REVIEWS
Pachter, Henry & Minnich, Elizabeth Kamarck & Stark, Irwin & Nassau, Harold & Kohák, Erazim
UTOPIAN THOUGHT IN THE WESTERN WORLD, by Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 896 pp. $19.95. Utopia seems deader than a doornail—no better proof...
...It is neither probable nor desirable that kings should be philosophers, because the possession of power ruins the free use of reason...
...Yet the basic question of utopianism, its validity and usefulness, can be answered only by comparing the solutions that different utopians have suggested in the course of history: What assumptions on human nature are necessary to make utopia plausible...
...I also find other "passages" suggesting that the Manuels are perhaps less familiar with Marxist than with 18th-century writers...
...It is therefore strange to read in the Manuels' book that Herbert Marcuse "was aware that Marx had been reluctant to see work as play...
...That is how I would have acted...
...These people are no strangers to oppression, or to resistance to orders of the state...
...Chamberlain is introduced as a "dominant and domineering man profoundly convinced of the rightness of his judgments...
...they may regret that Huxley's Brave New World, Zamiatin's We, and Orwell's 1984 receive only a brief collective, though laudatory, mention...
...One knows that Fourier proposed to use people's natural inclinations to make work pleasant...
...The sole work covering the field, T. G. Masaryk's The Spirit of Russia, is excellent, but it is more than four score years old and bears signs of age...
...they envisaged sane, rational policies (for instance, family planning), and engaged in pleasant forecasts of future progress...
...The range here is from Dante's Paradiso to H. G. Wells's Time Machine...
...One was the myth of the noble savage, the purity and simplicity of primitive man, the belief in a golden age...
...In that he relied on Friedrich Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, where the identity of work and play is first discovered, and on the writings of Fourier, whom Engels also praised, especially in the Anti-Duhring, for his criticism of bourgeois sexual morality...
...Why these people were able to stand against the order of the day is, of course, a question one must ask...
...He calls for giving employers incentives to hire economic marginals, asks that no policy be enacted that has a disequalizing effect, and he believes that seniority systems, the closed shop, and tenure diminish competition (especially between whites and qualified blacks) and should therefore be eliminated...
...Another clue is that this was, in Hallie's phrase, a "kitchen struggle...
...It is not enough to learn the lesson of Munich: we must learn when to apply it...
...The pastor knew that you cannot wait for a battle and then ask your troops to lay down their arms...
...For people whose political point of reference is America's intervention in Vietnam, however, "appeasement" calls forth a different shame and a different resolve...
...q Harold Nassau Uncertain Lessons of Appeasement MUNICH: THE PRICE OF PEACE, by Telford Taylor...
...That matrix has long been inaccessible to the English reader...
...Grand says, "One must help a neighbor, of course," and when they saw refugees on their doorstep, the Chambonnais said only—in Magda's words—"Come in, and come in...
...IN THIS BROADER VIEW of appeasement, other "realities" emerge...
...But underlying this sound advice is the assumption that historical reality is like a bedrock that a statesman or researcher will know by the solid clank it makes against his shovel...
...And please also be sure to enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...Unflattering mirror that they are, our bookstores show us not only how powerful but how acceptable, as well as profitable, is our craving for something extreme...
...Defenders of affirmative action respond that even if we assume that there is some truth in the Horatio Alger myth, conditions have changed drastically since the 19th and early 20th century...
...He realizes that one result of being a student of cruelty is to become unablc to feel either outrage or compassion spontaneously— and then to fear for the health of one's heart...
...Russia's two major thinkers, Tolstoy and Dostoyevski, were novelists and social commentators rather than philosophers in a strict sense...
...utopia perishes when the king thinks that he is the philosopher...
...To teach its lesson on the basis of Munich alone is, in today's world, unrealistic and, perhaps, disingenuous...
...Hallie tells us: One afternoon I was reading some documents relating to Adolf Hitler's twelve-year empire...
...unlike de Sade, he is not fantasizing for fun...
...Moderates were already on the way out, and Hitler wavered too often for us to accept the contention that this conference had to lead ineluctably to war...
...Bernal's mindboggling "fable" of the brain living without the body...
...But it is difficult to discover utopian thought in the Encyclopedists' exuberant assumptions on the possibilities of reform...
...Andrzej Walicki has covered the same ground with the advantage of scholarship and the perspective of years...
...The merit of this study lies in viewing the subject from a somewhat novel angle...
...Each of the two philosophers rates a chapter in the Manuels' book, although neither, unlike Bernal or Teilhard de Chardin, anticipated the kind of scientific breakthrough that might overthrow our conception of man or of the universe...
...That optimism, however, had its utopian foundations...
...While we are sophisticated to the point of scorning those fantastic dreams of universal goodness and gratification, it is precisely in the strongholds of learning that graffiti proclaim the abolition of the state, of work, of boredom and repression, or the outbreak of a new era in which Love rules supreme...
...There are no longer frontiers to be settled or cities to be built...
...Perhaps they had less trouble than some in being able to believe what was happening...
...There are those utopians who accuse the world of having strayed from the ways God intended, and those who think that God's work has to be done over...
...Chamberlain consistently ignored military intelligence, or bent it to other uses...
...It is because we cannot know how we would act that we must, like Magda, work at it...
...The more overt forms of social discrimination have been visibly modified if not eliminated...
...The question, obviously, is not whether we should face up to realities, but which realities to face up to...
...But obviously, one cannot call "utopia" every piece of writing that sounds unrealistic and disregards some law of nature or otherwise offends our sense of time and place...
...When, during the Munich crisis, the British cabinet considered Czechoslovakia's capacity and will to resist, Chamberlain ignored the favorable report of the well-informed military attache and accepted a gloomy assessment by Colonel Mason-MacFarlane who had merely driven to Prague, at night, to deliver a message to Benes...
...Unfortunately, however, where large groups are compelled to compete for marginal allocations—good housing and desirable jobs—the rule is in effect an open one...
