The Good Society
Slater, Joseph
The Good Society The Radical Papers, edited, with an introduction, by Irving Howe. Dou-bleday. 378 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by Joseph Slater 11 ^hese twenty essays do not have quite so wide a range...
...John Schrecker and Michael Walzer collaborate in a sober and persuasive argument that military intervention "is justified only when it is really counter-intervention...
...Most of the essays are addressed to particular social and political problems...
...Harvey Swados, more personally, with a novelist's sense of dialogue and detail, characterizes the United Automobile Workers as a giant paralyzed by success and by problems too vast for any union to cope with...
...and not, in any large way or any near future, the tradition of British and Scandinavian Social Democracy, which George Lichtheim thinks can hardly be more than a model of civilized frugality and technological restraint...
...In two essays on the maladies of American education, Christopher Jencks and Robert Wolff write remarkably different prescriptions: Jencks, fearful of uniformity, would like to see government subsidization of individual tuition payments so that "the market mechanism" might maximize variety in colleges and universities...
...Not, primarily, the Marxist tradition...
...And it is an obligation to try to do something now...
...Tom Kahn argues that there are no solutions to the problems of the Negro short of the full employment which would come from "democratic central planning...
...But the idea of socialism, the visions of the good society which came to Fourier and Oscar Wilde and— even—Lenin: these make a living and sustaining tradition...
...And Lewis Coser says that the centrifugal and polycentric forces which in the 1960's seem to have broken up the Communist empire may have produced a turn of history comparable to the halting of Islam in the Eighth Century—and may have made possible the rebirth of the socialist movement...
...Wolff advocates either "forced homogenization" of the colleges or a "random admission" policy which would have the same effect...
...At the other extreme, in the last paragraph of the book, Emanuel Geltman and Stanley Plastrik write: "Socialism is not merely an exercise in discontent...
...Pragmatic, various, dissentient, they argue in a socialist context, and they are framed, structurally, by essays which assert the viability of the socialist tradition...
...Reviewed by Joseph Slater 11 ^hese twenty essays do not have quite so wide a range as their collective title suggests...
...They are concerned not with Maoism, Black Mus-limism, Mattachine, the Dirty Speech Movement, or other points on the cutting edge of contemporary radicalism but rather with dull, square old democratic socialism and its relevance in a time of cold war and the welfare state...
...Socialism," they say, adapting Tolstoy, "is the name of our desire...
...Ben Seligman, in an admirable, scholarly study of the effect of automation on the unions, proposes a number of partial, possible remedies...
...conversely, Paul Goodman's contribution, "Notes on Decentralization," attacks even supermarkets and superhighways as destructive of human values...
...This book indicates that it is still, or again, vigorously alive...
...They are committed to no orthodoxy—indeed the journal in which most of them were first published is called Dissent—and the measures they advocate are hardly more socialist than they are liberal or progressive, but their common assumption or implication is that some sort of socialism is still the way out...
...Such a socialism, beginning with the need to envision and ending with the obligation to act, affirmative, unfettered by dogma, hospitable to intelligence and contradiction, was once a major force in American life...
...There are two essays on foreign affairs...
...It is an ideal, eclectic, Utopian, visionary, almost mythic socialism that Irving Howe and Lewis Coser delineate in the powerful essay which begins ¦—and dominates—the book...
...It is socialism, finally, that these radical papers come around to...
...It is an affirmation of what is possible to man unfettered by economic and political repression...
...Michael Harrington writes perceptively of the special economic and psychological plight of the "new" poor...
...Despite some facile simplification of the complex, painful questions of race and poverty and one astounding piece of infantile leftism on The (student) Movement, the total effect they produce is one of honesty, maturity, and intelligence...
Vol. 30 • August 1966 • No. 8
