BOOKS
BOOKS Pursuit of liberty JEROLD S. AUERBACH POLITICAL REPRESSION IN MODERN AMERICA FROM 1870 TO THE PRESENT by Robert I. Goldstein Two Continents/Schenkman. 682 pp. $22.50 hardcover. $6.50...
...But consensus, Goldstein argues, is more likely the result of repression, which has undermined radical dissent since our earliest days of industrial corporate capitalism...
...Our narrow limits of political tolerance make our Presidents virtually interchangeable...
...As it was, he tended to share the too comfortable leftist view of the 1930s — that fascism was the last stand of a decaying capitalism...
...Otis L. Graham Jr...
...He covers the treatment of women and minority groups under Social Security and their changing roles in the American economy...
...He is the author of "Unequal Justice...
...He retained his "incorruptible sense of reality" and his conviction that ideological abstractions must "always lead in the end to victimization and human sacrifice...
...In spite of his need to view Stalin's Russia from afair^ however, Trotsky did subject it to a most intense scrutiny throughout the 1930s...
...OtisL...
...At times he was led to concede that Stalin's Russia was politically not far from its fascist contemporaries...
...f Social Security benefits for single workers and widows should be increased 12.5 per cent...
...In part this is no doubt due to the skill of its editors, Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly, but above all it is a reflection of the unity of Berlin's thought over time...
...Goldstein's account is replete with examples — from IWW free speech fights to recent antiwar protests — of the assertion of civil liberties as prelude to the demise of political opposition...
...He found it impossible, in spite of Stalin's barbarism, to write off the Soviet Union because to him it embodied the achievements of 1917...
...This quality of intellectual empathy touches these essays on every page and gives them a poignancy — and a moral urgency — one does not usually associate with works of intellectual history...
...William Steif (William Steif is a Washington correspondent for the Scripps-Howard newspapers...
...One might say the same of Sir Isaiah Berlin...
...He had no frills beyond candor and truth...
...While he was admittedly no intellectual giant, he knew a good new idea when he saw one, and he nurtured a good many of them, such as the TVA, the unicameral state legislature, the necessity for multipurpose plans for every major river valley, or the feasibility in 1942 of making large amounts of fuel alcohol from farm products...
...In particular, he has addressed himself to the fundamental conflict between pluralist and monist visions of the world...
...By 1927 Trotsky was banished to the hinterlands — later to go into exile in Turkey, France, Norway, and finally Mexico...
...Psychologist and Marxist James M. Lawler explores this topic, so problematic to educators and activists alike...
...crippled or destroyed radical labor and political groups, and, perhaps most deleteriously, encouraged Americans to impose self-censorship on their own exercise of political freedoms...
...Part of the excitement Holt communicates is his inventiveness in teaching himself...
...Rewarding guide SOCIAL SECURITY: TODAY AND TOMORROW by Robert M. Rail Columbia University Press...
...To see only isolated dissenters, besieged by a hostile majority and defended by courageous civil libertarians, is to miss the political context that explains the linkage...
...His agenda for improvement of Social Security includes some well-reasoned ideas that might be considered radical on Capitol Hill but make a lot of sense when divorced from garden-variety politics...
...The Vietnam war repression marked a shift to undercover surveillance and harassment, which propelled the United States toward 1984 when, George Orwell predicted, government would create and sustain its own opposition, only to suppress it...
...Radical protest ebbs and flows, but there is seldom continuity or nourishment from one era to the next...
...Regardless of the verdict, the political movement has disappeared, its time, money, and energy consumed by the legal struggle in which it has participated...
...7.95...
...But because of Trotsky's role in 1905 and 1917, his courage, his struggle with Stalinism, and the clarity of his prose, it seems likely that history will accord him a place among the greats...
...Consequently, although political repression may be less extensive here than elsewhere, the spectrum of acceptable political opinion is significantly narrower in the United States (as Tocquevilje noted so long ago) than in any other industrial democracy...
