REVIEWS

...This then seems a deviant case in the history of ideas, at least if we take him at his own estimate...

...For once Professor Hoffmann's mind is blank through no fault of his own...

...there was nothing to report, and this, it seems to me, is the basic reason for the conspiracy's failure...

...A valuable aspect of the Lash book is his detailed and persuasive examination of how the accretion of presidential power in the period before Pearl Harbor, and the growing aid given to Britain, were entered upon only on the basis of a patient, gradual process of education...

...The work unfortunately is marred by a number of inaccuracies and plain errors of fact...

...In similar ways, the clothing of the period made the body of the wearer into a "mannequin...

...The modern bourgeois as we see him emerge in the novels of Balzac, possessed by a voracious appetite for possessions and mobility, operates on a scene in which no stable obligations and traditional styles guide behavior...

...The public expressive powers, which were so prominent in the preceding age, decayed...

...Once he and trade union secretary Leuschner were arrested, the conspiracy had no labor contact...

...A modern scholar, Stephen Greenblatt, discussing the first images of America among Europeans, argues that the Indians horrified a ruling class "obsessed with the symbolism of dress," their nakedness being perceived as a token of a cultural void.* Yet that very nakedness was seen by the romantics as a sign of uncorrupted innocence...

...it was the desperate last resort of people whom Hitler had uprooted...

...He might then have to admit that the wearing of masks is still quite prevalent even in our days...

...Therein lay their greatness...

...They become boring, and they are bored themselves...

...As a result, he has a tendency to provide only highly selective evidence that sustains his thesis while almost completely neglecting data that might put it into question...

...With the decline of public ritual, in the drabness of modern devitalized city life, people either flee into the privacy of the family from encounters with others they no longer know how to control or they engage in ultimately vain efforts to express their authentic, their real, personality by striking through their masks...

...Let us insist that Congress shall carry out their recommendations...

...Communism as a menace has been defanged domestically and even abroad, but the political sociology of the United States seems to have remained much the same after the transitory turmoil of the '60s...

...To sustain his contention that the active public of the 18th century has been transformed into passive spectators in the 19th, be it in the theater or the boulevards, Sennett draws a picture of the later period with people sitting in the cafes "relaxing, drinking, reading but divided by invisible walls...

...the melancholy evolution of the Vietnam involvement...

...528 pp...

...Roosevelt advocated intervention in Mexico, "to clean up the Mexican political mess...

...For some time, especially during the baleful years of the Vietnam War, there seemed to be little interest in, and less knowledge of, recent history...

...Lash sums up the role of the two protagonists of the book in his discussion of the early exchanges between them: Without Churchill, Britain might have gone the way of France and, despairing of the United States, solicited a 318 compromise peace with Hitler...

...Stalin was a realist," Ismay emphasizes, "and knew perfectly well that the only alternatives open to the Russians were either to keep on fighting for their lives or to become slaves of Hitler...

...America in Our Time fails to rise above journalism to the level of interpretative history because, despite the author's shrewd assessments of particulars, its point of view is still largely that of the period it deals with...

...Of the 846 pages, not one analyzes the conspiracy's failure...

...What characterized the Dreyfus Affair above all was the general and abstract plane onto which the debate moved once it transcended the immediate issues at stake...

...LET ME CONCLUDE by saying that Sennett's is among the most stimulating and thought-provoking works in social history that I have read in recent years...

...that was 15 years ago, but Hoffmann's "final handbook" contains no reference to that debate...

...q 316 ROOSEVELT AND CHURCHILL - 1939-1941: THE PARTNERSHIP THAT SAVED THE WEST, by Joseph P. Lash...

...Hence they attempt to stimulate their jaded palate by ever-increased doses of private stimulants...

...And here they become the saviors of democracy, effectively barring the way to the tripartite alliance of dictators that had taken over Europe, much of China and Southeast Asia, part of Africa, and was on the way to conquest of the world...

...When the lend-lease bill was up in Congress, opposition was led by Colonel Lindbergh, Father Coughlin, Herbert Hoover, Joseph Kennedy, General Wood, and Norman Thomas...

...In his introduction Lash tells how his approach evolved...

...In the bourgeois Paris of the 19th century, the etiquette of the ancien I./gime counted for little, and public virtues were the butt of ridicule...

...On a television program in 1971 Lash was asked what the difference was between the presidential usurpations of power that took us into the Vietnam War and "Roosevelt's road to Pearl Harbor...

