LETTERS
The Influence of FDR Editors: In your Winter 1985 issue, Dissent's reviewer, Leo P. Ribuffo, is distressed by the fact that my book In the Shadow of FDR: From Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan has...
...They may still see things in a personal light but can no longer contribute to change them...
...But as I have reread the reviews in preparing a revision of the book for a paperback edition, I have been struck by how little attention was paid to the presumed outlook of the author and how much to the historical question he was raising...
...recalcitrant in France...
...He was then moved to a regular cell, and his wife (but not his daughter) could visit him once a month for two hours...
...If so, it was an eloquence that meant different things to different people, unlike the eloquence of public speech...
...Nor can the ambiguity be solved by attempts at redefinition, for the difficulty lies in the nature of a community's self-love...
...More recently, in her brilliant catalogue essay, Blam!: The Explosion of Pop, Minimalism, and Performance, 1958-1964, Barbara Haskell has noted an artist's complaint, "De Kooning had already painted all my paintings," and she has attributed the emergence of a new aesthetic in these years to the attempt of artists to escape the shadow cast by the Abstract Expressionists...
...It's not so much that love is blind, on his view, as that it is ("beyond a certain intensity") impotent—incapable, that is, of changing its object...
...But if we take it for granted that the French community to which he was loyal, to the point of silence, was itself interested in power, then the notion of "a judgment on power, not on love" becomes a curious mystification...
...The likely military and religious policies of the Reagan administration will create many more such abuses, which they both will need to oppose, an effort in which both will need allies...
...In seeking to honor Camus in the second of these roles, Walzer aims at something larger than the rehabilitation of a man of good faith...
...One more point before the deeper issues: "the French in Algeria, the British in India, and the Israelis in West Bank settlements" are not comparable cases and don't "pose comparable difficulties...
...Writing an analysis is not synonymous with being "unfriendly," yet neither does it mean compiling accolades and accusations uttered in retrospect...
...But Walzer's line of defense raises a more general question...
...It does not defend either the established present or any historical period of the past as the ideal, but seeks to find examples in both to guide its efforts toward a future founded in views deeply critical of the present...
...Only if the success, say, of a PLO terrorist campaign undercut the left and made compromise impossible might he feel compelled to fall silent...
...If so, my lapse is not unique (nor is it confined to the "New Left...
...now he parodies their views...
...Without a sure constituency to bring his various interests into coherence, the detached critic is driven unavoidably to a series of extreme postures, in the hope of satisfying his momentary instinct for justice...
...In any case, I think that I should set the record straight before turning to the deeper issues raised by David Bromwich's probing letter...
...As a result, I had to construct the narrative in very large part from original sources...
...The dearth of historical literature created a second, and even more imposing, problem—that there were almost no published sources on which to draw...
...or perhaps he made too much of it...
...I think so...
...As I understand it, Walzer's objection to Sartre and de Beauvoir is not that they lacked feelings of love and attachment, but rather that they felt no allegiance to any existing community...
...I will not, therefore, suggest that Graubard has simply projected his own views (if they are his own views) onto libertarianism...
...In truth, I think that any historian who does not recognize the significance of the growth of the state in the Roosevelt years is missing a central chapter in the history of 20thcentury America...
...Walzer cites, as a motive for Camus's silence, the fear of terrorist reprisals against his family, and seems to view this as part of a necessary complex of motives for the critic who admits "primary loyalties...
...The critic, evidently, is to criticize power, and to speak for a justice that defers to love...
...Compared to the loyalist, the critic who consents to this disability may seem unreliable and even absurd, as he changes his attitude from one issue to the next...
...WILLIAM H. STODDARD Chula Vista, California q Camus's Algerian War Editors: Michael Walzer's essay "Commitment and Social Criticism: Camus's Algerian War" (Dissent, Fall 1984) offers a sympathetic portrait of Albert Camus in two different roles: as a courageous social critic, at a time when his people remained securely in power...
...A literary critic who placed Allen Ginsberg in Whitman's "shadow" might legitimately be asked whether Blake exerted greater influence...
