Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words. BRODSKY Could this, "The Trial of Iosif Brodsky" (NL, August 31),...
...New York City Michael Klein SIMULATION AND DEMOCRACY In attempting to defend his professional activities, Ithiel de Sola Pool ("Fantasy and Reality," NL, August 31) misses the very important and valid point to be found in Eugene Burdick's novel: The 480...
...Possony now writes to "insist" upon the accuracy of his description of Lenin as having "the talent of a first-rate scholar...
...Despite the subsidized research on the RCIA, and its use as a subject for theses by...
...That that which merely attracts the approval of the greatest number of people is, by itself, not the healthiest basis upon which to build a functioning democracy has, as we all know, been demonstrated early in the history of attempts to set up democratic governments...
...And not one gambit missed that's dear to the bourgeois heart —from the judge's confirmed belief that writing poems or translating them isn't work and can be done after hours to her sneering at what money they earned because it was so little...
...And all this from the country of Chekhov whose characters so frequently delivered apostrophes to the future, when people would be more enlightened, and to work...
...He has gone, with indefatigable burrowing, to the primary sources: the court records, the minutes of the AFL Executive Council, the records of Attorney General Palmer in the U.S...
...September 14) may be left with a serious misconception of Professor Taft's work...
...then the Bolsheviks will be finished...
...The Building Service Union can claim to "speak for" just as many...
...Possony says that he explicity rejects the notion that Lenin was a German agent...
...Is there a picture of the Judge available...
...Possony later ads that "Skvortzov, a Mason, frequently functioned as Lenin's liaison officer with Masonic circles...
...Possony says that he never stated that the Freemasons were significant financiers of Bolshevism...
...that Grand Solution for those who, not doing any, saw it as the only means of rescue from the ennui of their frittered-away days...
...Berkeley, California Lewis S. Feuer University of California LABOR HISTORY The only reason why it is unfortunate that Philip Taft scanted the Retail Clerks International Association in his Organized Labor in American History is that readers of The New Leader ("History or Chronicle...
...I fear that Dr...
...Or maybe he should have looked at both...
...students who must leave more significant work to their betters and themselves exploit the minutiae of history, one can hardly argue that the retail clerics have had a role in American history in any way comparable to the miners, the steel workers, the machinists, and the others to whom Taft devotes himself...
...For the single reference to the RCIA in the index should be explainable to anyone who understands that Taft is writing about labor "in American History," not about "Unions in the U.S.," or "Organized Labor Tomorrow...
...All I can say in support of this view is to claim the support of most of the literature on human rationality and free discussion, from Adam Smith through John Stuart Mill, to Von Neumann...
...judge is a steady job at the nearest factory...
...Yet this seems to be the path embarked upon by Professor de Sola Pool and many of his colleagues...
...In contrast, the Cigarmakers report a membership of just 5,800 and the International Union of Journeymen Horseshoers have only 290...
...From the former came Gompers and Strasser, from the latter, John Fitzpatrick...
...When a politician or social scientist describes (with or without the aid of a computer) what will persuade a voter, the voter is very likely to listen and say "Oh, that's how you think it is," and to behave in exactly the opposite way precisely because of the supposed "prediction...
...And now work...
...Their own dishonesty will ruin them.' Subsequently, Lenin improved delivery, and the Germans never found it necessary to disclose the truth...
...Consider the fate of the professional politician presented with two alternatives by such simulation or other kind of "scientific" finding: If he sticks to an honest ethical argument he will lose but if he switches to a dishonest, demagogic argument —which the simulation spells out in detail— he wilt win...
...Possony in his book made a more generous claim for Lenin's intellectual stature: "Lenin's mind might have enabled him to become one of mankind's great thinkers...
...He describes this group as founded by three millionaires and one of the Morozovs, a wealthy family...
...woman...
...The result is not only u new history but a definitive one...
...The social simulation as practiced by Simulmatics, Inc...
...BRODSKY Could this, "The Trial of Iosif Brodsky" (NL, August 31), have been imagined...
...It is a long way from the first statement to the second, which, was the one which I cited and with which I disagreed...
...266) 3. "It is important to note, however, that Lenin was unable to consider the case for revolutionary war on its own merits...
...as interpreted by cant is something done only "for the good of the state" and the answer, according to this, alas...
...It should be possible to understand what an account of the past must be without depriving anyone of the hope that the future belongs to the Retail Clerks...
...Boulder, Colorado Donald Sutherland Department of Classical Literature University of Colorado LENIN I should like to reply briefly to Dr...
...Translated to the political arena this means that the simulation will "predict" what image or what line of arguments will, all other things being irrelevant, have the greatest desired effect upon the electorate...
