On Knowledge and Power
Mills, C. Wright
1 During the last few years I have often thought that American intellectuals are now rather deeply involved in what Freud once called "the miscarriage of American civilization." I do not...
...This is, perhaps, as it must be, given the immorality of accomplishment, but what is somewhat disconcerting about it is that these men are below the level on which they might feel a little bit ashamed of the uncultivated level of their relaxation and of their mental fare, and that no intellectual public, by its reactions, tries to educate them to such uneasiness...
...Knowledge seldom lends power to the man of knowledge...
...The United States is now engaged with other nations, particularly Russia, in a full-scale competition for cultural prestige based on nationality...
...Bad men increase in knowledge as fast as good men," John Adams wrote, "and science, arts, taste, sense and letters, are employed for the purpose of injustice as well as for virtue...
...Lionel Trilling has written optimistically of "new intellectual classes," and has even referred to the Luce publications as samples of high "intellectual talent...
...It is not natural in the course of their careers for men of knowledge to meet with those of power...
...Moreover, in using up, in one way or another, the heritage of liberal ideas, banalizing them as it put them into law, the New Deal turned liberalism into a set of administrative routines to defend rather than a program to fight for...
...He is a commander of the age of the memo and the briefing...
...The first is dignified and eloquent, the argument marching from principle through illustration to conclusion...
...Such ideas are propped up by many little slogans about those who "teach because they can't do," and about "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich...
...but persons of power do surround themselves with men of some knowledge, or at least with men who are experienced in shrewd dealings...
...But the supposed, and secret, knowledge of some men-on-the-powerful-make, and their very free use thereof, has consequence for other men who have not the power of defense...
...And the point to be made about this is that public communications from those who make powerful decisions or who would have us vote them into such decision-making places, competes with it, and more and more takes on those qualities of mindlessness and myth which commercial propaganda or advertising have come to exemplify...
...In America today, men of affairs are not so much dogmatic as they are mindless...
...Joseph Wood Krutch, The Measure of Man (Indianapolis: Dobbs-Merrill, 1954) . 1' iv THE DEMOCRATIC MAN ASSUMES the existence of a public, and in his rhetoric asserts that this public is the very seat of sovereignty...
...Where getting ahead requires the good opinions of more powerful others, their judgments become prime objects of concern...
...And in a society of power and wealth, knowledge is valued as an instrument of power and wealth, and also, of course, as an ornament in conversation, a tidbit in a quiz program...
...Intellectual work is related to power in numerous ways, among them these: with ideas one can uphold or justify power, attempting to transform it into legitimate authority...
...And what this makes possible is the prevalence of the kindergarten chatter, as well as decisions having no rational justifications which the intellect could confront and engage in debate...
...That was in 1790...
...When pressed further by reporters he asserted that the "military chiefs think it is sound, and I think it is sound," and later, when asked about specific cases, added: "In some cases, all you can do is ask the Lord...
...with liberal hope carefully * Examples of The American Celebration are embarrassingly available...
...The New York Times Book Review, August 23, 1953...
...They have made plain the central place now achieved in the governmental process by secret police and secret "investigations," to the point where we must now speak of a shadow cabinet based in considerable part upon new ways of power which include the wire tap, the private eye, the widespread use and threat of blackmail...
...If you ask to what the intellectual belongs, you must answer that he belongs first of all to that minority which has carried on the big discourse of the rational mind, the big discourse that has been going on—or off and on—since western society began some two thousand years ago in the small communities of Athens and Jerusalem.*** This big discourse is not a vague thing to which to belong—even if as lesser participants—and it is the beginning of any sense of belonging that is worthwhile, and it is the key to the only kind of belonging that free men in our time might have...
...up by economic boom and military fright, the noisier political initiative has been seized by a small group of petty conservatives, which on the middle levels of power, has managed to set the tone of public life...
...Nowadays what we are up against is precisely the absence of mind of any sort as a public force...
...Today that maintenance requires intellectuals of quite some skill and persistence, for much reality is now officially defined by those who hold power...
...The entire series of decisions concerning the production and the use of atomic weaponry has been made without any genuine public debate, and the facts needed to engage in that debate intelligently have been officially hidden, distorted, and lied about...
...so John Reed reports to America the early phase of Bolshevism...
