Reviews
Robbins, Richard & Clark, Joseph & Pachter, Henry & Guttmann, Allen
THE GERMAN DICTATORSHIP: THE ORIGINS, STRUCTURE, AND EFFECTS OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM, by Karl Dietrich Bracher. With an introduction by Peter Gay. Translated by Jean Steinberg. New York: Praeger....
...As Theodore Adorno has shown, the trait that distinguishes the Nazi types is not conformism but "the authoritarian character": the middle-class rebel without a cause dreams of BOOKS power and glory...
...THE USES OF DISORDER, by Richard Sennett...
...After that he figured he would send the S.A...
...a Mack the Knife who promised every Caspar Milquetoast revenge on his oppressors...
...13.95...
...ONE CAN APPROACH the phenomenon of fascism from various angles...
...Schiller's Spieltrieb, the instinct for play, will have to be satisfied by whatever can be socially actualized...
...Young people have fixed on radical politics as a way into a less constricted community but it is, for Sennett, too limited a forum...
...Yet, no matter how much things Communist change, much remains the same...
...This answers the question Peter Gay asks in his magnificent introduction: why should people under forty, for whom the Nazi ghosts are not an ever-haunting experience, study this episode...
...But if the paperback edition is to reach as wide an audi ence as it deserves, it would need more helpful notes explaining German institutions and customs...
...Our imagination of the good life," writes Elliott, "is as barren as our imagination of the bad is rich...
...men had to have their raids and "crystal nights," their sadistic orgies of torture, and their race war against inferior breeds...
...but not quite persuasive enough...
...The poet will work with people rather than with words...
...To achieve that, the S.A...
...The Allies with whom the conspiring officers were in contact demanded unconditional surrender...
...It set economic, social, political, and military goals where there had been a blind play of arbitrary forces...
...As a Western correspondent completes a tour of duty in Moscow and returns to sum up his impressions, there's a depressing similarity between his story and those written during the years of the transition from "socialism" to "communism...
...It was a state based on a terrorist ideology, begun with terroristic means, maintained and expanded with terroristic methods, and poised to spread terror abroad...
...Why did it end with a grotesque maniac with a Chaplin moustache...
...Marcuse argues that literature and the other arts now have an essentially subversive function...
...Lowenthal's underlying thesis is that "although the conscious purpose of a totalitarian dictatorship is to change the social structure without changing the political system, the planned social change results inevitably in unintended and indeed unforeseen political change...
...This, in turn, required totalitarianism...
...Communist regimes are usually devoted to industrialization since they have been established mainly in backward, agrarian countries...
...a nationalistic-statist aberration of socialism seeking to combine social romanticism and state socialism...
...The philosophers' dreams seem closely related to the novelists' nightmares...
...Plato, Thomas More, Francis Bacon, B. F. Skinner...
...Family lines, work lines, school lines would all criss-cross, resulting in a creative, loosely-organized "disorder...
...He shows how radically different all relationships between politics and economy, man and nation, party leadership and administration, society and ideology, police and law, education and social rank were in the totalitarian state from anything Germany had known before, and that Hitler's plan to subvert more of the traditional values went even further...
...there is a need to compete in innovation and "innovators may not be ideologically pure...
...Even as Hitler "agreed" to obtain power by constitutional means, Goring explained: Legality all the way to the top rung of the ladder...
...Elliott, who does not make this particular point, notes that Skinner's Walden Two concludes with the image of an unoccupied throne: The implication to be drawn from the last paragraph of Walden Two is that, had Frazier beenon the throne, Walden Two would have developed into a tyranny...
...Has its idea survived...
...What I do mean is that Sennett deliberately refrains from discussing the economic and political obstacles to future community planning...
...But in time totalitarianism became a fetter on further development...
...He describes four types of Communist regimes: first, the "quasi-totalitarian," in which he includes Stalin's Russia and Mao's China before the Cultural Revolution...
...Contemporary culture must not simply be criticized...
...In contrast, Sennett sketches out the possibility of a different kind of growth, the achievement of an adult identity, the development of a "caring about" within the social framework of "a new anarchism...
...It is forced, Johnson notes, to relax the terror that forms the major control of totalitarianism...
...On June 30, 1934, he staged his "Ninth Termidor"— liquidating the Nazi party's left wing along with some personal enemies and exfriends...