...Because Lenin and Trotsky are the two great figures rightly identified with the Bolshevik seizure of power, it is not always realized how brief was Trotsky's association with the Bolshevik wing of the Russian revolutionary movement...
...It is depressing, but necessary, to confront it as unflinchingly as Goldstein has...
...In his early seventies in 1974, retired longshoreman Hoffer (The True Believer) decided to keep a diary for six months to "reanimate and cultivate the alertness to the first faint stirrings of thought...
...is the complexity of his vision, the degree to which he understood the causes and nature of conflicting ideals simpler and more fundamental than his own...
...14.95...
...With considerable restraint, he shies away from the crude view that Bolshevism and Stalinism are one and the same...
...That they failed is history...
...Since 1870 the targets of political repression (defined by Goldstein as discriminatory government action based on perceived political beliefs) have been predictable and consistent...
...It includes his famous study of Tolstoy, "The Hedgehog and the Fox," as well as portraits of the radical journalist and memoirist Aleksandr Herzen, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, and the novelist Ivan Turgenev...
...IfMedicare is inadequate and should be expanded...
...They attribute "consensus" to the beneficence of American wealth, the frontier safety valve, JeroldS...
...But the seizure of power was a dubious strategy if one thought of socialism as the road to a genuine people's democracy...
...6,000 conscientious objectors imprisoned...
...Like everything Hoffer has written, the daily jottings are terse and unpredictable...
...An ardent socialist and an acute observer of his times, Herzen was not deluded by "general nostrums, vast systems, and simple solutions...
...The relentless Stalin destroyed all opposition...
...is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara...
...In light of these concerns, it is not surprising that he has been drawn to the generation of radical Russian thinkers and writers who came to prominence in the mid-1800s, for these men left a remarkable record of the struggle between monist and pluralist visions which dominated their time and, in some instances, raged within their own minds...
...Herzen, by contrast, embodies the values — the "tough-minded" pluralism — that Berlin himself embraces...
...But Norris, however one comes at him, was a person of no remarkable habits or tastes...
...Goldstein's account offers no escape from this impasse, perhaps because in our culture there is none...
...And Trotsky, as builder of the Red Army and its commander in chief during those civil war years, was a prominent part of it all...
...Without an economic program worthy of the name, this minority regime, dedicated to a little-understood socialism and ruling in the name of a working class that was small and soon to be decimated in the years of civil war, had to resort to harsh measures and unpopular improvisations to remain in power...
...Ball is far more expert on Social Security than anyone else on the Washington scene today...
...3.95...
...Who has it and why...
...Typically, they were well-born, westernized in education and taste, deeply alienated from the ruling autocracy, and appalled by the conditions of life in their vast backward country...
...Above all else, he craved a simple unitary vision of the purpose of life such as he believed was given to small children and simple peasants...
...6.50 paperback...
...Sir Isaiah Berlin is one of those rare scholars who by virtue of the depth of his insight and the grace of his prose transcends the confines of any single discipline...
...At the end of the 1930s, the Washington press corps voted him the best Senator at work...
...Political repression, writes political scientist Robert Justin Goldstein, "has been an important and neglected factor in shaping major aspects of American political development since 1870...
...Goldstein offers some perceptive observations along the way...
...Testing intelligence IQ, Heritability, and Racism, by James M. Lawler (International Publishers...
...Readers will relish his gift for aphorism ("A generation that wearies of technology is bound to turn to magic") and his continuing intellectual curiosity as his physical tempo slows down...
...His mind tends to jump to big generalizations ("Communism is a failure as an economic system but may triumph as a military instrument") and vivid personal reactions (he scorns Marx because he "never did a day's work in his life"), but his iconoclasm is nearly always refreshing as he reflects on the past and the state of society today...
...The Trotsky view was that the surge of revolutionary sentiment then sweeping Russia overflowed the limits of a purely middle-class revolution — the leaders of which were, in any case, confused and inept — and that the workers should take power via the Soviets...
