REVIEWS
O'Cleireacain, Carol & Leiter, Robert & Cohen, Mitchell & Geltman, Emanuel & Tyler, Gus
THE RADICAL PERSUASION (1890-1917): ASPECTS OF THE INTELLECTUAL HISTORY AND THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THREE AMERICAN RADICAL ORGANIZATIONS, by Aileen S. Kraditor. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State...
...This was supplemented by a second study, consisting of clinical interviews with a small number of male students, who were divided equally into radicals and nonradicals, Jews and non-Jews...
...There was a form on which students had to record their religion for graduation from medical school—Christians on one line, Jews on another...
...And what 525 that were often at odds with each other and did not create their own norm per se, it was alien to the spirit and style of what by the early 20th century had become "orthodox" Marxism (particularly in the Second International...
...It could be that there was another "Julia," but if there was it strains credibility...
...No one would argue that horseshoes should continue to be made forever...
...Both were elected by "immigrants...
...Later, in Vienna, toward the end of the story, when discretion and caution are of the utmost importance, she allows herself a moment of impulsive protest...
...by a responsible sponsor...
...Changing the domestic/foreign price and cost relationship will change the impetus for deindustrialization...
...This happens after the Anschluss, in the time of the Nazis...
...catty is THIS HAPPENING...
...Will's column has appeared occasionally in the Daily News...
...In this system, as in all systems we know, there is a ruling class, consisting generally of the owners of the means of production, whether owned outright or indirectly through the state...
...Stanley Rothman teaches government at Smith College and S. Robert Lichter political science at George Washington University...
...However, it is far more difficult to remain objective while reading the book...
...But when all the separate acts of John Q., Suzy Q., Joe Schmoe, and Jane Doe are added up, the total is far greater than the sum of the parts and these unlisted actors become an Everyman, a shaker and maker of history...
...The Destruction of Reason gives us the underside of what its author takes to be a linear, necessary march of historical progress that leads to the ultimate victory of reason, while his teleology of unreason makes Hitler's epoch humanity's greatest catastrophe— merely a warp on that inevitable path...
...I like my own life very much, but if that had not been available and if I had to choose another one, I think it would have been yours...
...This place had the unusual advantage for 519 Vienna that the concierge lived in the back, and so was unable to observe who entered the apartment...
...Surely, the dozen or so "Polonians" (Poles), who went on strike in colonial Virginia in 1619 to win the right to participate as full citizens in the commonwealth assembly (mentioned by Captain John Smith in his diary), were not aware that they were "proletarians," but used the most ancient "proletarian" weapon to voice a typically "proletarian" demand...
...False passports, however, were more often the pressing need...
...And what does Lukacs mean by irrationalism...
...Enlightenment, they concluded, "behaves toward things as a dictator toward men...
...Given the reserve role played by the dollar, changes in the U.S...
...10"), engages in efforts to promote its perceived interests...
...In the U.S...
...ONCE IN THE u.s., both continued their activities, Muriel in psychiatry and social causes, Joe in work with and for refugees, through the International Rescue Committee...
...Viewed pragmatically—as an organizer would do who has to motivate himself and his people— proletariat, system, and vanguard, even if they are "myths," are highly functional...
...Although Lukacs had written excellent literary and aesthetic studies only a few years earlier (such as Goethe and His Age), The Destruction of Reason shows one of the century's great minds at a low point...
...These economic and social costs represent a huge national loss...
...The bulk of deindustrialization (excluding "horseshoes") is the substitution of foreign plants for domestic plants, foreign production for domestic production...
...The second Socialist congressman was Victor Berger from the predominantly German city of 513 Milwaukee...
...With the premise that thought and its object are radically separate, Lukacs tells us that irrationalism commences with "a discrepancy" between "intellectual reflection and the objective original...
...That is the essence of a complex, convoluted, and clever book by Aileen S. Kraditor, professor emerita of history at Boston University...
...The second period, which corresponds to the age of imperialism, is marked by the rise of proletarian movements and such events as the Paris Commune...
...What reading and buying a book meant may be gauged by the fact that years later the Buttingers built a house in Manhattan primarily to accommodate a library planned for 100,000 volumes...
...To the radicals of yesteryear (and to some of today) the proletariat was more than a class engaged in a struggle against another class...
...For a Jew, reading Roois of Radicalism is an oppressive experience, something analogous to having a pillow pressed against one's face with everincreasing force...
...And she sometimes lent her American or British passport to Austrians fleeing the country, retrieving it in Paris...
...economy created enough new jobs to absorb a 25 percent increase in the labor force, even though the economy was only growing at three-quarters of the rate of the 1960s...
...She stayed in Vienna beyond the Anschluss for as long as she dared to in order to complete her medical degree and to get the last false passport or American "affidavit" she could manage for fleeing comrades...
...They do for both leader and led what less imaginative and less inspiring "facts" cannot do...
...KRADITOR FINDS that this notion of the "vanguard" was based on two elitist premises: first, that the masses were asleep and that the radicals were their awakeners...
...Later, socialists needed "affidavits"—documents presented to American consular officials that the person in question would be assured of support for five years in the U.S...
...He wrote The Young Hegel, developed a theory of literary realism and, later, of aesthetics...
...Yet in the authors' retelling of the story, the rigid rebels did not act independently...
...The] postwar series of labor victories that successfully constrained the flexibility of management by regulating the workplace and forcing the corporate sector to underwrite part of the costs of the "social safety net...
...The capital mobility option...
...The confusion is compounded by repeated comments on the gap between the radicals, depicted as predominantly American, and the workers, perceived as predominantly immigrant...
...After the workers' resistance had been smashed in 1934, the leaders of the Austrian Socialist party had to flee...
...Brunswick, who becomes her analyst and lifelong friend...
...27.95...
...Most important, they offer the realization that workers are not merely cogs in the game of international capital mobility...
...Lukacs divides the era of modern German irrationalism into two broad periods...
...Passing back and forth over the border between Austria and Czechoslovakia entailed large risks...
...economic expansion abroad generated enormous short-run profits, but in the course of doing this it helped establish excess (unused) productive capacity in one basic industry after another...
...Shortly thereafter I returned to the question: "If the workers are unconsciously striving for socialism, what need is there for a Socialist party...
...Scores of people pass through the book...
...Decides to go to Vienna (like "Julia"), hoping that Freud will take her as a patient, but he recommends Dr...
...UAW wage rates would not fall but would be worth less in yen, which would make producing in Japan less attractive than it has been...
...Beyond the economic impact, the links to increased disease and stress-related mortality rates, increased suicide, homicide, admissions to mental hospitals, imprisonment, and alcoholism have been documented by Harvey Brenner and others...
...Because of its infatuation with manipulative rationality, the Enlightenment makes computation and utility the measure of all things...
...There can be little doubt that many radicals, perhaps most of them, felt it was their duty to "awaken" the masses...
...If Kraditor had been there, she would have been annoyed not simply by the double "myth" that there was a proletariat and that it was instinctively inching toward socialism but also, and above all, by the hubris behind the final "myth" that we the comrades—were the "vanguard...
...When Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, he assailed a system, the tyranny of the British Crown whose multitudinous crimes are listed at length...
...It is almost as though their concentration on the structural aspects of the job issue has made them lose sight of the broader picture...
...According to the authors, technological change, the increased centralization of capital, the emergence of conglomerates, tax write-offs for investment, and the social compact between capital and labor have all contributed to making increased capital mobility a necessary road for maintaining profits: During the boom years, U.S...
...There were movements of working people that were not organized by radicals...
...Eventually, as the known socialist leadership had to flee, Joe became head of the underground...
...It was first published in 1953, was finally translated into English and issued in Britain in 1980, and is now available in the U.S...
