Reviews
Goldbloom, Maurice & Schur, Edwin & Chase, Edward T.
POLITICS IN MODERN GREECE, by Keith Legg. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 367 pp. $10. GREEK POLrrICs is terra incognita to most nonGreeks, including all too many of those...
...Even in the unfavorable postwar climate, some unions—e.g., longshoremen, printers, and Athens transit workers—served their members well...
...The junta does...
...An even more serious weakness is an excessively gentle treatment of the armed forces in general and of the present military regime in particular...
...If one places the Center line properly, and takes proper account of the organized abstentions in some elections (notably that of 1946), the maximum number of voters who cross it in the course of all the elections from 1930 to 1961 is about 5 percent...
...It is the bread of the hungry you cling to...
...Titmuss tells us relatively little about why it is that Britain has succeeded so well in maintaining its voluntary system (which produces adequate supplies and draws on a generally representative pool of donors), though he does com ment on the broadly altruistic spirit that he feels is reinforced by the policies and practices of the National Health Service there...
...There have been much greater shifts in the allegiances of individual politicians...
...Nor are the habits of French deputies and British MPs so different...
...He also minimizes the reforms of the Center Union government headed by the late George Papandreou, and in doing so he is guilty of some serious inaccuracies...
...and the great potentialities of demand in many areas of preventive medicine...
...It is depressing to learn that there is complete reliance on paid donors in Sweden, and even more so to discover that the Soviet Union makes substantial payments to a large proportion of donors...
...Throughout, he expresses anguish over the dismal prospects of the world's southern peoples...
...He ends on the ambivalent note that whereas things look hopeless, just possibly the issue of environmental deterioration may prove a rallying ground for the race to achieve genuine reformation in its presently suicidal systems of high consumption...
...He is overwhelmed by his fiercer concern for the plight of capitalism's victims...
...As MOST WRITERS ON GREECE, Mr...
...Yet this does not mean that American political conflicts are meaningless, though their meaning is often obscured by their nonideological aspects and by the absence of any necessary relationship between belief and party affiliation...
...but the same is true of most American legislators...
...To have undertaken at all a systematic study of what might be called the social circulation of blood was an act of sociological imagination...
...He even concedes that there is an oversimplified but partly valid "equation of economic freedom and political freedom...
...immediately after his release, he visited London on behalf of the junta and then promptly returned to Greece to resume business at the old stand...
...Legg misses the significance of what happened in 1963-64, when for the first time the Left-of-Center vote went over 60 percent of the total...
...yet, as Titmus rightly emphasizes, a system under which blood is bought and sold hardly encourages such honesty...
...One stereotype dear to political scientists is that pre-1967 Greek politics was based on patron-client relationships rather than ideological differences, and was therefore essentially meaningless...
...At one point he says, "These organizations are termed parties here only for the sake of convenience...
...that the commercialization of blood and donor relationships represses the expression ofaltruism, erodes the sense of community, lowers scientific standards, limits both personal andprofessional freedoms, sanctions the making ofprofits in hospitals and clinical laboratories, legalizes hostility between doctor and patient, subjects critical areas of medicine to the lawsof the marketplace, places immense social costson those least able to bear them—the poor, thesick and the inept—increases the danger of unethical behavior in various sectors of medical science and practice, and results in situations inwhich proportionately more and more blood issupplied by the poor, the unskilled, the unem BOOKS ployed, Negroes and other low income groupsand categories of exploited human populationsof high blood yielders...
...As Richard Titmuss makes clear, in this superb book, such is the operative principle that governs blood donorship in the United States and much of the world today...
...When the fires of socialism no longer burn, it will mean that mankind has extinguished that hope and abandoned that ideal...
...Indeed, HeiIbroner sees Maoist China in a favorable light and asks the reader rhetorically, wouldn't you rather take your chances of life today in China over India...
...Such factors as the perishability of blood, the desirable medical exemption of various categories of persons as donors, and medical limits on the frequency with which an eligible donor should give blood, inevitably restrict supply...
...Legg has done some useful research on such matters as the attitudes of deputies toward their role and brought together interesting statistics on their occupational backgrounds, family connections, etc...
...He clearly shows and beautifully articulates the broad social and moral significance of blood distribution...
...Edwin Schur The Blood of Society THE GIFT RELATIONSHIP: FROM HUMAN BLOOD TO SOCIAL POLICY, by Richard M. Titmuss...