...Tom Hayden ran for the Senate...

...In World War I Josephus Daniels, secretary of the Navy, was anti-imperialist and reminded the country that "an American tradition . . . more important than any naval heritage [was] `the supremacy of the civil over the military authority.'" Roosevelt, on the other hand, as Lash points out, exhorted the country, after the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, "to trust the judgment of the real experts, the naval officers...

...What emerges . . . is that among their respective associates Churchill and Roosevelt had the broadest vision and the bravest hearts...

...For example, the German sociologist Helmut Plessner, who was born in 1892, began publishing in the '20s, and taught at Goettingen after World -War II, is here described as a "younger member of the Frankfurt School"—with which he had no connections...

...Hodgson for the most part simply reiterates the familiar debunking arguments of the late '60s aimed at the complacencies and rigidities of policy associated with the preceding decade...

...373 pp...

...Secure careers and personal self-fulfillment once again are the primary concerns of students and the young in general...

...When the cafe became a place of speech among peers at work, it threatened the social order...

...But the laundered money that paid for that broadcast, Lash reveals, "came from the conspiratorial oilman William Rhodes Davis, who had floated the Gliring peace feelers in October 1939...

...He obviously didn't read Lazarsfeld's and Thielen's elaborate survey of 311 its effect on professors, The Academic Mind...

...Covent Garden and even more so the East London theater areas were commonly surrounded by taverns and whorehouses...

...Deprived of a public forum, they are "inhibited from exercising the capacity to playact...

...Hodgson confesses to sheer bafflement at the anti-Communism of so many liberal and radical intellectuals and trade union leaders in the late '40s...

...I'm not just picking on an obviously shallow statement, for Hodgson's central theme in the book is that the troubles of the '60s resulted from the lack of an organized left, including the lack of a committed intelligentsia, to resist the ideology of the "liberal" center that became ascendant after 1954 and fell apart in the late '60s...

...Throughout the book one is struck by the author's tendency to think in, blacks and whites, in either/or terms...

...In a world devoid of rituals, codes, and commonly understood signals, privatized people crave for authenticity but end up as casualties on the quest for a "liberation" that, being defined in private rather than public terms, must forever elude them...

...All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of moral imagination which [are] necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd and antiquated fashion...

...Dress in the street, just as speech in the theater, was an "artificial" contrivance that gave the impersonal realm of encounters with strangers a highly charged diversity of meanings, a playful intensity, that has been almost wholly lost in our day...

...Although it was not successful either, this earlier resistance can claim that it did not wait to denounce Hitler until defeat stared Germany in the face, and it was not conducted by people who had first served Hitler as price commissars, staff officers, financial advisers, and ideologists...

...But we are now in the late '70s, the slogans, visions, and rages inspired by Vietnam and the various protest movements have lost credibility, and the present scene in many ways resembles 1960 more closely than 1970...

...If ever a group of intellectuals engaged in a politics of conscience and enlightened discourse in 19th-century France, it was these people...

...Hoffmann does not seem to know the names of any of the underground papers that were distributed by the workers' parties, not to speak of the organizations or the persons responsible...

...There is a highly informative chapter on the media, describing the new emphasis on TV news-reporting at the beginning of the '60s in the wake of the quizshow scandals and the speedy rise of television as the public's major and often sole window on the world...

...New York: W. W. Norton...

...But the basic question, why Mussolini could be arrested without resistance while Hitler's generals would not break the oath they had sworn to a murderer, this question is not discussed...

...The night before the Nazi invasion of Russia, June 21, 1941 (an invasion of which Roosevelt and Churchill had given Stalin 317 accurate advance intelligence), Churchill said: "Hitler was counting on enlisting capitalist and right-wing sympathizers in this country and the U.S.A...

...it is the relative, not the absolute, situation of the poor that must be changed if poverty is to be abolished" strikes me as being true by definition...

...From the outset, too, it was clear that Stalin would alternate lavish demonstrations of friendship with arrogant and brutal disdain for his allies...

...The author tells the story of the conservative-military conspiracy that collapsed with an abortive attempt on Hitler's life on July 20, 1944, and the subsequent massacre of the German nobility...

...Isn't careful checking of factual information a part of the civility with which authors are supposed to treat readers...