...In his account virtually all of modern German thought apart from Hegel and Marxism (and a fairly stodgy Marxism at that) is composed of varieties of irrationalism, which, however unintentionally, do the intellectual spadework for the greatest embodiment of unreason: nazism...
...Enrolled in medical school, Muriel-"Mary" kept both an apartment to live in with her little daughter and a place where she could study, close to the school...
...Surely the stuff of fiction...
...For once life has a happier ending than invention: "Julia" loses a leg and dies...
...Both, wrote Lukacs, were rooted in irrationalism...
...She also had a small place in the woods, which she had acquired shortly after coming to Vienna...
...Almost all have unionized auto industries...
...The plant shutdowns indeed range across auto, steel, rubber, chemicals, timber, hand tools, machine tools, housewares, and textiles...
...After all, to "enlighten" means to let in the light not vastly different from waking one up...
...Nothing in Thomas Hardy's notable 518 coincidences quite matches this unlikeliness...
...When he was faced with these attacks Lukacs was a refugee in Vienna (he had been deputy commissar for public education in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic and had fled in 1919, barely escaping Admiral Horthy's death sentence...
...To Marx, the answer was one word: dialectic...
...There have been news stories about what may have been a bit of Hellman's flummery...
...With no rational way to divide up the international market, U.S firms found themselves subject to intense world competition and, as a consequence, shrinking profits...
...And Muriel's young daughter somehow quickly learned to accept the rules imposed by caution...
...466 pp...
...ROOTS OF RADICALISM: JEWS, CHRISTIANS, AND THE NEW LEFT, by Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter...
...q Mitchell Cohen (Un)Reason and Its Modern Adventures THE DESTRUCTION OF REASON, by Georg Lukacs...
...I thought the matter over...
...it can treat women dismally...
...Undoubtedly, many of the currents of thought that Lukacs analyzes are appropriately characterized as irrationalist...
...She was approached by the head of one of these cells...
...For example, deindustrialization and the balance of payments go together...
...In contrast to those postwar scholars who sought to save Nietzsche's writings from the Third Reich's misuse of them, Lukacs insists that there is a fundamental kinship between the spirit of Hitler and that of Nietzsche...
...And it is of no consequence, as they see it, that in West Germany, where (for obvious reasons) no Jews resided, there flourished a student movement of comparable size and influence...
...The fact remains that capitalism is a "system" that determines the contours of the larger society profoundly, sometimes predominantly, even if never exclusively...
...But such a list hardly exhausts the 521 "defensive" policy options open to us...
...causing] large numbers of workers, families, and communities...
...Is the system a myth...
...Part of any "culture" is the economic "system" through which the tribe or nation expresses itself...
...In the Manifesto he described how the "thesis" spawned its own "antithesis" as capitalism gave birth to its own "gravediggers...
...Nazism raised the most troubling questions about Western civilization for Horkheimer and Adorno in a way it did not for Lukacs...
...Surely, the movement had far greater variety than the authors are willing to admit...
...Muriel Gardiner had been contemplating an autobiography...
...In large part that is because it covers a different subject from the rest of the work...
...Literary forms," wrote the playwright, "have to be checked against reality, not against aesthetics...
...Lukacs aimed to reveal here "Germany's path to Hitler in the sphere of philosophy" as a reflection of Germany's "concrete development in general" and the class struggle in particular...
...Sadly, time has corrected the notion of the Platonic proletariat...
...Yet very often, whenever intermediaries couldn't go, "Mary" made the trip herself...
...The ugly scenes which followed Hitler's triumphant entry into Austria need have been none of her concern...
...It is a steep descent," he concludes, "from Schelling and Schopenhauer—via Nietzsche, Dilthey, Spengler, etc.—to Hitler and Rosenberg...
...In more recent years, his visits to Vietnam led to his books, The Smaller Dragon and the two-volume Vietnam: A Dragon Embattled, and to a number of articles he published in Dissent...
...could encourage the depreciation of the dollar...
...LUKACS'S MAMMOTH VOLUME The Destruction of Reason illustrates just how much of Stalinism he actually ingested...
...The ideology was different, but it served similar psychological needs...
...I don't want to oversell a dollar depreciation...
...At fifteen or so, he bought his first book, Engels's Origins of the Family...
...In the World War I years, New Yorkers elected five Socialists to the state legislature—Abraham Shiplacoff, William Feigenbaum, Charles Solomon, Sam Orr, and Louis Waldman—all from Jewish districts...
...Why repeat...
...We can begin to ask, and to answer, how large America's basic industries will be, how many workers they will employ, where they will be located, where the capital will come from to ensure competitiveness, and what the return on that capital will be...
...LukAcs thus emphasized human subjectivity and class consciousness, refocusing on the "superstructure" that Marxist dogmatists viewed as a mere reflection of society's economic "base...
...Modern Germany became the site of irrationalist philosophy's most comprehensive development, he argues, because of its retarded and dislocated evolution, and especially that of its bourgeoisie...
...Such seeming illogic is really the most natural logic for anyone challenging the status quo—no matter how powerful...
...Their parents had directed their own aggression against "communists" or blacks...
...She prefers to think of "societies" rather than "systems...
...Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press...
...Interest and compassion became conviction and commitment, at great risk, as Muriel Gardiner became "Mary" in Austria's underground socialist resistance...
...Joe "Wieser" is a central figure...
...My guess is that if Kraditor had read the foreign-language press of that time— German, Italian, Jewish, Finnish, Russian, Polish, Hungarian—she would have concluded that these "immigrants" were just as deeply into the class struggle, into the theories of Marx and Bakunin, Kropotkin and Hegel as a good American like the Wobblies' Bill Haywood...
...New York: Basic Books...
...The radical's obsession with "the system," argues Kraditor, put the would-be revolutionary in a logically untenable position...
...What we have here is principally an account of her life, and antifascist activities, from February 1934 until she left Paris after the outbreak of World War II in 1939...
...But such a permanent form of revolution cannot generate counterinstitutions...
...Rather, the inequities are used as a means of achieving a larger purpose: the general weakening of the social order...
...Third, by the totalitarians who try to convert the "vanguard" into a one-man party and who plan to seize power at the revolutionary moment to enthrone the "vanguard...
...It is not likely, for example, to have a major impact on potential future trade, because it would tie all countries to the dollar—including many in Latin America and Asia that are more competitive for lucrative investment...
...Because the class struggle does involve conflict, the movement requires a decision-making center, cadre, lines of communication, discipline, a hierarchy of command, strategies, tactics...
...Joe" had been born into a peasant family as poor as Muriel's was rich...
...The protean rebel seeks out change, flux, and fluidity in his life-style, while resisting all forms of psychological closure," the authors write, and aims at "continual destruction of social institutions, insofar as they interfere with individual experimentation...
...At the same time, the European economies had no net job creation, and Japan only an 8 percent increase...
...Such a battle took place three years later in his own Budapest against Soviet tanks, and Lukacs was on the side of the revolutionaries...
...Let's get rid of their George and put in our own George...
...What all these three have in common is their disdain for the view that the "vanguard" should awaken, enlighten, educate the mass so that—to use Marx's phrase—"the liberation of the working class" shall be "the task of the working class itself...
...Clear recognition of this fact would thoroughly undermine the book's thesis...
...This ruling class, in the economic sphere, reaches out for political power, whether by force, persuasion, or economic clout...
...It would affect the competitiveness of existing production and trade, that is, it would help to prevent further job loss...
...Irrationalism, he argues, is not dialectical and not materialist, and it "became operative" by challenging such modes of thought...
...In the latter, reason enables us to grasp the truth of the world beyond the appearances that irrationalists take for reality...
...Raised as a Protestant, Muriel Gardiner, by now "Mary," writes "Jewish" on her papers...
...And," he added with a twinkle, "you, my young comrade, have a good pair of eyes...