...There are a number of books dealing with various periods and aspects of the question: a few very good, several moderately good, others useful either as original documents or because they make such documents available...
...For many years it was standard operating practice for Greek governments, when they wanted to do something that they feared would arouse popular protest, to let it be known that they were acting at the insistence of the Americans--even though the latter were often in fact strenuously objecting to the policy in question...
...Legg's statement that "a substantial amount of EDA revenue comes...
...but ultimately, all blame for any errors can be shifted to the foreign embassies...
...The detailed description of the United Democratic Left (EDA), which Mr...
...Heilbroner sees in the domination of the scientific mentality a powerful new impetus in the shift toward authoritarianism and away from the market...
...Some readers may feel Titmuss is rather optimistic in concluding that the British experience illustrates "how social policy can help to actualize the social and moral potentialities of all citizens...
...To whom shall we debit the grisly corpses, living and dead, in the streets of Bom bay...
...For example, he comments, "no money values can be attached to the presence BOOKS or absence of a spirit of altruism in a society...
...One cares about Heilbroner because he is an academician who cannot be dismissed for affecting a modish New Left authoritarian bias...
...Legg pays little attention to the trade union movement and is wrong in much of what he does say...
...In the United States, the poor (who are, of course, often sick as well) now comprise the majority of blood donors...
...The unions did not first become involved in politics in the 1920s...
...It is not true that the postwar Greek army "appeared to be united and above politics...
...the split in the army between the Britishbacked faction represented by such generals as Ventiris and the secret American-supported IDEA organization, whose figurehead was Marshal Papagos, is notorious...
...a large proportion of the remaining voluntary donors give blood under one of several arrangements providing for an eventual "return" if needed...
...It was thus able to impose Papagos's Minister of Public Works Constantine Karamanlis as Papagos's successor over the heads of senior leaders with greater prestige and political claims...
...THERE IS TENSION, even suspense, in Robert Heilbroner's new collection of articles...
...Not to mention that both Ronald Reagan and Sam Yorty are former fellow-travelers, while Charles Goodell was not always a "radical-liberal...
...The increased percentage of voters in 1950 is approximately equal to the vote cast for the leftwing and Left-Center parties, the Democratic Front and EPEK, in that election...
...Recently, about one-half of all blood and plasma donations in the United States have been contributed by paid donors...
...Prices, all kinds of prices, are treacherous, mindless signs because they fail to register external diseconomies or economies...
...Legg fails to mention...
...Titmuss concludes that the growth of commercial blood banks, rather than increasing overall supply, has simply meant a reduction in the proportion of voluntary donations...
...Legg's book...
...and then systematically denied an increase in well-being so that capital can be amassed for future growth...
...Edward T. Chase Economist's Progress BETWEEN CAPITALISM AND SOCIALISM: ESSAYS IN POLITICAL ECONOMICS, by Robert Heilbroner...
...In much the same way, Greek politics before the coup was also meaningful, though differences in policy might depend as much on the current leadership of the parties as on which of them held power...
...This is so because many of us are strongly inclined to take blood for granted...
...Similarly, Legg neglects the role of the Greek Communist movement in the preMetaxas period, although as early as 1920 it polled 120,000 votes—about a third of the total cast in the major cities...
...And the December 1944 rising was, as Winston Churchill was at pains to point out, undertaken without Moscow's aid, advice, or consent...
...For both Greeks and nonGreeks, the factual vacuum tends to be filled by stereotypes and myths...
...The Greeks themselves usually know a little more about their country's history, but much of what they know isn't so...
...6.95...
...But while he is impatient with democratic dissent—one might say too impatient—his favorite target is the market system, which "solves its tasks efficiently just because it applies to the varied and tangled needs of a human community one and only one criterion, the criterion of wealth...
...in which a Tydings was defeated in Maryland by a Beall for the seat he had originally won from the latter's father but which his own father had also once held...
...he treats the events in question without regard to either the American role or —in the case of the establishment of the Greek Rally—the way in which traditionally "liberal" sectors of big business turned against the Center and went over to the Rally because of their resentment of the economic measures carried through by George Kartalis, the Socialist Minister of Coordination in the Plastiras-VenizeIos Center government of 1951-52...