...In the popular theaters, moreover, "wine, punch, ale and spirituous liquors [are] being constantly sold at exorbitant prices, and there freely drunk during the said plays . . . . " "Mean, idle and disorderly people," so contemporary documents assert, "do commonly resort to said plays, and after the performance is over from thence go to the bawdy houses . . . or to other houses of ill-fame . . . . " Such documents, many of which can be found in M. Dorothy George's fine study, London Life in the Eighteenth Century, are never alluded to in Sennett's study, presumably because they cast a somewhat different light on the civility of 18th-century London...

...Since Professor Hoffmann cannot explain what turned these former supporters of Hitler into enemies, he also cannot explain why their coup had to fail...

...I find his thesis a powerful antedote to the sentimentalism of works in the Berman tradition...

...What a bore to have to go over all this again...

...315 Or take the theaters, another of Sennett's preferred loci of public display...

...But they also proved something else: there was nothing but a conspiracy, there was no popular movement, no revolution, no mass desertion...

...Both Lord Beaverbrook and Averill Harriman, in the initial negotiations to bring aid to Russia, muffed the opportunity to assert the rights of Poland, and for that matter to establish the equal role of the democracies in the common struggle...

...America in Our Time is a superior example of the genre of contemporary history written by journalists who covered the events they describe and attempt to recreate them for a readership that also lived through them...

...Intimate vision is induced in proportion as the public domain is abandoned as empty...

...Nor has this important problem been discussed in the vast German literature (Hoffmann's bibliography takes up 20 pages) on the myth of the 20th of July...

...NOT THAT Hodgson's position amounts to a pessimistic conservatism...

...Here he asserts that the bourgeoisie, now seeing itself threatened by the emerging working classes, actually fostered alcoholism among them so as to prevent them from engaging in subversive talk...

...Despite his own predilections and aversions, he strives, with a great measure of success, to evaluate what happened as it happened...

...The cult of privacy and the quest for authenticity in the modern world, Sennett argues, have been accompanied by a decay of the public sphere and the atrophy of public capacities and powers...

...Unhappily for him, Bell wrote on the eve of disruptive events that produced an explosive resurgence of ideological passions, although many of the details, if not the mood, of his diagnosis look rather better today than they did a few years ago...

...Men and women were able to transcend the limitations and constraints of private and family life...

...Sennett attempts to document this general thesis with a series of interrelated chapters, dealing, inter alia, with the theater, with modes of dress and modes of address in public places in the 18th and 19th centuries and in our own age...

...Nor is it true that "scarcely an intellectual with a shred of reputation could be found even to raise a voice against the outlawing" of the CP—Dissent protested, and there were others...

...The book records the period from Kennedy's inauguration through the first Nixon administration...

...Pound, of course, was at that time in a Washington mental hospital after having been found guilty of treason, but, letting this pass, what "writers of social and political dissent" were "shied away from...

...Hitler was, however, wrong and we should go all out to help Russia...

...In between, Hodgson does an excellent job of retelling the major stories of the decade: the beginnings, intensification, and dissipation of black protest...

...Dress became drab, uniform, and colorless as the department store displaced the individualized boutique or haberdasher...

...Whatever affect the bourgeois still possessed was reserved for the domestic circle or acted out in occasional adventures and "affairs...

...A chapter on the "foreign policy Establishment" will convince anyone who needs convincing that there is such a thing, and Hodgson opportunely chose to interview none other than Cyrus Vance as a representative member...

...His answer was that the threat of Hitlerism vindicated the course taken by Roosevelt...

...Of Willy Brandt he only gives the incorrect report that he fought in Spain, and of Fritz Erler he makes no mention at all...

...In the 19th century and more so in ours, civility, i.e., the style of ,activity that protects people from one another and yet allows them to enjoy each other's company, suffered a precipitous decline...

...The bibliography lists Rothfels's answer but neither my article that had provoked it, nor Romoser's critique...

...Good heavens, there are literally hundreds of novels and other descriptions that show that they were also talking—even if that doesn't happen to fit Sennett's thesis...

...Most readers of this journal will certainly agree, although the claim that "only if a real transfer of resources has taken place has relative inequality been diminished...

...For example, Hodgson writes that in the '50s "students of literature shied away from the writers of social and political dissent to pore over the safe obscurity of Pound and Eliot, Yeats and Joyce...

...Here was the quintessential imperialist—Winston Churchill...