...Yet, she is allowed to pass anyway...
...To Plato, the abstraction—the idea—is the only true reality...
...The Marxists focused upon the inevitable crises of capitalism, not merely the disruptions of modernity...
...A few she distrusted, even disliked, but it is amazing how many remain lifelong friends...
...How then, asks Kraditor, could these radicals, with their assertions of capitalist omnipotence, challenge the system of which they themselves were a part...
...xiii+ 179 pp...
...While The Destruction of Reason is not without insights, it is its animating impulse that is objectionable...
...No "Julia," just "Mary"—code name...
...If to enlighten, to educate, to awaken connote elitism, then all the men and women who have ever taken it upon themselves to open the eyes of others to the truth are elitists...
...Muriel Gardiner sponsored so many people that eventually U.S...
...In pursuit of these objectives, this class has, in the last two centuries, profoundly influenced the course of history and the contours of societies almost everywhere on the face of the planet...
...London: Merlin Press and Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press...
...Bluestone and Harrison's evidence on the economic and social costs of job deaths is compelling...
...But there were also students, radical and otherwise, who cared deeply about the war's immorality and the inequities of the draft...
...KRADrroR's DUTOU R into the gap between American radical leaders and immigrant masses is quite unnecessary if her real point is the "mythicist" trait in America's revolutionary vanguard...
...But the truth is that it took years of protest before the country "turned itself around" and understood the depth and seriousness of its misadventure in Vietnam...
...q turing has its logic, it also makes the book unnecessarily repetitive...
...323 pp...
...And one can hardly blame Lillian Hellman for using it in her autobiography, as appears to have been the case, changing "Mary" to "Julia...
...Over and above that, it captures tendencies of development that exist only incipiently and so have not yet had the opportunity to unfold their entire human and social potential...
...He smiled indulgently: "Your body may want to go in a given direction, but to do so you will need eyes...
...but we also know that not one of these things has an existence outside of the mind...
...Lukacs, in Brecht's view, remained wedded to a more traditional aesthetic in which literature would reveal a total social and historical process through the experiences of concrete, individualized characters...
...The Socialist movement," he explained to me in his precise and terse manner, "is the conscious expression of the unconscious strivings of the working class...
...Are we to assume that, if the radicals had not tried to peddle their myths to workers, then John Q. and his brethren would have no myths in their heads...
...Avoiding a competitive depreciation is an international political problem and that means, finally, negotiating the speed of deindustrialization...
...At that, fair or foul, one has to be grateful to Hellman...
...The problem for society comes when job deaths exceed births dramatically, as they do in a depression or when there are such large changes in the nature of jobs that workers displaced by job deaths do not meet the needs of the job births...
...Restricted by his position at the court of Weimar, suggested Goldmann, Goethe was free only to criticize the revolution but not to articulate its positive aspects...
...To invent a John Q. Worker who is the embodiment of reality, as opposed to mythology, is to manufacture just another myth, isn't it...
...After all, if the three organizations that Kraditor discusses led nobody but themselves, they were nobody's vanguard...
...Lukacs, however, portrayed the cunning of unreason...
...Industrial policy should combine policies aimed at job deaths, job births, and the life expectancy of jobs...
...J. Q. W. would be a rare specimen indeed if this were so—quite inhuman...
...We see here an odd version of a famous Hegelian concept...
...When the radicals saw their organizations as the think tank, the inspiration, the "leader" of the proletariat, were they on a flight of fantasy, perhaps powered by an ego kick...
...All of this information was gathered not just to better understand "the causes, nature, and consequences" of the student movement of the '60s but, more specifically, to explain why, in America, "young people of Jewish background played so large a role...
...Indeed, in an epilogue to The Destruction of Reason signed January 1953, Lukacs concludes his tome with these words: "Fighting in reason's name, the masses have proclaimed their rights on the streets, their right to share in determining their own destiny...
...It is distinct from the slave system, the feudal system, or communism...
...In this first period, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Kierkegaard battle Hegel and idealist dialectics on behalf of varying claims for intuitionism, the absurdity of history, and the need for faith...
...They stayed a day, a week, whatever was necessary...
...Insisting that the world is proceeding on a path of continual rationalization, Hegel wrote of "the cunning of Reason," the process by which the grand march of reason attains its own historical ends through the unwitting, subjective passions of particular men...
...However, the job-creation phenomenon is not the subject of The Deindustrialization of America...
...HELEN MURIEL MORRIS (the name is put to special use late in the story) was the granddaughter of Nelson Morris who had come to the States as a Jewish 13year-old in the mid-nineteenth century, made his way to Chicago with a dollar in his pocket, and eventually founded the large meat-packing firm of Morris & Company (later sold to Armour...
...Is the vanguard a myth...
...The issue between Lukics and Brecht then, as Lunn emphasizes, was not realism itself but the nature of realism and the reality it grasped and portrayed...
...These parallels may tell us the ultimate source of Lukacs's antipathy to Nietzsche...
...How far the "radicals" led the masses out of Egypt is not mathematically calculable...
...The authors argue that exclusion from Christian society has forced the Jews (now as well as in the past) to adopt political radicalism in order "to undermine all aspects of the culture" that contribute to their marginality...
...The English language is rich enough to have supplied these writers and orators" with language that did not assume that the masses were asleep...
...MARXISM AND MODERNISM: AN HISTORICAL STUDY OF LUKACS, BRECHT, BENJAMIN AND ADORNO, by Eugene Lunn...
...Hence while his greatest writings were animated by "an integral liberty," his work in this period represented an "artistic checkmate...
...And yet, a rose, called by any other name, is still a rose...
...So let's turn to the real question: were the perceptions of proletariat, system, and vanguard really myths and, if so, what kind of myths...
...When still younger and a student in Italy, she had been horrified by Mussolini's march into Rome in 1922...
...The dominant ideology of that second period of German irrationalism—the imperialist era—however, was "vitalism" (Lebensphilosophie), which promoted, according to Lukacs, a blind faith in intuition as well as radical doubt in the possibility of objective knowledge...
...Illustrated...
...We are amazed at "Mary's" energy—looking after a household, studying medicine, and always filling the need to help someone...
...Finally, the radicals saw themselves as persons obliged to lead, to set an example of 517 dedication, devotion, energy, self-sacrifice...
...331 pp...
...For Brecht, Lukacs's realism was too constricting and did not allow a full confrontation with a multidimensional and contradictory historical reality—that of the contemporary world...
...John Q. Worker obscures her vision of the "working class...
...The radical vision of the proletariat may have been such a "needful falsehood," though not intentionally so, that saw the worker on a bigger-thanlife scale, as Caliban with conscience and consciousness, as a superheroic figure, as the Savior...
...has become unacceptably rapid...
...American radicals have lived with and by a mischievous mythology built around the proletariat, the system, and the vanguard...
...They were a "vanguard," challenging the "divine right" of the bourgeoisie in the Gilded Age...
...It won't anymore...
...she belonged to neither the hunters nor the hunted, the persecutors nor the persecuted...
...However, inasmuch as modernism was composed of a plethora of revolts literary or stylistic paradigms in general...
...Now the children vented hostility against the "Establishment" or capitalism...
...As Michael Lowy notes in his insightful study, Georg Luktics: From Romanticism to Bolshevism (1979), Lukacs engaged in "a consistent effort to `reconcile' Stalinism with bourgeoisdemocratic culture...
...Her evidence lies in the many stories in the radical press built around the "awakening," such as "China Waking from Age-Long Sleep," "Kansas Awakens," "Turkish Workers Awaken," and so on...
...Capitalism is one such system...
...In fact, his perspective represented but one of the varying Marxist responses to modernism in art and literature that emerged at the time...
...However, she decided to take up medicine, planning to attend medical school in Vienna for two years, then to complete her medical education and internship in the U.S...