...and it rests upon the need, shared by many spokesmen and statesmen as urgent, to create and to uphold the cultural prestige of America abroad.* THE NOISY CONSERVATIVES, OF COURSE, have no more won political power than administrative liberals have retained it...
...All around, just below the weighty man of affairs, are his technical lieutenants of power who have been assigned the role of knowledge and even of speech: his public relations man, his ghost, his administrative assistants, his secretaries...
...Wilson, with his God and his Experts, because in his assertion he explicitly denies two things needed in a democracy: articulate and knowledgeable publics, and political leaders who if not men of reason are at least reasonably responsible to such knowledgeable publics as exist...
...What is important about this is that by implication and omission, by emphasis and sometimes by flat statement, this astounding volume of propaganda for commodities is often untruthful and misleading...
...The problem of knowledge and power is, and always has been, the problem of the relations of men of knowledge with men of power...
...For dogma has usually meant some more or less elaborated justification of ideas and values, and thus has had some features (however inflexible and closed) of mind, of intellect, of reason...
...and whether it be a direct lie or a lie by omission, whether it be by virtue of official secret or an honest error...
...But political intellectuals too have been giving up the old ideal of the public relevance of knowledge...
...today we have good reason to know that it is so...
...So the Romantic poets symbolize the French Revolution to an English public and elaborate one strain of its doctrinal legitimation...
...But to say that those who succeed to power must be "smart," is to say that power is knowledge...
...In the meantime, in those channels, political rhetoric continues to slide lower and lower down the scale of cultivation and sensibility...
...His intelligence is revealed only by his occasional realization that he is not up to the decisions he sometimes feels called upon to confront...
...How many men would be in both our line-ups...
...So, in this context of material prosperity, with the noisy little men of the petty right successfully determining the tone and level of public sensibility...
...And they have done so in a manner that reveals clearly the basis upon which their attractive power rests: they have attacked the symbols of status and the figures of established prestige...
...I1 Once upon a time, at the beginning of the United States, men of affairs were also men of culture: to a considerable extent the elite of power and the elite of culture coincided, and where they did not coincide as persons they often overlapped as circles...
...For what America has got abroad is power...
...In so far as he is politically adroit, the main tenet of his politics is to find out as much of the truth as he can, and to tell it to the right people, at the right time, and in the right way...
...Wilson, what room is there for political leadership...
...with radicalism deflated and radical hope stoned to death by thirty years of defeat—the political intellectuals have been embraced by the conservative mood...
...What is at the root of these anxieties is not simply international tension and the terrible, helpless feeling of many that another war is surely in the works...
...A Secretary of the Army, also a man of older family wealth, is told off by upstarts, and in public brawl disgraced by unestablished nihilists...
...But, if we mean what the words seem to mean, surely we would find few if any men in America today who were in both groups, and surely we could find many more at the time this nation was founded than we could find today...
...But more importantly, most have been so busy defending civil liberties that they have had neither the time nor the inclination to use them...
...Mills, "Liberal Values in the Modern World," Anvil and Student Partisan, Winter 1952...
...Only when mind has an autonomous basis, independent of power, but powerfully related to it, can it exert its force in the shaping of human affairs...
...Given the caliber of the American elite, and the immorality of accomplishment in terms of which they are selected, perhaps we should have expected this...
...For these men have replaced mind by the platitude, and the dogmas by which they are legitimated are so widely accepted that no counter-balance of mind prevails against them...
...Most men are encouraged to assume that, in general, the most powerful and the wealthiest are also the most knowledgeable or, as they might say, the smartest...
...Cf...
...George Washington in 1783 read Voltaine's "Letters" and Locke's "On Human Understanding...
...Among them there is no demand and no dissent, and no opposition to the monstrous decisions that are being made without deep or widespread debate, in fact with no debate at all...
...In these respects we have, I believe, suffered grievous decline.* There is little union in the same persons of knowledge and power...
...but he has often become a consultant, and moreover a consultant to a man who is neither king-like nor philosophical...
...Among these values none has been held higher than the grand role of reason in civilization and in the lives of its civilized members...
...3, Mr...
...He is open only to abbreviated and vulgarized, pre-digested and slanted ideas...
...otherwise how could they be where they are...
...In this competition, what is at issue is American music and American literature and American art, and, in the somewhat higher meaning than is usually given to that term, The American Way of Life...
...The characteristic member of the higher circles today is an intellectual mediocrity, sometimes a conscientious one, but still a mediocrity...