...He writes on the conflict between Utopia and Development in Communist policy...
...Elliott develops this argument as part of a comparison between the requirements, advantages, and disadvantages of the utopian genre compared to those of the more realistic novel, but my own interests are drawn toward a similar point made by Herbert Marcuse, whom Elliott cites on two occasions...
...Possibly so...
...Still, The Uses of Disorder is an original, an interesting new graft on the old tree of social anarchism...
...New York: Alfred A. Knopf...
...While leaving employers in possession of their industrial properties, the Nazis shifted decision-making and controls to central allocating offices...
...But here he is pondering the future of those millions among us who are above the poverty line and beyond the ghetto, of the young people in particular who have rejected suburbia and have been groping toward a new freedom which they associate with an emergent sense of community, possible only in "dense, disorderly, overwhelming cities...
...In his Essay on Liberation (1969), Marcuse deals with the task which Marx and Engels were historically unable to take up...
...A high point in this symposium is the essay by Richard Lowenthal, who is well-known to readers of DISSENT...
...but it was smashed before the Second World War broke out...
...I am quite aware that I have used Elliott's valuable little book for speculations which may run counter to its author's...
...But Johnson is not a dogmatist, and he recognizes that "neither the market system nor Communist command economies have proved particularly efficient in managing today's unprecedentedly complex economies...
...In Marcuse's speculations, as in Elliott's suggestions, the realization of the dream is also its end...
...The more complete the design, the more likely that terror will be needed to achieve it...
...they must find a way to mesh centralized authority with decentralized planning...
...BOOKS THE THIRD REICH WAS NOT SAVED from ruin by its enemies but went down to defeat...
...That the Bolsheviks seized power in backward Russia, Lenin attributed to one of the "zigzags of history...
...The big firms also got most of the industrial assets confiscated from Jewish and foreign owners...
...China has zigzagged between developmental emphasis on material rewards and an extreme utopian rejection of such incentives...
...Without detracting anything from the martyrdom of Martin Niemoller and Friedrich Weissler, leaders of the Church Bearing Witness, or of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the defeatist theologian, of the thousands of Catholic priests who went to jail, and especially Provost Gruber, Bracher concludes that "discussions about resistance before July 20, 1944, revealed how isolated these views were...
...Thus, the Soviet Union today faces an acute shortage of computer installations and Burks suggests that "The basic obstacle to innovation in Communist countries is the inability of Stalinist central planning to provide automatic institutional responses to new situations...
...I cannot believe that whatever a community does by itself is per se good because it was selfinstituted...
...After they seized power, they first upset the traditional values of society and the customary rankings—calling on children to inform on BOOKS their parents and teachers and on employees to watch bosses who were insufficiently patriotic, burning books, and in every other way demeaning the habitual German respect for authority, learning, and titles...
...impotent before the new powers of technocracy, bureaucracy, and social democracy, he longs for a "new order" where he might find a place in the shade of power...
...One could treat it as a breakdown of reason under the conditions of monopolism (as in Georg Lukacs's Destruction of Reason, unfortunately not available in English) or as a breakdown of nerve (as does Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom...
...He deals, specifically, with the fact that projected utopian societies seem by their exclusion of conflict to exclude literature too...
...Specialists will have to determine whether or not Elliott's analyses of More and Swift are original...
...While destroying all organs of proletarian self-protection, they gave the German worker benefits he had never enjoyed under the republican regime: trips to the Mediterranean on "Strength Through Joy" ships, adoption of May Day as a national holiday, steady employment, a motorcyclette and the prospect of a small car...
...But while the momentary abolition of socioeconomic distinctions and the general mood of license are indeed reminders of a Golden Age that never was, the alleged relation of satire to utopian fiction is not persuasively argued...
...A chapter that contains some fruitful lines of analysis is the one by H. Gordon Skilling on "Group Conflict and Political Change...
...they used revolutionary means such as the military training of civil-war troups, the deliberate flouting of laws, and murder...
...Most German historians have exalted the opposition that developed in conservative circles of the church, the aristocracy, the military, and that led to the abortive putsch of July 20, 1944—too late to save the honor of a class that had followed Hitler into his Third Reich and then into his war, but suddenly found itself staring at military defeat...