...He himself cannot define what will replace market incentives and end the cash nexus, so he concludes only with a reassertion of faith that somehow socialism will transcend its internal contradictions...
...Nonetheless, Heilbroner remains resolute in his general belief that authoritarianism, collectivism, and revolution are essentials for progress...
...To whom, for example, should be charged the permanent and irreversible mental and physical stunting of Latin America's children that follows from an inability to alter the established social order...
...These things happen everywhere...
...THE HEART OF HEILBRONER'S BOOK is his wrestling with the moral as well as practical problems of socialism and his analysis of the price-market mechanism: "I think a valid case can be made for the usefulness of the moneymaking system as an instrument for social accumulation, at least in certain stages of history and in certain social settings...
...Since it is not fully ascertainable in advance whether a donor carries certain diseases in his blood, the purity of blood supplies depends crucially on donor truthfulness (full disclosure of medical history, etc...
...From this standpoint, the commercialization of blood in the United States reflects the continuing treatment of medical care in market terms...
...Both factions were rightist, but their rivalry was so intense that it served as an effective obstacle to a military dictatorship until Papagos's installation as Premier brought the final triumph of IDEA over its rivals...
...In that way, the Embassy could expect to get what it wanted on important questions by subtle rather than obvious pressures...
...Again, in 1958 when the three most important national leaders of the traditional Right—Tsaldaris, Kanellopoulos, and Stephanopoulos—broke with the National Radical Union [ERE] of Karamanlis and formed the Union of Populist Parties, their slate polled less than 3 percent of the vote...
...The tension comes from Heilbroner's agonizing over the classic issue, the social injustices perpetrated by capitalism on the one hand and by the totalitarianism historically associated with "soeialism" on the other...
...perhaps here was the book to present an integrated account of the evolution of modern Greek politics...
...Socialism, on the other hand, "intends progress to lead to the creation of a wholly new kind of society, free of invidious striving and built on motives of cooperation and confraternity...
...This split was a major factor in the failure of the attempted IDEA coup of May 1951, and played an important role in the alliance of the palace—which had ties to Ventiris —with the traditionally republican groups against Papagos and the Greek Rally...
...hence "the swing toward the state...
...Stanford: Stanford University Press...
...The statement required was in most cases much more humiliating than that, and signing it did not guarantee release...
...The late Sophocles Venizelos was particularly adept at this...
...Socialism's basic problem, he suggests, is motivation, since if "a hierarchy of remunerations" is used, socialism abandons its ideal of virtual income equality...
...in which Harry Byrd, Jr., bolted his party but kept his hereditary Senate seat, running as an independent...
...Embassy and put together with the aid of all sorts of American pressures and inducements directed at individual politicians, won four-fifths of the seats in parliament with 49 percent of the vote against a divided opposition...
...More important, he says that "during the resistance [the Communist party] became an outright agent of the Soviet Union...
...New York: Random House...
...But it is not an accurate picture of Greek politics, either before 1967 or since...
...After the election I had a long discussion with one of Peurifoy's chief accomplices, who defended the Embassy's course of conduct but admitted that he was not happy about the extent of the Papagos victory...
...294 pp...
...the necessary information simply isn't there...
...Apparently neither centralized planning nor a formal attachment to socialism ensures a satisfactory policy in this area...
...in which other successful candidates included a Kennedy in Massachusetts, a Taft in Ohio, a Stevenson in Illinois, and a DuPont in Delaware, and in which the American party candidate for President again became the Democratic governor of Alabama...
...Greek politicians do have personal followings, and Greek political parties are often formed as alliances of such followings...
...This was the result of the imposition of the plurality system in place of the "reinforced proportional representation" system previously in effect...
...To some extent Mr...
...Legg also says that "there has always been sufficient power in Greek press legislation to muzzle journalists offensive to the regime, military or not...
...Legg gives of the Center Union and ERE...
...After demonstrating that by strictly economic criteria the commercialization of blood is bad policy, he goes on to assert that there are other important aspects of the problem that can never be satisfactorily dealt with through economic calculation alone...
...denunciation of the "old political world" sometimes seems to be an essential weapon in the arsenal of any Greek politician...
...What it comes down to is that while he deplores the costs of revolutionary authoritarianism—and prays wistfully for a regime with the total dedication of the revolutionary combined with the "decency of the gradualist"—he feels compelled to predict that only the totalitarian will effect the basic changes, above all else overcome not simply the resistance of old regimes but the torpor of the masses "who must be wrenched from their established ways...