...Unfortunately, past and present American administrations have rejected such a posture...
...Then the fourth study, a translated version of the survey, was administered to 230 male students at two West German universities...
...29.95...
...No more so than "culture," a social force whose presence and power Kraditor 514 would not deny...
...Unfortunately, they are not alone in this oversight...
...It speaks for a certain quality of person and mind...
...The radical saw, or depicted, the "system" as that "sorry scheme of things entire" that the proletariat "would smash and remold nearer to the heart's desire...
...If we allowed monetary policy to expand enough, and if we reached agreements with the other major developed countries not to engage in competitive depreciation but rather to allow this looser monetary policy to be validated into a lower exchange rate for the dollar, then much of our international noncompetitiveness would disappear...
...This is true of Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, anarchists, faculty senates, little leagues, and corporations...
...q Robert Leiter They Started It...
...So is Kraditor when she tries to make us aware of the truth about radicals: she is opening our eyes to something about which we were blind...
...All teachers, priests, authors, parents are guilty—if they are doing their job...
...Surely, there were people who did not wish to lose their elite status as students and as members of the middle class with secure, well-paying futures...
...The flight of capital to anti- and nonunion environments does not seem to jibe with a very interesting table listing all the countries involved with producing Ford's "World Car...
...Only when enough people accept that workers are an important resource, whose waste is a human tragedy and a national economic disaster, can we begin to address the political issues of reindustrialization...
...Early in the book, Kraditor suggests that immigrants shunned the radical movement because they could find security (the author's word is "predictability") in the immigrant community that enjoyed "social space" in America's pluralist society...
...Likewise the system...
...In Nietzsche, Lukacs finds "the imperialist myth designed to counter socialist humanism," a morality for the ruling class in a time of decay, a call for unleashing bourgeois egoism...
...Is there a way to help stop this process, a way that Bluestone and Harrison ignore...
...The leader of the Socialist Labor party was Daniel DeLeon, born in Curacao of Sephardic Jewish parentage...
...I n 1949, a few years after his return to Budapest following a quarter of a century's exile, Georg Lukacs found himself under vigorous attack by the press and the party hierarchs who accused him, among other things, of "revisionism" and "objectively" serving imperialism...
...Henceforth Lukacs devoted himself primarily to the study of literature and the history of philosophy...
...Modernism thus corresponds to irrationalism while realism, like reason, lets us understand ourselves and our world...
...The famous Lukacs-Brecht dispute Lunn writes of perhaps illustrates best what was at issue in Marxism's confrontation with modernism...
...He knows them insofar as he can manipulate them...
...Their interpretation is that "the pace of private capital mobility...
...The first and largest was a study of American college students in which a survey questionnaire was administered to over 1,100 students at four large universities...
...Would Kraditor have been happier if the radicals used a phrase such as "enlightenment" instead of "awakening...
...Most of the actors—the John Q. Workers—in the grand drama were unaware that they were acting out "proletarian" roles...
...Even three years later, many of these workers have not found jobs that pay as well as those they had before...
...In their early teen-age Joe and his brother found work at a glass factory, and a new world opened...
...she understands them...
...look much more like Europe—which simply reinforces the point that they are anti-deindustrialization, not reindustrialization, policies...
...I was a teen-ager, asking 515 about the proper relations between the Socialist party and the "pure-and-simple" trade unions...
...IT is F,ASS to be objective and criticize Roots of Radicalism...
...But in its very steepness, it sufficiently expresses the character of irrationalism and the necessity of its development...
...But as a consequence of this coincidental, sometimes collaborative effort, working people moved from the 80hour to the 40-hour week, from subsistence wages to a living wage, from being treated as hands to being treated as humans...
...Consider the lessened need for "concession bargaining...
...Joe matched her in activity, always walking the thin line of capture...
...These facts do not mean that we have enough job creation...
...better information and planning...
...All these abstractions are cranial artifacts and hence can be tagged as myths...
...Hence they did not share in the crisis of liberalism because they possessed scientific socialism with its explanatory power...
...How accurate is this description...
...As a believer in the historical necessity of progress, Lukacs contrasts this view of limits with the perspective of dialectical reason, which allows us to transcend the appearance of unresolvability and to grasp the totality behind it...
...Rather, it was the first wave of Jewish radicals who persuaded the later, more traditionally authoritarian radicals to act in a manner foreign to their nature...
...For Rothman and Lichter it would seem that student radicalism began and was then championed by a wide range of university professors and media people...
...Lukacs generally defended his fidelity to the Soviet regime on the grounds of the struggle against nazism...
...Congress was Meyer London, a Jew representing a Lower East Side district in New York that was overwhelmingly Jewish...
...Even DeLeon, who insisted that "legislation favorable to labor is a fruit that can be strained through the loins of a capitalist Congress as little as a Kentucky stallion can be strained through the loins of a Texas coyote," believed that some day the working class would elect its own Congress, abolish the capitalist system, and adjourn sine die...
...Thus, argued Horkheimer and Adorno, our world of differences and varying human qualities and realities is reduced to interchangeable quantities: "On the road to modern science, men renounce any claim to meaning...
...I had not known of the intensity of your political activities in Vienna, only the vaguest rumors...
...Such a monetary and exchange-rate policy is particularly well suited to the defensive strategy offered by Bluestone and Harrison...
...Although "the later Lukacs" produced works of lasting value, his status as perhaps the greatest Marxist philosopher since Marx still rests on his 1923 masterpiece, History and Class Consciousness...
...Perhaps the word "educate" is more acceptable, although "educate" means "to lead out or' and to "lead toward...
...Let's agree that an economic system is only a subset of a larger culture, as is evident from the different ways in which the capitalist system expresses itself in the United States, Japan, and West Germany...
...Confronted with apparently unresolvable problems in that world, irrationalists assume the problems to be unresolvable...
...For if they had known, they could never have worked the miracles they did...
...381 pp...
...The development as Lukacs describes it is only possible because of his preconception of Reason as One and Unreason as One...
...528...
...women would win equality...
...unreason becomes nazism...
...The only important thing for Rothman and Lichter is that, in America, the Jews were the ones who started it, the ones who always start it...
...For humans are myth-making animals who invent a mythology and then live by it...
...But what is particularly useful about this book is its systematic documentation of a huge number of plant closings that have not received widespread notice...
...Indeed, the two most prominent leaders of the Socialist party were Morris Hillquit, an immigrant Jew, and Eugene Victor Debs, whose parents were Alsatian immigrants...
...Underlying all these useful "truths" there was, as all of us know who have spent a lifetime in the movement, still another truth: the inevitability of progress...
...They substitute formula for concept, rule and probability for cause and motive...
...and "economic democracy...
...27.50...
...The authors put the events within a historical context...
...The totality of the modern world—a world of modern technology, corporations, science, and the social life corresponding to them—could best be presented through modernist techniques (montage, simultaneity, and so on...
...This book is about job loss, plant closings, and community decline, or what the authors call "widespread, systematic disinvestment in the nation's basic productive capacity...
...It could be objected, of course, that this "vanguard" could not have been much of a "vanguard" since most workers never followed it into the promised land...
...The erosion of the authority of social institutions provides them with a mechanism to vent their rage at "authoritarian" fathers...
...Ruth Mack Brunswick, witnessed the crushing of the Socialist Defense League by Dollfuss's fascist troops on February 12, 1934...
...That is correct...
...she even feels a quasi-sadness for these ineffectual angels with their inability or unwillingness to relate to the reality she calls "John Q. Worker...
...Most of us can recite the names of industrial giants that no longer exist, such as Youngstown Sheet and Tube or the Mahwah Ford plant...
...Without a "vanguard," a mass becomes a blob...