...home...
...Karl Dietrich Bracher, of Bonn University, whose earlier works deal with the Weimar Republic, has written a profound study that rejects and combines all these partial views and sees Fascism and Nazism as revolutionary movements directed against the liberal state...
...It may be that nineteenthcentury readers were drawn to Bellamy's ideas by the narrative structure through which he presented them, but, if this was so, American society must have been even more barren of literary possibilities than Henry James said it was...
...One could look at it as a European disease of the twentieth century (see Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism and Ernst Nolte's Three Faces of Fascism), or as a special form of populism, a potential degeneration inherent in all democracies (J...
...In Elliott's analysis, utopia is "the secularization of the myth of the Golden Age, a myth incarnated in the festival of Saturnalia...
...But any idea of overthrowing the Nazi regime was illusory as long as the army was loyal to Hitler and as long as the subversive officers remained wedded to two unbelievable conceptions which nevertheless appear to have been genuine: that they would shed no blood, not even Hitler's, and that they could not break the oath he had forced them to swear...
...The inadequacy of X is no proof of the superiority of Y or Z. The alleged genetic relationship between satire and utopian fiction is but one aspect of Elliott's book...
...Perhaps, since we have never known what a utopian society might be like, it is more to the point to say that imagined utopias have generally lacked novelistic interest...
...if German terms, such as volkisch or Gleichschaltung, are untranslatable, the index should refer the reader to the explanation of the term...
...ALL LITERATURE IS UTOPIAN in that fictive worlds are literally ou topos, i.e., no place...
...Generalizing, Lowenthal suggests that the trend in most Communist countries is from totalitarian to authoritarian systems...
...1970, I have shown that Albert Speer could not have been deceived...
...I do not mean that he is enamored of "cultural revolution," that he sees the new life-style of the young as a cleansing force...
...In DISSENT, Nov.–Dec...
...By contrast, the German generals had prepared a plan to arrest Hitler should war break out in September 1938...
...Here's a volume of essays by various scholars that analyzes changes in the Communist coun BOOKS tries since the death of Stalin...
...Novelists, however, have tended to write negative utopias, nightmarish visions of totalitarian society...
...Krupp, Flick, Rechberg, Schacht, Hugenberg, Klockner, Mannesmann, etc., still held economic power in Nazi Germany...
...In the penultimate essay, however, Elliott returns to more speculative considerations...
...This was indeed the excuse cited by Hitler's nationalist allies and fund raisers: bankers Schroder and Schacht, generals Schleicher and Blomberg, aristocrats Papen and Neurath—they all had been "deceived...
...Bracher seeks a clue in the person of the "leader"—a rural type speaking a coarse argot...
...It is a rare author who does not mean his tale "to point a moral...
...Released fromthe bondage of exploitation, the imagination, sustained by the achievements of science, couldturn its productive power to the radical reconstruction of experience...
...In the end Sennett's vision depends on faith...
...Sennett, who teaches sociology at Brandeis University and has been studying carefully the evolution of the 19th-century industrial city into the 20th-century postindustrial metropolis, is of course thoroughly aware of such matters as the failure of urban renewal or the desperate search for revenues to cover city services...
...Joseph Clark Change under Communism CHANGE IN COMMUNIST SYSTEMS, edited by Chalmers Johnson...
...There was another obstacle...
...but when Pacelli succeeded him as Pius XII, he remained silent in the face of Hitler's war...
...198 pp...
...All too easily do the comparisons drop from their mouths: is not My Lai equal to Auschwitz, the Chicago trial as bad as the Gestapo, the United States today as undemocratic as the Weimar state which gave birth to Nazism...
...When instead he went to Munich and handed Czechoslovakia over to Hitler, all resistance broke down in view of Hitler's repeated proof that destiny was on his side and that his political calculations had been correct...
...a racial community ideology...
...The discussions of individual works are reasonable and perceptive...
...Bracher makes a special point of the fact that Hitler managed to conceal his revolutionary aims from his bourgeois, military, and aristocratic allies, that he "deceived" them by pretending to have mellowed since he made the Beer Hall putsch and wrote Mein Kampf...
...Although he begins with a reference to Friedrich Engels, it is only to show that even Marx's collaborator responded to the tropes and figurative subtleties of utopian thought...