...In Western countries, the demand for blood is increasing rapidly—given the development of new medical techniques (a single open-heart operation, for example, may require as many as 60 donations), the increased resort to surgery of all sorts, the growing immunological use of blood products, and rising accident tolls...
...Titmuss, a major architect of the United Kingdom's National Health Service and the leading student of its health care and welfare policies, provides in this book a comprehensive view of blood distribution policies and practices and a devastating critique of the growing tendency to treat blood as a market commodity...
...It was therefore with anticipation that I approached the current volume...
...GREEK POLrrICs is terra incognita to most nonGreeks, including all too many of those responsible for American policy toward Greece...
...Under a new technique for collecting plasma, in which red cells are immediately returned to the donor, very frequent donations may be accepted—from donors who usually are unable to maintain the medically desirable diet between donations...
...it is the clothing of the naked you lock up...
...And that is a pity...
...After the election, it set about remedying the situation by encouraging the factional rivalries of the various leaders whom it had dragooned into unity...
...The indictment is, of course, based on fact...
...Indeed, the one group to which the junta was from the very beginning not merely considerate but obsequious was big business...
...what he does not observe is that what was happening, as far as the voters were concerned, was a realignment within permanent groupings...
...The ascendant elites are the scientists and the technologists, with mentalities antagonistic to individual entrepreneurship with its anarchic social consequences...
...The current risk of serum hepatitis following transfusion is about three or four times greater in the United States than it is in Britain...
...The same arguments have been used by the Communists, as well as even by democratic reformers...
...This was before the influx of the Asia Minor refugees, who were later to become the backbone of Left and Center parties...
...An important one is Mr...
...It is important in understanding Heilbroner to distinguish between his fluctuating roles of advocacy and prediction...
...Quite apart from deleterious effects on the health of donors, there is a substantial probability of dangerous impurities in the collected blood...
...In the 1952 elections, for example, the Greek Rally of Marshal Alexander Papagos united most of the factions of the Right with certain politicians formerly belonging to the Center, but with close ties to big business and the Americans...
...But then Bobby Kennedy started out as assistant counsel to Joe McCarthy's committee, while Joe himself originally beat Bob LaFollette with the help of Communist votes and money...
...Legg is misled by the continual birth and death of parties in Greece...
...Even here, however, there are some inaccuracies...
...Socialism is, at its root, the effort to find a remedy in social terms for the affront to reason and morality in the status quo," he writes...
...The change was rammed down the throat of an unwilling parliament by public ultimatums from Ambassador John Peurifoy...
...In fact, it was precisely during the resistance and the immediate postwar period that the CP was not simply an agent of the Soviet Union...
...certainly not in English...
...the money you bury is the redemption of the poor...
...Legg suggests that deputies tend to shift from opposition parties to the one in power...
...339 pp...
...In spite of all its weaknesses and errors, this is not a bad book...
...Indeed, the junta can and does claim that the 1967 coup was a necessary prerequisite to the establishment of a "true democracy" in which the nation's interest would triumph over traditional influence networks...
...from certain trade unions...
...One leading capitalist, Professor Stratis Andreadis, was arrested for having given money to EDA...
...But most are wretched...
...Nor is it correct to say that "large-scale labor organization has had little success in Greece...
...Most of the junta's decrees on economic matters have embodied new favors for big business, and the military government has been at least as accessible to its blandishments as any civilian government ever was...
...Certainly, no major Greek parties except those influenced by the Communists have ever been parties in the same sense as the Socialist, Communist, and Christian Democratic parties of Europe...
...It is fair to say that the problem of the legitimacy of the ruling elite in such situations does not seem to trouble Heilbroner as much as it might...
...Because of his overemphasis on the singularity of Greek politics, Mr...
...And with Embassy backing, Karamanlis was able to maintain his leadership of the bulk of the Right, which he reorganized as the National Radical Union (ERE) for eight years...
...This party, initiated in the U.S...
...It is the preservation of such humane values, as well as the physical health of human beings, that is imperiled when we treat blood as a market commodity (for if we can treat blood in this way, Titmuss asks, what is there in human life that cannot be so treated...