...WIIAT IS TIM AUTHORS' DEFENSE against this plague of job deaths...
...Rebuilding the social safety net...
...They, like most workers, acted out of personal pride or pain— particularistic, petty, parochial...
...This is, of course, the crux of an ancient philosophic dispute...
...There was the time in '56, for instance, when Joe flew to Vienna at the outbreak of the Hungarian uprising, and took steps to bring help and rescue to the Hungarian freedom fighters...
...q Carol O'Cleireacain Of Human Tragedy & Economic Disaster THE DEINDUSTRIALIZATION OE AMERICA, by Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison...
...but then she was able to get her brother and American friends to fill their "quota" of affidavits...
...Consider the redistribution of income that would result...
...Protean rebellion defines itself solely in terms of opposition and negation, and it is authoritarian because "it is rooted in a deep ambivalence toward power that causes the rebel to oscillate between aggressive and submissive postures toward authority...
...The proletariat is a social fact: it is that body of people in a market (capitalist) economy who do not own their means of production and who, therefore, sell their talents for wages and salaries to earn their daily bread...
...And this class, like every other class, develops a philosophy, a Weltanschauung, rooted in the tenet that what is good for it is good for all...
...Kraditor's query made me recall a brief conversation I had many years ago with Morris Hillquit who, according to Kraditor, "was totally immune to mythic visions...
...But there was a second wave of New Left radicals—those who came into the movement from 527 the mid-'60s on and were primarily from conservative midwestern homes—designated here as "rigid rebels...
...We have not as yet found a name for the new "system," for the same reason that it is much more difficult to detect smog when you're in it than when you're several miles away...
...exchange rate require consultation and coordination with other governments and central banks...
...There is a brief intimacy with Stephen Spender, who becomes another lifelong friend...
...And what are we to make of such language and conclusions as these: "Jewish and non-Jewish radicals scored significantly higher than nonradicals in their phallic-assertive imagery and lower in genitalintegrative imagery...
...It contained an extensive collection on Central Europe, later donated to an Austrian university, in Klagenfurt...
...indeed, perhaps out of control...
...has shifted the fulcrum of bargaining power in favor of capital to an unprecedented degree...
...ALTHOUGH THE CONCEPTS of proletariat, system, and vanguard are not myths, all three were adorned with the mystical figments of genuine mythology— at least in the eyes of later generations with 20-20 hindsight...
...Gertrude Stein was a pure Platonist when she wrote that a rose is a rose is a rose...
...The Farmer-Labor party of Minnesota, a major party in that state, was rooted in the socialist sentiments of Scandinavian immigrants...
...AS EUGENE I UNN WRITES in his fine historical study of Lukacs, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno, Marxism and Modernism, it was through its confrontation with modernism that "a serious and flexible Marxist aesthetics for the twentieth century" developed...
...In the fierce war between the Socialists and the Communists that started at the end of the period covered by Kraditor, the decisive forces were the language federations within the old SR Indeed, when the American Socialist party refused to support its government in the First World War, it was not uncommon to charge that it did so because the party was based on "foreign" (immigrant) elements...
...better job security...
...In this second period irrationalism wages war against dialectical materialism...
...One only has to look at the language they employ: Jewish radicals do not oppose their government, they long to subvert it, to undermine the existing social order, to unravel the American civic myth...
...But this would have meant a narrowing of focus, and Rothman and Lichter are after much bigger game...
...This is consistent with evidence presented by Lou Ferman and others at the University of Michigan's Labor Relations Institute, indicating that even for the two-thirds who do find new employment, one-half become permanently located in inferior jobs at lower wages...
...a worker is nevertheless (like our rose) a proletarian and has been acting as such for a couple of hundred years...
...And it may not be practical...
...Kraditor goes at her self-designated assignment with passion, the kind that can only be summoned up by someone who once shared the mythology (which she says she did) but no longer does...
...This economic class, like every other class in history (consult James Madison, "Federalist Paper No...
...a greater social wage for labor...
...John Q. is rooted in the earth while the revolutionary is lost in some cloud...
...She grants that there were many in prominent posts, especially in the Socialist party, who were realists, with a pragmatic grasp of John Q. Worker and the society as a whole...
...LukAcs's literary and aesthetic arguments— though infinitely more subtle and intelligent— follow a path similar to that of The Destruction of Reason...
...But for a movement on the march, in need of hope and forecasts of favorable issue, the notion that human beings are destined to ascend to a higher humanity is indispensable--a necessary functional figment...
...it can indulge in racial, religious, ethnic prejudice...
...We, with our perfect hindsight, know the limitations of these moving ideas, but we ought to be grateful that our radical forefathers did not know what we know—or think we know...
...A recitation of the process of deindustrialization does not necessarily generate expertise on reindustrialization...
...In all these efforts, it would be nonhistorical to exclude the work of "reformers" who were definitely nonradical...
...What could be more antithetical to a paradigm of historical necessity as well as to 526 could have better served those (like Adorno) for whom an open Marxism was essential but also insufficient and too all-encompassing, given our experiences with reason and unreason in modern times...
...All these, except perhaps the last, are policies with which the "good old FDR liberals" would have no problem...
...First of all, and perhaps this is what allows him to use it as a catchall, he defines it negatively...
...Likewise, the proletariat is the proletariat is the proletariat, although some of its members are white, some yellow, and some stinky...
...Imagine our surprise then to read in the New York Daily News (July 10, 1983) an editorial note saying that George Will...
...We have had a creeping increase in structural unemployment...
...Complicity 1,, underground work led to close association and, eventually, love...
...Later, she suggests the radicals "were, in an ironic sense, more closely tied to the conventional American world view than was John Q. Worker (usually a recent immigrant) who often did not even know what the conventional world view of Americans was, and who rarely joined the Americans' ideological debates...
...There are many ways of suppressing truth and many ways of stating it...
...Pentimento and "Julia" may have been the last little nudge to get on with it...
...Kraditor says that the use of the word—awakenwas more than a stylistic fad...
...Steep indeed...
...Second, by the terrorists who believe that the "vanguard" can replace the mass by acts of individual violence...
...Over the past decade, the U.S...
...They did, finally, have to get out of Austria, then, as war was approaching, out of France...
...In fact, that was the essence of "scientific socialism...
...In trying to figure out how to prepare trustworthy guardians for the state (philosopher-kings), Socrates says: "How then may we devise one of those needful falsehoods—just one royal lie which may deceive the rulers, if that is possible, and at any rate the rest of the city...
...In 1972 Muriel Gardiner received a letter from Anna Freud that reads, in part...
...her object then was to be an educator and writer...
...19.95...
...What remained was a dispersed underground, hidden and working in separate cells...
...At a young age, after his father's death, he was put to work at near slave-labor conditions on another farm...
...Inasmuch as modernism entailed what Irving Howe calls "an unyielding rage against the official order"—specifically against established literary and artistic styles it would seem something appealing to, if not serviceable for, Marxists...
...A few years later, marriage seemed a practical step...
...NOW TO THE Focus of her life in Austria...
...Certainly, in the area of social legislation, the radicals made a major and definable contribution: their "immediate demands" were the backbone of the New Deal and of subsequent programs in the Fair Deal and New Frontier periods...
...He pursued this line of thought in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (coauthored with Theodor Adorno at the end of World War II), which argued—in direct contrast to Lukacs's Enlightenment-Marxist faith in progress—that totalitarianism represented the dialectical outcome of the Enlightenment tradition itself...
...And their marriage has continued for over 40 years here in the U.S...
...Furthermore, Will knew that Reagan's people had used some material from the Carter campaign and never reported it...
...Some parts of this explanation ring truer than others...
...With her Gardiner passport "overstamped," so to speak, and too noticeable, she went to England, which permitted dual citizenship, and obtained a passport in her maiden name, Morris...