...Consistent with our stand in support of struggles for freedom and self-determination throughout the world, we ask the Cuban government to release Ariel Hidalgo, and any other persons whose rights have been similarly denied...
...left and right...
...More than one reviewer has indicated that much, indeed most, of the material has never appeared in print before...
...Since August 1984, even these monthly visits have been prohibited...
...In fact, the connected social critic can still say no to his own people, even when survival is at stake...
...He was liberated from his own love, not from other people's...
...Perhaps I am too hard on Roosevelt and too soft on his successors...
...Granted, impartiality can "slide into cold indifference," yet the warmth of Camus's morality is what stopped him from speaking...
...This is a large defect, and Walzer suggests how far it limits both the influence and practicability of "existentialist" criticism in general...
...He would not have been impotent, however, had he not loved so well, for the challenge was still politically possible...
...NANETTE ROSA-COLLAZO VIRGINIA SANCHEZ-KORROL CLANCY SIGAL I. F. STONE CARLOTA SUAREZ PAUL M. SWEEZY NANCY WECHSLER STANLEY WEIR eight years in prison under the Fifth Section (titled "Enemy Propaganda"), article 108-1 of the Cuban Penal Code, which punishes any person "who, (a) incites against the social order, international solidarity or the socialist State by means of oral or written propaganda, or any other form...
...Since the Progressive era, liberals have exaggerated the ability of benign presidents to transform the social order and international relations...
...I have shown how Truman resented being thought of as a caretaker...
...Or it could mean continued economic well-being (short of expropriation...
...Both adhere to ethical standards that require them to attack established abuses of power, and defend individuals against these abuses...
...Suffice it to say that the best revisionist interpretations (including synthetic essays by Barton Bernstein, Howard Zinn, and William Appleman Williams, as well as many monographs) do not dismiss the New Deal as a "regrettable episode...
...They restricted the matter to be discussed almost before the discussion began, and his silence was an enforcement of the same restriction by other means...
...WILLIAM E. LEUCHTENBURG Chapel Hill, North Carolina LEO RIBUFFO Replies Readers of Professor Leuchtenburg's angry letter who missed my review will be surprised to learn that I noted "interesting insights" in his book, nowhere doubted his legendary capacity for research, and paraphrased his arguments fully before questioning some of them...
...It is suggested that in taking that attitude I have become less analytical, but it does seem a strange mode of categorization to equate "analytical" with how unfriendly you are toward FDR...
...For him, Camus is an instance of the "connected" critic, the insider who acknowledges his ties to a community even as he works to expose its injustices...
...This is my position, at any rate, and Leuchtenburg should be able to distinguish it from the "hostility" to liberalism he finds among reviewers in "far right" periodicals (apparently Commentary and National Review...
...Since publishing the book, I have come upon a statement in the New York Times in August 1984 by a former Nixon speech-writer stressing that point and upon Michael W Miles's observation in The Odyssey of the American Right, "The New Deal and the 1930s were still the yardstick by which Nixon wanted to measure the historic significance of his presidency...
...Yet it is true that I do not believe that the myth of FDR is fabricated out of nothing, and I have not been persuaded by the writings of New Left historians who view the New Deal as a regrettable episode...
...The Influence of FDR Editors: In your Winter 1985 issue, Dissent's reviewer, Leo P. Ribuffo, is distressed by the fact that my book In the Shadow of FDR: From Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan has received such a "warm reception," and he attributes the critical acclaim to the mindless hospitality of reviewers to liberal doctrine...
...how Carter, despite launching his campaign from Warm Springs, encountered difficulty with the Roosevelt myth...
...But critics do bear the responsibility for examining the evidence...
...Hidalgo was eventually convicted and sentenced to For Information, Contact: Prof...
...At this point, however, they can no longer be simply asserted...
...Moreover, the question of how great a president FDR really was is, though important, not central to my inquiry...
...But neither a book nor even a substantial article had ever been written about FDR and his followers...
...Indeed, once the critic speaks in these tones, his testimony is indistinguishable from that of the citizen with a bad conscience...
...For what each of his successors had to deal with was not the historical Roosevelt but the myth of FDR, and any awareness they had of how far the real Roosevelt fell short of the myth could only have augmented their frustration...