...Heilbroner is profoundly skeptical of Marcuse's faith that in a setting of socialist abun BOOKS dance, man's invidious selfish nature would give way to Eros and the Nirvana Principle...
...That book, unfortunately, remains to be written...
...Social policy "must inevitably be concerned with the unquantifiable and unmethodological aspects of man as well as with those aspects which can be identified and counted...
...7.95...
...Leaders have shifted from one party to another...
...Thus in 1952 the two politicians who had respectively headed the Right and Center in Corinth for years, Constantine Tsaldaris and Constantine Rendis, both ran on the slate of the Center, but the former Tsaldaris voters remained true to their traditional politics rather than their traditional leader, and went over en bloc to the rightist Greek Rally, which carried the district...
...Legg substantially underestimates the role of the palace in the politics of postwar Greece...
...most of these had been convicted of such crimes as multiple murders...
...Reflecting on Heilbroner's book, it seemed to me that what appears to drive him most strongly is not some ideological fervor but his sense of repeated outrage over the fact that since our society's guiding dynamic, the pricemarket system, does not register social values truly, then all judgments, all allocations are awry, in fact perverse, corrupt...
...That, indeed, was one of the things some highly placed Americans as well as large sections of the Greek officer corps didn't like about the Papandreou government, and hence one of the major causes of its downfall in 1965 as well as of the 1967 coup...
...Legg comments on the 1946 election without mentioning that the entire Left and Left-Center boycotted it...
...In contrast, the 1946 uprising was a Cominform operation from start to finish—and the finish was a result of the expulsion of Yugoslavia, the principal guerrilla base, from the Cominform...
...Redistribution in termsof blood and blood products from the poor tothe rich appears to be one of the dominanteffects of the American blood banking systems...
...None of this is to be learned from Mr...
...in Greece, the contrary is more often the case...
...Those freed in recent amnesties, and many of those still in concentration camps where they have remained without charges for almost four years, are to a large extent old and sick...
...To describe them as "hard core" is certainly a peculiar use of language...
...And one may find some ambiguity here...
...Strong local connections certainly helped a politician to get elected, but longestablished local grandees have repeatedly found themselves ignominiously defeated when they ran without the support of the major party within their ideological tendency...
...But the actual goal was more often political instability...
...Communications between Greece and Moscow during the war were practically nonexistent, so the Greek Communists had to act on their own...
...They only register effective (i.e., cash-backed) demand, oblivious to malign or benign side effects, much less social need...
...Titmuss brings together an enormous amount of hitherto uncoordinated data...
...Isn't this really the unstated, since barely discerned, underlying cause of the alienation of America's young and the despair of its old...
...Certainly it seems likely that the major characteristics of a society's general system of health care are likely to be found as well in such subsidiary systems as that involving the distribution of blood...
...Thus, while he acknowledges the evils of revolutionists, Communists or otherwise, he writes: We tend to count carefully each corpse at tributable to the terrorists, guerrillas, or avowed soldiers of revolutionary action, but to ignore the bodies of those who perish because of the actions of our own side, military or not...
...Socialism is the expression of a collective hope for mankind, the idealization of what it conceives itself to be capable of...
...there were strikes in Northern Greece against Venizelos's involvement of Greece in World War I on the side of the Allies, and a number of union leaders were imprisoned as a result...
...ROOKS Mr...
...One of the easily foreseeable results of this situation—though it took the Embassy by surprise—was a popular front between the Center and the Communistinfluenced Left in the next election...
...By reviewing a wide array of official and medical surveys and analyses, supplemented by original research of his own (for example, on the expressed motives of voluntary donors in Britain for giving blood...
...He is certainly correct, for instance, when he points out that foreign intervention in Greek affairs, massive though it has been, has been less than the Greeks believed it to be...
...Legg is in error in believing that within months after the coup of April 21, 1967, "only the hard core who refused to renounce their political ties and to abstain from future political activity remained in custody...
...its attentions were reciprocated...
...This represented the first real breakthrough in the pattern of almost even division, which had stood in the way of radical reform...
...On the basis of his careful study of the private market in blood in the United States (as compared to the completely voluntary British system), he reaches the following conclusions...
...This charge has been taken up by both the Left and the ruling junta for their own reasons...
...And again, "Greek politicians can make extravagant promises...
...Yet, without differentials in income rewards for labor, men may not be attracted to where they are needed and hence increasingly "coercive planning" is used, "with all the difficulties of efficiency and morale that such measures must bring...