...While Franklin D. Roosevelt was mobilizing the creative ideas of a swirling set of bright young reformers during the Hundred Days, Norris watched in baffled helplessness from the Senate and accepted FDR's direction — including the plan for the TVA, which had been Norris's general idea but whose mature design came from others...
...Among his suggestions: TSocial Security should not be part of the President's annual budget (as, indeed, it was not until 1969...
...Even President Carter is playing this game in his fiscal 1980 budget...
...Although Goldstein contends that the most important variable in the struggle against repression is the attitude of policy makers (especially the President) toward dissidents, the "liberal" Democrats — Wilson, Roosevelt, Johnson — resemble the "reactionary" Republicans — Harding, Eisenhower, Nixon...
...Auerbach is a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School...
...14.95...
...You can't ask for much more than that...
...Books Briefly Iconoclastic longshoreman Before the Sabbath, by Eric Hoffer (Harper & Row...
...It seems that the more Presidents change, the more repression stays the same...
...He understood what made — and what in a measure justified — radicals and revolutionaries: and at the same time he grasped the frightening consequences of their doctrines...
...Finally, Ball offers thirty-one "propositions" for reforming the present system in the fairest possible manner so that "a decent measure of economic security to the retired, the disabled, and widows and orphans" is provided...
...Berlin evokes these men — their characters, their ideas, their moral and intellectual dilemmas — with almost startling immediacy...
...Again, a younger Trotsky would have scoffed at the idea that state ownership and socialism are the same thing...
...193 pp...
...He did not pretend to understand the great economic catastrophe which began in 1929 and lasted until World War II...
...The Socialist Party, in the belief that if it played by democratic rules it would be fairly treated, was virtually destroyed for its opposition to World War I. World War II, the "good" war for liberals (who had nothing controversial to say), was hardly that for those who were suppressed (120,000 Japanese-Americans sent to relocation camps...
...He discusses its relationship to private pension plans, to "welfare," to the disability program, and to Medicare...
...But the same Leon Trotsky seemed to lack the needed warmth and patience to build a personal following...
...Trotsky was something of a lone eagle in the Russian revolutionary movement...
...The sound of music Never Too Late, by John Holt (Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence...
...Throughout the book, and especially in the last chapter, he traces the consequences of such thinking...
...On the evidence of this collection of essays on four outstanding figures of the intelligentsia of Nineteenth Century Russia, he is also a marvelously subtle and discriminating connoisseur of men, with a novelist's knack for conveying particular qualities of temperament and mind...
...This suggests that it is more a political culture and structure, rather than a series of Presidential administrations, that requires scrutiny...
...Goldstein offers an important hint when he observes that the political Right is immune from repression for the same reason that the Left is vulnerable to it: "Conservative forces control American government and society...
...f Social Security coverage should be "universal," including Federal workers and the 30 per cent of state and municipal workers who are not paying into the system...
...242 pp...
...he was equipped with a sturdy but quite simple set of political ideas straight out of the mainstream of the progressive era...
...This is biographer Lowitt's fault only to the degree that he decided to tell in detail the narrative of every legislative and political battle, however tedious...
...Presumably the younger Trotsky would have argued that socialism and democracy are interdependent...
...He had carefully remained aloof from the contending factions...
...Above all, he was dedicated to enlarging individual freedom, and he attacked — in language remarkable for its bite and contemporary accents — any doctrine, whatever its auspices, which subordinated the liberty of the individual to some sweeping ideological abstraction...
...One left-wing political movement after another is attacked as subversive (which, of course, it is...
...he relates any number of guidelines developed in his work with children (How Children Fail, How Children Learn) to his own learning explorations and discoveries...
...An America without Social Security is almost unimaginable today...
...No concept is more easily employed or more misunderstood, lending itself to indescribable confusion and misapplication...
...As his book makes clear, he doesn't care about political fashions...
