We Unhappy Few
Fischer, George
'We Unhappy Few' After Utopia, the decline of political faith, by Judith N. Shklar. Princeton University Press. 309 pp. 15. Reviewed by George Fischer T^he thesis of After Utopia is that •1 ever...
...Yet is it not as foolhardy to slight other ideas merely because they are less fatalistic, less "utopian," or less avant garde...
...Shklar may be guilty of the same "intellectual determinism," of overemphasizing the role of intellectual ideas, that she rightly notes in others...
...A second omission in After Utopia, in part an outgrowth of the first, is of other kinds of ideas...
...After Utopia fails to prove, or even to discuss, whether elaborately abstract and elaborately "utopian" political philosophy is in fact equally plausible (or equally essential) in different times and places...
...Spender and Auden...
...This currently widespread academic failing is notably absent from a parallel study, Leonard Krie-ger's German Idea of Freedom...
...how revealing that this charmed circle of "we unhappy few" excludes not only Bertrand Russell and Lord Keynes but all of American thought...
...Maritain, Ber-diaev, and T. S. Eliot...
...On this question Dr...
...Harold Laski and the Webbs, von Hayek and von Mises...
...for the world's one advanced free civilization...
...Her book thus becomes a truly chilling dictionary of gloom and doom quotations from such varied figures as Malraux, Sartre, and Camus...
...But why, I wonder, not also the most influential of this group outside the intelligentsia itself, Toyn-bee and Schweitzer on the right and Orwell and Koestler on the left...
...Yet it has two regrettable omissions...
...Shklar never steps outside the narrow confines of certain schools of avant garde philosophy, theology, and ideology...
...Above all—how innumerable the omissions...
...Walter Lipp-mann and Hannah Arendt...
...Can and need the West in its present stage of development—advanced, complex, fluid, prosaic—give birth to the same kind of ideas that appear under different circumstances...
...This first book by a Harvard instructor is brilliant, important, and also profoundly anti-defeatist in intent...
...Reviewed by George Fischer T^he thesis of After Utopia is that •1 ever since the Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century formulated the West's grand ideals of a future good society (or "utopia"), ideas about politics have steadily declined in quality and quantity...
...It would be foolhardy to ignore Western schools of thought that reject most things, big and small, which today seem essential (or feasible...
...What remains is disenchanted, defeatist, fatalistic, or hostile about Western civilization's present and future...
Vol. 22 • February 1958 • No. 2