...so Rousseau legitimates the French Revolution, Milton the regime of Cromwell, Marx—in vulgarized form—the Russian revolution.** And so, in an intellectually petty way, do the U. S. intellectuals now embraced by the conservative mood—whether they know it or not— serve to legitimate the mindless image of the American ascendancy abroad, and the victory of the silent conservatives at home...
...Atlantic Monthly, August 1949...
...The intellectual ought to be the moral conscience of his society, at least with reference to the value of truth, for in the defining instance, that is his politics...
...it is the respected judgments of Secretaries of State, the earnest platitudes of Presidents, the fearful self-righteousness of sincere young American politicians from sunny California, that is the main danger...
...New Contributors to this issue:—HERBERT MARCUSE is internationally known as a writer on political philosophy and as the author of a study of Hegel and Marx Reason and Revolution .. E. V. WALTER . has written on conservatism for Partisan Review and the scholarly journals...
...Cf...
...matter, cultivated men of sensibility...
...It is not, however, primarily a matter of the distribution of "intelligence"—as if intelligence were a homogeneous something of which there may be more or less...
...Knowledge and power are not truly united inside the ruling circles...
...That evaluation is what is lacking from the American power elite...
...it is seen as an instrument...
...Such men as these are crackpot realists, who, in the name of realism have constructed a paranoid reality all their own and in the name of practicality have projected a utopian image of capitalism...
...The powerful and the wealthy must be the men of most knowledge...
...with the liberal rhetoric made official, then banalized by widespread and perhaps illicit use...
...BERTRAM SARASON is presently at work on a book about Edmund Burke . . . WILLIAM NEWMAN has written about British politics and culture for the London Twentieth Century...
...What knowledge does to a civilization (in revealing its human meaning, and setting it free) —that is the social ideal of knowledge...
...And none has been more sullied and distorted by men of power in the mindless years we have been enduring...
...And more important than that: by the work they do not do they uphold the official definitions of reality, and, by the work they do, even elaborate it...
...Gerth and Mills, op...
...The links between university and government are weak, and when they do occur, the man of knowledge appears as an "expert" which usually means as a hired technician...
...We object to Mr...
...Beyond the lack of intellectual cultivation by political personnel and advisory circles, the absence of publicly relevant minds has come to mean that powerful decisions and important policies are not made in such a way as to be justified and attacked, in short, debated in any intellectual form...
...And then, suppose we selected the one hundred most knowledgeable men, from all fields of social knowledge, and lined them up...
...In their moral fright, post-war liberals have not defended any left-wing or even any militantly liberal position: their defensive posture has, first of all, concerned the civil liberties...
...The silent conservatives of corporation, army and state have benefited politically and economically and militarily by the antics of the petty right, who have become, often unwittingly, their political shocktroops...
...For such men as now typically arrive in the higher political, economic and military circles, the briefing and the memorandum seem to have pretty well replaced not only the serious book, but the newspaper as well...
...But usually he keeps such feelings private, his public utterances being pious and sentimental, grim and brave, cheerful and empty in their * In Perspectives, USA, No...
...He is briefed, but not for longer than one page...
...and, more than that, this classic public also decided much that was decided...
...Knowledge, of course, is neither good nor bad, nor is its use good or bad...
...the silent conservatives achieving established power in a mindless victory...
...All of which is a safe way of diverting intellectual effort from the sphere of political reflection and demand...
...with ideas one can also debunk authority, attempting to reduce it to mere power, to discredit it as arbitrary or as unjust...
...Such a position is democratically possible only when there exists a free and knowledgeable public, to which men of knowledge may address themselves, and to which men of power are truly responsible...
...rather than a new party, its instrument was a loose coalition inside an old one, which quickly fell apart so far as liberal ideas are concerned...
...For an informed account of new cultural strata by a brilliantly self conscious insider, see Louis Kronenberger, Company Manners (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1954) . universal generality...
...There is no opposition to public mindlessness in all its forms nor to all those forces and men that would further it...
...Cf...
...There is no opposition to the undemocratically impudent manner in which policies of high military and civilian authority are simply turned out as facts accomplished...
...Only where publics and leaders are responsive and responsible, are human affairs in democratic order, and only when knowledge has public relevance is this order possible...
...They assume also that knowledge always pays off in such ways, or surely ought to, and that the test of genuine knowledge is just such pay-offs...