...He is by no means unaware of moral and ethical dimensions, but he is chiefly concerned with literary form...
...Those who think so should read Bracher's proofs that the Nazi takeover was by no means inevitable...
...AFTER THE 1956 UPHEAVALS in the Communist world, and with the open outbreak of conf ict between the Soviet and Chinese regimes, it became difficult to maintain the old belief that Communism was unvaried and unchanging...
...Bracher devotes a full chapter to the various attempts—happily fruitless so far—to continue or revive it...
...He sees a particular danger in the trend away from the politics of participation and toward a "guided society" which opens the door to pseudopolitical movements of a revolutionary-authoritarian character...
...After that, the bourgeoisie felt assured...
...third, the "quasi-pluralistic authoritarianism" of Hungary and Poland during the 1953-56 thaw, and the Soviet Union under Khrushchev...
...the fourth type, so far rare in Communist history, "democratizing and pluralistic authoritarianism" as in Czechoslovakia between January and August 1968, and in Yugoslavia after the break with Stalin, but especially after 1966...
...There are always conflicting groups and group interests, as he sees it...
...an imperialistic nationalism...
...Pope Pius XI, the first sovereign to conclude a treaty with Hitler, came to regret it...
...If the young are to regain identity, revive community, they must learn to bring "intense family life" out into the neighborhood...
...Sennett is sensible on the issue of "local community control," unlike some of the New Left romantics...
...Though it's easy to differ with Skilling he opens up helpful avenues for scholarly investigation...
...Chalmers Johnson develops the thesis of a "built-in boomerang" in Communist economic modernization...
...In this social world adolescence does not flow into maturity...
...Today, 17 years later, one talks with correspondents fresh from the Russian steppes, and they still get their oranges at diplomatic parties...
...The city as an anarchic system" would be able to live and breathe...
...Condition" rather than "crisis," because The Uses of Disorder is not concerned directly with the familiar litany of problems: crime, race, poverty, pollution, housing...
...8.95...
...The dilemma of these regimes, he finds, is that they need a limited pluralism and still must keep things under tutelary control...
...If Bracher accepts this legend, he may be the victim of a misunderstanding...
...The assumption, of course, was that "the dictatorship of the proletariat" would be achieved in the advanced capitalist countries and move on rapidly to utopia...
...THE SHAPE OF UTOPIA, by Robert C. Elliott...
...This ideological anti-front was forged [out ofj four tendencies—a conservative-authoritarian glorification of the state...
...Resistance to Hitler, then, would have to be expected first from those who had lived in the spirit of 1789—i.e., the Left...
...Had he not given them the state they had desired and prepared—a strong national and military dictatorship that provided jobs for all and talked back to Western capitalists...
...that civil liberties must not be despised but continuously defended...
...THE GERMAN DICTATORSHIP: THE ORIGINS, STRUCTURE, AND EFFECTS OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM, by Karl Dietrich Bracher...
...Until 1938 none of these people—with the exception of Fritz Thyssen, a bankrupt steel magnate—had any objection to being ruled by Hitler, Goring, and their Gauleiters...
...SENNETT'S POINT OF DEPARTURE is that "modern urban communities of affluence" are terribly constricting in human terms, however secure from want...
...If the desire for perfection is directed from imagined constructs to the confused, intractable world of men and women in society as we have known it, the desire is liable to meet resistance that only force can overcome...
...a necessary tension ("disorder") is repressed because conflict, as such, is "bad...
...For the next six years opposition remained confined to individual acts of sabotage and treason—some of astonishing courage, such as Colonel Hans Oster's betrayal of Hitler's attack plans to the Dutch in April 1940...
...Despite the twisting of Marxist doctrine to place the locus of proletarian revolution in the underdeveloped Third World, Lenin started from a Marxist assumption...
...Here neighborhoods would consist of unstable, yet viable mixtures of social elements— young and old, middle- and working-class, black and white...
...Satire is the secular form of ritual mockery, ridicule, invective—ritual gestures which are integrally part of the same festival...
...In this reconstruction, the historical topos [i.e., place] of theaesthetic would change: it would find expression in the transformation of the Lebenswelt [i.e., world of actual experience]—society as awork of art...
