Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR 'NEW SOVIET SOCIETY' I am truly grateful for the final text of the Communist Party's Program. I have it, but without the very interesting and valuable annotations. It is a book I...
...His contemporary followers might do well to ponder their master's words...
...But he will be disconcerted when he steps up to the ribbon counter and orders 200 watts of grosgrain...
...It is based on an arbitrary assumption of what a film should be, rather than being a felt and intelligent appraisal of what it is...
...You and I don't always see eye-to-eye, but I do want to congratulate you on the excellent quality of The New Leader...
...Valley Cottage, N. Y. Harvey Swados MILL'S DISCIPLES I would like to add a footnote to Robert Lekachman's accurate observation, in his review in the December 10, 1962 issue, that John Stuart Mill was more of a collectivist than his self-styled disciple, Professor Milton Friedman...
...Kristol thinks "that a lot of chatter about the road to serfdom is little more than a form of special pleading...
...He is quite right, for considerations of mere size do not impinge upon principle...
...A surprising number of them are in fact transliterations or adaptations of Russian words: "interessovat" (to interest), "chai" (tea), "colloco...
...It is equally obvious, when one looks into the matter, that "big unions," as we know them today, were originally created by Federal legislation and are today sustained by it...
...I presume that Kristol has the title of Albert Jay Nock's book...
...Columbia, Mo...
...It is an excellent piece of work, scholarly and authentic...
...A film may be many different things, and one of the things it might be is an absorbing drama of character, superbly acted, unselfconciously photographed, which retains the integrity of the original play...
...Speaking to the House of Commons, Mill once observed: "So far from being a set of maxims and rules, to be applied without regard to times, places, and circumstances, the function of political economy is to enable us to find the rules which ought to govern any state of circumstances with which we may have to deal—circumstances which are never the same in any two places it does not supply us with a ready made judgment upon any case, and there cannot be a greater enemy to political economy than he who represents it in that light...
...Still playing with the quantitative, Kristol says: "What with big business, big unions and big bombs, the notion of a small government is almost comic in its inadequacy...
...Congratulations on a much-needed job well done...
...produced by non-governmental agencies...
...It could set the world ahead a full century...
...Similarly, it is not so much the size of America's political agency as the fact that it is out of bounds which ought to concern Kristol...
...This quantitative change, however, is the consequence of changes which are qualitative— good principles have given way to bad...
...It is not the size of Ghana's government, however, but its lack of limitations that bothers us...
...Kristol confuses the categories...
...It is a book I shall use...
...ALEXANDER G. Korol Many thanks for sending me a copy of The New Soviet Society...
...SIMON May I take this opportunity to say how eminently readable John Simon's recent reviews in The New Leader have been...
...Simon has decided that imaginative images and an intelligently mobile camera are the primary canons to apply in judging a film...
...To the size of the country...
...I, for one, had serious doubts about putting The New Leader on my Christmas gift list...
...A. L. Hamby BIG GOVERNMENT Irving Kristol has earned the right, if anyone has, to rib the conservatives ("Big Government and Little Men," NL, November 26, 1962), but I wonder if he has seen his semanticist lately...
...And whenever we try to adduce proper sanctions and authority for political action, we become involved in a question of principle...
...Yet Kristol is generous, for it is customary to assert that all of the chatter about the road to serfdom is a form of special pleading...
...Wouldn't it be interesting if this residue were seriously discussed just once in the journals to which Kristol has access...
...Encountering this association a certain number of times Kristol would conclude—reasoning as he does in this article—that 20 watts and 24 inches are equivalent terms...
...To the number of criminals in it...
...The world's largest shop devoted to the exclusive manufacture of French horns employs under a dozen people...
...George Gibian There is a distinction between the frank discussion of an author's treatment of sex and pornography...
...To its involvement in wars...
...none of our bombs have been The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...
...As a rhetorical device, the contrast between big government and little men is fine, but one is constrained to ask: "Big with reference to what...
...And what is bigness in a business...
...Mill, who never let theory interfere with human betterment, was speaking for a proposal which would have drastically curtailed the "rights" of the Irish landlords...