...progress depends on grass-roots pressure as well as a receptive White House...
...When, however, Camus hopes that his society like his family "will survive at least and, by surviving, have a chance to show its fairness," he makes an appeal that may justify his action and immobility alike...
...He tries to reason morally, but with a full sense of his people's fate...
...When the French withdrew from Algeria, it was Sartre and not Camus whom de Gaulle chose for his tribute: "As Sartre goes, so goes France...
...This silence Walzer chooses to regard as an implicit act of criticism: it is "eloquent in its hopelessness...
...Furthermore, instead of denying that FDR was a "large presence" in Richard Nixon's life, I credited Nixon with a good understanding of his predecessor...
...But why wasn't Camus's refusal to endorse either the position of the FLN or the position of the pied noir majority an example of principled recalcitrance...
...I would argue that silence here becomes the rule rather than the exception, whenever the critic feels (a) that the very survival of his community is imperiled...
...Libertarianism is an oppositional philosophy, and there is a great deal for it to oppose in Ronald Reagan and the triumph of corporate capitalism...
...That is hardly surprising, for I conceived of the book neither as a celebration of liberalism nor as an exaltation of Roosevelt but rather as an effort to deal with a particular historical problem: the influence of a political leader on his successors, a subject that, curiously, historians had not dealt with before...
...The West Bank settlers of the last ten years are not a community or a cadre but a faction, drawn mostly from the extreme right of Israel's political spectrum...
...Although the enthusiastic reviews Leuchtenburg received in the American Historical Review, Journal of American History, Washington Post, and New York Times Book Review brought me no "distress," they did prompt reflections on a mood within the historical profession...
...Authors are often much better served by critical reviews than by approving ones, and in moving into an uncharted field such as the "shadow" genre, I appreciate all the help I can get...
...David Bromwich recognizes the moral advantages of connection, but he worries about its liabilities...
...Among others, Leuchtenburg's colleague Otis Graham 253 has documented Nixon's affinity for social planning and extension of the welfare state...
...rich and poor...
...One could imagine a volume in which the author painstakingly shows how the great and good FDR cast his benign influence on each of a series of grateful successors...
...I am somewhat puzzled by this contrast...
...Ariel Hidalgo was first arrested in 1980 when he faced a rock-throwing group and loudly protested their attack on a student who was seeking to leave the country during the exodus of Cubans from the port of Mariel...
...b) makes, distributes, or possesses propaganda of the character mentioned in the preceding clause...
...and as a citizen who withdrew from the writing of criticism, when his people came under a physical threat from outside...
...Well, but love of what...
...Thus most historians are less likely than ever to agree with—or even consider seriously— the minority view that basic defects marred Roosevelt's version of liberalism...
...A problem for any admirer of Camus is his refusal to speak of Algerian politics throughout his last years...
...The government's case consisted of testimony by the local neighborhood defense committee, which spoke of Hidalgo's "talking too much...
...Now: is the critic served by his connection, his loyalty, his love...
...One might well feel differently about the survival, security, well-being of such very different groups...
...In writing about FDR and the Supreme Court or the history of America since 1945, as I am now doing, I can count on an all but overwhelming trove of books and essays...
...endlessly acquiescent in the Third World...
...The French in Algeria were a community of some million and a half people...
...On the other hand, Leuchtenburg tends to discount Roosevelt's dangerous legacies, minimizing, for example, connections between FDR's politicization of intelligence agencies and later abuses under Johnson and Nixon...
...Samuel Farber, Political Science (718) 852-6304, Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, N.Y...
...Leuchtenburg exaggerates FDR's impact, however, because he ignores the greater influence of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Dwight D. Eisenhower...
...Since few poets initiate social legislation, dispatch troops, or seek votes, critics like Bloom can plausibly, if not always convincingly, limit the search for "influence" to the explication of texts...
...Hidalgo was freed, but he was arrested again in 1981...
...For simply expressing his views, Hidalgo spent the first 14 months in jail in deplorable conditions—solitary confinement in the Combinado del Este prison near Havana...
...In fact, Hidalgo was sentenced to the maximum term of one to eight years established by this law...