...One of the plans for a united Europe was launched by Napoleon, another by Hitler...
...Hitler, according to Taylor, could have been dissuaded from war by a strong show by the democracies, even at a very late date...
...But what the book misses in providing meaningful historical background of thought it makes up by gossip about thinkers...
...That mankind had once been closer to its ideal image was taken as proof that it can reach this peak again...
...In a society permeated by racial discrimination," writes Dorn, "it makes no sense to say that one group suffers discrimination while another group receives equal treatment...
...misunderstand Marx: abundance only makes socialism possible...
...Fair enough...
...Edwin Dorn's Rules and Racial Equality offers an answer that should come as no surprise to civil libertarians...
...Schacht who were not moving fast enough...
...I do not mean to belittle their courage...
...New York: Doubleday...
...THROUGHOUT THE STORY of the Chambonnais I was reminded of one of Albert Camus's characters, Grand, who, when praised for his courage in risking contamination to help out during the plague, responds, "Plague is here, and we've got to make a stand, that's obvious...
...Of course, authors are free to write their own books...
...Hitler's utopia provided for a division of roles: contented and obedient state slaves on the one hand...
...By contrast, the Abbe de Saint-Pierre was a utopian...
...France would not fight at all...
...Its meanings have overflowed the borders of the event...
...Hallie will not be the only one who has cried over their story...
...Some people try to cure themselves of their feeling of guilt, as if it were an illness...
...Taylor looks at the plotters' commands rather than their titles and concludes that the plan cannot be deemed a real threat...
...I would like, however, to open a question that some readers might find awkward...
...His translator has served him well: only rarely does the reader note that he is reading a translation...
...New Haven and London: Yale University Press...
...It would be hard to speak of a distinctly Russian philosophy in the 19th century...
...Most will agree with Karl Mannheim in calling "utopian" only those "orientations which, when they pass over into conduct, tend to shatter the order of things prevailing at the time...
...Yet, Leibniz and Kant each receive a chapter in the Manuels' book, while Saint-Pierre only manages to be mentioned at all because Rousseau "evaluated his papers with perspicacity...
...In his discussion of Munich, as in his analysis of Vietnam, he is content to assign individual responsibility and he is silent on the underlying question of just which national interests were at stake...
...Self-flagellation may not help us prepare to be good, but neither do rushes of moral fervor and their aftermath, self-congratulation...
...Moreover, white workers because they were white were favored over native black workers...
...What makes cornplaints about reverse discrimination so specious, he adds, is that "historically there has been systematic discrimination in favor of whites...
...The problem is, as Marcuse knew in his pre-utopian phase, how to make the world more rational...
...But what Hallie calls "obsession" with his subject seems to be closer to a strong person's refusal to submit to what cannot be mastered...
...Appeasement politics gained credibility because they derived, in part, from Britain's long tradition of seeking a balance of power in Europe...
...not as a monument of mankind's struggle for a better life...
...Nevertheless, Condorcet's drafts of constitutions were Girondist: he counted on the natural and foreseeable progress of enlightment among the people...
...For Marx, on the other hand, we might claim status among the utopians...
...The Manuels rightly include in their survey Thomas Mentzer and Georges Sorel, although neither wrote a utopia, and Sorel despised utopians...
...Instead, I suspect that white Americans will continue to muddle through, devising and accepting whatever schemes will help alleviate the problem short of seriously compromising their own economic interests...
...For, obviously, Mannheim's "prevailing order of things" refers only to the social-political, not to the biological environment...
...Still, there is much to be said for quixoticism when it reminds us, as Mr...
...To the generation that experienced World War II, appeasement evokes the bitter memory of weakness, misplaced hopes, and tragedy...
...The Marxian utopia consists in the abolition of the law of value and of private property...
...I understand his passion, but it makes me worry that we, the readers, may also join in and too quickly say with relief, "Ah...
...The plans revealed by Albert Speer have all the silly paraphernalia of classical utopias: meticulously designed hierarchies and command chains, grandiose architectural plans for the capital, huge construction schemes where the helots do useful work and don't think of freedom...
...New York: Harper & Row, 304 pp...
...Taylor's conclusion rings true that Hitler's views comprised no more than a "strategic orientation" to accept war if necessary...
...utopian fantasies have yielded both good and evil in ample measure...
...For instance, they assume that under socialism the worker gets back the full value of his input—though Marx takes many pages to refute this precisely in the Critique from which the Manuels quoted earlier, The Critique, however, was a private letter, not meant for publication and of limited scope...
...Their strength shows what happens when we are able to overcome false dignities...
...The utopian ideal of More, of Owen, of Marx was compatible with the assumption that men would still have to work, not only to feed, clothe and house themselves but also to educate themselves, to become a better community and to satisfy the higher aspirations of mankind...
...Given two contestants in the hundred-yard dash, one white, fast and fit, the other black, fast and suffering from a pulled muscle, though they set out from the identical starting line, there can hardly be a question about the finish...
...His battling approach has been misunderstood and unfairly treated because he bared wounds that are ours too...
...By the same token, Hitler's alliance with the Rhineland industrialists and the Junkers, which Taylor finds "extraordinary," is less astonishing to a student of social history: Barrington Moore pointed out 15 years ago that "fascism developed most fully in Germany where capitalist industrialist growth had gone furthest within the framework of a conservative revolution from above...
...Perhaps this dream of eternal peace and of cosmopolitan man can serve to clarify further the meaning of utopia...
...but the reviewer has to ask what principles of inclusion and exclusion the authors have used...
...By contrast, a dys-topia is the description of a terrible state of affairs, designed either to ridicule a utopia or to satirize our own society...
...It is their story, after all, and in his fervor he seems at times to betray their modesty, and his own...
...Taylor shows that France's failure to act in 1936 did eventually lead to the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939...
