Selective Vision

...He ignores the fact that much of it was written (and sections of it appeared as articles) years before the publication date of 1951-in other words, before the zenith of anti-Communist fears and passions...

...This needs two qualifications...

...I grant there was an affinity between Arendt's view of totalitarianism and the militance of the '50s, and that her portrait had an extreme and visionary quality, an excess of "ideal typical" exaggeration...

...Finally, economic organization is undeniably important and Arendt does minimize the "infinite gradations" between "freedom and totalitarian rule"-but we remember, and will always remember, Hitler and Stalin (and link them together) for Auschwitz and Dachau, the SS, the Yezhovschina, and the Gulag Archipelago, not for political alliances with industrial barons or the rationality of Five-Year Plans...

...Yet the Germanization of the Western mind has infected even avant-garde and radical youth with German-tinged historical nostalgia...

...When he writes that Arendt's fearful anticipation of a third world war was "not uncommon around 1950" but "as little as a half-decade later it was already sounding exaggerated," a reader can only wonder why Hughes chose to run for the Senate as a peace candidate in 1962 and served as chairman of sane from 1967-70...

...Among Hughes' best insights, on the other hand, is his grasp of the "nostalgic element" in the thought of Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, of how they "dwelt in the spiritual universe of preindustrial Germany at the deeper levels of their being...

...He frequently retreads ground that has been rather thoroughly trod before-by his own students, in fact, with regard to Marcuse and the Frankfurt School, where he draws heavily on Paul Robinson's The Freudian Left and Martin Jay's The Dialectical Imagination, as well as on the work of his late friend, George Lichtheim...

...For this reason, books like The Sea Change are a help beyond their undeniable value as scholarship...

...Underscoring a further convergence between Salvemini's analysis of Italian fascism and Neumann's 1944 study of the Nazis, Behemoth, Hughes maintains Salvemini and, most of the time, Neumann offered no more than a moderate version of the Marxist thesis that fascism was the creature of monopoly capitalism in crisis...

...A critic of Hughes might, after all, discount his own opinions as expressions of passe '60s radicalism or the spirit of detente, or whatever...

...Match that, however, with George Orwell's-no doubt less "lapidary"-statement that "The sin of all Left-wingers from 1933 onwards is that they wanted to be anti-fascist without being anti-totalitarian...

...Yet Hughes' sense of the man and his roots rarely fail to illuminate the thought, particularly in the present work where several of the people-Salvemini, Neumann, Marcuse, Erikson, Tillich-have been personal friends and colleagues of the author...

...First, Hughes minimizes Neumann's later modification of his thesis in Behemoth: In several of his essays in The Democratic and the Authoritarian State (posthumously published in 1957), he asserted the "primacy of politics over economics" in Hitler's Germany...

...all of his books are short and pithy...

...One may broadly assent to Hughes' approving citation of "Max Horkheimer's lapidary formula: 'Whoever is unwilling to speak of capitalism should also keep silent about fascism,'" which he characterizes as "the most general way in which a Marxist or Left interpretation of the socioeconomic bases of the fascist system might be phrased...

...Hannah Arendt knew this and told us its implications in The Origins even before all the evidence was in...

...Yet if "Left interpretations" of fascism were, as Hughes argues, unfairly discredited in the heated period of the Cold War, it is surely equally unfair to invoke that transitory atmosphere today to depreciate Arendt's book...

...But The Sea Change is far from being complete, for it totally neglects a number of intellectual tendencies introduced by German refugees that have been at least as influential as those it examines...

...Indeed, the "University in Exile," the original Graduate Faculty at the New School, is never referred to by Hughes...

...Few scholars carry so much learning so lightly...

...And in this connection Hughes does an injustice in his unrelievedly critical assessment of Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism-certainly the most weighty and brilliant effort to correct the bias perceived by Orwell...

...and the developments in psychoanalytic ego psychology associated with Heinz Hartmann and Erik Erikson...

...Hughes does not so much as mention Leo Strauss, who inspired a whole corps of students of classical political philosophy first at the New School for Social Research and then at Chicago-an especially regrettable omission because, in contrast to Hughes' figures, the Straussians, while equally anti-fascist, are on the political Right, not the Left...

...These may be minor cavils...

...Nor does he indicate that she herself became a powerful critic of Cold War extremism and its ultimate hubris in Vietnam...

...In his chapter on fascism, Hughes observes that recent scholarship has helped redress the relative neglect of Mussolini's regime in favor of its shorter-lived German partner, and he contends that many contemporary conclusions on fascism were anticipated by Salvemini in the 1930s and early '40s...