...NEVERTHELESS, HITLER'S DICTATORSHIP was not a "tool of monopoly capital" as the Communists made out in their theoretical bewilderment, but a true revolution in the sense that it brought new strata to the top, ousted a significant part of the former dominant classes for good, set up new machinery to deal with social and economic relations, provided an entirely new cultural environment for German society, and endowed the nation with a new state...
...Sennett's view of the new community, informed by insights from psychology, sociology, litera ture, is attractive and persuasive...
...For Sennett relies too heavily on a change in consciousness, a psychological liberation movement to open the way to structural change...
...L. Talmon in Totalitarian Democracy...
...There was some trepidation about how the secret police might view those bulging pockets, but it was worth the embarrassment...
...Robert Elliott is subtle and persuasive in his commentary on irony and literary play in Thomas More and in B. F. Skinner, but satire is quite another matter...
...Of particular interest here is not the ephemeral National Democratic party (which failed to get the 5 percent of the vote required for a seat in the Bundestag) but the widely read Soldatenzeitung, which cultivates the memory of Hitler's and the Kaiser's glorious wars, and the "intelligentsia" magazine Nation Europa with such luminaries contributing as Sir Oswald Mosley, Maurice Bardeche, and Mrs...
...adult lives become frozen into rigid patterns...
...frightened by his loss of status, he flees into fantasies of romantic imperialism...
...These crises might have brought to power a simply reactionary clique, perhaps a military dictatorship (as Stalin expected), or a restoration of the Hohenzollern (which Chancellor Bruning frankly admits in his memoirs was his aim in office...
...Alexander Pope and T. S. Eliot, for example, are two considerable satirists whose tendency was to affirm the political and religious status quo and to shun utopian speculations...
...But, in the event of a reordering of priorities and a reallocation of money, there is no reason to suppose that "the new anarchism" of the coming generation will somehow just prevail...
...democratizing the army...
...The first analyses, mostly by Communist writers, explained it simply as the dictatorship of monopoly capital (a thesis that still lingers in Franz Neumann's Behemoth, 1941, and Ignazio Silone's School for Dictators, 1937...
...On the contrary, although he does not refer to the spirit of Woodstock directly, the whole tone of the book is skeptical toward youth for youth's sake...
...nice" people like Schacht, the financial wizard, and Mayor Goerdeler (who later headed an underground opposition) agreed to serve as his bank president, price commissar, etc...
...At first it seemed as though the schemers in the defense establishment had not been mistaken in their estimate of Hitler's conversion...
...And, "old-fashioned" though it may sound, without explicit policies and organized political coalitions, faith in creative "disorder" will have no place to go...
...Is it any wonder, then, that George Orwell chose to cast his most effective attack on totalitarianism in the form of an antiutopia...
...5.95...
...Before 1933, the Nazis pursued the revolutionary aim of abolishing the Republic and its institutions...
...Stanford: Stanford University Press, 358 pp...
...their conspiracy was based on the assumption that the Western powers would stand firm in defense of Czechoslovakia, and Chamberlain had been so advised...
...Although Swift, to whom Elliott devotes an interesting essay, is certainly satirical and utopian in his Gulliver's Travels, there seems to be no necessary connection between a scorn for the way things are and a desire to show that they might be radically improved...
...553 pp...
...The German conservatives were eager to dress up their counterrevolution as a revolution...
...To disagree with it (as I will) is only to acknowledge its appealing quality...
...City planning, for example, proceeds from elaborate master schemes that override authentic community needs...
...Elliott argues that utopian and satirical fictions both derive ultimately from the impulses celebrated at the Roman festival of Saturnalia, when slaves mocked masters and masters served slaves, when Libido found outlet and Id had its holiday...
...Skilling rejects the idea that a Communist system can ever be fully totalitarian...
...Bracher thinks that the unsolved problem of the national state can turn any European crisis into a crisis of German democracy...
...Control would emerge instead of being "preplanned...
...there is a destructive "urge for a purified identity...
...For once, happily, in such a book, the author does not write dissertationese, and the English does not sound like translatese...
...The majority are those who feel that continuation of an unbearable condition—the ancien regime, the hated Weimar Republic—is the greater evil, and the surrender of power to a Hitler the lesser risk...
...As IN MOST such collections of essays, the book has an uneven quality...