...The reader gets no hint that the term "collective security" had become so much a catchword of British party politics that by the mid-'30s it had lost its credibility...
...For all his reform projects (he would have liked to assure a job to everyone), he was far from having illusions about the equality of men...
...Taylor does neither...
...But such factors have no place in Taylor's history...
...Distinct from utopia (no place) is u-chronia (no time), which transports us into another age, whether the regretted past or the hoped-for future...
...his aim was to restore man's creative genius to its rightful place...
...Utopia results when the philosopher dreams that he is king...
...THE MANUELS DEAL at length with an impressive galaxy of major figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Alberti, More, Miintzer, Rabelais, Bruno, Francis Bacon, Campanella, J. V. Andreae, Comenius, Winstanley, Kilburne, Newton, Leibniz, Fenelon, 461 l^ousseau, Kant, Turgot, Restif de la Bretonne, de Sade, Condorcet, Godwin, Saint-Simon, Babeuf, Owen, Fourier, Diderot, Enfantin, Comte, Proudhon, Marx, Kropotkin, Freud, Teilhard de Chardin, Marcuse, Dr...
...A great innovation in man's outlook upon himself, one that permitted the projection of more utopias certainly, but in itself not a utopian view...
...Stanford: Stanford University Press...
...The plan to "recover" this original harmony of the real and the ideal animates all utopians from Rousseau to Kropotkin, and it certainly is much alive in the Young Hegelian writings of Moses Hess and in Marx's "early manuscripts...
...Taylor's analysis of the "Halder Plot" against Hitler by members of the general staff is incisive...
...If there have been dramatic increases in the number of blacks completing college, a jump from 4.1 percent in 1960 to 8.1 percent in 1974, the corresponding jump for whites has been from 11.9 percent to 21.0 percent...
...The idea that fascists also can have utopian thoughts is somehow chilling and repugnant...
...The villagers had the chance to see that resistance of some kind was possible—and to feel how good it is...
...It is ironic that such controversy surrounds policies that promise so little...
...Hallie does not know why they were not treated more harshly than they were—why, for example, the leaders were released from the camp even after refusing to sign the required loyalty oath...
...this is called eu-psychia and describes the happy harmony that might be achieved not by rearranging the laws but through new mental or religious powers or with the help of inventions yet unknown...
...Taylor himself came to oppose the war in Vietnam— primarily on the grounds that it could not be won within acceptable political and moral terms...
...These factors also get short shrift from Taylor...
...Saving refugees was a hobby for the people of Le Chambon...
...Furthermore, one-third of the villagers were Darbyists, members of a radical sect so antiestablishment they will not even attend services...
...Perhaps, however, not all the significance of the plot should be measured by its chances of success...
...Finally, Taylor argues that the optimal time for Britain and France to have moved against the fascists had been during the Ethiopian crisis of 1935...
...Trocme had also learned young that nonviolence must be practiced and must be on time, a phrase Hallie repeats throughout his story...
...but he does try to provide some clues as to why the people themselves acted as they did...
...But 40 years after the event we should come to terms with causes as well as with consequences...
...He contrasts Chamberlain's gullibility about German intentions with Baldwin's belief that the 1935 Naval Accord could act as a gauge: if Germany stayed within the agreed limits, well and good...
...Doubtless, by 1938 these had become the primary realities...
...K. 0...
...The gap between black male earnings and white male earnings grew from approximately $1,000 in 1947 to $3,000 in 1975...
...and not a few in the West viewed appeasement as preferable to alliance with the Soviet Union...
...Racial inequality hasn't gone away...
...We learn about Sancho Panza's government on Barrataria only that it was "awarded" to him...
...For all that, Russian thinkers of the prerevolutionary days did create a surprisingly rich and vital intellectual tradition and a matrix to which thoughtful Russians still turn when they seek relief from the stilted sterility of Marxism...
...Skirting the issue of whether history can teach policy lessons, we can at least demand of a historian who would teach us a lesson that he either state the general case or draw precise analogies...
...The one kind places before humanity the next tasks we must tackle...
...Balanced and extensive, it supersedes older works...
...The students and the villagers in Le Chambon received training before anyone knew how much it would be needed...
...People who practice goodness as a "hobby" for selfimprovement, who do not seek out people to help but simply do not fail to help those who need them would surely avoid the claim to membership in a kind of mystic community with which Hallie closes his book...
...The American view of equality is of a special sort...
...In The Holy Family, Marx made use of Fourier's ideas, but turned them around: "If man forms himself through his sensuality then the empirical world must be so constructed that he finds in it that which is truly human...
...In recent years, as Marxism 471 became less and less viable as a serious intellectual option for its wards, that long hidden spontaneity has reemerged, in puzzling fragments...
...Many utopias that seem to describe a good society may also be read as eu-psychias, symbolic descriptions of the harmonious soul...
...Crises pass, archives close, and sometimes we forget to look back to count the change from the bill that has been paid...
...Today, of course, we may consider "utopian" not only the didactic methods by which the philosophes hoped to prevail, but the entire set of assumptions from which they started: the innocence of man as he emerged from the creator's hand, hence the corrigibility of his aberrations and indeed his infinite perfectibility and educability, the idea of Progress in general, and the reliance of progress on reason and instruction in particular...
...He tells us what the leaders knew, when they knew it, and, most interesting, what they could have known had they wanted to...
...The utopians do not accept their alienation from the reality of the world in which they are forced to live...
...The second group of "utopias" that, to be precise, are something else concerns itself with the extension of knowledge...
...His goal is to teach us "not a new lesson, but a great one": Munich is a "valid symbol of the dangers of not facing up to unpleasant realities...
...Both cherished what might be called "open" utopias...
...The belief in an ideal state is the product of a rejection-projection process...
...The price of such study is high, and Hallie is honest about it...
...on the other, continuation of a warrior race that would do the 463 thinking and enjoying for the others, just as they do in Plato's Republic...
