BOOKS
C., L. & Orlans, Harold & K., K.
THORSTEIN VEBLEN. By David Riesman. Charles Scribner's Sons. $3. In this unsympathetic book Thorstein Veblen is not the subject, he is the victim. An uncomfortable figure to...
...Mr...
...For David Ries man possesses to an eminent degree what Lionel Trilling calls "the liberal imagi nation...
...His remarks themselves are sometimes profound, more often simply clever and frequently irrelevant...
...A mentor Pocket Book published by the New American Library...
...An uncomfortable figure to cozilyinstalled liberals, Veblen is psychoanalyzed away...
...Six years now that unbaked idol has stood in the pantheon of social sciences, head packed with servo-mechanisms, computing equipment, feedback circuits, electronic information, and noise...
...such analysis serves as a social defense mechanism...
...He views from without, withholding from his objects the privileges of his own reflective position...
...Nor is this fault fully repaired by the substantial additions made to the text by a Publisher's Preface and by an Introduction containing a survey of available edi 110 • DISSENT • Winter 1954 tions of Bakunin's work, plus a short biography of Mr...
...Maybe he should have been investigated...
...In this unsympathetic book Thorstein Veblen is not the subject, he is the victim...
...Within these important limitations, his...
...IN TEE TWILIGHT OF SOCIALISM, by Joseph Buttinger...
...Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., New York...
...There is no Wnfer 1954 • DISSENT • 109 analogue in the machine to the instinct of self-preservation...
...Emotion...
...He himself does not come under the terms of his own doctrine...
...This important study and history of the revolutionary socialists of Austria and the Social Democratic movement will be reviewed in detail in the next issue of DISSF,NT THE THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS, by Thorstein Veblen...
...A writer who can declare that it was inconceivable to Marx "that business could actually make more profit by quantity production at low price than by restricted produc tion at high price" and that Marx's theory of crisis assumed that crisis re sulted from "the competition of firms within industry"—such a writer does wisely to avoid Veblen's economic the ory...
...This book is a meticulous exposition of Bakunin's theoretical thought, taken mostly from the published books and articles, not from the incomparably greater mass of mss...
...A phi losopher, his argument is semantic and, logical rather than empirical, and con fined to the cybernetic concept of "pur pose" or "teleology" mainly as used by Rosenblueth, Wiener, and Bigelow in a 1943 article in Philosophy of Science...
...He considers behavior, except his own...
...Either the "purpose" of everything, animate and inanimate, is to reach a "final con dition" of dissolution or rest in accord ance with the law of entropy—in which case the word loses defining power...
...If asked why he embraces cybernetics, he would for once answer not in cybernetical terms of feedback, circular loops, and automatic control, but in terms like these: `because I think it to be true...
...Riesman's book is a prime exhibit of the current vogue for using pseudopsychoanalytical terminology as a means of devaluating critics of the status quo...
...And if their rebelliousness hasn't been analyzed away during their life-time, such neglect can be remedied posthumously (and thereby, with regard to Veblen, a good deal more safely...
...Yet it is no small thing that an important part of Bakunin's ideas are now presented for the first time in English...
...They cite the roulette wheel and the clock as orderly but "purpose less" mechanisms, because "there is no final condition toward which the move ment . . . strives," whereas the target seeking torpedo (alias "man") is "pur posive" because it guides itself to its goal by reacting to signals received from the target...
...Riesman demonstrates a trained incapacity for pursuing an idea for more than a paragraph...
...thinking, except his own...
...The Free Press...
...It is there, and there only, that the scattered elements of Maximoff's ideological exposition of Bakunin's thought are united by a summary that stems from Bakunin himself...
...The same phrases, repeated with little variations, are connected only superficially through a merely verbal arrangement of titles and subtitles...
...Social Research, Summer 1953, pp...
...The cybernetical model reduces animal nature to the two terms of sentience and motility, while in fact it is constituted by the triad of perception, motility, and emotion...
...172-92...
...seem, inter alia, to represent the return of the repressed hostility against his own domineering father...
...Without them, the living body of his "thought in action" is transformed into a purely ideological system—in this case, a system of four parts, 56 chapters and about 1,000 paragraphs...