...but the hangings will take place nevertheless...
...For that much, Bracher rightly insists, the Nazi movement was revolutionary—a trait that is usually underrated in Marxist analyses of fascism and also by authors who think of Germans as especially "conformist...
...In the famous phrases of Engels, there must be a transition from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom...
...On the basis of a century's experience unavailable to Marx and Engels, he sketches the outlines of a utopian society on Marxist principles...
...it must FZsDDJ *1 be dislocated, disrupted, and "desublimated" so that repression can be identified and ultimately replaced by liberation...
...As early as 1919 Lenin demanded of the Russian workers "absolute submission to the will of the Soviet director, or the dictator, during work...
...The illusion that something might be saved, on the other hand, explains a fact that at first sight seems surprising: thousands of generals and other officers, civil servants and politicians were part of the conspiracy that almost took Hitler's life on July 20, 1944, and it is remarkable that their secret was not betrayed—while the Socialist and Communist plots running parallell to the main action were busted by the Gestapo in June...
...170 pp...
...Elliott writes that "the one unanswerable argument for the utopian vision is a hard satirical look at the way things are today," but the argument is all too answerable...
...infiltrating the administration with deliberate disregard for the civil service order (the famous German Beamten mentality) ; touching even the churches' integrity and setting up a blasphemous "German Church...
...new experience is feared...
...Aldous Huxley, Eugene Zamyatin, and George Orwell are the obvious examples...
...In Marcuse, society itself becomes a work of art which obviates the need of art as we presently know it: . the aesthetic could become a gesellschaftliche Produktivkraft [i.e., a socially productiveforce] and as such could lead to the "end" ofart through its realization...
...The utopia of worker management and the withering away of the state, described so vividly in State and Revolution, became instead a dictatorship over the workers...
...Instead of utopia we had what Lowenthal calls the "dictatorship of development...
...Such authors forget that, to become a Nazi, a citizen of the Republic had first to question the authorities...
...There seems to be little doubt that it was not the conservatives but the National-Socialists whom Hitler betrayed...
...they need to make a virtue of group conflict on a vital, small scale and without violence...
...but even those conspirators ready to assassinate Hitler were not prepared to abandon his conquests...
...And the reasons flow from the modernization process itself...
...people can want to be vicious together...
...One recalls, years back, the special delight of a diplomatic reception in Moscow where you got fresh oranges and hid them in your pockets to bring home to the kids...
...it substituted arbitrary power for law, the subordination of all citizens to the purposes of an elite order, the total reversal of a trend that had started in 1789...
...Nationalism was transformed into "radical imperialism," populism into an antidemocratic leader cult...
...Rudolf Hess...
...Marcuse's interpretation is less than perfectly clear, but the function of art in utopian society bears remarkable resemblance to the function of free speech in contemporary society as set forth in his famous essay, "Repressive Tolerance...
...Utopian literature, as a genre, is a blatantly moralistic mode that has always been associated with philosophical discourse...
...Elliott offers no answer, which is not a surprise, since he did not set out to write a treatise in political theory...
...that there is a world of difference between even the gravest mistakes of a democracy and the deliberate evil of a totalitarian dictatorship...
...In ideology, too, they imposed on the nation a consciousness that was anticapitalist, antibourgeois, antimiddle-class, anti-Western, antirational...
...But once the regime has progressed to jet aircraft, computers, and nuclear reactors, the old controls are no longer adequate...
...The irony is that literature and the other arts are apparently to vanish from the kingdom of freedom which they have helped to create, partly through their destruction of the values of capitalistic society and partly (I assume) by their persuasive projection of utopian possibilities...
...Opinion polls show that there persists a residual core of pro-Nazi feeling, of alienation from the new Federal Republic, of indifference toward the danger of a Nazi resurgence...
...Richard Robbins Can Life Become Better...
...Bracher, who is not interested in political economy, simply states that "the Nazi leadership had respect for the top managers who faithfully paid their Adolf Hitler Fund contributions...
...Plato, Thomas More, Francis Bacon, and B. F. Skin BOOKS ner—a mixed group—have all written utopias...
...the commentaries on nineteenth- and twentiethcentury works by Hawthorne, Huxley, Orwell, and Skinner are intelligent but not exactly new...