...When Kant wrote Toward Eternal Pease, he was not a utopian but expounded the conditions under which peace was thinkable (he was realistic enough to stipulate that no debts must be contracted for purposes of defense...
...This, I think, is my kind of religion...
...It may be ungrateful and ungracious to deny the epithet "radical" to writers who were persecuted by church, censors, and police...
...Not so much because of his utopian slogan—which the Manuels keep calling his "banderole": "From Each According to His Faculties, to Each According to His Needs"— but because he did believe that the revolution would reconcile individual and community, subject and object, freedom and necessity, want and work: "Only in community will personal freedom become possible...
...To the Manuels utopia may be a literary genre, a constitution for a perfect republic, a science-fiction fantasy of human survival through cosmological transformations, a state of mind, a religious JulesVerniad into the inner life...
...But a story of perfection is not what we need if we are, with Hallie, to learn to accept the goodness of real people...
...To believe in progress, past and future, meant "to break free from the wheel" (the Manuels' felicitous phrase alludes to the cyclical view of history as it had earlier prevailed), to escape from the erratic ups and downs of fortune, from Vico's ricorso...
...The difficulty, perhaps insurmountable in our society, is that compensatory inequality demands of whites an altruism that is simply unrealistic to expect...
...In an age when so many utopias—the liberal, the socialist, the internationalist, the nationalist, the religious—have been shipwrecked it may be comprehensible that utopias of a new kind, more fantastic than ever, are being offered...
...IF ALL FANTASIES of bliss—heavenly, terrestrial, and satanic alike—are counted, as long as their content reaches out beyond our present conception of reality, the number of published utopias exceeds 1,600...
...This book asks that we neither submit to horror nor glorify it, that we neither flee from nor glorify goodness, but that we take them both seriously...
...Even so, there was no decision to go to war...
...Marx and Engels found the idea splendid but in need of a more philosophical foundation...
...The effectiveness of the French system of alliances with Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Russia depended on France's ability to attack Germany if Germany marched east...
...Economic question cannot be ignored...
...He rightly concludes that the information, if not the will, for sounder decisions was readily at hand: Britain and France would have been far better served by fighting alongside Czechoslovakia in 1938 than without it in 1939...
...As Marcuse himself discovered, increased opportunities for gratification have reinforced, rather than weakened, the hold of the existing class structure on its citizens...
...Finally, I must confess that I was a little embarrassed by Hallie's passionate self-identification with the people of whom he writes...
...It cannot fail to provoke feelings of old shame and new resolve...
...ADMITTEDLY, there are two basic kinds of utopias: from the one Marcuse took the title of his first book, Reason and Revolution...
...The mass suicide .. . at Jonestown (Guyana...
...Within this field of interest, Taylor's Munich is by far the most complete study we have...
...Andrzej Walicki's compendium of Russian prerevolutionary thought provides the background for understanding that spontaneity...
...The problem is not the rehabilitation of play...
...Delving into the papers of the British cabinet, military staff documents, and a wealth of diaries, Taylor has recreated in remarkable detail the political and diplomatic events leading up to war in Europe...
...Rules about rights—the right to vote, the right of free speech, the right to a trial by jury—tend to be closed...
...To do no harm became his guiding purpose...
...Oh, yes...
...The great man who had learned to live simply, to work with people, learned during the war that he could lead, and learned what power felt like...
...Nor are they primarily critics of the official Marxism...
...Bernal, Norman Brown, and cursorily with an even greater number of minor characters...
...The confrontation between the moderate generals, Blomberg and Fritsch, and the bellicose Goring eventually led Hitler to make himself commanderinchief...
...But I never close my door, never refuse to help somebody who comes to me and asks for something...
...Perhaps the real surprise was, as N. H. Gibbs remarked, Britain's total reversal of policy only six months after Munich...
...There also was Magda Trocme, who said of herself: I try not to hunt around to find people to help...
...Of course, it helped the villagers that they were isolated, a fact that Hallie does not emphasize...
...There would be no serious problem were such goods in abundant supply...
...SINCE THE MANUELS DEAL with their utopians seriatim, they are unable to discuss problems systematically and comparatively...
...Still, it is a deep relief to meet the Chambonnais...
...Asked why they were willing to risk so much for strangers, they answered, "Where else could they go...
...This gives the narrative somewhat the air of fate surrounding a classical tragedy: Chamberlain the tragically flawed hero, Hitler his nemesis...
...It is the guilt of innocent survivors, of those who live when others have died...
...456 pp...
...is outweighed by frenetic millenarian enthusiasm, the fanatics of utopia to whom the vision has been revealed can lead both their foes and their followers to the holocaust...
...WHAT HALLIE FOUND to the story of the villagers of Le Chambon, a small village isolated on a high plateau in southern France, is the other side of the horror of a world gone wrong...
...WHY...
...Implicitly, this definition excludes at least three areas to which the Manuels devote considerable attention...
...For good reason, utopias are usually thought of as a leftish vice because they must make assumptions about human nature that are normally found only on the left: that man is rational, perfectible, inclined to be peaceful if given a chance, and capable of brotherly love or at least of benevolence, or that wise institutions can cure him of his competitive and belligerent instincts...
...And it is a terribly painful and persistent guilt because, since nothing was done, neither expiation nor forgiveness is possible...
...Appeasement" is one of the most provocative words in our political vocabulary...
...Both men, in different ways, put more faith in themselves than in their military intelligence and so made decisions based more on personal hopes than military reality...
...neither the end of Goethe's Faust II nor his Pedagogical Province is mentioned...
...History books on the war years, kept separate, attract far fewer browsers...
...It cannot be read calmly, but still less can it be read in a spirit of submission to or celebration of horror...
...A fundamental change of human nature as we know it is a necessary condition of utopian harmony...
...And it threatens, at that point, to be his book, not theirs...
...Marx's real commitment to utopia must be found in the early writings where he deals with the liberation of "species man" and all his faculties...