...Without making too much of it, Muriel Gardiner presents her awakening social conscience, which sometimes took the form of a kind of "primitive" rebellion—as when she gave away most of her clothes and jewelry...
...officials balked...
...Mary" had become a full-fledged member of the underground, meeting many of its members, especially "Wieser," an underground name of "Joe" Joseph Buttinger...
...Rothman and Lichter believe that Jewish marginality "is the most significant single variable in explaining the differential role of Jews in the radical movements in Europe and the United States...
...democracy would be the exclusive and natural form of government...
...His 1934 essay, "Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline," asserted that expressionism, despite the contrary intent of its practitioners, possessed numerous features that "fascist literary theory could accept without having to force them into its mold...
...She had, in her earlier years, never intended to become a doctor...
...the tangible and transient are mere shadows...
...Its emphasis on job deaths, which the authors rightly lay at the door of capital mobility and the search forthigher profits, leads to a series of defensive policy options...
...Indeed, when we are lost, baffled by the surface of reality, we inevitably begin to question the possibility of progress, which is inextricably linked to the power of reason...
...Kraditor makes the point that the radicals were confusing "system" with "society...
...So when they thought of themselves as the "vanguard," they were not just prating pompously to puff up their ego...
...Consider the strength labor would have in making the Federal Reserve Board more accountable to Congress and the public...
...865 pp...
...In contrast to the fetishization of "empirical facts" practiced by many Marxist and non-Marxist social scientists, Lukacs emphasized the centrality of Marx's dialectical methodology and the need to place facts within the totality of social, political, and economic relations in order to render them comprehensible and meaningful...
...I have received the Philadelphia Bulletin [Bulletin of the Philadelphia Association for Psychoanalysis, June 1972] with the articles...
...The first half is given over to analysis and description, the second half to a detailed account of the authors' testing procedures...
...By the time the author was born in 1901, the family was wealthy...
...What difference might it make to American economic policy if American workers, rather than middle- and high-income tourists and investors, were the ones conscious of what an appropriate exchange-rate policy could do for them...
...In History and Class Consciousness, Lukacs insisted that Marxism be defined not by blind adherence to the letter of the master's writings but by the spirit of his method...
...Theodor Adorno wryly remarked that the book revealed the destruction of Lukacs's reason...
...Lunn argues that after the defeat of the German left and the rise of fascism, such Marxists as Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno could become sympathetic to modernist culture because, unlike pre-World War I Social Democrats, they recognized "that as socialists they were not immune" to disillusionment...
...But we are doing better than Europe and Japan...
...The impossibilists made the possible possible by insisting on the impossible...
...Herbert Steiner, director of the Documentation Archives of the Austrian Resistance, and he checked with former resistance fighters...
...Thus Lukacs emphasized socialist culture as the heir to classical bourgeois culture and insisted on the latter's relevance for the emergence of the former, while Brecht emphasized the discontinuity of the world he found himself in with the world of a Goethe or a Balzac...
...Recognizing that human and technological progress are neither identical nor necessarily connected, Horkheimer and Adorno warned that idealizing humanity's domination of nature, and thereby canonizing the methods of natural science as the ultimate tools of all knowledge, helps insure the domination of human beings by each other...
...Let's grant Kraditor's point that there re-ally is no society where all the parts fit as neatly together as her definition of a "system" would necessitate...
...Would Kraditor insist that the Age of Enlightenment or The Great Awakening —both highly democratic concepts—were "elitist...
...But the fact is that for millions of workers in the United States, in a time of great awakening (oops), the radicals did provide a vanguard of superdedicated souls who roused and aroused, enlightened and enthused, moved and maneuvered millions of workers to transform their lives and the society around them...
...She meets and marries Julian Gardiner, has a daughter, Connie, is divorced, retains her friendship with Gardiner...
...While History and Class Consciousness had offered an uneasy balance between a utopian vision of the proletariat as the "identical subject-object of history" and Leninism, by the time of his arrival in Moscow Lukacs was an advocate of a Popular Front strategy for the exiled Hungarian Communists...
...By applying "reductionist" logic—the whole is best understood by examining its separate partsKraditor loses sight of the forest for the trees...
...He specializes in moralistic declamations and quasi-Burkean reflections that seem to have put him a notch above most of his brethren...
...Although Brecht never accepted all the assumptions underlying modernism, he sought to "functionally transform" its techniques for progressive purposes, just as Marx imagined socialism functionally transforming the advances made in the means of production under capitalism...
...This review, concentrating on the issue of deindustrialization, plays to the book's strength...
...The essential difference between the abusers and the users of the "vanguard" concept is that the former try to substitute it for the people while the latter try to elevate the people to its own level of thought and action...
...In the end, it is only because Lukacs begins his teleology of unreason with a simplistic Manichaeism that he can maneuver diverse types of thinking into the service of his thesis...
...But, much like Bluestone and Harrison's policy suggestions to eliminate tax subsidies for mergers and other unproductive investment and plant relocation, exchange-rate policy raises the issue of the distribution of power between capital and labor...
...They describe the various forms such disinvestment takes, assess its impact, analyze the forces behind it, and examine policy options to confront the problem...
...The defeat of his position in the party (by Bela Kun's supporters) coincided with his withdrawal from active politics...
...All would make the U.S...
...The great German battle between reason and unreason is the superstructural counterpart of the socioeconomic historical evolution to Hitler, and thus equally the battle between progress and reaction...
...Her evidence is drawn from the speeches and statements of radicals associated with the Socialist Labor party, the Socialist party, and the Industrial Workers of the World in the years 1890-1917...
...Other actions were inspired by radicals...
...He repudiated his book and in future years published numerous "self-criticisms...
...Most of them went to Czechoslovakia and later, when the Nazis took over that country too, elsewhere...
...Plato, in The Republic, showed a real understanding of how important such "myths" are in enabling humans ro rise to their highest potential...
...The all-powerful Czars, the all-powerful Bourbons were assailed by revolutionaries precisely because they were all-powerful and because they presided over a system to perpetuate that power...
...The policies the authors set forward to avoid some of this injury, to slow down the pace of private capital mobility and to compensate workers and their communities for the remaining costs have 522 been tried, with varying success, in other countries...
...In the event, Muriel Gardiner checked with Dr...
...37.50 cloth, $12.95 paper...
...The notion that the radical movements of the "shake-up" period were eschewed by immigrants is an invention, really an unnecessary one, to prove that the revolutionary vanguard could never reach the masses, because they spoke different languages —literally...
...In time, all of these places became "safe houses" for underground resisters...
...Management found that it could no longer afford the social contract and maintain its accustomed level of profit...
...Especially affected by attacks from within the Comintern, Lukacs 523 retreated...
...It is clear that we are currently living through both a recession and a period of production shifts—from the industrial to what some have called the postindustrial society...
...A brief epilogue speaks of their life in the U.S...
...Deindustrialization focuses on job deaths...
...In our heads a million myths are in ceaseless and endless warfare...
...NAME "MARY": MEMOIRS OF AN AMERICAN WOMAN IN TILE AUSTRIAN UNDERGROUND, by Muriel Gardiner...
...Movements have leaders...
...The first Socialist elected to the U.S...
...While growing up in America, she attends fine schools, travels abroad, aspires to be a writer, goes to Wellesley, engages in political discussion, is influenced by a few teachers...
...This is different from reindustrialization, which is a positive policy strategy...
...The book is divided into two sections...
...After all, Moses never had a chance to lead his people into the Promised Land...
...also] contributed to the profit squeeze...
...This question gets to the essence of the relation between the radical and John Q. Worker...
...Reindustrialization is about job births...
...Their book is the outcome of four related studies conducted over the past decade...
...Lunn ties the rise of modernism to the demise of the promise of liberalism, particularly in the late 19th century...