...I posed this question, an update of the perennial question concerning continuity within American progressivism, partly because I haven't made up my own mind...
...Bromwich wants us to admire "principled recalcitrance," and I am more than ready to do that, at least sometimes...
...Rather, their central theme is that, despite constraints imposed by American politics and ideology, the Roosevelt administration could have done more to provide unemployment relief, restructure the economy, protect the civil rights of blacks and Japanese-Americans, rescue European Jews, and perhaps avoid war with Japan...
...At the same time, FDR's fervent defenders include unreconstructed veterans of the Popular Front (and often their professorial children) who believe that he would have avoided the Cold War...
...DAVID BROMWICH Princeton, N.J...
...254 Inasmuch as American society is dominated by corporate capitalist enterprises, many of the state interventions and oppressions libertarians criticize are products of these enterprises' influence...
...If I had intended to write an apotheosis of Rooseveltian liberalism, the book would have had a very different form...
...Camus published his first articles on Algeria in 1939...
...There, the Reagan era has produced less conservatism or neoconservatism than a rallying around FDR and the New Deal...
...q Speak Up for Human Rights in Cuba Editors: We all have been long-standing opponents, in our writings and actions, of U.S...
...Yet students of poetry and the presidency ask different kinds of questions, explore different materials, and often need divergent methods...
...and that one needs to restore a sense of how much Roosevelt and the New Deal achieved, while continuing to point out the shortcomings of both...
...Walzer gives less attention to the shortcomings of the loyalist critic: above all, his liability to imagine a dramatic contrast between love and power, and to persuade himself that by declaring his allegiance to the former he renounces all connection with the latter...
...This is the kind of question that now appears to be increasingly attractive to historians working independently in the most diverse fields...
...While we have varying views of the Castro government in Cuba, we are greatly disturbed by the case of Ariel Hidalgo, a Cuban leftist writer, historian, and educator...
...In writing In The Shadow of FDR, I sought to do what had not been done previously—to move this preoccupation of literary critics to the sphere of political history, to ask what meaning the memory of Franklin D. Roosevelt has had for his successors...
...During the two years that remained before his death in 1960, he wrote nothing more...
...Leuchtenburg does not specify whom he means by "New Left historians," and the label itself, a product of polemics during the 1960s, sheds more heat than light...
...Certainly, the libertarian vision and the democratic socialist one are deeply at odds...
...Contrary positions on these issues can of course be argued...
...Walzer admires the loyalist critic for his concern with "the complexity of love," as against the detached critic's commitment to an abstract justice ("As if the critic plucked his principles from the sky...
...Is it fair to demand such comparisons from a book called In the Shadow of FDR...
...It recognizes the claims of liberty in spheres other than the economic, and vigorously opposes any inequality of rights based on religion, race, sex, age, class, or nationality...
...11210...
...The prosecution chose not to mention that the police had seized an unpublished manuscript in which Hidalgo attempts to demonstrate that a new ruling class has taken over the "socialist" countries including Cuba...
...Plainly, such a critic will not as a rule get a serious hearing from his countrymen, for his sentiments seem to place him outside their shared situation...
...But the account is altogether different...
...Close reading is a valuable tool and empathy an admirable trait, but no more so than the ability to make necessary comparisons and select evidence appropriate to the questions at hand...
...Yet are there not times when a principled recalcitrance effects a good that is denied to consistency and humanity...
...It does not seem to accord with the historical record, in which businesses have too often taken actions harming individual liberty...
...The British in India were largely an administrative and military cadre, an elite of rulers, not of settlers...
...I quote this last sentence from a recent essay of Walzer's on another French critic, Julien Benda ("The Politics of the Intellectual," in Conflict and Consensus, Walter W. Powell and Richard Robbins, eds., New York: Free Press, 1984), but its pertinence to his argument on Camus seems clear enough...
...We believe that Hidalgo's trial, the law under which he was punished, and the prison conditions he is enduring fail to meet the most elementary standards of human rights...
...The trouble is that the meaning of survival is infinitely elastic...
...It hardly matters whether this was a joke or not: the point is that nothing could be said about Camus...
...challenge the society to which he was attached...