...This concept of equal opportunity may have worked to some extent for earlier immigrant groups...
...Many would have refused under the eyes of the Marshall...
...More than a century after the Civil War amendments and despite decades of legislation, Supreme Court decisions and affirmative action programs, racial equality remains unfinished business...
...q To Our Contributors • When sending manuscripts, please make sure that you do not send your only copy...
...In assessing the failures of Neville Chamberlain and Stanley Baldwin, Taylor defends Baldwin...
...the second may become rebels whose longing for love turns into hatred and whose yearning for equality turns into a new elite rule...
...So Taylor's account is a worthwhile reminder, especially to the younger generation, of other ways in which leaders and nations delude themselves— and of the cost...
...The texts it produced are, for the most part, of a sociological rather than a philosophical interest...
...Appeasement, however, had not been conceived as a way of pacifying a ruthless, insatiable power...
...THEN, HAS THE PROBLEM proved so intractable...
...It still reverberates in Rosa Luxemburg's Introduction to Economics, where she devotes much space to "primitive communism" for the explicit purpose of showing that it proves the possibility of communism for the future too...
...The "latitudinarian and ecumenical conception draws its documentation from extraordinary voyages, moon-travelers' reports, fanciful descriptions of lost worlds, optimum constitutions, advice to princes, millenarian prophecies, architectural plans for ideal cities...
...Similar ideas can be found in Stefan George's Seventh Ring and in Spengler's Prussian Socialism...
...Utopia seems deader than a doornail—no better proof than the recent long academic monographs about its history...
...Le Chambon is an isolated village that for centuries has been a home for Protestants in largely Catholic France...
...When General Adam confronted Hitler with the fact that his forces could not conceivably halt a French invasion while Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, Hitler replied, "We have no time to listen to this stuff...
...Although Taylor admits that nothing significant was settled at Munich, he adopts it as his point of reference because it highlighted the intertwined destinies of Chamberlain and Hitler and so, Taylor states, "This is a book about these two men...
...This approach seems to be logical: if unequal treatment produces unequal results, equalizing treatment will equalize results...
...This is the crux of the problem...
...It "began and ended in the privacy of people's homes," and "decisions that were turning points in the struggle took place ii• kitchens and not only with male leaders as the only decision-makers but often with women centrally involved...
...This passage, however, occurs not in the context of utopian prospects (such as the abolition of the law of value, which really mattered to Marx), but serves only to illustrate "the contradictions between the foundations of capitalist production and their development" (this is the subheading of the page, and there can be no question of "fantasizing...
...This brings us to the limitation of Taylor's book...
...155 pp...
...Hallie calls it "horrified indifference," and the "horrified" applies to his feeling about himself...
...But the fatal flaw in the equal-opportunity concept is that it can work under only one condition—that the races are substantially equal at the time the rule is imposed...
...The resistance of Le Chambon was not that of followers but of equal participants dealing directly with pressing realities...
...Ah, I only wish everything was as simple...
...British public opinion opposed the war...
...The components of Taylor's historical reality are twofold: character of leadership and military 470 preparedness...
...And the historical lesson about appeasement raises some thorny questions of ideology and historical perspective...
...it looks to equality of rules, not to equality of results...
...Once Nazi Germany put troops on the west bank of the Rhine, France's strategic superiority appeared to vanish...
...Examples of the latter are Brave New World, also We, and 1984...
...It is one thing, for instance, to say that "Every person over 65 is eligible for social security benefits" (an open rule) and quite another to say that "Every person over 65 will receive social security benefits" (a closed rule...
...Significant progress has of course been made...
...will long remain a symbol of utopian madness in action...
...The desire to break away from the customary frame of reference may be the decisive characteristic of the utopian...
...Norman Brown or Teilhard de Chardin fall into this category...
...the new utopia [Marcuse's liberation of Eros] was destined to transcend him and to revive the Fourierist ideal that Marx had condemned...
...they reconstruct it along lines that would make it more lovable...
...but if blacks today are better off than they were 30 years ago, there is little evidence that they are narrowing the distance separating them from their white counterparts...
...it was the cruelty perpetrated in the death camps of Central Europe...
...467 Irwin Stark The American Dilemma Revisited RULES AND RACIAL EQUALITY, by Edwin Dorn...
...Taylor ends his history with Chamberlain's turn after the fall of Prague, but it is interesting to note that German and British officials met in January 1939 to divide up the world coal trade, and as late as July 1939 there was still talk of a billion-pound British loan to their best customer—Germany...
...And it can provoke a disastrous insouciance in the face of international dangers...
...You understand nothing...
...Such a refusal can lead to what Karl Jaspers (another philosopher who thought through his horror) called "metaphysical guilt...
...And the leaders continued their work without their supporting community, too: they organized Protestant services in the camp where they preached nonviolent resistance to a growing congregation...
...phase II is that of communism, when the utopian "banderole" has been realized...
...If not, then Britain would know what it was up against...
...It reminds them of false rationalization for the abuse of power, obsession with American preeminence, and overreaction to past experience...
...Sorel did not have such basic trust, nor did he think that man is good...
...Yet, the spirit of utopia erupts again and again in the least expected places...
...They even ascribe to Marx a "bold fantasizing...
...That was the lesson of Melvin Lasky's superb though tortured Utopia and Revolution, when he made the last tour of the place—or no place—a few years ago...
...Cabet's Voyage to Itaria is mentioned only where Marx quoted from it...
...for Thomas More may have permitted himself a pun: eu-topia, the good place, is ou-topia, no place...
...it also taught nonviolence...
...Dorn's theoretical argument, summarized too briefly here to do it full justice, begins with an analysis of the classic American approach, the drive toward the goal of equal opportunity...
...14.00...
...But what of the rule governing equal opportunity—equal housing, for example, or equal employment opportunity...
...The school offered the usual academic subjects...