...This was, of course, before Hodgson himself ever came to America, but the opening section of the book deals at length with the '40s and '50s as background to what came later...

...Goerdeler and others tried to make a deal with Alan Dulles's office in Zurich: if we give you Hitler, will you let us keep the frontiers of 1939 and 1914 (yes, including the Sudeten area torn from Czechoslovakia at Munich, and Alsace Lorraine, with South Tyrol and other pieces of geography thrown in...

...In the world of strangers in city squares or in the theater, people overcame their "natural" limitations to become truly cultivated human beings...

...The more the pity, then, that instead of painting a full portrait, warts and all, Sennett has only a pike these so one-sided that it fairly cries out for correctives...

...He does not know SAP, ISK, Trotskyists...

...nakedness, disclosure, authenticity, belonged to the radical wing of the political spectrum, while the defenders of civilized masking and of the taming of natural man through the powers of convention defended conservative traditions...

...Lash cites British military leader Major General H. L. Ismay, who wondered "whether we were right when confronted with that kind of behavior to turn the other cheek as we persistently did throughout the war...

...Sennett could hardly have found a worse example...

...Possibly, he suggests, it was "the sheer anti-intellectual stupidity of the Communist Party" (is this more complex...

...Here was the patrician, often jingoist politician, Franklin Delano Roosevelt...

...This, colorful world of the 18th century was, according to Sennett, succeeded in the next by the grayness, the manufactured uniformity, the standardized wares of the age of a capitalist ascendancy...

...Instead, we learn about a thousand little malfunctions— telephones that worked for Goebbels but not for the conspirators, a general who could not keep a promise, etc...

...It goes back at least to those messianic medieval sectarians who advocated literal nakedness to recapture Adamite innocence in opposition to the elaborate clothes of the upper classes...

...Godfrey Hodgson is an Englishman who first came to the United States as a graduate student in 1955, served as a Washington correspondent of the London Observer from 1962 to 1965, and has returned frequently for long stays in the past decade...

...Lash describes how, when the Western powers were offering aid to Russia, Stalin was demonstrating that even under conditions of a lifeanddeath struggle the Soviets would remain a closed system...

...Not even a trace of the real problem is allowed to transpire...

...This was out of the question after Operation Barbarossa, Ismay says...

...IN THE PERIOD Lash chronicles there is more than the usual quota of history's diverting and disturbing examples of paradox...

...Until the end of the 18th century, Sennett claims, public life was sustained and vigorous, especially in the cities...

...q THE FALL OF THE PUBLIC MAN, by Richard Sennett...

...Hearst headlines proclaimed British and American fears as stupid, and affirmed Hitler's peaceful intentions...

...Without Roosevelt, the United States might have pursued a "fortress America" policy, leaving the totalitarians free to destroy England and to consolidate their positions on the continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa...

...At present, however, according to Sennett, people are deprived of the sustenance of public intercourse, they experience strangers as threatening, and hence withdraw into a private shell of domestic intimacy and narcissistic self-absorption that makes them incapable of sustained public activities...

...Open places were progressively enclosed because they had become dumping grounds for filth and camping grounds for vagrants and beggars...

...He does not even try...

...IT IS not possible in a relatively short review to reproduce the often exciting documentation Sennett provides to underpin his main thesis, but I hope to have conveyed at least the main lineaments of his message...

...When Rousseau attempted in the Confessions to disclose his whole private self, both reputable and disreputable parts, to the gaze of the public, he self-consciously laid the foundations for a truly radical assault against traditional culture and its pieties and conventions, as when he argued in the First Discourse that "The good man is an athlete who loves to wrestle stark naked...

...Modern men and women, so concerned with expressing their own feelings, it turns out, "are not very expressive people...

...He claims that an intellectual historian may find the answer in the "rich archive" of "the files of the Partisan Review, Dissent, Commentary, and the rest over a third of a century," although Dissent was in part created to dissent from the other two journals mentioned and Hodgson even echoes its own original statement of editorial purpose when he accuses—unjustly, for the matter was more complex—Partisan Review of "the bleakest Cold War anti-Communist orthodoxy...

...Almost invariably those who stood for *Greenblatt's paper appears in F. Chiapelli, ed., First Images of America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976...

...15.00...

...As so many others have done before him, Hodgson treats Daniel Bell as a representative spokesman of the consensus shattered in the late '60s...