...They have wanted to understand how poets and novelists have coped with the overbearing sense that a great figure who has gone before them has appeared to preempt the field, with the lament of Robert Burton that "we can say nothing but what has been said," and with T. S. Eliot's perception, "When a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once for all, and cannot be achieved again...
...No French Algerian fighting to maintain French hegemony and resisting every compromise could possibly have imagined that Camus was on his side...
...Survival to the French in Algeria, for example, could mean the retention of political sovereignty, or of a disproportionate degree of power...
...He is giving notice in advance that, in spite of his protests, he will cooperate with everything the community demands for "survival...
...Crises of this sort ought to be rare but in fact they are common: the French in Algeria, the British in India, and the Israelis in West Bank settlements, disparate as they are in other respects, pose comparable difficulties for the critic who wants to preserve a governing community and its way of life...
...farmers, workers, professionals...
...and (b) that those who constitute the peril have suffered great injustices from the community itself...
...It is not that he didn't have a position during those last years, only that he didn't have a new position...
...And it is in that context, I believe, that the book can best be understood, not as a filiopietistic study of FDR...
...The distinction follows from a belief that critics stand somewhere and not nowhere...
...that 252 the New Left perspective is all antithesis...
...Some months ago, in fact, Michael Kammen suggested that the book could be seen as part of an emerging historiographical genre that includes such works as an examination of the cult of the Virgin Mary and Nina Tumarkin's fascinating Lenin Lives...
...The last example has been raised by other readers of my Camus essay, who suggest (as Bromwich does not) that 1 was really writing in Aesopian fashion about the contemporary Middle East...
...That was what Camus faced at the end: he still had a position (he still had, it seems to me, the right position) but no ground left to stand on...
...Perhaps so...
...His very gifts as a critic, his attachment to a place, a people, a way of life were his undoing in Algeria...
...and no president deserves uncritical support...
...What, then, of the critic who gives Camus's apology for renouncing his task: "I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice...
...or simply life (short of extinction...
...intervention in the affairs of Latin American and Caribbean countries...
...Perhaps that took courage (though Joseph Frank argued persuasively in the last Dissent that, in Sartre's circle, it would have taken more courage to break with the FLN), and perhaps we ought to admire that courage...
...or geographical integrity (short of relocation...
...Our conflicting assessments of In the Shadow of FDR derive not from my failure to "confront evidence" but from differing conceptions of what constitutes the best evidence...
...This is not to say that we can do without attachments, only that those who feel them palpably, and at every step, cease to function as critics however they may continue as poets...
...in this it is far removed from the conservatism of the Reagan administration...
...Certainly, it is true that almost the only unfavorable notices have come in periodicals hostile to liberalism, though until now they have all been on the far right...
...how Kennedy insisted that the 1930s were not pertinent to his own day...
...No matter where we rank them in the presidential ratings game, historians judging FDR's influence on Lyndon Johnson need to decide in what significant ways Great Society programs differed from New Deal programs...
...Beyond these considerations, it is hardly a viewpoint that libertarians would accept...
...Camus, as Bromwich describes him, is a social critic debilitated by his attachment, who could not at the end 256 PETE CAMARATA NOAM CHOMSKY JOHN ENRYK CLARKE BERNADETTE DEVLIN MCALISK EY BARBARA EHRENREICH ALEXANDE3t ERLICH (1912-85) SAMUEL FARBER BARBARA GARSON GA Y COMMUNITY NEWS RICHARD HEALEY JOANNE LANDY GORDON K. LEWIS SAM MEYERS RALPH MILIBAND CARLOS MOORE PAUL ROBESON, JR...
...But one lesson of Camus's later career would seem to be that attachments beyond a certain intensity make the work of criticism untenable...
...In brief, I think that to develop a credible synthesis of the New Deal, one first needs a usable dialectic...
...At a certain level, libertarianism favors certain aspects of the Reagan administration of which Dissent's contributors will surely be critical...
...But after perusing not only all of the books and articles on Nixon, but materials from such original sources as the Helen Gahagan Douglas papers at the University of Oklahoma, oral history memoirs at California State, Fullerton, the Duke University archives, and the transcript of Nixon's extensive interview with David Brinkley made available to me by ABC, I found the conclusion inescapable that FDR was a large presence in Nixon's life...