...Taylor admirably reconstructs the 1937 "Hossbach Conference," at which Hitler and his military and economic leaders discussed the possibility of war...
...And she startled him more when she said, "You know...
...Trocme, whose mother died in an accident for which his father had felt responsible, believed he had a personal battle to fight against death...
...The bibliography is sparse...
...It is sad but true that we must also learn that Pastor Trocme ended by ruling "with a rod," as one villager put it...
...Immanuel Kant But the problem of the utopian dream is not the religious delirium with which it has been occasionally associated...
...This leads to a third group of thinkers to whom the Manuels have devoted some of the most brilliant and fascinating chapters of their book: Diderot, Condorcet, Kant, and other philosophers who have formed our modern notions of Progress and Enlightment...
...The question is whether we will...
...While not exactly a book the general reader would want to keep by his bedside, this is a most valuable reference work and should find its place on every library shelf next to Masaryk's Spirit of Russia...
...Hitler is often vacillating and unsure even though "demonic," "satanic," and "infernal...
...The two most famous examples of all, Plato's Republic and Thomas More's Utopia, must be so interpreted...
...it] will at best lead to ambiguous change in the standing of the races...
...The violence attendant on school busing for integration, the burning of suburban homes occupied by blacks who have liberated themselves from inner-city slums, the shocking rate of black unemployment, and the huge differential that persists between the income of black and white families should remind us that the solution of the problem is still elusive...
...for whenever] the rationalist Hellenic element...
...He went off to work with organizations, to take a bigger place...
...of this Saint-Simon does not breathe a word...
...He notes that Baldwin "initiated the first system for survey of Britain's military needs," while Chamberlain questioned the "assumption that Britain must be prepared to fight...
...On the average, black families now have less than one-fifth the total wealth accumulation and at each income level less than one-half the wealth of white families...
...She and they knew what it takes to get on with a hard life...
...But it ain't necessarily so, Dorn contends...
...Attentive readers may wonder what Restif de la Bretonne (inventor of a plan to organize prostitution) and de Sade do in this company...
...from the other he fashioned his later proclamation of the revolution of unreason...
...On the contrary, a view that was much at one with the main current of philosophical developments from the deep pessimism of the 17th to the optimism of the 18th century—a philosophy, but not a utopia...
...It fails to deal with some important issues...
...the other promises personal happiness and bliss, or even salvation, to its believers...
...But this is hardly news—Churchill offered us this view 30 years ago...
...They projected a future that would not be dominated by superstition and clerical taboos...
...William Shirer and Walter Gorlitz have suggested that Hitler committed himself to war at this meeting...
...Telford Taylor, who teaches at the Columbia and Benjamin Cardozo law schools, has taken advantage of reopened archives to examine what passed for currency during the Munich crisis of 1938...
...Pastor Andre Trocmd was a passionate, intellectual man, the scion of a wealthy and powerful family...
...You see, it is a way of handling myself...
...Taylor acutely observes that when Chamberlain reported to the cabinet on the Godesberg talks, just before Munich, he defended appeasement in general and then added, as an aside, "If we now possessed a superior force to Germany we should probably be considering these proposals in a very different spirit...
...the nations of the Empire were not ready to fight for Czechoslovakia...
...It was not the politics of these years that was at the center of my concern...
...What is frightening about this realization is how readily we seem to turn to an almost voluptuous submission to violence, as if, in seeking out stories of horror, we celebrate the force we lack yet crave...
...On the other hand, they may miss such titles as Samuel Butler's Erewhon and Anatole France's Ile des Pingouins...
...For years, I had been studying cruelty, the slow crushing and grinding of a human being by other human beings...
...Americans may miss J. F. Cooper's utopian novel...
...For "rules"—laws, regulations, judicial decisions—are either "open" or "closed...
...A. J. P. Taylor viewed it as an attempt to consolidate preparations for war by getting rid of such conservatives as Dr...
...Even if Taylor is correct in viewing these factors as irrelevant to Munich, they are certainly a part of the historical lesson of appeasement that Taylor would teach...
...To qualify as utopian, must a plan simply transcend the given framework or does it require a break...
...12.95...
...in a passage where he foresaw technological progress reaching a high level— virtual automation—that man's relation to the machine would become purely intellectualscientific guidance...
...Nor was this discriminatory practice confined to employers...
...Francis Bacon chose the .form of a utopian novel to advertise his empiricist philosophy and to plead for the organization of science, but he proposed no change in the prevailing order of things, and the experiments in his House of Solomon were all well within the range of science then thought possible...
...everyone can be given these rights and can generally exercise them...
...It is interesting to discover in Hallie's book that Camus spent several months living close to Le Chambon before he wrote The Plague...
...In our society," Dorn writes, "large amounts of goods are not subject to the rule of equal opportunity...
...Like Marx, they were confident that the expected apocalypse would lead to a fundamental change whose details did not need to be spelled out...
...The one kind addresses itself to social evils or to evils that can be attributed to social, political, and economic unreason...
...Dorn does here, how deeply the prolongation of racial inequality gashes the fabric of our democratic pretensions...
...If one group is discriminated against, the other group is discriminated for...
...THE DRAMATIC QUALITY of this view of history is heightened by Taylor's tactic of beginning his narrative at the end of the story, the actual conference in 1938, and then flashing back to the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, working quickly through the '20s, and meticulously through the '30s...
...Despite repeated disappointment, enthusiasts keep investing some far country with the glow of a new utopia, or some glamorous leader with the wisdom of King Utopus...
...Their questions, like their answers, were very simple...
...q 3 The reference is to "the land of cakes," where the rivers are wine, and roasted chickens fly into folks' mouths—a 13th-century satire on monasteries...
...Total technology is the ineradicable signature of the Marxian utopia...
...Philip Hallie's Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed is such a book...
...Does the ideal merely serve as a yardstick, or is a conversion possible...
...The Manuels try to make a case even for Turgot—certainly an interesting servant of progress, but a utopian...
