Perceiving the Real World

...With much of this argument it is hard to argue...

...How does the state as planner determine who gets rich and who stays poor...

...But the question here unanswered is how groups that sincerely believe themselves in contention can at a time of declining economic growth reach peacefully a viable social compact...

...The transition from individualism to communitarianism has for the most part already occurred...

...Although in the past Locke has served successive waves of thrusting new Americans well, the times of unlimited resources and boundless expansion have drawn to a close...

...Reviewed by Robert Lekachman George Lodge, an Eisenhower sub-Cabinet official now teaching at the Harvard Business School, is the grandson of that Senator Henry Cabot Lodge who did his bit to scuttle the League of Nations and the son of another Senator Henry Cabot Lodge who was the Republican Vice Presidential candidate in 1960, ambassador to Saigon, and UN representative...

...As a theory of social change, or a blueprint for a communitarian society, it fails to carry conviction...

...In Japan, praised by Lodge as a useful model of the new communitarianism, the economic and political order is regulated by a coalition of banks, industrial enterprises and conservative politicians...

...Nevertheless, Lodge stops abruptly just when the logic of his position might require him to examine the hard questions of economic and political power that old-style capitalism answered after a fashion through the operations of product and political markets...

...Skeptics might be pardoned for wondering, however, whether a concealed premise is the reservation of a dominant role for large corporations and supporting parts for the rest of the cast, in the manner of French as well as Japanese planners...

...No one actually owns General Motors or any other huge corporate entity...

...The country's traditional values are here summarized as "the Lockean Five": individualism, property rights, competition, a limited state, and scientific specialization...

...None too covertly our politicians have often been as much for sale as the products of the corporations purchasing them...

...In the spirit of Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means, the author proclaims that large corporations simply are not private property in any traditional sense...

...For all I know, nature may in fact intend that the interdependent parts of complex societies cooperate rather than clash...

...In the complex and highly organized America which has evolved," we are told, "few can live in the ruggedly individualistic state Locke had in mind.' "The New Ideology," now emerging, also comes in five parts: com-munitarianism, rights of membership (guarantees of survival, income and health), community need, the state as planner and coordinator, and "Holism.' Rights of membership, whose extent and diffusion Lodge tends to exaggerate, are "augmenting and replacing property rights...

...Such sponsorship lends a certain piquancy to this serious assault upon a number of the idols of the conservative tribe...

...Lodge has relied upon such standard sources as Gal-braith, Nader, Keynes, an assortment of articulate businessmen, even upon Charles Reich and Karl Marx...

...Increasingly, property is controlled by community interests...

...Lodge insists, apparently against the opposition of business types who naively believe the opposite, that the United States really is a highly ideological country...

...As the state fulfills its new mission, government must become both more "efficient" and more "authoritative...

...In short, as an item of enlightened business analysis, The New American Ideology merits attention...

...Lodge enjoins businessmen to surrender outmoded Lockean ideology, accept new realities, and set their organizing talents to harmonious administration of the new communitarian order...

...Here at home the new interest in planning expressed by such alert business types as Felix Rohatyn, Henry Ford II and Robert Roosa may truly be founded on disinterested understanding of the public interest...

...The direction of change is in any case irreversible...

...Trade unions have been junior partners, and at least until very recently, no one represented the interests of women, consumers and environmentalists...

...Environmental, consumer and minority concerns tend more and more to circumscribe the mastery of owners over their assets...

...If there really is a center of the respectable Eastern branch of the Republican establishment, the Lodge under present examination possesses a third-generation claim to inclusion...

...Again overstating a plausible tendency, Lodge reports that "A curious thing has happened to private property—it has stopped being very important...

...When Harvard professors of business administration concede the decline of classic market capitalism and preach preferences for cooperation and planning that are presumably shocking to the ears of most of their auditors, the rest of us probably ought to applaud these new perceptions of the real world...

...The drift is toward identification of our government as "the setter of our rights and the arbiter of community needs...

...Planners will operate on "the theory that nature tends to group units of whatever kinds into wholes, and into a single integrated whole,' Lodge's somewhat cloudy definition of "Holism...