...Socrates then proceeds to invent such a "Phoenician tale," a useful truth to serve as an organizing principle for his desired society...
...Today no major Marxist party (socialist or communist) has any intention of wiping out all private enterprise...
...Great realism, Lukacs writes, portrays not the most obvious in reality but what is permanently and objectively more significant, namely man in the whole range of his relations to the real world, above all, those which outlast mere fashion...
...In this volume of essays, the categories of classical German philosophy (particularly Hegel) were vigorously reinjected into a Marxism that, both in the East and the West, had become dominated by a crude positivism and a crude economic determinism...
...14.95...
...In retrospect, it seems that while the concepts of proletariat, system, and vanguard have validity, they were often misapplied and, even more often, endowed with magical qualities—in the same way that religion, psychoanalysis, vegetarianism, megavitamins, or computers are endowed with such powers...
...According to Rothman and Lichter, the early leaders of SDS, who were disproportionately Jews from the eastern part of the country, represent the self-expansive or "protean" form of psychopolitical rebellion...
...They cannot be judged by whether all the workers, or most of them, completed the long march to socialism...
...Probably no more so than any concept—as distinct from the concrete...
...Lukacs wrote it while under attack by Matyas Rakosi's hatchet men in the late 1940s and early '50s...
...Whether Marx (and the radical of the last 100 years) was inspired consciously by Darwin's theories of evolution or unconsciously by the messianism of the Hebrew prophets, faith in the future was so deeply accepted that it was rarely debated...
...Berkeley: University of California Press...
...However, after the first three decades of the 20th century, a new reality had imposed itself—a reality far from that predicted in The Communist Manifesto...
...But though the strucBad Will One of the conservative writers who has recently become prominent is Mr...
...And while Code Name "Mary" quite properly confines this autobiography's scope, the reader who knows something about Muriel and Joe wishes there had been a little more...
...Lunn's Marxism and Modernism is especially successful in placing these issues within their historical context, thus helping to explain why one diverse group of Marxists at a given historical moment found relevant what at another time was shunned...
...This brings us to what is perhaps the most vulnerable aspect of Lukacs's analysis and assumptions...
...thought breaks down before reality, which becomes "an area beyond reason...
...While no worker is the Platonic perfection of the proletarian idea (ideal...
...And it is also clear that the present political mood, so markedly different from that of 20 years ago, has played its part in this book's composition...
...it will take up arms against fellow proletarians...
...At the heart of the book was an essay on the "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat" that examined the process by which, under capitalism, the world of products of human labor comes to be regarded by its producers as a world of things and of relations among things beyond their control...
...Mary" lives, and continues a productive life that has included, in addition to private practice, work with New Jersey's Board of Health, a book on Freud's "Wolf Man," and an important book based on her work with juvenile prisoners, The Deadly Innocents: Portraits of Children Who Kill...
...The author is not angry with the self-anointed saviors of yesteryear...
...Foreword by Anna Freud...
...Indeed, if "capitalism" is not a "system," ours is the only culture ever that lacked a "system...
...Her definition of a "system" is "a social order in which the political, economic, and social spheres were tightly integrated and mutually consistent in their values...
...But she had to stay on, and the why of it becomes the heart of the book...
...q Emanuel Geltman A Heroic Tale, Told Simply CODE...
...Though the authors concede that such "subversion" (their word) may involve an attack upon genuine inequities or irrationalities, they also insist that the attack is generally not directed at a particular inequity or irrationality per se...
...Is the proletariat a myth...
...But, in many cases, 516 the cooler heads in the establishment yielded to reform, not necessarily because they favored the step but because they feared "the revolution...
...she had joined in SaccoVanzetti protests, showed her concern with social issues as a member of the Wellesley (College) Forum, joined Harvard and Radcliffe students in organizing a student conference addressed by socialist and liberal leaders...
...In each case, participation was voluntary...
...Literature, he maintained, must grasp not merely what is on the surface but rather what is beneath it, the world's objective reality—a "totality...
...Written simply, without flourish or glitter, it is a record of how a privileged young American woman, in Vienna for psychoanalytic sessions with Dr...
...But until we get there, controlling the pace of economic dislocation and minimizing its costs represents a first step toward an American industrial policy...
...However, to claim that they were all—except for Hegel and Marxism—road signs to the Third Reich is not just an absurdly sweeping generalization but a remarkable example of backward tunnel vision...
...It is not a panacea...
...it was a calculated conclusion based on the dynamics of a "system" that raised up a "proletariat" that would transform the social order...
...After analyzing Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Simmel, Martin Heidegger, and Karl Jaspers, Lukacs turns to the evolution of 19thcentury German sociology and finally to race theory itself...
...I knew then that I was one of the anointed, of the "vanguard...
...Anna Freud But they were Muriel Gardiner's concern, and they had to be, as this book makes clear...
...to have been seriously injured...
...In the three-dimensional world of the five senses, there are only individual specimens (no species)—some white, some yellow, some odorless, some stinky...
...The author does not stretch her conclusions to include all radicals...
...At strategic points throughout the book the authors attempt to disarm such criticism...
...New Haven: Yale University Press...
...In a 1941 article entitled "The End of Reason," Max Horkheimer asserted that fascism was "reason revealing itself as unreason...
...Here was an intellectual energizer to "enthuse"—to put theos (Greek for God) en (into) the human spirit— an enthusiasm without which men and women may never claim that they were created in the image and likeness of their Maker...
...The aim of the Jewish radical is to estrange the Christian from society, as he feels estranged from it...
...So what...
...they were "spontaneous...
...We know that each of these things is, in some sense, real...
...The U.S...
...It matters little to the authors that "SDS grew more receptive to organized political violence as its non-Jewish contingent grew in size...
...Kraditor uses this investigation into the "methods and principles of writing history" (a definition of historiography) to debunk the many myths spread by her fellow historians of leftist persuasion who shared the mythology of the turn-of-the-century radicals...
...Some of the best radicals —Debs, Kate Richards O'Hare—looked upon the struggle for the rights of women and Negroes as diversionary and unnecessary...
...The authors are both academics...
...democratic movements have a special need for skillful leaders if the movement is not to fall into anarchy...
...Kraditor provides plenty of passages (one of the real values of the book) to prove the point...
...In the dialectic clash between capitalism and socialism, some kind of synthesis appears to be emanating from the interplay of "thesis" and "antithesis...
...And it is no myth that a radical change in the economic system will radically change the whole society, including its "political" and "social" spheres...
...By my lights, the "proletariat" is not a myth any more than "the forest" is a myth, although neither of them has an existence per se outside the human head...
...As Lunn points out, to the extent that modernism's diversity had unifying themes—aesthetic self-consciousness, temporal simultaneity, paradox and uncertainty, demise of the integrated human subject—they were at odds with faith in a linear development of human history toward an inevitable goal brought forth by the class struggle and a corresponding belief that literature and art ought to reflect "realistically" that evolution and struggle...
...Themes parallel to those of The Destruction of Reason appeared in Lukacs's literary and aesthetic writings, especially as they pertained to modernism...
...Their heads are filled with myths heard in infancy from mother or wet nurse, from the boys or girls, from the pulpit or press, in school, on radio or TV, on the street, in the ethnic enclave, from the cognoscenti, from books, from their analyst, their bartender, the commercials—from fantasies that spring out of the dark recesses of their own being...
...Clearly, a reassessment of the New Left and the young radicals of the 1960s is long overdue...
...It was not some utopian blueprint sprung from desire and dreams...
...And for this reason, we are told, the Jewish male radical comes to identify with powerful causes in order to appease doubts about his masculinity...
...helped Reagan's staff prep him for the debate with Carter and then appeared on ABC television to comment on the debate and say what a fine job Reagan had done without mentioning his own role...