...Yes...
...Possony's present explication of various passages in his book will puzzle many readers...
...Archives, and to the private correspondence of history-making figures such as Gompers, Green, Woll and Nockles...
...each one is worth at least a chapter in a book on organized labor in America history...
...Probably an adviser who told a politician that he would gain by being demagogic and dishonest would be naively disregarding the fact that someone on the other side would recognize the fact and point it out...
...Washington, D. C Nehemiah Jordan Ithiel de Sola Pool replies: Nehemiah Jordan is too sophisticated a social scientist to perpetrate the fallacy of presuming that the social sciences "predict" in the same way as the natural sciences...
...Actually Dr...
...usually a perceptive critic of the literature on labor, appears to have been so wrought up by Taft's trifling treatment of Seligman's union that his review became a polemic against scholarship...
...Taft, so rightly called by Seligman "an indefatigable burrower" has corrected in his book more errors, long believed as facts, than anyone can count...
...What, however, is the import of such statements as the following...
...New York City Jean Garrigue The Brodsky trial is of course the eeriest Kafka, but brutalized and vulgar as Kafka never is, and as I had hoped Russia no longer was...
...Kafka and Babbitt met...
...153) In my review, I dissented from Dr...
...Even the Terror kept up some sort of ideological style, and I can think of no instance of abjection to match this...
...we have heard it all before, but not delivered by judicial authority — prejudice with its mind made up beforehand, vengeance predetermined...
...257) 2. "If the Germans had not had their secret hold over Lenin, could the Bolsheviks have resisted German demands...
...Seligman, in his review, asks to be "forgiven one somewhat personal observation," as he makes his point about Taft's "slighting reference" to the RCIA...
...He has done this by going back beyond the accounts in the New York Times, Harper's Weekly, the Socialist Call, and other such periodicals from which practically all of our labor history has so far been written...
...Jordan's letter with its simple carry-over of the elementary natural science notion of prediction reaches the anti-intellectual conclusion that democracy functions better if participants are ignorant and stupid...
...Not only should he be forgiven, he should be thanked for his candor...
...Enough to bring tears to a cat's eyes...
...274) Dr...
...1. "On January 7, 1918 the German Foreign Secretary cabled his agents that the time had come to provide a few broad hints through the available safe channels but not in public...
...Being controlled by the Germans, Lenin simply was forced to deliver the peace...
...In his book, however, in discussing the financial help provided Lenin by the presumably Masonic group, he writes: "This was by no means a chance gift, but was rather a contribution in accord with a deliberate program...
...To the extent that The 480 illuminates this potentiality it is to be welcomed, despite whatever other flaws it may have as a book...
...Possony's interpretations, his book, in my opinion, is a valuable one which presents the reader with much interesting and important information not available in other books...
...When a physicist describes how an apple falls, the apple pays no attention...
...The complexity of the interaction between knowledge and purposeful behavior has been the main subject of hundreds of social science writers from Adam Smith through Von Neumann...
...By their strategic economic importance, by their violent responses to repression, and/or by the talents of their leadership it was the unions of such groups which influenced economic, political and social history...
...Stefan T. Possony's letter in The New Leader (August 31, 1964) concerning my review of his Lenin: The Compulsive Revolutionary...
...Possony's admiring judgment of Lenin's intellectual powers...
...One does not patronize the Retail Clerks —or the Building Service Employes—to inquire what Taft should have left out of his book so as to treat with organizations and leaders who have had no discernible effect on legislation, judicial precedent, national wage levels, political thought, or industrial relations practices...
...Jordan's brief note...
...Ben Seligman...
...This is perhaps a tenable position though certainly not demonstrated in Dr...
...One is not impressed with the historical importance of Seligman's RCIA because "it now speaks for over 400,000 employees...
...One is tempted to say to Seligman that if he didn't want to read Taft's book, he should have read the title rather than the index...
...I should like to add, however, that despite disagreement with Dr...
...does, to the extent that it ' is successful, undermine democracy...
...390...
...Without it, one could be left completely mystified by his visceral approach to the most important book in its field that has appeared in more than a generation...
...I cannot begin to imagine such a woman...
...The purj pose of the simulation, though thank heavens it is far from having achieved this, is to be able to tell the customer what social effects action proposed by him will have...
...If the truth were to become known in Russia...
...I too, in this space, cannot demonstrate my belief that the market place of free discussion seems to work...
...Most of them reached the conclusion that rationality and purposeful action in an open society leads to desirable social outcomes...
Vol. 47 • September 1964 • No. 20