...Confronted with these doubts, the critic is someone who tells his community which outcomes would be tolerable, and why...
...he wrote regularly about Algerian politics until 1958 (four years after the war began) when he brought out a collection of his most important pieces with a long introduction...
...Certainly these statements, carefully evaluated, tell something about Roosevelt's influence, and such literary critics as Harold Bloom may help us to find deeper meaning in them...
...Still, my advice may serve to inhibit fantasies about a forthcoming Age of Hart, Cuomo, Bill Bradley, or Edward Kennedy...
...the actuality of state involvement in economic affairs, which is primarily to aid business...
...I read widely in the history of other lands, other times, and found some suggestive treatments in works such as Merrill Peterson's on Jefferson's image, Miguel Bretos's on Simon Bolivar, and Jonathan Spence's on K'ang-hsi, but none that was directly apposite on the impact of a head of state on those who succeeded him...
...He would be, as Camus himself was for many years, "someone who tells his community what outcomes would be tolerable, and why...
...Especially during the New Deal, but also during the first part of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter administrations, those farther left were susceptible to similar illusions...
...Then, when disappointment set in, liberals and radicals mixed burn-out with the quest for a new hero...
...Believing that increased awareness of the difficulty of structural change might produce better presidencies and mitigate the cycle of reform boom and bust, I used my review to reiterate a venerable minority position: "reform enthusiasms pass quickly, leaving basic problems unsolved...
...Historians of the presidency must (as I stressed in the review) pay at least as much attention to their subjects' actions as to their words...
...If, in seeking a meaning for the materials I had unearthed, I could not turn to a historical model, I found that the subject I was exploring was of the liveliest interest to literary critics who, in works such as Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence and W. Jackson Bate's The Burden of the Past and the English Poet, have been directly concerned with the "shadow" phenomenon...
...This is a surprising view to find suggested in Dissent, which, as a democratic socialist journal, presumably is committed to defending the rights of individuals against oppressions instituted by business...
...Even more than his book, Leuchtenburg's letter illustrates my point...
...Moreover, the complex debate over the New Deal's meaning cannot be reduced to a case of illiberal leftists and rightists assailing a pragmatic center...
...As Leuchtenburg's letter illustrates, he relies heavily on what later presidents said about FDR...
...If so, the message should have been clear: an Israeli Camus would support the Labor and left parties in their search for a compromise peace...
...If authors are to be held to high standards, and they should be, so should reviewers, and a willingness to confront evidence and a commitment to civil discourse are good places to start...
...But the Algeria that Sartre helped to create is by no means an admirable society, and it was Camus, because of his connection, who saw what was coming and, silent or not, refused to turn a blind eye...
...Leuchtenburg, who ignores this issue in his book and again in his long reply, apparently still considers deeds irrelevant to the discussion of influence...
...In 1976, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities—the Church Committee—saw a line of political harassment stretching from Roosevelt through Johnson to Nixon...
...But, at a deeper level, the two have important things in common...
...How often, and at what cost, will a loyal critic feel compelled to withdraw into a silence like Camus's...
...it does, however, show the need for a further distinction, between love and power: "Justice is a judgment on power, not on love...
...And in this case, the effort to change pied noir politics was made infinitely more difficult by the work of detached critics like Sartre, who were entirely indifferent to the fate of the men and women Camus loved...
...and...
...At his brief one-session political trial, unmentioned in the Cuban press, Hidalgo was only allowed to say a few words at the conclusion of the proceedings...
...Honest witnesses have their own value...
...While I agree with Walzer that the appeal is sympathetic, 1 cannot see that it affords a premise for criticism...
...Prominent academic critics include the self-proclaimed Jeffersonian Paul Conkin and such "realist" interpreters of foreign policy as Paul Schroeder and Bruce Russett...
...Nevertheless, much as Harold Bloom needs some fixed conception of a great poet in order to measure "swerves" by successors, Leuchtenburg required a normative Roosevelt, and the FDR he presented looks better than current scholarship warrants...