...If the groups start out unequal, the equal-opportunity concept will merely perpetuate inequality...
...If this is true, Utopia is not a political treatise but a Christian tract...
...Both obviously meant the peace of empire:Pax Romana, Pax Teutonica...
...They refused to set up a flag to be saluted by the students at the Cevenol, but allowed those who wanted to salute to do so by facing across the road toward the public school flag...
...Marx never proposed to liberate "labor...
...it is not identical with a distributive economy...
...When statesmen face world crises, they often tell us that their decisions are based on information the rest of us lack...
...The landscape they show us has no battlefields but only playgrounds for amiable fools whose dreams and fantasies are seen as interesting byplays in the multibranched stream of man's consciousness...
...Fortunately, every once in a while a different kind of book appears...
...He speaks of learning to hate, of feeling the passion to destroy, and of his own despair at finding these desires in himself...
...Her sense of helping as necessary to her, for herself, struck Hallie as harder to understand than her husband's passionate commitment cast in the terms of his faith...
...This leads to another utopian assumption of the philosophes to which both anarchists and Marxists were to fall heir: the cosmopolitan faith in one rational humanity and the possibility of eternal peace—the hoped-for end phase of man's history and the beginning of the good life in a good society...
...At the end of their lengthy study of utopian thought the Manuels conclude that...
...With his great talent in law and military intelligence, Taylor, the chief prosecutor at the Nuremburg war crimes trial, now puts the past on trial...
...There is merit in returning to the utopian sources of Marx, and the Manuels are certainly right in tracing his inspiration back to Saint-Simon...
...Unfortunately, the Manuels never give references for the "passages" or "some scholars" they allude to, 2 but I think the "passage" in question is in Grundrisse (Europa Verlag, p. 592), where Marx indeed speaks of "labor no longer part of the production process but man merely its regulator and guard...
...Led, but not surpassed, by their pastor and his wife, Andres and Magda Trocm6, they took in the refugees who came to the village, hid them against the "rafles" (roundups) of Jews, and helped them flee across the border into Switzerland...
...To understand them we need some understanding of the intellectual matrix from which they spring...
...By summer 1938, however, matters had changed...
...The "dissidents"—the Russian term actually means "those who think in other ways"—did not spring from thin air...
...However, unlike dys-topia, there is no dys-psychia in the Manuels' topology...
...economic growth has slowed considerably and "wage competition among individuals has been replaced by job competition replete with credentialism, union perquisites and highly institutionalized hiring procedures...
...British economic interests had long been willing to recognize Germany's dominance in Central Europe so long as British interests in the Balkans and Romania were safeguarded...
...G. W. 462 Leibniz also pleaded for organizing scientific research, but never in the form of a utopian novel...
...Jaspers and Hallie live with it and accept it as a reminder that we are all involved in and responsible for our world, that being human means being implicated not only in humaneness but in humanity...
...The first is, obviously, the private utopia, the expansion of sensibility, the religious ecstasies (insofar as they are not ideological accompaniments of social movements), and such science-fiction fantasies as Dr...
...In that sense, Berdyaev is an honorable exception rather than a typical representative of his time...
...He cannot know why the whole village was not rounded up or razed...
...The problem has always been how much violence has to be done to reality in order to realize the dream...
...But we must make a distinction: Mentzer was convinced that man is good, and he trusted that Paradise can be regained if everybody is free...
...On the other hand, I find it strange that the authors say they have "drawn on" their earlier book whereas they have taken 300 pages verbatim from it...
...When the pastor, his assistant, and the local schoolmaster were arrested and sent to a detention camp, the villagers carried on their work without leaders...
...Sorel used the revolution only as a myth, and he would have been most unhappy to find himself in a society without combat...
...17.50...
...Although Taylor expends much time meting out justice to individuals, the hinges on which this book turn are discussions of military strategy and strength...
...Although his famous Projet pour rendre la paix perpetuelle scarcely transcends the framework of the diplomatic art of his age, he gets lost immediately in constructions of new institutions: a European parliament, a senate of arbitration, a military force to discipline aggressors, uniform laws and currencies throughout Europe—to which Leibniz sagely and sadly answered that "some sinister fate always interposes betwixt man and his happiness...
...The misunderstanding is at the bottom of my serious reservations about this book...
...The first few acts of resistance were small ones...
...Her understanding of the work necessary simply to be a good person and her pleasure in the modesty of the villagers who did well must, however, have helped the villagers to understand and learn to live by the preachings of their pastor...
...In 1862, longshoremen forced the dismissal of all blacks from the New York docks...
...as an inadvertent example one may cite B. F. Skinner's Walden II, the grim behaviorist fantasy of a totally manipulated society...
...Painstakingly, he compiles concise reports on the personalities and texts of that forgotten Russia...
...They did not want encouraging news," Taylor concludes, "they wanted news which would justify capitulation...
...If affirmative action programs that do not unduly disturb traditional job safeguards have aroused such vehement public opposition, it does seem quixotic to propose that government incur the wrath of segments of the community that have at least moved some distance toward rectifying a historical injustice for which in any case they do not feel personally culpable...
...I assume this to be the basis for Dorn's rather grudging support of affirmative action...
...the other paints in great detail a land of Cockaigne, 3 and invites us to jump into it right now...
...The Manuels The Manuels here refer to the two phases Marx outlines in his Critique of the Gotha Program...
...No official knew...
...He writes from anger...
...Nor does Taylor make any effort to relate the leaders to the society in which they acted...
...it eschews, e.g., the works of J. L. TaImon and Gershom Scholem...
...Thus, the "inexorable" conclusion Dorn arrives at is that "a period of compensatory inequality is required...
...The first tend to be communitarians who withdraw from the world, with a sense of their own righteousness their main compensation...
...We recently have been subject to an increase of disaster books on World War II...
...It does not offer any dramatically new reading of events...
