Quest for Social Salvation

...116 pp...

...Sinclair's appraisal of Guevara only half succeeds because it is overflowing with sycophantic mush to which Guevara's disconcerting honesty would have objected...

...The "Modern Masters" series, edited by Frank Kermode, and published by The Viking Press...

...Camus is the artist among the five who, in their different ways, have become the ideologists of many, particularly radical youth...

...1.65 paper...

...The advanced industrial societies no longer command the allegiance of their more highly educated youth, and post-colonial society is torn asunder as new social classes seek to carry through the revolution which the transition to political independence began...

...The failure to adopt a consistent stylistic format (retaining instead the variegated styles of Leach's original essays) somewhat mars the presenta-tion and gives one the feeling that the contents were compressed between the covers with haste...

...As the son of Algerian working class parents who gave him a French education and culture, Camus could never come to terms with his Algerian experience, or with the whole non-European world that was the environment of his early life and the background of his later disquiets...

...so familiar in fashionable radical circles that we must be careful not to miss its extreme heterogeneity: the student movement in the United States, the black population of the U.S...

...These five books are the first in a series that will include Marshall Mc-Luhan, Noam Chomsky, George Lu-kacs, Leon Trotsky, George Orwell and—why in this context?—James Joyce...

...whether useful or not, what he teaches is simple and can be easily understood...

...A better if bolder name for the series would have been "Modern Heroes...

...Only Andrew Sinclair's Guevara is an almost uncritical tribute...

...If they all attain the high standards set by these first five volumes, the project will be valuable, especially to the so-called "general reader" in search of a guide to the ideologies that are convulsing our confusing times...

...In its searing pages we read that the European working class can be relied on only to betray the colonial worker and peasant...

...Levi-Strauss, one of the most powerful minds among contemporary scholars, would reject this description...

...that if violence corrupts those who use it, it might also enable them to escape from a world of fantasy into a world of reason...

...Quest for Social Salvation by GABRIEL GERSH BOOKS TT^rank Kermode says in his general introduction to this "Modern Masters" series of short critical-biographical studies: "By Modern Masters we mean the men who have changed and are changing the life and thought of our age...

...As Caute points out, quoting Nguyen Nghe, "wars of liberation do not last forever and . . . the violent experiences which men undergo in their cause may create as many problems as they solve," since "all killing is by definition dehumanizing...

...Was explosion of hero-myths the aim of the editor...

...They reveal him moving beyond the cult of negritude to a more universal position formulated in The Wretched of the Earth...

...Andrew Sinclair's Guevara has been anticipated by the Twentieth Century Fox movie to which it adds some information without any deeper analysis...

...Of the five reviewed here, only Che Guevara can be considered a master...

...The ostensible reason was not just the Stalinist controversy, but, as O'Brien says, Camus' acceptance of the violence used by the Right-wing forces in Algeria...

...But no one in possession of the facts can deny that he was also an unsuccessful Director of the Cuban National Bank, totally miscast as Minister of Industry, and a misguided leader of the final Bolivian campaign, conceived and planned by himself as the best way to expedite revolution in South America...

...The most thoroughly masterly of this series is O'Brien's Camus, whose message is that Camus' record is compounded of tragedy and defeat...

...It is a triumph of lucidity and conciseness to establish so well much of the political and philosophical framework of Marcuse's Eros and Civilization and his One-Dimensional Man...

...Often Sinclair mentions Guevara's integrity, courage, and singleness of purpose...

...115 pp...

...142 pp...

...Despite Maclntyre's logical and rational demolitions, much of Marcuse's thesis is difficult to test, since it depends on assertion rather than argument...

...Here Alasdair Maclntyre's book is admirable...

...His two books have been translated, but the only connected studies of him in English have appeared in periodicals...

...Undoubtedly, much of this sociology will still be written, but the work of Marcuse and Fanon can perhaps provide a starting point...

...Leach, with humor and impartiality, explains Levi-Strauss5 originality, castigates his intellectual arrogance and theoretical dogmatism, and puts him into perspective not only in the field of anthropology but also in the general history of thought...

...114 pp...

...For instance, Maclntyre shows that although he is nominally a Marxist, Marcuse has no faith in the revolutionary role of the proletariart of advanced industrial societies, and places confidence in "a collection of revolutionary forces...

...David Caute's detailed and intelligent introduction is helpful and timely, and there is a useful but brief comparison with some of the black American militant writers like Eldridge Cleaver and Malcolm X. In Caute's account, Fanon's writings are set in the context of history...

...Like many revolutionists, Fanon was an idealist with a deep belief in the perfectibility of man, but his commitment to liberation through violence discredits his theory...

...Explosion, debunking, in a real sense "demythologizing," are in fact the practice of the authors of three of these books: Conor Cruise O'Brien, Alasdair Maclntyre, and Edmund Leach...

...The facts of Guevara's life are presented in a readable form, and Sinclair shows us how this upper middle class, asthmatic medical student became the prototype of the "new man" he wanted to create in a new socialist world...

...As a result, O'Brien believes that Camus' political views, like those of other left-wing colonials, exhibited "estrangement, unreality, and even hallucination"—so much so that Camus could take seriously, as a real cultural possibility, the chimera of a French Algeria where Islam and Albert Camus, by Conor Cruise O'Brien...

...However, I have a few regrets about this volume...

