The Open Future and the Marxist Past

...Rossiter brings out very well the underlying premises of the American tradition...

...I am not sure, however, that in his reprimand to Marx for his excessive materialism and determinism he realizes how deeply the same elements are imbedded in the original liberal dogma, which, if in a diluted form, is still the main prism through which we look at the world and the future...

...The difficulty is illustrated by quoting two of Rossiter's reprimands to Marx and Engels: "Those who presume to construct general laws of history should do at least as much digging for foundation materials as did Spengler or Toynbee," and "The new man of Marxism, we are bound to say, is a dream in which a line of tough-minded thinkers from John Adams to Reinhold Niebuhr has forbidden us steadily to indulge at all purposefully...

...It is the inability and, in the other case, the unwillingness, to grasp that rather simple point which turn most discussions of Marxism into a sequence of irrelevancies with the Great Depression in the West and Stalin's atrocities, depending on one's stance, being used as clinching arguments...

...It is to review Marxism through the prism of the body of ideals and theories identified as "democracy—U.S.A...

...Pathetic, because the sad fact is that for all their greater breadth and scholarship, the ideas of Toynbee and Niebuhr do not appear in the world of 1960 to be making much headway against the echoes and results of Marxism...

...Professor Clinton Rossiter's undertaking is, however, a special one...

...Are we really so undeterministic...

...It is indeed by forgetting historical and social relativity that both the critics and the apologists for Marxism err...

...Reviewed by Adam B. Ulam Professor of Government, Harvard University...

...Indeed, one of the incidental services that a good book on Marxism ought to accomplish is to expose the oversimplifications and over-optimisms of our own tradition...

...This confrontation of the complicated with the hard to define is accomplished by Rossiter with all the skill, lucidity and discreet humor one has come to expect from his works, but the flaw in his work comes exactly from the extreme difficulty of the self-imposed task...

...Then in another passage in the book Rossiter says, "The man of the American tradition is a rational man, one who when given half a chance will make political decisions calmly and thoughtfully with the aid of Aristotelian reason—reason tempered by experience...

...Is it really true that "most Americans think of history as something that moves toward an 'open future' not foreordained by the past, that it is propelled by many forces...

...The ideas that Communism is simply the result of poverty and lack of education, that a primitive community needs only economic help and a rushed educational program to enable it to exist under an intricate constitutional and democratic system—these oversimplifications of a political campaign suggest that our tradition is not as triumphantly non-deterministic and non-materialist as Rossiter would at times urge...

...Can Marxism really be understood as viewed from America, i.e., through the American traditions and opinions presumed to exist and be valid in 1960...

...These comments are both somewhat unfair and somewhat pathetic...

...The apologist is blind and irrational when he refuses to grant that he confronts not an infallible canon but an aggregate of theories and sentiments particularly appropriate and politically attractive in a society changing to industrialism and modernity...

...One does not have to evoke the testimony of Jeremy Bentham or James Mill, but simply look at the recent Presidential campaign to see how deeply we have drunk of the same spring which originally fed Marxism...

...Unfair, because we have to judge man's ideas within the context of his times...

...A formidable and dangerous undertaking, for in addition to wading through the multiplicity of theories, interpretations, schisms, etc...

...And rationalistic determinism and materialism creep back in when we hear that "what we mean by 'half a chance' is a decent environment and a system of constitutional restraints that can hold his ineradicable love of power in fairly close check...

...The critic forgets that within the context of the times when Marx's ideas were coming to fruition, i.e., the '40s and '50s of the last century, many of his economic, historical and philosophical conclusions were but the commonplace of radical, and indeed often of liberal, thinking on these subjects, none more so than the notion that you can discover fairly rigid and universal laws of historical and economic development...

...we do not tax Ricardo with not having anticipated Keynes, nor Bentham for failing to include Freudianism in his psychology...

...It suffers neither from self-righteousness, so typical of so many works in this field, nor from self-doubt generated by the Soviet production figures and missiles...

...And very few treatments of the prospects of Marxism and Communism achieve the balance and reasonability of his last chapter...

...Author, "The Unfinished Revolution" It is well known (it is appropriate in view of the subject matter to start in the style of the late J. V. Stalin) that every man, or at least every social scientist, has his own Marx, and that it is dangerous to ask an author of a book on Marxism to review another one...

...which comprise the bulky literature on Marxism, the author has proposed to grasp something extremely difficult from another point of view, something so elusive that it even defies nomenclature—is it "Americanism" or "liberalism" or what...

...For all the criticisms addressed to Rossiter's book, however, his attempt to compare the two systems of thought and the two viewpoints is both instructive and fruitful...