...for a further discussion of these three aspects of authority...
...Accordingly, in their imbroglio with the noisy right, liberal and once-left forces have, in effect, defended these established conservatives, if only because they have lost any initiative of attack, in fact, lost even any point of effective criticism...
...Cf...
...But today, the personal and the social ideals of knowledge have coincided in what knowledge does for the smart guy: it gets him ahead...
...1 During the last few years I have often thought that American intellectuals are now rather deeply involved in what Freud once called "the miscarriage of American civilization...
...Perhaps nothing is of more immediate importance, both as cause and as effect of this mood, than the rhetorical ascendancy and the intellectual collapse of liberalism: As a proclamation of ideals, classic liberalism, like classic socialism, remains part of the secular tradition of the West...
...To say that those who succeed to wealth must be smart, is to say that wealth is knowledge...
...As a political rhetoric, liberalism's key terms have become the common denominators of the political vocabulary, and hence have been stretched beyond any usefulness as a way of defining issues and stating po sitions.** As the administrative liberalism of the Thirties has been swallowed * A modified version of this essay was presented to a joint meeting of the William A. White and the Harry S. Sullivan Societies in New York City, February 1955...
...For a less flamboyant example, done in at least dim daylight, see Daniel J. Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953) ; and for a scatter of celebrants, see America and The Intellectuals (New York: PR series, Number Four, 1953) . adjusted to mere rhetoric by thirty years of rhetorical victory...
...Like most others in this society, the man of knowledge is himself dependent for his livelihood upon the job, which nowadays is a prime sanction of thought control...
...III In our time, all forms of public mindlessness must expropriate the individual mind, and we now know that this is an entirely possible procedure.* We also know that ideas, beliefs, images—symbols in short— stand between men and the wider realities of their time, and that accordingly those who professionally create, destroy, elaborate these symbols are very much involved in all literate men's very images of reality...
...Suppose we were to select the one hundred most powerful men, from all fields of power, in America today and line them up...
...The status edifice of bourgeois society was under attack, but since in America there is nothing from the past above that established edifice, * Although this interpretation is now widely published, Paul Sweezy's and Leo Huberman's original article remains the most forthright account of it: "The Roots and Prospects of McCarthyism," Monthly Review, January 1954, and since those of once liberal and left persuasion see nothing in the future below it, they have become terribly frightened by the viciousness of the attack, and their political lives have been narrowed to the sharp edge of defensive anxiety...
...What lends his view its optimistic tone, I believe, is less the rise of any new intellectual classes than (1) old intellectual groups becoming a little prosperous, even successful, in a minor way, on American terms, and, (2) of course, the confusion of knowledge as a goal with knowledge as a mere technique and instrument...
...The height of such mindless communications to masses, or what are thought to be masses, is the commercial propaganda for toothpaste and soap and cigarettes and automobiles...
...also involve the legitimation of the power and of the decisions by means of doctrine, and they usually involve the pomp and the halo, the representations of the powerful.* It is in connection with the legitima tions and the representations of power and decision that the intellectual —as well as the artist—becomes politically relevant...
...In the old days," Archibald MacLeish has remarked, freedom "was something you used . . . [it] has now become something you save—something you put away and protect like your other possessions—like a deed or a bond in a bank...
...And he ought also to be a man absorbed in the attempt to know what is real and what is unreal...
...Gerth and Mills, Character and Social Structure (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1953) , pp...
...The defensive posture, secondly, has concerned American Values in general, which, quite rightly it has been feared, the petty right seeks to destroy...
...But above all—among the men of knowledge, there is little or no opposition to the divorce of knowledge from power, of sensibilities from men of power, no opposition to the divorce of mind from reality...
...Of course our selection would depend upon what we mean by power and what we mean by knowledge—especially what we mean by knowledge...
...Or, stated negatively: to deny publicly what he knows to be false, whenever it appears in the assertions of no matter whom...
...he talks on the phone, rather than writes letters or holds conversations...
...and is addressed more often to the belly or to the groin than to the head or to the heart...
...As liberalism sat in these "hearings," liberals became aware, from time to time, of how close they were to the edge of the mindless abyss...
...By the mindlessness and mediocrity of men of affairs, I do not, of course, mean that these men are not sometimes intelligent men, although that is by no means automatically the case...
...Such a public and such men—either of power or of knowledge, do not now prevail, and accordingly, knowledge does not now have democratic relevance in America...