...urban slums, the Chinese cultural revolution, the National Liberation in Vietnam, Cuba...

...It is rather meant for people who have a general grasp of what such people seem to teach, and who have not the evidence or training to know by what criteria to accept or reject their views...

...They reveal him reacting as a native of Martinique to the intellectual world of France, where he was trained as a psychiatrist, and to his experiences in Algeria, where he came to full revolutionary maturity...

...The Marcusian vision of the modern world is highly academic, but this is not the approach of Frantz Fanon, whose importance as a writer about race (as in Black Skin, White Mask) and about the struggle against colonialism {The Wretched of the Earth) is beginning to receive some recognition...

...Reading the accounts of Marcuse, Fanon, and Guevara, one realizes that the revolutions of our time are not those posited by Marxism...

...that it is the peasants rather than the urban proletariat who will generate the revolution...

...Marcuse is a survivor of the pre-World War II great tradition of German philosophy, political theory, and sociology—a tradition linked with Hegelian thought and the Marxism of the Nineteenth Century...

...that the colonial nation can fight for freedom even though it does not fulfill the Marxist criteria of a revolutionary class...

...It is useful to have these three essays on Levi-Strauss, originally published in different places between 1962 and 1966, brought together in a popular edition, since they will now have a much wider readership (which they deserve) and a greater impact...

...But the series is not intended for those capable of reading, say, Herbert Marcuse or Claude Levi-Strauss with enough training and background to make an adequate assessment...

...In this sense, his savages are the equivalent of Marcuse's idealized students, Fanon's idealized blacks, and Guevara's idealized peasants—with the important difference that he does not regard them as the leaders of the quest for social salvation...

...And though he never confronted this trouble directly and did not change his position on the Algerian war, he did confront it at a deeper level...

...Levi-Strauss has devoted his career to the analysis of data about South American Indians, with the intention of proving that the savage mind is fundamentally the same as the cultured mind, although it operates with the help of different categories...

...Guevara's career led him from the life of a guerrilla in the Sierra Mountains, to important positions in the Castro government, to his roving commission as a world revolutionary in Africa and Asia, and, finally to the rigors of a guerrilla's struggle for survival in the Bolivian mountains—and to martyrdom...

...But the major merit of Maclntyre's book is that it not only represents Marcuse's ideas faithfully, but also exposes many of his intellectual ideas in a delightfully polemical way...

...For many it is his best novel—and, though not set in Algeria, it is "the one in which Algeria is most painfully present...

...The Fall was an admission of guilt and renunciation of an easy conscience...

...Of the five authors of the books in this series, Edmund Leach had the most difficult assignment, and he has dealt with it admirably...

...At the same time, Leach conveys the marvelous sense of intellectual excitement that Levi-Strauss can generate...

...Claude Levi-Strauss, by Edmund Leach...

...To understand the thrust of change in our world, therefore, we need a new sociology, less insular than that which has formed the mainstream of the Twentieth Century...

...Then, with the onset of the Cold War and his bitter quarrels with Sartre, Camus' position crumbled and he found himself isolated, confused, and rapidly petrifying into a public monument...

...It is surprising that in One-Dimensional Man "these counterforces and tendencies"—alleged to be undermining, for the benefit of humanity, industrial society's anti-human "system of domination and coordination"— should not even be mentioned "except for one or two paragraphs until the penultimate page," and that even then "no great hope is attached to their prospects...

...Perhaps they should not be called masters if we regard masters as those who, when studied, impart the message they intend to teach...

...The persistent cultural barriers between French and Anglo-American thought and writing have delayed recognition of his important though unfinished work...

...In the middle of this miscellany are what Maclntyre cruelly but humorously calls "idealized students who have produced the first parent-financed revolts in what is more like a new version of the children's crusade than a revolutionary movement...

...116 pp...

...Nor was Guevara concerned about human suffering of the worst kind, provided that it could ultimately contribute to the realization of his own version of human liberation...

...With Frantz Fanon, the black Frenchman from the Antilles who offered an ideology for African blacks, David Caute is uncertain...

...As Leach shows, Levi-Strauss is a visionary who finds it quite difficult to recognize the plain, matter-of-fact world in which most of mankind lives, who has contrived an idealized, Rousseaulike, noble savage quite divorced from reality, who is reluctant to accept factual material which casts doubt on his complicated theories...

...Herbert Marcuse, by Alasdair Maclntyre...

...Indeed, Mar- cuse's Hegelian background is not part of Anglo-American culture, and few outside the ranks of the professionals are competent to trace in detail his relation to Marx and the neo-Marxists...

...Christendom would attain "Mediterranean" unity...

...Frantz Fanon, by David Caute...

...O'Brien tells us that for a few years after World War II, Camus was "the most brilliant and the most influential figure on the non-Communist left in France" and that he was canonized as the archetype of the non-revolutionary Just Man...

...Maclntyre's dislike of Marcuse's "nostrums described in inflated language" makes him give less credit to some of them than they may deserve...

...4.95 cloth...

...Moreover, some sort of introduction would have been rewarding...

...Che Guevara, by Andrew Sinclair...

...Marcuse's synthesis of Freud and Marx in Eros and Civilization is interesting, and as far as Marcuse's analysis of advanced industrial societies is concerned, it is difficult to confirm or deny its validity because the facts are too numerous to make more than a speculative assessment...