...Hodgson's much less nuanced contention that the 1960s marked a crucial watershed in American history amounting virtually to a loss of faith by Americans in their capacity to solve their social problems at all may look equally time-bound a few years hence...

...In contrast, he makes much of it in the following century...

...On topics that I know best first-hand, Hodgson is less reliable, notably on trends in the intellectual and academic world in general and in sociology in particular, especially during the late '40s and early '50s, which, it so happens, is also the only period when, owing to the accident of family connections, I had access to more than the New York Times in gauging what was going on in Washington...

...As Rome's public life withered, as the res publica—which had once been sustained by public intercourse, by ceremony and political debate in the forum and on the marketplace—became a formal obligation no longer sustained by emotion, people withdrew into the pursuit of private pleasures or sought in various mystical oriental religions "authentic" enlightenment and spiritual solace...

...Perhaps the biggest paradox is that World War I, fought for conquest, domination, and territorial aggrandizement by both sides, paved the way for World War II, in which one side waged a struggle for freedom against totalitarian enslavement...

...The actor on the 314 18th-century stage, as Diderot argued, was not supposed to express his own feelings but assumed the mask that the playwright had created...

...But the small world of intimate Gemeinschaft cannot sustain this excessive burden so that the person is finally reduced to self-absorbed and narcissistic encapsulation...

...Hodgson thinks that America has at last learned this lesson from the '60s, but Bell, writing in 1960, thought it had been learned from the history of the two decades between 1930 and 1950...

...On both sides of the curtain, mutually understood conventions governed emotions and guided behavior...

...I think that I detect a trace of "the worse, the better" in the readiness of so many left-liberals today to proclaim the end of economic growth and the elevation of the politics of redistribution—the class struggle?— to the top of the political agenda...

...Let me give a few examples...

...When the first German book on the Resistance appeared, George Romoser and the present reviewer took its author, Hans Rothfels, to task for the same omissions: lack of reference to the workers' opposition, and lack of deeper analysis of the conspiracy...

...He concludes that it was mainly based on personalized and ad hominem arguments rather than on reasoned analysis of the issue...

...SOME AMERICAN AUTHORS have raised the question of the social base and the political nature of the conspirators, but Hoffmann has decided not to 319 include any of them in his bibliography...

...Curiously, this does not seem to hold in the present case: while Berman is indeed an impassioned spokesman for radical politics, Sennett is not a conservative...

...The rise of an aggressive totalitarianism in conditions of an advanced and modern industrial system determined the character of World War II...

...HODGSON is not Lillian Hellman, but he too exaggerates the effects of McCarthyism on the intellectual community...

...To Sennett, the private man whom Berman wishes to celebrate is in fact the isolated, the nonpolitical man...

...q THE HISTORY OF THE GERMAN RESISTANCE 19331945, by Peter Hoffmann...

...nevertheless, after Hitler's bloody coup of June 30, 1934 (the so-called Roehm revolt), Goerdeler accepted the post of price commissar...

...I am not denying that the conspirators of 1944 were idealists in their own way, or that their motivations were honest...

...Conduct now became a means of advertising and aggrandizing oneself...

...The title of this massive volume is a misnomer, and the claim of the jacket, that this is the "essential, surely final handbook on the subject" is unjustified...

...The contrast between Berman and Sennett, between the politics of authenticity, of nakedness and disclosure, on the one hand and the politics of public masks, of enclosure of the self, of the restraints of deference and demeanor on the other, has a long history...

...Did that create the risk of Russia actually coming to terms with Germany...

...At the time, Rothfels answered in a respected German magazine...

...The wearing of public masks permits pure sociability, and shields oneself and others from the burdens of personal intimacy...

...But they were too often oblivious to the opportunities that arose from the alliance to meliorate the future threats of Soviet conquest and domination of a dozen nations...

...Upton Sinclair...

...The record shows that virulent as was Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler in the '30s, it was surpassed in malignancy by Stalin's appeasement of Hitler, from the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in August 1939 until the moment when Hitler launched his legions against the Soviet Union...

...Throughout the book the author remains sensitive to the role of the media in shaping and reflecting events and, especially during the Nixon administration, becoming, however inadvertently, political actors in their own right...

...He tacitly acknowledges this in prefixing a key chapter with a famous 1906 quotation from Werner Sombart on why there is no socialism in the United States...