...A brief look at two presidencies illustrates my basic disagreement with Leuchtenburg...
...I not only spent many days in five different presidential archives—from Boston to Abilene—but consulted more than 150 manuscript collections and over 190 oral history memoirs at places such as Laramie, Wyoming, Thibodaux, Louisiana, and Brunswick, Maine...
...And, if the libertarian movement is to regain the vitality it has begun to lose during the latest elections and political realignments, it will need to realize this...
...Although my critique of Leuchtenburg was more methodological than ideological, there was a moral present...
...Walzer, it seems to me, overrates the impotence of a figure like Camus, who is neither so weak nor so special as the idea of an unempowered love makes him appear...
...Graubard seems to imply that state economic intervention in aid of business is beneficial to individual liberties, and that a Leviathan state would necessarily be hostile to business...
...MICHAEL WALZER Replies Perhaps I made too much of Camus's "silence...
...q Economic Democracy Editors: Allen Graubard [in "Ideas of Economic Democracy," Dissent, Fall 1984] draws a contrast between "the current libertarian vision of a Leviathan state destroying individual liberties...
...how Eisenhower, contrary to general impression, detested Roosevelt and the New Deal...
...My mother or justice: as if I stood beside my helpless mother while the rest battled unfeelingly for justice, whereas the truth is that my friends will avenge with arms what I protect in silence...
...It may be argued that Camus's love of Algeria was extraordinarily free and pure...
...He stood fast by the principles he had defended over the years— though he may no longer have believed that there was much chance of those principles winning out...
...how Johnson wanted not merely to emulate FDR but to excel him...
...Walzer reads this as a confession of sentiments more human than the "hardwon impartiality" of Sartre and de Beauvoir...
...Maybe so, though it's not always the case that success, even moral success, is waiting if only we say the right words...
...I am surprised to see Graubard discussing libertarianism in vague generalizations that a modest amount of research could have shown him to be poorly founded...
...The argument against the detached critic depends on an additional observation that carries a good deal of weight itself...
...Eisenhower, Carter, and Nixon (misrepresented as an unrelenting foe of New Deal social legislation) receive less than their due...
...Unfortunately, we lack an opportunity to give critical support to a Mondale administration...
...I can understand how Graubard might have gained the opposite impression, in that the political strategy favored by a large faction within libertarianism has been to appeal to somewhat the same population as has responded to Reagan, Hart, or Jarvis: a population with a primarily economic definition of liberty, insufficiently critical of the corporate system from which its income is derived, and fairly conventional in life-style and in cultural and social views...
...I did not challenge their view in this book, which would have been inappropriate, but I have done so in a volume of essays edited by Harvard Sitkoff that Knopf is about to publish...
...He still was, however, not allowed to receive writing or reading materials...
...But his preference still leaves a puzzle about the two kinds of critics...
...But the core of the libertarian viewpoint, as expressed in the works of such authors as David Friedman and Murray Rothbard, is intensely critical of corporate capitalism and the bureaucratic, centralized pattern of organization it has imposed on American society...
...Furthermore, he argues that this class should be forthrightly opposed...
...In his book, he merely passed over FDR's scholarly critics...
...What principles were served, for example, by Sartre's absolute refusal to criticize the politics of the FLN...
...That is a question I hope to be writing about, in a variety of ways, over the next several years, and I don't have an easy answer...
...I started to write about Nixon and Roosevelt with the expectation that no more than a few paragraphs would be required to demonstrate the lack of any relationship...
...I can't see that detachment makes things easier or better...
...But it is not quite right to say that he was silent, since people continued to buy and read and argue about his book...
...255 For•Walzer, this does not imply a skeptical attack on justice...
...Leuchtenburg may not have intended to write a "celebration of liberalism" or an "exaltation of Roosevelt...
...it's just that he can't give up his principled interest in survival...
...One final point...
...and how Reagan's relation to the hero of his youth has been shot through with ambiguity...
...Sentences like "Leuchtenburg's political light meter goes haywire when it places Richard Nixon in the shadow of FDR" do not advance any dialogue...
Vol. 32 • April 1985 • No. 2