...the U.S...
...Legg says it did...
...So far as I know, no comprehensive study of modern Greek politics exists in any language...
...BOOKS The reader may assume that Heilbroner would choose Communist China, yet a while back in this magazine (November–December 1967) he gave the qualified response that "To be sure, if I could choose to be an intellectual in both nations I would opt for the other [the Indian] side...
...In the United States, the difficulties are compounded because of the lack of any central planning...
...In recent years, however, no party based only on such relationships has succeeded in getting to first base in Greece...
...Among other things, Kartalis had forced leading business interests to pay back taxes which had acmumulated for years, and had called in government loans given to industrialists at low interest for plant expansion but used by them to speculate against the Drachma...
...sometimes they have carried large numbers of followers with them—but more often in recent years they have not, a fact Mr...
...The arrest was never announced, and he was released in a few days for value received...
...Embassy usually preferred a parliament in which the Right and Center were fairly closely balanced, with a small group of deputies particularly responsive to the Embassy's wishes holding the balance of power...
...Viewing blood distribution practices as an index of the quality of social life, Titmuss insists that we should distinguish between mere economic policy and more general social policy...
...Nor did the Papandreou government ever make use of administrative deportation, as Mr...
...if Greek democracy was simply a facade for a corrupt shell game, then it can be argued that its destruction was at worst a venial sin...
...Mr...
...In the foreseeable future, there appears to be no predictable limit to demand in countries like the United States and Britain, more especially if account is taken of unmet needs...
...Legg notes, and it is widely recognized, that in Greece they have involved a complex system of clientage...
...His analyses often serve to illuminate particular aspects of Greek life, and his book is useful if handled with care...
...Yet, as Titmuss documents, there is in fact a very serious world blood crisis with respect both to adequacy of supplies and medically sound criteria of quality...
...comparable figures for Britain are between 1 and 2 percent...
...He concludes that however cruel revolutionaries (Chinese, Cuban) may be, they have demonstrated an ability to lead men "out of their misery for at least the first critical stage of the journey," whereas at this juncture in history "it is the shameful fact that we have nothing as good and, worse than that, have ranged ourselves against nearly every movement that might have led men toward a better life, on the grounds of our opposition to Communism...
...the Embassy had not wanted even its hand-crafted party to be too securely in power...
...Legg stresses "political stability" as one of the aims of American intervention in Greek politics...
...In fact, of some hundreds in prison in 1963 for political offenses—including common-law crimes committed during the civil war—only about a dozen remained in July 1965, when Papandreou was dismissed by the King...
...this influence, even exerted in the awarding of contracts, was probably the most distinctive feature of Greek political life...
...A not insignificant proportion of donors consists of Skid Row derelicts and drug addicts who donate as frequently as possible, and who consider "donorship" a major source of income...
...the rates in Japan and West Germany, both heavily reliant on purchased supplies, greatly exceed the American ones...
...But though he concedes here the great difficulties, nonetheless he can foresee no hope that capitalism can ever overcome the truly gross inequities of society, while socialism, though it may well have to use the market as a functional tool, in fact remains the only hope for social justice...
...if present trends continue, there is every indication that the crisis will get much worse...
...thus both George Kartalis, the British Labor party protege who was responsible for most of the rather considerable achievements of the Center governments of 1950-52, and Michael Kyrkos, one of the leaders of the Communist-sponsored United Democratic Left (EDA), started out as ministers in a prewar right-wing government headed by Panagis Tsaldaris...
...In pre-Metaxas days, there were very effective unions among the railroad workers and certain other groups...
...Greek deputies did usually spend much more effort on smoothing the way of their constituents with government agencies than on their legislative duties...
...New York: Pantheon Books...
...He feels the chief new directive force in 20th-century history is technology, and that its impact is toward "the conscious direction over and control of the environment, including the social environment," "a deliberate application of intelligence to social problems...
...Perhaps one should also consider the right-wing thugs convicted of the murder of the EDA deputy Gregory Lambrakis, described in "Z," as political prisoners...
...It has been difficult for Greeks to appreciate that major powers have interests elsewhere that might dictate policy toward Greece, or that outside powers do not have to control every internal action...