...When the German armies were nearing Paris, an "interview" was composed for Karl von Wiegand, chief foreign correspondent of the superpatriotic Hearst newspapers, by the German foreign office, as Hitler's interpreter, Dr...

...Howard Fast...

...in the Daily Worker, the newspaper of the Communist Party...

...One can readily agree with Hodgson on most of the baneful consequences of the absence of a left, but he hardly seems to understand why this became especially conspicuous in the 1950s and thus falls back on the old chestnut of McCarthyite repression...

...Ismay affirms that it was right to give Russia all it needed to fight the Nazis and that the Red Army was making good use of allied material...

...in this volume we have a drama-packed moment of history depicted with all the color and suspense of the years when Hitler (and Tojo) created an acute danger of totalitarian domination of all the world...

...the brief explosion of the student and counter-cultural revolts...

...This is then used as evidence to sustain the thesis that by the turn of the century public discourse had decayed so that personalized invective had displaced civil argumentation...

...Leber, a former minister of the Interior whom Hoffmann insists on calling "an ultrasocialist," was co-opted by Goerdeler on a personal basis, and though he can hardly have believed in the hair-raising utopias that the conspirators dreamed up at their meetings, he played along with another of their favorite games—distributing cabinet posts...

...Hodgson comes down hard and effectively on the effusions of Ben Wattenberg and others that the '60s raised just about everybody into the "middle class," but he also perceptively and sympathetically describes the persisting belief of American workers in individual opportunity, which made them so unresponsive to George McGovern and the New Politics...

...In continuing to advocate redistributist tax reforms and welfare policies, we cannot afford to forget that growth is still necessary to improve the lot of those who have not yet achieved the material comforts and spiritual afflictions of an upper-middle-class standard of living, even if growth can no longer be counted on to solve painlessly all of our social problems...

...New York: Alfred A. Knopf...

...Some of the beliefs that Roosevelt acquired in his jingo period were useful in later days when a just cause required a big navy, a draft, and huge armaments...

...And please also be sure to enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope...

...What is more, with the destruction of the public dimensions of peoples' lives, their private lives also become distorted since they cannot by themselves sustain the whole person...

...DOGMAS AND ORTHODOXIES are not very helpful in explaining World War II...

...The usurpation of power represented by Vietnam and Watergate directed attention to the "imperial presidency...

...Finally, a byproduct of the victory over the totalitarian axis was the liberation of the British colonial empire along with the freeing of the Dutch, French, and most remaining colonies...

...It had no roots...

...During the 1940 campaign, the doughty leader of the coal miners, John L. Lewis, made some sort of history when he broadcast for "Democrats for Willkie," a Republican front...

...As the family became a refuge from the terrors of society . . . people perceived the public domain not as a limited set of social relations . . . but instead saw public life as morally inferior...

...their plans, lovingly outlined and preserved for posterity by Rothfels and Hoffmann, would have led Germany back into the past, not just before the Republic but even before the 19th century...

...But what is the point of flailing away once more at the "end of ideology" writers and exposing yet again the hubris of the cold warriors and enthusiasts for world development under the direction of the United States...

...But possibly a bigger paradox is Churchill himself, who opposed Russia's provisional democracy in 1917 because his real sympathies were with Nicholas II but strove mightily for an alliance with Stalin's Russia from 1938 on...

...The intellectual leader of the conspiracy, Carl Goerdeler, had resigned from his post as mayor of Leipzig when the Storm Troopers removed a statue of Felix Mendelssohn from a public square...

...THE EDITORS provides an interesting analysis of the rhetoric Emile Zola employed in his famous open letter J'Accuse, defending the cause of Alfred Dreyfus...

...But he questioned the right of Stalin to bully his partners...

...The Dreyfus intellectuals defended universal and abstract values such as justice and the rights of men against the claims of the state and the social order...

...But he is almost totally silent about the underground work of the labor movement that preceded the officers' revolt...

...Which only shows that these people were naive and blind: had they not participated in the militarization of German life and thought, in the systematic brain-washing of the German people during Hitler's "peaceful" conquests...

...Watergate, the decline of George Wallace, and the election of Carter have ended the right-wing "backlash" against the '60s, just as the downfall of McCarthy made possible the liberal consensus that is Hodgson's chief target...

...Of the group New Beginning he knows its sectarian and totally inactive branch but not those who became effective after the split: Paul Hagen (Karl Frank), Sering (Richard Lowenthal), Neureither (Franz Borkenau...

