...Walzer's idea of the social critic is also, curiously enough, more sensitive to unity and continuity, more inclined to find old values than to create new ones...

...260 pp...

...To appreciate John Paul II in his own dimension it was necessary to visualize him in his native land...

...Dissent in the Soviet Union, Hughes notes, differed from that in Poland...

...tolerating innovation and the "progressives" who regarded him as too prudent and cautious...

...Kundera, an exile from the' 'Prague Spring" now living in Paris, writes of the uprooted, weak, and humiliated...

...John P. Diggins Both books under review are written by American intellectuals seeking roles for the intellectual in the modern world, and both, with a single rare exception, look to European thinkers to provide the heroic,models...

...But in his confrontations with the dissident theologians Edward Schillebeeckx and Hans Kung,'the pope found himself, according to Hughes, in the thankless position of trying to satisfy both the conservative clergy who suspected him of...

...LEON v. SIGAL teaches international politics at Wesleyan University...

...His books include Nuclear Forces in Europe and Fighting to a Finish: The Politics of War Termination in the United States and Japan, 1945 (Cornell...

...Her most recent book is Women and War (Basic Books...

...Why didn't the- pope tradeoff political liberation', for adherence to theological dogma...

...While the post-structuralists probed texts, other Parisian students and intellectuals awoke to the world of the Gulag and Kampuchea...

...BERNHARD WILPERT, a professor of work and organizational psychology at the Berlin University of Technology, has conducted international studies on working and industrial democracy in Europe...

...He thus upholds as exemplary the "connected critic," the anguished observer who is not so much detached and alienated from his native land as he is devoted to recovering its lost ideals...

...But Gramsci's idea of "organic intellectuals" would have been anathema to Walzer's other hero, Randolph Bourne...

...james odonohoe is a priest of the Archdiocese of Boston and associate professor of theological ethics at Boston College...

...Peter, who came to Rome twice, the second time to be, crucified...

...Criticism, Walzer insisted that the critic must not impose transcendent, universal standards but instead draw upon implicit principles and values embedded in the conventions of the everyday world...

...Russian intellectuals have yet to reject Marxist ideology while the Poles placed their faith in religion and patriotism...

...Walzer also has insightful things to say about Martin Bu-ber, Albert Camus, and Julien Benda, author,of the timeless tract, The Betrayal of the Intellectuals...

...Walzer believes that Foucault- perhaps the most widely read French author in America since Tocqueville-is "not a purposeful social critic" because he illuminates the ubiquity of power only to imply the futility of opposing it...

...The "Africaner radical" Breyton Breytenbach is admired as a poet exiled from South Africa yet still committed to the anti-apartheid resistance, however uncertain its future...

...Since existence offered nothing certain and foreordained, only the "unbearable lightness of being," history must provide what Hughes aptly calls "an unremitting effort of memory...

...Walzer praises Gramsci's "commitment" to a policy of practical activity that would fuse intellectuals and workers in a dialectic of mind and body...

...and Simone de Beauvoir, who sympathized with the oppressed status of women only to distance herself from them as victims of biological entrapment...

...Hughes sees John Paul, II being Just as much a dissident as the liberation theologians...