Political Character
CHAMBERLAIN, LAWRENCE H.
Political Character Citizenship Today. By D. W. Brogan. North Carolina. 116 pp. $3.00. Reviewed by Lawrence H. Chamberlain Professor of Government, Columbia University AMERICANS HAVE long been...
...Sharing responsibility for the generally dispiriting picture, because of their unwillingness or inability to rise to the demands confronting them, are English women...
...Beethoven didn’t schedule an appearance of the bull fiddle every 20 bars, rain or shine...
...cluding the family, the church and the press...
...With the single exception of Tocqueville, no other European, not even James Bryce, has analyzed American character and socio-political structure so revealingly...
...But since 26 pages of solid poetry do not get written in the United States per year, we will not commit ourselves to a page in every issue...
...Reviewed by Lawrence H. Chamberlain Professor of Government, Columbia University AMERICANS HAVE long been the beneficiaries of D. W. Brogan’s penetrating comments upon our institutions...
...With government no longer holding a subordinate position but, rather, ineluctably occupying the very center of our lives, our attitudes toward and our bases of appraising political decisions remain colored, indeed distorted, by anachronistic relics of an age long gone...
...One can be grateful to Brogan for what he has done...
...In rather striking contrast is the chapter on France...
...In his inventory of American character traits Brogan discovers a number of soft spots whose implications he attempts to analyze...
...Related to these defections and in part contributory to them are failures in certain institutions, in“WE PUBLISH SERIOUS POETRY because National Review has a complex continuing statement to make and the poet can help make it, contributing to it as the bull fiddle contributes to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony...
...The problems it faces are almost unbelievably difficult and the uncertainty of who can take up the baton when de Gaulle can no longer carry it looms broodingly, yet there seems to be a hope that the spirit of France glows with a steadier flame and will prevail...
...they come off poorly indeed in comparison with the women of France during the postwar period...
...His overarching concern is whether the qualities which have served this country well in the past will prove adequate to American and world needs in the future...
...The picture is fragmentary, blurred, almost out of focus...
...A single example will have to suffice here: our traditional subordination of government and politics to business —a reflection of a national predisposition to regard private enterprise as the true productive force of our country and to look upon all things governmental as not only peripheral but parasitical—which accounts for the low esteem in which politics has been held...
...The total is by no means inconsequential: some restrained strictures on England, an enlightening and optimistic interpretation of France, a constructive if slightly didactic lecture to the United States...
...one finishes reading it with the feeling that some vital element has been omitted...
...Limited to a single lecture on each country, Brogan uses the techniques of both broad generalization and rigorous selectivity...
...In this small volume, from the Weil Lectures in Citizenship at the University of North Carolina, Brogan, Fellow of Peterhouse and Professor of Political Science in the University of Cambridge, discusses citizenship in England, France and the United States...
...the nationalization of politics, the growth of party discipline and the attendant decline of political independence...
...According to Brogan, the emergence of women as a political force, the resurgence of the church under the enlightened influence of a young clergy and the moral and political leadership of General de Gaulle have brought France to a new threshold of opportunity...
...In the latter instance we should be especially grateful rather than resentful because Brogan’s motives are friendly and his advice worth taking...
...Against the backdrop of traditional centralized control, church-state conflict and supra-nationalistic psychology, he traces the chief developments since World War I and manages to present a pattern and logic that enables the outsider to comprehend what has so often appeared to defy rational explanation...
...Specifically, he deplores the displacement by the welfare state of the traditional reliance upon individual initiative and private effort, the abdication of local government...
...Shifting his diagnosis to American political character, Brogan begins by identifying the salient components and then proceeds to assess their significance...
...Whether we as a nation can modernize our thinking to match the realities of our world responsibilities is the question Brogan raises but does not answer...
...Here Brogan blends recent political history with institutional development to produce a meaningful, credible and generally hopeful interpretation of French politics...
...Brogan’s treatment of his own country leaves one depressed and confused...
...In his treatment of England—the least satisfying of the three lectures —he concentrates on a single theme: the general enervation of political spirit that has occurred in recent years...
...Observing that popular ideas and stereotypes are extremely tenacious, holding on long after the facts that produced them have disappeared, he argues that we remain saddled today with obsolete superstitions regarding politics...
...He is hopeful, perhaps even cautiously optimistic, but he warns that we are going to have to work hard if our success story is to be prolonged...
Vol. 43 • October 1960 • No. 39
