The Commanding Heights
Yergin, Daniel & Stanislaw, Joseph
the end of it) in subsequent poetry. (Only Ararat seems a nonce occurrence--a point whose height does not reach toward a higher realm, or provide views of the lower one, but that becomes, at...
...Hollander's essays so successfully unsettle the generic boundaries between poetry and prose writing that you may be ruined for the business-as-usual prose of the majority of other critics, even if bewildered by his subordinating argument to description...
...China gets a whole chapter to itself, and Russia most of a chapter, although there is more on India than on China and Russia put together...
...The poet Richard Howard perfectly described Hollander's work as trusting in the possibility of "a teeming surface bearing one to a high place...
...What caused the 1980s developing-country debt crisis...
...Commonweal 2 7 April24, 1998...
...Hayek, Milton Friedman and the Chicago School monetarists descending on Chile everything blurred and forced into the same freeze-dried package...
...Indonesia, the Netherlands, and the Philippines a few paragraphs...
...Charles R. Morris, author of American Catholic (Times Books, 1997), is completing a book on financial innovation and risk...
...Hollander achieves such transport in that parenthetical reflection on Ararat...
...The narrative is clouded with much irrelevant detail, of the kind that case writers dredge up to give a faux immediacy to business-school textbooks...
...But just a few pages later, we are told almost as an aside that "in 1982, French Socialists feared crossing the threshold of 2 million unemployed...
...It is the first time this has happened for two hundred fifty years...
...There are six-anda-half pages on Poland, a page-and-ahalf on Czechoslovakia, three pages on Bolivia, two on Chile, three on Argentina...
...ask the authors, and respond fearlessly: "Growing debt, rising interest rates, and falling revenues...
...WE'RE ALL CAPITALISTS NOW Charles R. Morris hortly before he died, the poIitical philosopher Isaiah Berlin commented in an interview: "Where is there an active Left now...
...Economics was too important to be left to the blind and violent whims of a "market" that was usually rigged in favor of the rich anyway...
...When I got bogged down it was not because of the diverting gems laid down in the path of each essay but rather because I was so disheartened by the bitter and barely limned portrait of the state of American poetry and poetry teaching...
...The Work of Poetry finds Hollander perhaps overindulging the temptations that beset us with advancing age, but more in evidence is the suppleness of writing and thought that makes his poems such potent witnesses for the ongoing vitality of formal verse, i i Daria Donnelly has taught literature at Brandeis and Boston University...
...those who do may prematurely put down the volume...
...The evident failure of the capitalist system in the 1920s and 1930s seemed the final vindication of the Socialist idea...
...Whether the state should direct the economy was rarely questioned: the challenge was merely to find the right tack between Stalinist bludgeoning and less intrusive modes of Keynesian guidance...
...Where are they now...
...That very morning, however, his wife called up the hosts to say that they would have to cancel...
...The name of the second author, Joseph Stanislaw, a business associate at Yergin's consulting firm, is in much smaller type, so one must assume that this is Yergin's book...
...Radical intellectuals, even as late as the French Revolution, gave relatively little thought to questions of wealth and property...
...Daniel Yergin, who won a Pulitzer for The Prize, a history of the quest for oil, has the credentials for such a challenge, and Commandiny, Heights' splendid t i t l e - - t a k e n from Lenin's description of the government's place in the economy--raises hopes...
...Franqois Babeuf, the revolution's "Gracchus," was one of the few proto-Communists in its ranks...
...Sadly, Commanding Heights' ambitions far exceed its powers...
...Unfortunately readers unfamiliar with contemporary poetry will not recognize his portrait as caricature...
...Shouldn't the authors have something to say about that...
...Two years later, amid rising unemployment and inflation, Mitterand recanted and stood aside while his finance minister, Jacques Delors, engineered a French version of a Thatcherite turn to the right...
...Now they don't, and everybody is much better off...
...Surely, this is the stuff of grand narrative, a project for a writer with the flair and intellectual sweep of a Hugh Thomas or a Paul Johnson...
...When I was young, there were left-wing leaders in F.ngland--Laski, Cole, Tawney...
...Hollander's effort to restore our sense of an enlarging poetic past does not require a blighted poetic present...
...The notion that equality of possession is prerequisite to equality of rights became radical doctrine only after the violent upheavals of 1848, when Marx began to weave disparate strands from Hegel, Ricardo, Saint-Simon, Fourier, and others into a grand synthesis that became the charter for the intellectual Left for the next hundred years...
...Private enterprise led to monopoly, war, colonialism, and the immiseration of the working classes...
...Once all the best people were Socialists or Communists, or at least believed in a strong, directive, economic role for the state...
...There is little real analysis...
...In I_atin America, maybe...
...Every story is essentially the same...
...In the same vein, isn't it just a bit early to opine that "Tony Blair's great accomplishment was to fuse social-democratic values of fairness and inclusiveness with the Thatcherite economic program...
...Intellectual consensus is always a danger signal, and the self-satisfied preening over the triumph of capitalism probably means that we are on the brink of some huge, unforecastable explosion...
...How do you tell...
...Or if they're not better off, as they demonstrably are not in Russia, they surely soon will be...
...Among school dropouts, the rate of unemployment is 29 percent...
...For at least a generation, centrally directed economies appeared to be the world's most successful, leading to a considerable crisis of confidence in America, the country most resistant to Socialist ideas, especially after the Soviet Sputnik launch in 1957...
...Franqois Mitterand, after years of grassroots effort, succeeded in rebuilding the Socialist party and led a left coalition back to power in 1981, promising a decisive "break with capitalism...
...Each of these essays - - some pyrotechnically allusive, others warmly crowded with recollected poems and literary friendships - - asks the reader to work hard and, at almost every paragraph, repays our labor...
...Is the great experiment working or not...
...And, at the other end of the list, there is Thomas Mann's Der Zauberber,g, in no way a typical revision of any of these...
...Taiwan, Hong Kong, Commonweal 2 6 April24, 1998 and Singapore each get a couple of pages...
...Only Ararat seems a nonce occurrence--a point whose height does not reach toward a higher realm, or provide views of the lower one, but that becomes, at the subsiding of the Deluge, the new First Ground...
...The rise and fall of the political Left since the midnineteenth century is, in many ways, the story of a shifting consensus on practical economics...
...Instead of grand narrative, we get a dutiful compilation of potted little economic histories of almost every country in the world--or at least it feels that way...
...In 1997, the number is over 3 million...
...Oz~ sont h's ne~,es d'antan...
...Compare the "end of ideology" theorists of the early 1960s, and John Kennedy's famous 1962 declaration that there were no ideological issues left, "only technical problems, administrative problems...
...The revolt against royal authority in America was led by a conservative propertied and professional class...
...and then the last remnant of true believers were put to ignominious flight by the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989...
...maybe in Korea...
...Too bad that it is still sorely needed...
...A first-rate analysis of the kind that Yergin and Stanislaw have attempted would make fascinating reading...
...Along the way, we get snippets of intellectual history--Keynes vs...
...In fifteen frenetic months, Delors began the great task of modernization that his successors would carry on...
...But the political Left allowed its cause to become so tightly tied to specific theories of economic organization that it was exposed and vulnerable when Socialist economies started visibly lagging about twenty years ago...
...What a coincidence, being appointed finance minister on the very morning you are scheduled to have lunch with friends...
...So a section on India opens with "Manmohan Singh was due for lunch at friends' in New Delhi on June 21, 1991...
...They describe the great French U-turn of 1983...
Vol. 125 • April 1998 • No. 8
