If They Let Us. . .
RORTY, JAMES
If They Let Us... Live and Let Live. By Stuart Chase. Harper. 142 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by James Rorty Author, "Tommorow's Food," Contributor, "Commentary," "Harper's" The decisive difference...
...It is an informed and intelligent response to the challenge of the technological imperatives which are the dominant forces of change in our era...
...Actually, it would seem much more probable that in 1946, when the plan was presented, the Russians preferred to develop their own bomb and use it as a threat with which to blackmail the free world into submission...
...If we don't, it will not be Chase's fault...
...Whether we have the wits or the will to make such a response, or whether the Russians will let us, may well be doubted...
...Stuart Chase's program, drawn up with all the care and professional competence of a certified public accountant who has spent a laborious and useful life trying to keep his country economically and socially in the black, is in many respects admirable...
...He has done his lucid and logical best, in one of the best books he has written to date...
...If there is a flaw in Chase's program, it derives from his inability to believe the worst about Moscow's intentions...
...Chase obviously thinks they eventually will, since the mutual destruc-tiveness of atomic weapons makes hot global war impracticable as a means of implementing the MarxistLeninist program of Communist expansion...
...But the continuation of the cold war by other means is not at all improbable, and if it continues, the Federation of the Nations which Chase envisages is scarcely in view...
...Reviewed by James Rorty Author, "Tommorow's Food," Contributor, "Commentary," "Harper's" The decisive difference between the closed and open societies is that the former can and, to a considerable degree, do plan their growth, whereas the democracies flourish or wither more or less at the mercy of the technological, social and economic imperatives that condition their freedoms...
...In other respects it is hard to find fault with Chase's program...
...We may even live to see it put into effect—if the totalitarians let us...
...The Russians, he writes, rejected the Lilienthal-Ache-son-Baruch plan for the control of atomic energy "only because they could not believe that any nation with a monopoly of power would be idealistic enough to surrender so much of its sovereignty...
...Whether they do or not will depend upon whether they consent to the plan of world disarmament which is the cornerstone of Chase's program...
...The difference is decisive because unless we can improve on our past meagre essays at planning, the totalitarians, as Khrushchey has confidently predicted, will ultimately bury us and our freedoms, either under radioactive rubble or under a tide of political subversion and conquest...
Vol. 43 • July 1960 • No. 29