...With such a large role so arrogantly given to God, to experts, and to Mr...
...With ideas one can conceal or expose the holders of power...
...And more and more the area of the official secret expands, as well as the area of the secret listening in on those who might divulge in public what the public, not being composed of experts with Q clearance, is not to know...
...what we are up against is a lack of interest in and a fear of knowledge that might have liberating public relevance...
...Moreover, the attempt to so justify them is often not even made...
...It is much safer to celebrate civil liberties than to defend them, and it is much safer to defend them as a formal right than to use them in a politically effective way: Even those who would most willingly subvert these liberties, usually do so in their very name...
...Whatever else the intellectual may be, surely he is among those who ask serious questions, and, if he is a political intellectual, he asks his questions of those with power...
...The man of knowledge has not become a philosopher king...
...It is rather a matter of the quality of mind, a quality which requires the evaluation of substantive rationality as the key value in a man's life and character and conduct...
...Public relations displace reasoned argument...
...Unfortunately no one of them is really worth examining in detail: In order that the sort of thing I have in mind may be clear, by all means see Jacques Barzun, God's Country and Mine (Boston: Little Brown, 1954) . Mr...
...Within the compass of a knowledgeable and effective public, knowledge and power were in effective touch...
...These assumptions do reveal something that is true: that ordinary men, even today, are prone to explain, and to justify power and wealth in terms of knowledge or ability...
...As the decisions become more fateful, not only for Americans but literally for mankind, the sources of information are closed up, and the relevant facts needed for decision, and even of the decisions made, are, as politically convenient `official secrets," withheld from the heavily laden channels of information...
...And they have dramatized one political result of the hollowing out and the banalizing of sensibility among a population which for a generation now has been steadily and increasingly subjected to the shrill trivialization of the mass means of entertainment and distraction...
...For, in the eighteenth century, even in this colonial outpost, men of power pursued learning, and men of learning were often in positions of power...
...Knowledge is no longer widely felt as an ideal...
...With the increased means of decision, there is a crisis of understanding among the political directorate of the United States, and accordingly, there is often a commanding indecision...
...Such assumptions also reveal something of what has happened to the kind of experience that knowledge has come to be...
...and for the wise nation: it lends cultural prestige, haloing power with authority...
...They have brought into focus a new conception of national loyalty, which we came to understand as loyalty to individual gangs who placed themselves above the established legitimations of the state, and invited officers of the U. S. Army to do likewise...
...Post-war liberalism has been organizationally impoverished: the pre-war years of liberalism-in-power devitalized independent liberal groups, drying up their grass roots, making older leaders dependent upon the federal center and not training new leaders round the country...
...the second is a dreary garble of debating points, full of irrelevancies and bad history...
...It is to such things, or rather to Their Names, that this society sings its loudest praises most frequently...
...manipulation * Charles E. Wilson...
...and when men of knowledge do come to a point of contact with the circles of powerful men, they come not as peers but as hired men...
...They • Sec Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind (New York: Knopf, 1953) , which is surely one of the great documents of our time...
...what it has not got at home or abroad is cultural prestige...
...For now, of course, the live experience of men falls far short of the objects of their belief and action, and the maintenance of adequate definitions of reality is by no means an automatic process, if indeed it ever was...
...Among them a conservative mood—a mood that is quite appropriate for men living in a political vacuum— has come to prevail...
...They have brought into dramatic focus the higher immorality as well as the mindlessness of the upper circles in America...
...On the one hand, we have seen a decayed and frightened liberalism, and on the other hand, the insecure and ruthless fury of political gangsters...
...The defense of civil liberties—even of their practice a decade ago—has become the major concern of many liberal and once leftward scholars...
...Accordingly, in so far as intellectuals serve power directly—in a job hierarchy—they often do so unfreely...
...They have replaced the responsible interpretation of events by the disguise of meaning in a maze of public relations, respect for public debate by unshrewd notions of psychological warfare, intellectual ability by the agility of the sound and mediocre judgment, and the capacity to elaborate alternatives and to gauge their consequences by the executive stance...
...Barzun believes that "the way to see America is from a lower berth about two in the morning," and so far as I can tell from his book, he really means it...
...The elite of power, wealth and celebrity are not of the elite of culture, knowledge and sensibility...