...Camus seems to have learned that the simple life that prepares one for the worst of times requires unself-conscious, immediate caring...
...Although blacks are today more prominent in political life than at any time since Reconstruction, they nevertheless make up less than 1 percent of all elected officials in the country...
...Mere extrapolations of an existing trend should not be called utopia, or we would have to multiply the number 1,600 by ten...
...The critical event was the remilitarization of the Rhineland—knocking the pins out from under the policy of collective security...
...But what we need, if a paradox be permitted, are realistic utopias, projections that can and must be realized to assure peace, sanity, security to all...
...They are, rather, revitalizing an older tradition...
...How fundamental are the changes that are supposed to convert the "real" into an "ideal" society, and what is the relationship of the real and the ideal...
...They do not try to rid themselves of the pain of their care...
...Unlike Schiller, Marx did not compare work with play but sought a society in which both work and play would be the natural expression of man's creative powers so that the distinction would indeed disappear...
...There are limitations...
...Yet, an obverse of eu-psychia would be needed to justify the inclusion of psycho- and sexo-anarchistic fantasies about societies where every instinct is gratified and every perversion catered to...
...Our author submits that with the diatribe about Lebensraum and a military solution, "Hitler—the Hitler of Mein Kampffinally spoke...
...Although these people did not hear Pastor Trocmé preach, they found his ways compatible with their own, and they stood with him from the beginning...
...but Grand lives...
...With an old friend from his university days, Edouard Theis, Trocme founded a school, the Cevenol, in Le Chambon...
...q Russian Thought A HISTORY OF RUSSIAN THOUGHT FROM THE ENLIGHTENMENT TO MARXISM by Andrzej Walicki...
...A number of high officers, believing that Hitler was leading the nation into premature confrontation with Britain and France, planned to seize power if Hitler undertook war in 1938...
...Since the Manuels consider every extrapolation of scientific progress as a valid utopia, they have no difficulty in relating Marx to Saint-Simon's gospel of inventiveness and industry, the vision of virtual abundance that would introduce the distributive economy...
...The coup never took place—Hitler's triumph at Munich pulled the rug from under the doubting generals...
...Instead, we are told that "half of the globe's population is hovering between phase I and phase Il of communism...
...Indeed, Martin Gilbert has traced appeasement back to John Bright's resistance to the Crimean War—while Taylor starts with Britain's revulsion against World War I. Taylor is constantly astonished by the shortsightedness and gullibility of the appeasers...
...It shows us a way to handle ourselves...
...In the pursuit of genuine racial equality this may be a theoretically inexorable conclusion even if we grant, which I do not, that seniority, the closed shop, and tenure are expendable protections...
...He also is honest about something much harder to admit: before endless repetitions of horrors, one human reaction is boredom...
...But initially all did not join in and, without the space and time their isolation gave them, would not have seen how the others had succeeded...
...But what Taylor does, he does exceedingly well...
...Once the issue becomes national survival, as at Munich, the question need not be asked...
...But then one should expect them to proceed to the inevitable second part of the story: how did this revolutionary, utopian theory become first the ideology of a movement that was not utopian at all, and later the philosophy of a state that is a veritable counter-utopia...
...An open rule implies no substantive result, whereas a closed rule implies a rather specific result or set of results...
...The forcible super-imposition of Marxism as the orthodoxy of the Soviet state obliterated, for some three generations, the spontaneity of Russian thought, creating the unfortunate image of Russians as automatons printing out quotations from Marx and Lenin...
...Indeed, critics of affirmative action frequently cite the upward mobility of such groups and ask why blacks cannot succeed today without governmental intervention...
...Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich Coping with Goodness LEST INNOCENT BLOOD BE SHED: THE STORY OF THE VILLAGE OF LE CHAMBON AND How GOODNESS HAPPENED THERE, by Philip Hallie...
...So long as the Rhineland was demilitarized, France could strike decisively in the Ruhr industrial area...
...Phase I is that of socialism, when people are still rewarded according to their deserts...
...In other words, the utopian writer wants to change society...
...One must draw the line somewhere, and most people instinctively do so in their everyday use of the word "utopian...
...The Chambonnais quietly and firmly resisted Marshall Petain's measures of cooperation with the occupying Nazis, and just as firmly resisted the Nazis when they moved south...
...They have, it is true, provided a clue in their topology of utopias: these, properly so named, are reports of a strange place where people are ruled by unusual customs and laws that may be held up as models of the good life or serve as a counterfoil to criticize our own society...
...Not unlike American thought of the time, Russian philosophical thought tended to echo dominant European trends, Kant, Schelling, Hegel...
...No such difficulty besets the Manuels' elegantly written volume, evidently the fruit of a lifetime's dealing with the subject in the history of ideas...
...They will, I am afraid, continue to pay sincere homage to the principle of racial equality while steadfastly insisting on being more equal...
...Since it "intends at most to ensure weak equal opportunity...
...In The Plague, the priest, who thinks he must accept God's will to be a good man, and the atheist, who wants to be a saint without God, die...
...z It is surprising to find in a volume of this scope so few references to methodological discussion, the history of ideas, and the work of other scholars...
...Finally, these imaginary travels may not be headed for a different place or time but into the interior of the soul...
...These disaster books, like the disaster movies that have been breaking 465 attendance records, also reveal just how powerless we feel...
...In justice to Professor Walicki, his book is rather more interesting than his subject...
...1004 pp...
...We are told that Francis Bacon was an "anal type," that Restif de la Bretonne was a shoe fetishist (three times), that Rousseau may have been impotent, that Fourier was interested in Lesbian women, that Comte persecuted his wife, and that Giordano Bruno regretted not having done as well with women as King Solomon, whereas Marx's views on sex were "Victorian...
...Not accidentally, I am afraid, the Holocaust shelves now appearing in bookstores are often right next to those offering popular sex guides, books on astrology, exhortations to increased self-assertion...
Vol. 27 • September 1980 • No. 4