...One has the feeling that he began with his parochial notions about film art, and then looked around town to find two films that would bear out his point of view...
...Columbus, Ohio Elizabeth Lande, M.D...
...Hansard's Debates, March 12, 1868...
...As I struggled to distinguish between the betweens and the froms in this massive retaliation, I was reminded of the old Russian folk-saying: "People who live in Lever House shouldn't throw snowballs...
...I doubt that many of your readers see much point in his quotations, at length and ad nauseam, of the details of sexual perversion...
...New York City Walter K. Lewis The excellent introduction and annotations make The New Soviet Society an indispensable source for students of the Soviet regime and for anyone who wants to be intelligently informed on the subject...
...Ghana has a small government, relative to the size of our own...
...He can then proceed to praise a film that meets with his prescribed standards (Sundays and Cybéle) and damn the film that does not...
...Chicago, 111...
...Ithaca, N.Y...
...Whereas the general run of today's film criticism appears to be devoted to nastiness and wit (most of it quite bad), Simon can communicate enthusiasm for a film in a serious and legitimate manner, a very rare quality among reviewers in the intellectual journals these days...
...This implies that some of the chatter is not special pleading...
...Ernest Levy John Simon's arrogant review of Long Day's Journey into Night (NL, December 10, 1962) is an example of a prevalent and pernicious kind of film criticism...
...If this doesn't win the Pulitzer Prize, then the judges of the latter are incapable of recognizing a literary gem when they see one...
...Can Kristol find the referent for the term "big business," or is the size of a business a matter to be decided by consumers who, by their decisions to purchase or not to purchase, call the shots on production...
...but a shop employing 1,000 men is too small to manufacture automobiles efficiently...
...See especially "Sex and the Sinful Girl," NL, November 12...
...Our Enemy: the State, in mind when he says that he will never admit "that the State is our Enemy...
...Kristol observes that "big government" has never struck him as "an objectionable thing, in principle...
...Your literary critic, Stanley Edgar Hyman, ignores that distinction with regularity...
...It is obvious to everyone that there is a direct relationship between "big government" and "big bombs...
...It is as if he examined a batch of 20 watt fluorescent tubes and noted that each one measured precisely 24 inches in length...
...After reading his review of Lawrence of Arabia (NL, January 7), I found myself, for the first time in longer than I care to remember, actually anxious to see a film on a critic's word...
...A film does not have to stand or fall on the strength of these arbitrarily imposed canons...
...They are in exceedingly bad taste, and will make your otherwise excellent journal unacceptable in a good many homes...
...Irving-on-Hudson, ?. ?. Edmund A. Opitz HYMAN In his excellent review of Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange (NL, January 7), Stanley Edgar Hyman lists many words which he considers the author's coinage...
...I hope Nehru, Menon, Nkhrumah and the other neutralist leaders read this volume...
...New York City Norman Thomas The New Soviet Society, Herbert Ritvo's annotated version of the Third Communist Party Program, belongs in every library, and in the hands, the hearts and the minds of every diplomat of the free world...
...beli), "razrez" (to tear, cut), "toofles" (slippers), "banda" (band), "gruppa" (group), "kot" (cat), "minoota" (minute), "glazz" (eye), "yahzick" (tongue), and "grahzny" (dirty...
...It is only because I applaud the main thrust of Kristol's article so wholeheartedly that I have taken the time to quarrel with a couple of paragraphs in it...
...Cambridge, Mass...
...New York City Henry C. Gross...
...I would merely draw his attention to the fact that Nock made it perfectly clear in his book that he did not mean to say that government is our enemy...
...Now it is true that as a society's government approaches totalitarianism it does increase in sheer bulk...
...New York City John J. Donohue BELL AND BIRNBAUM "Since, as I tried to show by citations," Daniel Bell replies in your "Dear Editor" column of December 10, "Norman Birnbaum's prose made little syntactical or semantic sense . . ." and he follows up with '. . Birnbaum's singular evasion of one of the major points of my article: the question of how one evaluates the course of de-Stalinization, and the necessity for distinguishing between the intellectual defections of Kolakowski, Harrich and others from the political revisionism of Tito et al...
Vol. 46 • January 1963 • No. 2