...Because the book focuses on a time period (1890-1917), it is not altogether clear whether the radical's romantic view of proletariat, system, and self is to be seen as a chronic condition of the would-be revolutionary or just an aberration of an era that the author repeatedly refers to as the "shake-up period...
...The concept of "vanguard" has been repeatedly abused and misused by radicals in at least three recurrent ways...
...The unemployment, the permanent losses in income and pension rights, as well as the depletion of savings, generate severe hardship for workers, their families, and their communities...
...Leaders are invested with authority by those who choose them—or tolerate them...
...George Will...
...but he did take them a long way—out of slavery and toward the Commandments...
...Thanks to Hitler, Stalin, atomic weaponry, Freud, Niebuhr, and the discovery of indeterminacy, many of us have come to question the "inevitability of socialism," of Fabian gradualism, of progress, and even of continued existence...
...The draft, which is rarely mentioned in Roots of Radicalism, was talked about incessantly...
...Not surprisingly, History and Class Consciousness provoked the wrath of "orthodoxy" both in the Second and the Third International, for each had to maintain its own "objective truth...
...The authors do not mention some fundamentals: an appropriate mix of monetary and fiscal policy and an intelligent exchange-rate policy...
...New York: Oxford University Press...
...Germany's defeat is the historical event of the defeat of unreason by reason—and here by reason Lukacs meant Stalin's Russia...
...A decline in optimism, a loss of faith in progress, fear for the fate of the individual in the era of the masses—all these, coupled with the increased dependence of artists on the market, helped lead to a preoccupation with formal questions as well as to a vision of art and literature as something self-referential in a dehumanized, dislocated world...
...Although the author is a historian, the book is not a history: it refers to itself as "the Historiography of Three American Radical Organizations...
...With the victory of the working class, racial and religious prejudice would end...
...worker would never turn against worker in national wars...
...Hence Napoleon advanced the course of historical progress by breaking down Europe's ancien regime, but for the sake of his own grandeur, not for the birth of a more rational world...
...Through their multinational subsidiaries and the profitable sales of patents and licenses to foreign enterprises, the leading American firms even helped to generate their future competition...
...Yet even if he was so inclined, public criticism in the Russia of the purges was hardly feasible and his own survival in itself is something remarkable...
...More than that, however, he accommodated to and assimilated important elements of Stalinism...
...Conclusion...
...plant-closing legislation...
...It, or parties acting in its name, can come to power and rule without democracy...
...However, it is evident that, intentionally or not, Goldmann's characterization could (at least partially) fit Lukacs's career as well—although Lukacs, while living in Stalin's Moscow of the 1930s and '40s, was restricted to praising the outcome of a revolution...
...His positive definition combines Hegelian insight with crude materialism...
...We are not arguing that '60s radicals were more pathological, or even more likely to be acting on the basis of unconscious impulses than were conservatives or liberals...
...Her evidence about the movement being an army is derived from repeated reference to "class society" as "a state of war" with the "proletariat an army" and "the officer corps the S.P., the S.L.P., or I.W.W.," with "a strike a battlefield...
...Granted, some people in the New Left were narcissistic and driven by self-interest--or, more to the point, selfpreservation...
...It is indeed a good idea to read the record of the resistance in his book—Joseph Buttinger's In The Twilight of Socialism, a comprehensive account of the Austrian underground...
...If the authors had approached their subject from this perspective they might have had a case...
...First, by the sectarians who believe that perfection of the program and purification of the party will establish a bright, shiny standard around which the masses will instinctively rally...
...The solution was capital mobility...
...History has its cunning...
...If I understand what the author is trying to say (and it isn't always easy), the gap between radical and worker is not simply that between "leader" and "led" but between American and "immigrant...
...Some job deaths are inevitable...
...Undoubtedly, there are very important contiguities between nazism and earlier forms of German thought and nationalism...
...Julia" turns up in Hellman's Pentimemo and in the film of that name with Vanessa Redgrave and Jane Fonda...
...She directs her fire at "the mythicists" who dominated the radical movement of that day and, one suspects, of later days when the Communists dominated American radicalism...
...The radical depicted the "system" as all-powerful, in control of press, pulpit, and the president...
...And we certainly don't maintain that our findings discredit the student movement or the ideas developed by its leadership...
...Such individuals conceive of themselves as rebels against weak and corrupt authorities...
...The radical of yesteryear saw public ownership replace private ownership of the means of production and exchange—one "system" pushing out another...
...Is "mankind," or "male macho," or "feminine mystique," or "love," or a "nation," or "mankind" a myth...
...He found his way to the socialist movement and its literature...
...Faced by persecutors too powerful to resist physically, Jewish families of the diaspora gradually came to place tremendous emphasis upon inhibiting direct expression of physical aggression, particularly by male children...
...it was not just the morality of the Ubermensch that (rightly, in my view) repelled him, but perhaps more significantly Nietzsche's claim that "the will to a system is a lack of integrity...
...The first, which closes circa 1871, corresponds to the rise of the 524 bourgeoisie...
...The deaths must be weighed against the births...
...Her maternal grandfather, Gustavus Swift, born in New England, had also made his way to Chicago as a near-penniless young man, and built the Swift meat-packing company...
...Not wishing to be cast as an apologist for some of the methods and rhetoric of the New Left, I still must admit that the authors' portrait of "the '60s" in no way resembles anything I witnessed...
...More simply, Lukacs is arguing that "objective truth" is attained when the mind accurately reflects the world as it exists outside the mind...
...So reason, he argues, takes form in dialectical materialism...
...Modernists, however, ran aground in the chaotic appearances that confronted them...
...Likewise the military simile, while accurate, does not connote elitism...
...Why then have Rothman and Lichter written nearly 500 pages in which the psychological imbalances of radicals are described in numbing detail...
...The weakest part of the book is the last section, called "The Great Reindustrialization Debate...
...Goethe scholars may choose to dispute these claims...
...Indeed, there was (still is) a Yiddish socialist publication called "Der Wecker" (The Awakener...
...The cause of this, Rothman and Lichter maintain, is the Jewish family structure...
...That same year saw the publication of an article on "Goethe and the French Revolution" by his Rumanian-French disciple Lucien Goldmann, which argued against the prevalent view that the author of Faust was indifferent to politics in general and hostile to the French Revolution in particular...
...False passports were required, and they could be gotten by sending couriers to Czechoslovakia, where exiled SP leader Otto Bauer and others would make arrangements...
...But is Kraditor's notion of John Q. Worker not just another myth—a myth that like the radical's image of the proletariat is an equally romanticized version of John Q. Worker...
...In Kraditor's cosmogony, John Q. Worker is presented as "reality," as the counterpoint to the radical's mythology...
...There is also a brief survey of her life before and after "Mary...
...This is not to say that Ford doesn't use the workers of one country against those of another—just that it certainly hasn't shrunk from investing and producing in highly unionized environments...
...In this sense it parallels such policies as prior notification of plant closings, improved unemployment compensation, and job retraining and adjustment assistance...
...LUKAC'S PRESENTATION INVITES COMPARISON with the work of the Frankfurt School...
...second, that the movement was an army in which the radicals were the generals...
...As 20th-century "administered" monopoly capitalism replaced the liberal, competitive capitalism of the 19th century, this process attained its most acute form in fascism...
...The third study was conducted in 197475, when the authors interviewed 120 early New Leftists...
...She argues that even in Europe there never was such a "system," and that the "term is even less appropriate to the United States...
...Then she goes to Oxford...
...Just as he stressed the irrationalism of expressionism, Lukacs saw in modernism in general a foe of the literary realism he championed in the 1930s...
...520 Bluestone and Harrison cite studies indicating that plant closures lead to long-term unemployment for about one-third of the work force...
Vol. 30 • September 1983 • No. 4