...Still, he far too readily dismisses the book as a product of the early '50s Cold War mentality...

...After a review of the Great Migration set in motion by the coming to power of Mussolini in 1922 and Hitler in 1933, he describes the career of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the only exile he treats, except for a short analysis of the later Karl Mannheim, who went to England rather than to the United States...

...Hughes is the master of the short intellectual-biographical vignette, interspersing with superb economy the salient features of a man's life and the major themes of his thought...

...Last, but not least of his virtues, Hughes is never longwinded...

...Moreover, whereas Hughes examines a variety of works by several of his leading subjects, he fails to extend the same charity to Hannah Arendt, whose later views-except for a brief discussion of her account of the Eichmann trial-te never mentions...

...Reviewed by Dennis H. Wrong Professor of Sociology New York University This volume is the last of a trilogy H. Stuart Hughes has written on modern social thought-the first two, Consciousness and Society and The Obstructed Path, having dealt respectively with Europe from 1890-1930 and France from 1930-65...

...Few of us will ever understand Hegel, but we must come to terms with ideas and feelings that have often originated and found their earliest and fullest expression in the heartland of Europe...

...that she neglects economics...

...the former is already the subject of a full-length biography though still alive...

...Both men, he says, argued merely that "big businessmen, after certain initial hesitations, for the most part supported the fascist leaders, once the latter were installed in power, and that they received in return substantial favors from the fascist regimes...

...the work of the Frankfurt School philosophers, Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse...

...Nor does a thinker considered by Hughes disappear through absorption into philosophic origins, or placement in a wider social, political and ideological context...

...To close, there is a discussion of the recent fate of the book's protagonists and their theories...

...felt more at home in the world of Hegel or of Beethoven echoed the 'other' Germany of their ideological enemies-the anachronistic, romanticized Germany of those who preached rural values and community solidarity...

...Nonetheless, the very centrality of Hughes' own position as a professor of modern European history at Harvard and a prominent, sometime activist, Left-liberal intellectual has its costs here...

...Concerned with the impact of the European refugees of the 1930s on American intellectual life, The Sea Change moves closer to home-right down the hall from Professor Hughes, in fact, or at least just across the Harvard Yard, in the case of several of his leading figures...

...The omission is the more surprising since Hughes did discuss phenomenological thought in postwar France in the second book of the trilogy...

...His Harvard colleagues, Erikson and Tillich, have hardly been neglected either...

...His detailed criticisms are, as always, accurate and judicious: that Arendt deals less with the "origins" of totalitarianism than with its precursors...

...And it was true of the conservative Leo Strauss and the non-Marxist Hannah Arendt-and, for that matter, of Brecht-more reason why Hughes' failure to deal adequately with them is unfortunate...

...For Wittgenstein, Hughes depends largely on the memoir by Norman Malcolm published in 1958...

...Second, Behemoth was widely interpreted in the '40s as advancing a much stronger version of the capitalism in extremis theory, by, among others, Robert S. Lynd and C. Wright Mills, Neumann's colleagues at that time...

...Having read most of these sources, I get a strong sense of deja vu...

...Neither the Straussians nor the phenomenologists, to be sure, have cut much of a swath at Harvard, but, in contrast to so many of Hughes dramatis personae, they have yet to be studied at all by biographers and historians...

...This was also true, as Hughes acknowledges, of Tillich and of Mann, whose extraordinary effort to grasp in Doctor Faustus the demonic in German culture he penetratingly reviews...

...A complete account of the influence of the refugee migration would certainly give a central place to the individuals Hughes covers...

...Besides Strauss, the influence on contemporary social science of Alfred Schutz, who taught there for nearly three decades, and of phenomenology in general, long entrenched on West 12th Street, is today both wider and deeper than that of many of the doctrines Hughes reviews...

...Selective Vision The Sea Change: The Migration of Social Thought, 1930-1965 By H. Stuart Hughes Harper & Row...

...This feeling was fully dissipated only during the discussions of the Italians (Hughes is one of the few American scholars intimately acquainted with Italian thought and society), of Neumann and of Hartmann's ego psychology...

...Ideas rather than personalities are always his leading actors...

...The German demons have now been exorcised, the Germany of Bonn is, as Hughes observes, banal and boring...

...he is totally free of the biographical reductionism (degenerating at its worst into mere gossip) that too often plagues intellectual historians...

...that she forces the Soviet regime into a framework based largely on the Nazi experience...

...Subsequent chapters survey the "critique of fascism" advanced by the Italians Giuseppe Borgese and Gaetano Salvemini, and by Mannheim, Erich Fromm, Franz Neumann, and Hannah Arendt...