An Impassioned Sermon

...Reviewed by GEORGE LICHTHEIM Author, "Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study" Eduard Heimann belongs to a group of thinkers—Reinhold Niebuhr is probably the best-known— who for many years have tried to bring about a synthesis of Christian theology and Socialism...

...Here he is clearly in the German tradition...

...The central idea running through this bulky and learned "tract for the times" is that liberalism and Marxism are related, and that Marxism has grown out of the inadequacy of liberalism...

...These sudden descents into bathos are unfortunately paralleled in the more theoretical sections of Heimann's work, where the reader is occasionally plunged into rather shallow waters...

...In preHitler Germany this thinking was prominently represented by Paul Tillich, to whom Heimann is very close...

...In terms of his philosophical orientation, Heimann could be a pacifist or a neutralist, though in fact he is neither...

...After a lengthy and learned dissertation upon the inadequacy of Lutheran theology, for example, the wretched "social legislation" adopted by the Prussian police state in the 1880s is gravely discussed in terms of the JudaeoChristian tradition...

...Not only is there tension between Heimann the philosopher and Heimann the economist and political scientist...

...This leads to some confusion...

...Yet Heimann is now an American and, like other American writers, he has become deeply involved in the problems of the cold war...

...There are moments when the resulting medley of religious and political arguments resembles an impassioned sermon rather than an analytic effort...

...It is significant that Heimann prefaces his critique of Marx with a lengthy excursion into the role of science and the inadequacy of pragmatism...

...Unlike the long-established school of Christian Socialism in Britain, Niebuhr, Tillich and Heimann define their philosophy in terms of a scholarly critique of Marxism...

...At any rate, there is no particular reason why he should discuss political constructions such as the Marshall and Schuman Plans—however useful they may have been in defending Western Europe—as though they had profound spiritual significance...

...In Britain, it has for many years had an important foothold in the Labor movement...

...Unlike Roman Catholics and the authoritarian conservatives of the political Right, Heimann does not conclude that society should therefore try to discard the liberal heritage...

...This approach reflects the greater sophistication of thinkers who either stem from a German background or are aware of Germany's central role in the formulation of what is called "the philosophy of history...

...This reviewer believes Heimann has something important to say...

...He would be damned by the Left wing, treated politely but distantly by the Anglican Tories, and dismissed by the Liberals as a typical German philosopher...

...Eduard Heimann's work represents something like a confluence of these two streams of thought...

...He wants to go forward from liberalism to what he describes as Democratic Socialism...

...Across the Atlantic, it has never been as influential, though the recent growth of similar political trends in Canada is perhaps a sign that North America is becoming ripe for a respectable brand of Socialism which steers clear of anything connected with Marx...

...There are far too many references to current political issues awkwardly sandwiched between philosophical disquisitions...

...Indeed, with a history of more than a century of literary and political activity, Christian Socialism is by now a fairly ancient and respectable phenomenon in England...

...Conversely, religious tradition is invoked to underpin political arrangements of which Heimann approves, and to criticize institutions and groups which incur his displeasure for quite untheological reasons...

...But his argument implies, nonetheless, that liberalism was a colossal mistake and that Socialism needs a religious foundation...

...Consequently, he tends to argue his case in terms of a defense of Western and Christian values against Soviet Communism, while, as a Socialist, he simultaneously pleads for a "third position" midway between liberalism (which he identifies with capitalism) and Marxism (which he equates with Communism...

...There exists now, in postwar Germany as well as in France and elsewhere, a brand of Christian existentialism which is beginning to merge with the older tradition of Christian Socialism...

...specifically, in the tradition of German philosophizing about the human condition in a world from which religion seems to have vanished...

...But his book is badly organized and overloaded with irrelevant political matter not genuinely related to its central argument...

...There is an unsolved conflict between the Socialist "third position" and the rather conventional political exegesis which fills a good part of the book...

...If he lived in Britain, Heimann would receive a sympathetic hearing from the dominant wing of the Labor party, and might even become its official thinker (although in private the more prominent adherents of this school tend to declare themselves agnostics and rationalists...