...312 THE EVENTS of the '60s undeniably taught some policy-makers and intellectuals to "pull down thy vanity...

...Carter's economic policies are in a familiar Democratic mold and have been shaped by the same liberal economists who advised Kennedy, although Carter's policies are even more cautious and centrist than were the policies of Kennedy...

...In the same way, men and women today tend to withdraw from public committment in the quest for private emotional gain...

...Both efforts are bound to collapse, being, in the last analysis only sustained by the puny resources of naked and atomized selves...

...But his nostalgia for a world we have lost, his resolute antimodernism may move him nearer to conservative positions than he yet realizes...

...Ismay would have said to Stalin: "If you persist in your attitude of taking everything and conceding nothing in return, we will leave you to deal with your recent friend, Hitler, as best you can...

...While celebrating the public spaces on which the 18th-century Parisian or Londoner allegedly executed , his marvelously ingenious displays or civility, Sennett gives one no sense of the filth, the decay, the stench, and the sheer horror that disfigured city life in that century...

...Roosevelt did not fool the people, he enlisted their massive support for the struggle against Hitlerism...

...Would that the author devoted his energies in the next few years to bring forth a panoramic vision of the eclipse of the public scene that takes account of the many contradictions and ambiguities that mark human history...

...But it is depressing that someone as intelligent and wellinformed as Hodgson and too young, unlike Hellman, to have an axe of his own to grind about those days, should be so incapable of understanding that another Joseph, whose surname was Stalin rather than McCarthy, had more to do than the Wisconsin demagogue with the loss of confidence and defensive temper of the American left in the late '40s and early '50s...

...Not that the absence of a strong left and the dominance of a "liberal consensus" were an entirely new development of the 1950s, as Hodgson too often suggests...

...The very term "intellectual" owes its present-day connotation to the Dreyfus Affair...

...I found Hodgson most enlightening on those subjects he presumably knows best firsthand...

...But as he "examined Roosevelt's conduct before Pearl Harbor more closely," Lash writes, "I realized I had done him an injustice—that at no point did he move without having public opinion with him and that a central feature of his greatness was his ability to mobilize public opinion to get from Congress the action that he deemed necessary...

...There was repression in the civil service, especially the Far Eastern corps of the State Department, and, of course, in the easily frightened entertainment industry, but these are not necessarily the places where one would look first for leadership of the left...

...The Auden and Spender of the '30s—they hardly seem to have suffered neglect...

...Such a threat created a worldwide issue and a dominant worldwide necessity—the military destruction of the Axis regimes...

...The present volume, although it does not even mention Berman, may still be read as a response to his antinomian contentions...

...he despises those vile ornaments which cramp the use of his power . . . " Rousseau was soon answered by Edmund Burke who lamented that in the age of the French Revolution, all the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off...

...On the contrary, he argues that the new limits to economic growth now necessitate redistributist economic policies designed to achieve greater equality of condition as opposed to mere equality of opportunity...

...There is a bit of conventional evocation of the recent past in the "only yesterday" vein, some fairly hackneyed rhetorical belaboring of the symbolism of the careers and fates of various newsworthy or once newsworthy persons, and considerable overstatement of the long-range historical significance of the '60s, but most of this is contained in the first and last chapters...

...Their traditions would not have been able to give Germany a new future...

...Whoever can believe that alcoholism reduces the volubility and gregariousness of French workers then and now can, as the Duke of Wellington is said to have remarked on another occasion, believe anything...

...Sennett To Our Contributors • When sending manuscripts, please make sure that you do not send your only copy...

...Being unable to move with ease in public life, in the world of strangers, we put all the burdens of maintaining our sense of identity on a few people with whom we are intimately associated...

...P.S...

...A presentation of the record as it happened does not have to be a tiresome recital of events...

...Since there is both continuity and discontinuity in American policy, we're fortunate to have Lash's Roosevelt and Churchill, which presents a comprehensive record of events based on the major ingredient of the historian's trade—the primary source...

...Yet Bell took as the text for his epilogue to The End of Ideology Machiavelli's remark that "men commit the error of not knowing when to limit their hopes...

...The bourgeois theatergoer became a passive spectator who, to use Bertolt Brecht's phrase, reacted to the play in a gastronomic manner...

...Burke was rebutted in his turn by Thomas Paine who wrote in Common Sense that "Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence...