...Jonas notes that the cyberneti cians confuse serving a purpose (which both clock and torpedo do) with having a purpose (which neither does...
...A good critique of cybernetics is overdue...
...Anyone who wants to gain insight into the dominant temper of American liberalism in a time of war economy, should read this book...
...L.C...
...HAROLD ORLANS A BAKUNIN SAMPLER THE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF BAKUNIN: SCIENTIFIC ANARCHISM...
...If Veblen's admiration goes to "masterless men," insubordinate Icelanders or rebellious Wobblies, doesn't that suggest a "quasi-homosexual concept of brotherly love...
...or "purpose" derives meaning from the goals —the needs, desires, and emotions--of living things alone...
...If he is not an automaton, why are we...
...The book is further remarkable for its lack of serious attention to Veblen's economic theorizing, but in a way that is probably to the good...
...This, we are told, is the image in which, man is made...
...578 pages, $6.00...
...We are given not a systematic exposition of Veblen's ideas but formless and disconnected musings on a great many topics loosely related to the name "Veblen...
...There is only one example of the use of a substantial and coherent part of Bakunin's own argument for a summary of a whole part of the book as compiled and edited by Maximoff — the first twelve chapters of Part III being concluded by a long quotation from the "Program of the Alliance of International Revolution" of 1871...
...is the animal translation of the fundamental drive which, even on the undifferentiated preanimal level, operates in the ceaseless carrying on of the metabolism...
...Jonas does not think so...
...It rather gives us a foretaste of the hidden treasures that are still contained in the unpublished parts of Nettlau's gigantic work on Bakunin...
...Maximoff himself, written by the noted anarchist thinker, Rudolph Rocker...
...How much more useful would it have been if the great effort spent on this compilation of a few thousand isolated excerpts from a great mass of often quite heterogeneous books, pamphlets, letters and speeches had gone into an English edition of the complete text of even one of the major works of Bakunin...
...The violence," writes Riesman, "with which Thorstein Veblen in his declining years attacked all authorities would...
...The three cyberneticians define pur poseful behavior as that "directed to the attainment of a goal—i.e., to a final con dition in which the behaving object reaches a definite correlation in time or in space with respect to another object or event...
...or `because it is the rising fashion....' But if the cybernetician can set himself a goal and rationally pursue it, why not other men...
...argument is sometimes excellent and no where less than sound ; but it is less, than just to associate Wiener, a modest and intelligent man, with many of his, disciples' follies...
...Masterless men can be made safe and innocuous if only they are re duced to the dimensions of the middlebrow herd...
...which were assembled by Nettlau in his comprehensive Life of Michael Bakunin, itself still a handwritten manuscript copied out some fifty or a hundred times during 1896-1900 by the author...
...purposiveness, except his own...
...The organism has to keep going, because to be going is its very existence —which is revocable...
...A feedback mechanism may be going, or may be at rest: in either state the machine exists...
...Like many great scholars and economists," continues Riesman, "who either did not marry or did not have children, Veblen appears never to have exorcised his own father," and so what can you expect but "anti-American feeling— with all hopes transferred to the Bolsheviks" from the "embittered Bolshevik who wrote The Vested Interests...
...35 c. A reissue of the famous classic, with a provocative introduction by C. Wright Mills...
...Even the inclusion of one of the short pamphlets on Bakunin's life which were published by Nettlau, the classic historian of anarchism, as a by-product perhaps or a respite from the incessant labors on his unfinished masterpiece, does not make up for the lack of historical and conceptual integration of the present book...
...AUTOMATONS A CRITIQUE OF CYBERNETICS, by Hans Jonas...
...Edited by G. P. Maximoff...
...Unfortunately, they do not appear here in close connection with the historical conditions and concrete actions which entered into every theoretical concept of Bakunin...
...After having stripped Veblen, the man, Riesman tries to drown Veblen's intellect in a syrup of cultivated prose...
...The cybernetician is in an inextricable dilemma...
...Strapping Veblen (or his corpse) to the couch, Riesman thinks he can counter the strength of Veblen's arguments by discovering private weaknesses...
Vol. 1 • January 1954 • No. 1