...I do not know exactly what he meant by the phrase, although I suppose he intended to contrast the eighteenth-century ideals with which this nation was so hopefully proclaimed with their sorry condition in twentieth-century America...
...But if we would belong to it, we ought to try to live up to what it demands of us...
...By the middle of the twentieth century, the American elite have become an entirely different breed of men from those who could on any reasonable grounds be considered a cultural elite, or even for that • The New York Times, January 31, 1954, editorial page...
...413 ff...
...And do not forget The Committee...
...As a type of social man, the intellectual does not have any one political direction, but the work of any man of knowledge, if he is the genuine article, does have a distinct kind of political relevance: his politics, in the first instance, are the politics of truth, for his job is the maintenance of an adequate definition of reality...
...What it demands of us, first of all, is that we maintain our sense of it...
...Eisenhower, two hundred years later, reads cowboy tales and detective stories...
...And they have ridden into power on all those structural trends set into motion and accelerated by the organization of the nation for seemingly permanent war...
...Power and authority involve the actual making of decisions...
...they have attacked the history of those administrations, and the biographies of those who took part in them...
...There is also involved in them a specific worry with which many serious-minded Americans are seriously concerned...
...By their attack upon men and institutions of established status, the noisy right has appealed not at all to the economically discontented, but to the status frustrated.* Their push has come from the nouveau riche, of small city as well as larger region, and, above all, from the fact of the rankling status resentment felt by these newly prosperous classes who, having achieved considerable wealth during and after World War II, have not received the prestige nor gained the power that they have felt to be their due...
...This simple fact has involved those of the new gentility in the curious American celebration, into which much scholarly and intellectual energy now goes...
...Exploiting the American fright of the new international situation for their own purposes, these political primitives have attacked not only the ideas of the New and Fair Deals...
...As a theory of society, liberalism has become irrelevant, and, in its optative way, misleading, for no revision of liberalism as a theory of the mechanics of modern social change has overcome the trade mark of the nineteenth century that is stamped upon its basic assumptions...
...In its place there is "weight" and "judgment" which count for much more in their celebrated success than any sublety of mind or force of intellect...
...Quite unwittingly, I am sure, the U. S. intelligentsia has found itself in the middle of the very nervous center of elite and plebeian anxieties about the position of America in the world today...
...And, just now, at this point in human history, that is quite difficult...
...It is easier still to defend someone else's right to have used them years ago than to have something yourself to say now and to say it now forcibly...
...The New Deal left no liberal organization to carry on any liberal program...
...THE LACK OF KNOWLEDGE AS AN EXPERIENCE and as a criterion among the elite ties in with the malign ascendancy of the expert, not only as fact but as a defense against public discourse and debate...
...The New York Times, March 10, 1954, p. 1. and undebated decisions of power replace democratic authority...
...It is not the barbarous irrationality of uncouth, dour Senators that is the American danger...
...Many of the political intelligentsia have been so busy celebrating formal civil liberties in America, by contrast with their absence from Soviet Communism, that they have often failed to defend them...
...But all that such wisecracks mean is that those who use them assume that power and wealth are sovereign values for all men and especially for men "who are smart...
...Moreover, they are not in contact with it, although the banalized and ostentatious fringes of the two worlds do overlap in the world of the celebrity...
...What knowledge does to a man (in clarifying what he is, and setting it free)—that is the personal ideal of knowledge...
...When questioned recently about a criticism of defense policies made by the leader of the opposition party, the Secretary of Defense replied, "Do you think he is an expert in the matter...
...And with ideas of more hypnotic though frivolous shape, one can divert attention from problems of power and authority and social reality in general...
...While those two camps have been engaged in wordy battle, and while the intellectuals have been embraced by the new conservative gentility, the silent conservatives have assumed political power...
...Wilson...
...Much less for public debate of what is after all every bit as much a political and a moral as a military issue...
...Nothing is more revealing," James Reston has written, "than to read the debate in the House of Representatives in the Eighteen Thirties on Greece's fight with Turkey for independence and the Greek-Turkish debate in the Congress in 1947...
...so Virgil as a member of the Roman ruling class writes his Georgics...
...More and more, as administration has replaced politics, decisions of importance do not carry even the panoply of reasonable discussion in public, but are made by God, by experts, and by men like Mr...
...The celebration rests upon the felt need to defend themselves in nationalist terms against the petty right...
Vol. 2 • July 1955 • No. 3