...This probably comes from a misreading of a passage in Jean Meynaud's Les Forces Politique en Grece (the best survey of postwar Greek politics, rather sympathetic to the Communists, but scholarly and objective) in which Meynaud explains that under conditions as they existed in Greece EDA could not get significant financial trade-union support...
...The fact that this position is reached rather tortuously by a middleaged, liberal academician of extreme sophistication, with a background of Harvard, Wall Street, free-lance writing, teaching, and intimate association with the "New York intellectuals" traumatized by the spectacle of Stalinism and by the disintegration of the American socialist movement—this fact endows it with a special significance...
...Legg follows the usual custom of downgrading the significance of Greek political parties...
...Mr...
...Mr...
...His inner debate is agonizing, indeed, because of the earnestness with which he strives to give full marks to each side even as his predilection is so deeply socialist...
...Nor is it true that "the more influential business figures were arrested at the beginning of the coup...
...How strongly this injunction has moved Heilbroner is reflected in the high percentage of his writings about the undeveloped world...
...Perhaps the best way for an American to picture the nature of Greek political life before 1967 is to imagine a situation in which the Republican mayor of New York backed the Democratic candidate for governor, while the defeated Democratic candidate for mayor supported the Republican—a Rockefeller—for reelection to the office he had originally taken from a Harriman and successfully defended against a Morgenthau...
...In his concluding essay on "Ecological Armageddon," Heilbroner reviews the horrors of overpopulation and resource exploitation...
...by the time Marshal Papagos died in 1955, the Embassy had obtained within the Greek Rally the sort of decisive role it had lost in Parliament because of the Rally's overwhelming majority in that body...
...others sought asylum outside the country...
...On the other hand, almost all those connected with the present regime whose names meant anything before 1967 are former Communists or fellow-travelers...
...Vintage edition, $1.95...
...crucial shortages may arise in some communities while supplies are wasted in others...
...Heilbroner does not pretend to have a pat answer—indeed he devotes much discussion to the technical problem of socialist pricing, to von Mises's and Hayek's critiques, and Oscar Lange's rebuttals...
...The book is a marvelous demonstration of the ways in which systematic social research—even in its use of statistical survey results—can at the same time be both "relevant" and theoretically provocative...
...Legg properly recognizes as a political party organized by the principle of "democratic centralism," is a more accurate picture than the one Mr...
...He is utterly skeptical of those like C. P. Snow and Sakharov who see a solution in a massive payments transfer from the rich to the poor, or through the wonders of new technology...
...While it is certainly true that prejunta press legislation was no libertarian model, the fact is that it did not—even during the civil war—effectively muzzle the opposition press...
...Despite some appearances to the contrary, they are primarily the following of BOOKS individual leaders...
...FROM EACH ACCORDING TO HIS NEEDS, to each according to his abilities...
...one suspects that the Embassy let him get away with it because his Center to Right-Center Liberal party had a strategic position in the making and unmaking of majorities and was often ready to use that position in the interest of the Embassy...
...Studies suggest that between 15 and 30 percent of the blood collected in the United States is wasted...
...Heilbroner quotes this stunning passage from Ambrose, the fourth-century Bishop of Milan, and it can serve as the theme for his book: "Think you that you commit no injustice by keeping to yourself alone what would be the means of life to many...
...The political, social, and psychological barriers are such, he emphasizes, that change can only come through revolution and the iron disciplines, "the ruthless energy" of regimes capable of coercing the revolutionary generation to sacrifice itself for future generations...
...even in the relatively stable atmosphere of German politics, the Social Democratic President of the Bundesrepublik is a former Christian Democratic Interior Minister...
...Thus he states that under Papandreou BOOKS "only a few political prisoners were released...
...As Titmuss demonstrates, commercialization has a pronounced negative effect on the quality of available drug supplies...
...The prospect of ecological disaster may well drive home the grand lesson of the social costs of endless, unaccountedfor private-profit seeking...
...Legg makes many perceptive comments BOOKS on Greek political and social life, though they sometimes come as asides, unsupported by evidence...
...one suspects that legislators elected from local constituencies rather than at large will always tend to function in this way...
...The fact is that under George Papandreou the people of Greece were freer than they ever had been before...
...It is in his discussion of socialism's future that he describes its recourse to the market mechanism as necessary to prevent lumbering bureaucratic inefficiency...
...He had given it to all parties...
Vol. 18 • August 1971 • No. 4