...Then, as Roosevelt put it in one of his 1940 campaign broadcasts, "something evil is happening in this country when a full-page advertisement against this Administration, paid for by Republican supporters, appears—where, of all places...

...SENNETT DRAWS a parallel between the decline of Rome after the Augustan Age, and our contemporary predicaments...

...The officers and diplomats who had helped Hitler to prepare his war were honestly amazed and shaken when they found out that he actually wanted the war...

...On the major issues of social policy involving the blacks and the poor, Hodgson summarizes succinctly the continuing debates centered on the Moynihan and Coleman reports, the IQ controversy, and Christopher Jencks on education and opportunity...

...Paul K. Schmidt, disclosed after the war...

...An admirer of both Roosevelt and Churchill in the fateful years 1939-41, Lash doesn't hesitate to describe their failures and, when either of them dissembled, to relate how they lied...

...Obviously, he insists, there must have been "rather more complex causes" for this than their being "turned off by the Moscow trials and the Nazi-Soviet pact...

...The Act of 1735 for the enclosures of London's Lincoln Inn Fields, for example, reads in part: [This] great square . . . has for some years past lain waste and in great disorder . . . the same has become a receptacle for rubbish, dirt, and nastiness of all sorts brought hither . . . [and] many wicked and disorderly persons have frequently met together therein . . . whereby many robberies, assaults, outrages and enormities have been and are continually committed If open spaces led to such sustained abuses, and if enclosed places, by definition, were reserved for private rather than public uses, where then could the public life, so extolled by Sennett, flourish...

...This alignment was determined by Nazi Germany, not at all by the Soviet Union...

...Max Weber is said to have started working on his Economy and Society during a period in which he suffered from a mental breakdown and was incapable of any sustained intellectual activity, etc...

...And what strange sharing of beds there was in the years when appeasement of Hitlerism and America Firsters were deterring the mobilization of this country...

...A national ethos that survived a civil war and a catastrophic economic depression is not so easily extinguished...

...Sennett ignores 18th-century drunkenness...

...Finally, there was the paradox that one of the two major totalitarian nations, the Soviet Union, was allied with the democracies, while the other, Nazi Germany, was responsible for mankind's peril...

...In a certain sense that is true: they proved that at least not every German was prepared to march and die with Hitler...

...when the cafe became a place where alcoholism destroyed speech, it maintained social order...

...He seems to lack what Else Frenkel Brunswick has called "tolerance of ambiguity...

...The foreign policy Establishment may have been chastened by Vietnam, but the new President has drawn his chief advisers—Vance, Brzezinski, and Warnke—from its ranks...

...But there are some confusing facts: Claus von Stauffenberg, who carried the bomb into Hitler's bunker, had marched with the Nazi flag at a time when his officer's oath pledged him to defend the flag of the Republic...

...Still less satisfactory is the treatment of the tenuous connections that did exist between the conspirators and the labor movement...

...846 pp...

...19.95...

...Cambridge: MIT Press...

...Appearances were carefully manipulated so as to indicate the standing, rank, and status of the wearer...

...What there was must be characterized as an attempt to save as much as possible, not of honor but of territory...

...Some years ago in a much discussed book, The Politics of Authenticity, Marshall Berman argued for a politics of radical individualism, advocating the liberation of the person from the prison of convention and traditional restraint...

...By enacting public roles and wearing 313 civilized masks, people fashioned that "artificial" world of stylized intercourse that marks advanced stages of cultural refinement...

...In fact, he probably holds values that, on other levels, are not dissimilar from those of Berman...

...I remember an "alternate commencement" at the University of Chicago in 1968 where Noam Chomsky found a perfect analogy—America's war against Japan in World War H and the Vietnam War...

...Nor did the theater audience at that time express "natural" emotion...

...One last example will have to suffice...

...Environmental concerns are here to stay, but the Club of Rome has modified its doomsday forecasts of 1971 and allowed that some economic growth is still feasible short of disaster...

...To the credit of Roosevelt and Churchill they knew that victory over the Axis dictated an alliance with Stalin...

...According to this myth, the officers who tried to get rid of Hitler saved the honor of the German people...

...Eldridge Cleaver found God...

...But then it was Roosevelt in World War II who formulated the Four Freedoms and, with Churchill, proclaimed the Atlantic Charter, calling for self-determination for all people...