...Though history has shown the absurdity of radical nationalism in the twentieth century, the social and intellectual crises that propelled it into the madness of fascism have only been pushed back in the West and covered over by another authoritarian system in the East...
...Is it, as Robert C. Elliott suggests, a case of corruptio optimi pessima (the corruption of the best men is the worst), or is it that utopian thought is always tainted by the thinker's desire to wrest men to his will...
...Chicago: University of Chicago Press...
...the need for foreign trade dictates some accommodation to the international system...
...With an introduction by Peter Gay...
...Finally, one could treat it as a specifically German aberration, as George Mosse does in The Crisis of the German Ideology (and William Shirer in a bestseller only to be mentioned at a certain distance from this distinguished company...
...He does not seek the one overriding cause—be it economic, political, biological, psychological, or ideological— but describes a sequence of crises through the unhappy life of the Weimar Republic...
...second, the "consultative authoritarianism" of the GDR, Rumania, and Bulgaria...
...6.50...
...Quite apart from fundamental matters such as dictatorship, you still can't seem to buy fresh vegetables and fruit during the long Russian winter— unless you are part of a very small privileged group...
...Bracher speaks of "a verbal social revolution...
...Among those cited by Johnson are: efficient manufacture of advanced technical products requiring a long developmental period, which in turn requires tranquility...
...nor will it be fully pluralist, be argues...
...He went along as long as Hitler provided victories...
...Such reasons impel Communist regimes seeking modernization toward a market system...
...but he devotes over a hundred pages to the specific problems and events that assured his success...
...Allen Gutfmann Artless Utopia...
...As for the small ones, Bracher rightly states that many fell victim to the greed of Nazi leaders and that the solutions promised before 1933 played norole in economic policy: nationalization oftrusts, profit-sharing in big business, improvedpension system, creation of a viable middleclass, communalization of department stores, expropriation of large estates, abolition ofmortgage and loan speculation [the famous"breaking of the thraldom of interest"]—noneof these partly radical, partly romantic-reactionary plans was ever seriously tackled...
...In Marcuse's utopia, it seems likely that error will have no rights, and art—at least as we know it—will have no function at all...
...Implicitly or explicitly, literature is almost always a criticism of life because imagined reality is inevitably comparable to sensibly perceived reality...
...R. V. Burks's essay on "Technology and Political Change" investigates the economic factors that inhibit innovation and balanced growth under the centrally directed nationalized economies...
...As a historian, Bracher neglects neither the European failure of nerve nor the German and Austrian traditions which prepared Hitler's advent...
...a failure in his native land and a bully in his adopted country, "he represented the disenfranchised man eager to compensate for his inferiority through militancy and radicalism...
...Skinner seems not to recognize what a near thing it was...
...The argument in behalf of such "survival BOOKS communities" owes something obviously to Lewis Mumford, more to Paul Goodman and Jane Jacobs...
...It is also true that most utopians are not satirists in any conventional sense of the term...
...Bracher shows that the only genuine, instant, and political opposition against Hitler was organized by the labor parties...
...It is to Elliott's credit that his work encourages one's Spieltrieb...
...It is true enough that satire assumes some kind of norm against which deviation can be measured and by which folly can be mocked, but the norm need not be utopian...
...Actions can scarcely be compared without an implicit judgment...
...He is unwilling to acknowledge any structural problems except to say that once we are freed from militaryindustrial spending the financial resources will be ample for the job of city transformation...
...He sees the potential for growth and adulthood in the reorganization of city life into clusters of "survivor communities...
...These are men scarcely noted for satirical thrust...
...In every revolution the activists who go for total power and complete upheaval of the social structure are a minority...
...With an assist from "exogenous" factors, Yugoslavia, of all the Communist lands, has made the most significant moves away from massive coercion and toward self-management...
...We have here an urban utopia but not a bloodless one, a community that allows for a healthy degree of conflict and disarray...
...LOSS OF IDENTITY" and "quest for community"— these phrases, nearly worn out from overuse by pop-intellectuals, are rescued and restored to life by Richard Sennett in this thoughtful, seminal little book about the urban condition in America...
...Psychological malaise finds social expression in the elaborate mechanisms designed to "control" the problems of urban life...
Vol. 18 • April 1971 • No. 2
