Competition for the Master Plan

...It is easy to denounce, as Mr...

...If his ambitious project-the world conflict is quite a formidable topic to be contained in 250 pages-does not come off, it is because he confronts the various "stupid" orthodoxies which he lambasts so smartly with a truculent orthodoxy of his own...

...If the Soviets are kept from imposing, in their own dogmatic way, this formula on the uncommitted and backward peoples and drawing them into their own despotic orbit, then the West can contemplate the incipient "Plan Era" as the satisfactory, because necessary, consummation of its own strivings and ideals...

...The West, despite its many real and imagined failings and its pathologically bad conscience-induced, in part at least, by an overdose of Marxian readings -is still predominantly attached to the value of the unique human personality...

...author, "Geopolitics," "The Balance of Tomorrow" Although Mr...

...It is, therefore, all the more surprising that he does not come to grips with the most massive fact of international economics: The greatest wealth per head of population is still being produced-and has always been produced-by such underplanned societies as the American, the Swiss and the Belgian and not by centrally planned ones such as the Russian and the Yugoslav...

...Arnold is primarily concerned with the economic aspects of world conflict and gives short shrift to cultural and moral factors...

...Arnold lumps New Deal welfare economics and the "insular consumer socialism" of the British Labor party), are dead issues...

...Arnold's indebtedness to Marxian syllogisms becomes painfully apparent...

...Now, one need not take one's inspirations from the texts of laissez-faire or neo-liberal utopianism to cavil at Mr...

...The new Asian elites torn between Western ideals and traditional, mostly authoritarian or despotic, political philosophies, between Western gradualism and totalitarian absolutism-may come to favor the centrally planned "revolution from above" and to exact the same immense sacrifices from the peasant masses that paid for the rapid industrialization of Soviet Russia-because this method is simpler, more ruthless and more satisfying to the power urge...

...Arnold, these species of decontaminated totalitarianism represent variety and hence are at odds with the rigidity and intolerance of the totalitarian "camp," i.e., the Soviet orbit...

...Arnold's summary conclusions...

...Arnold speaks in this volume of many things and indulges in numerous provocative and mostly brilliant asides, he steadfastly labors a familiar thesis: "Old-fashioned" liberalism, as well as its heir the "neo-liberal utopianism" of the 1930s and 1940s (under which latter heading Mr...

...Hence the West must adopt the saving formula of centralized state planning and thus effect the "revolution from above...

...If the West insists upon shoring up outworn institutions, the revolutionary nationalists will turn to Stalinist totalitarianism as the sole alternative to the unplanned misery of Asia's and Africa's teeming millions...

...It is here that Mr...

...Contemporary conflict converges on the Planned Society or, rather, on who will do the "planning," the unreconstructed Stalinists or we democrats...

...It seems a little rash, however, to discount the regenerative power of several major ancient religions and to view the coexistential struggle between the free world and Soviet totalitarianism as being exclusively a competition over who will preside over the backward peoples' frantic rush toward higher standards of living...

...the author declares, and "the second wave has confronted us squarely with the issue of centralized control and with the threat of totalitarianism, which has grown out of the mishandling of the issue.' The proper political analyst will therefore welcome Titoist, Trotskyist and other heretical Communist regimes...

...Arnold's-is doomed to failure...

...Since the temper of the emancipated and emancipating Asian and African peoples is not only nationalistic but also revolutionary, and since the new native elites cannot ride the skittish beast without giving it its head, the question narrows down to one of direction: Any attempt to guide the revolutionary movement back into the fold of what liberals call Western "civilization" and Marxists call "bourgeois democracy"-the characterizations are Mr...

...Arnold does, the "orthodox stupidity" of statesmen unwilling to buy radical solutions...

...His analysis of the Communist synthesis of Asian nationalism and social ferment and of the Communist manipulation of the dynamism of the Chinese peasant masses is a masterpiece of concision...

...The West, he argues, cannot hope to win this non-military contest (which might well last a generation) if it does not come to terms with various mystiques of state planning...

...If Mr...

...He will do so because, according to Mr...

...it is more difficult to convert grandly simplified theories into a humanly tolerable system of production...

...No doubt, the Western impact on the "backward peoples," in the shape of Western moral and political ideas as well as technology, has triggered virulent nationalism and social ferment...

...While Mr...

...Arnold advises the West to "keep its powder dry" and hold itself in readiness for repelling armed Soviet aggression, general and limited, he views the uncommitted lands of Asia and Africa as the principal battleground of "competitive coexistence" and the cold war...

...Arnold denounces as an abomination, must be viewed, in part at least, as a perversion of the trend toward a centrally planned society which flows inevitably, Mr...

...The first wave of the industrial revolution made mass democracy possible...

...But this is no reason why the West should seek to jump over its own shadow and simulate, albeit with mental and moral reservations, a revolutionary ardor for the mystique of total planning...

...Nehru, who cannot be accused of undue partiality toward private enterprise, seems of late to have cooled toward state planning and state capitalism as the cure-all of India's economic ills...

...No doubt, Western reliance upon traditional indigenous institutions, such as the oppressive hierarchy of the Islamic family of Arabian feudalism, as props of resistance against Communism can be justly denounced as imbecilic as well as thickskinned...

...Although the devotees of state planning may shrug off this evidence as an historical accident, their theories will have to meet further and exhaustive pragmatic tests before they can be recommended safely as remedies for the plight of economically backward peoples...

...Arnold argues, from technological change...

...Leninist-Stalinist Communism, which Mr...

...Planning-the comprehensive kind-points to the short cut from squalor to economic progress...

...This recipe can be condensed as follows: If you cannot lick them, join them at least to the point of snatching their (the Soviets") patent medicine and dispensing it in bottles labeled "Freedom...

...That trend was correctly predicted by Marx...

...His asides on the follies of the Arabophiles make highly entertaining reading...

...Arnold's positive recommendations constitute a far from original attempt to steal the Communists' thunder without being struck by the lightning of totalitarianism, his purely expository digressions are always stimulating and often brilliant and witty...