...When Norris was asked what Lincoln would advocate to cure the Depression, he said, "Lincoln would be just like me...
...Indeed, as Berlin shows, their fascination resides above all in the degree to which their extreme susceptibility to the appeal of monist visions — notably the "vast imaginary symmetries" of Hegel and his progeny — was offset by their ferocious skepticism and critical intelligence...
...too often he appeared stern, and even arrogant...
...Subtitled "My Musical Life Story," this is a charming and often exciting account of educator Holt's gradual exposure to music and his learning to play the flute and the cello...
...And through it all he built a magnificent reputation for integrity, fairness, and independence of mind...
...His modest, candid book explains why...
...10...
...He loathes and fears sweeping abstract visions — whether of the Right or the Left — which purport to harmonize all fundamental values around some central absolute...
...inside the Soviet Union, internment and firing squads did the work, while abroad it was done by assassins...
...Four radicals RUSSIAN THINKERS by Isaiah Berlin Edited by Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly Viking Press...
...Our history suggests that as political grievances are channeled into claims for constitutionally guaranteed rights, the political movement that expresses the grievances melts away...
...He attacked J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI for violations of civil liberties...
...192 pp...
...Graham Jr...
...One such trend a year ago was a call to "roll back" new Social Security taxes, which quickly followed Congressional action to remedy another trend, the one that warned the nation that the Social Security trust funds were "going broke...
...Since retirement Ball has been a senior scholar at the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine, specializing in Social Security, and he is a member of the prestigious National Advisory Council on Social Security, which is scheduled to make its recommendations next fall...
...Although he stood apart from the intelligentsia and dismissed the Hegelian doctrines that enchanted so many of Aem as "unintelligible gibberish," Tolstoy shared their hunger for absolutes...
...He wouldn't know what the hell to do...
...When not working in his Senate chambers he was at home in his apartment with his wife, reading Senate materials with her or eating meatless dinners...
...Although these essays were conceived independently over a period of thirty years, the book is remarkably cohesive...
...It is possible that Trotsky would have made a more trenchant analysis of totalitarian ideology had he managed to live through and beyond World War II...
...This volume covers the remarkable Nebraskan's constructive and culminating phase in public life, which came in the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt after Norris spent fifteen years as critic and obstructor of some of the worst designs of Presidents Harding and Coolidge (and Wilson, some might say...
...Social Security Today and Tomorrow is not easy to read, even for those with some knowledge of the subject...
...Despite the present system's defects, Ball notes: "Social Security is America's most successful program of social reform...
...For not the least of the many pleasures offered by these portraits of Nineteenth Century thinkers is that, taken together, they yield the outlines of an oblique, unintended self-portrait of one of the most original and useful thinkers of our own century...
...Trotsky's role LEON TROTSKY by Irving Howe Viking Press...
...If rights-oriented individualism is part of the problem, not (as civil libertarians believe) part of the solution, we are fated to repeat the cycle of radical opposition, political repression, rights assertion, and radical demise...
...Social Security tinkering is a common affliction in Washington, but the tinkerers are normally like flies on an elephant...
...Lawler drops an ax on prevailing theories of intelligence which rest, above all, on tests that inevitably measure what their designers want measured (but not, however, that elusive intelligence) and add fuel to racist arguments and policies...
...493 pp...
...This was a brilliant strategy which Lenin quickly accepted...
...In 1957, when John F. Kennedy polled 150 scholars to select five outstanding Senators for portraits in the Senate reception room, Norris led the list...
...From the moment of his assumption of leadership of the Petro-grad Soviet in the abortive revolution of 1905 until his brutal 1940 assassination in Mexico by one of Stalin's agents, his was a presence that glittered...
...Norris had no distinctive prose or verbal style...
...Reading music is still difficult for him, he is largely self-taught, and he was in his forties when he began to play the cello...
...Lurking beneath the historical evidence and Goldstein's analysis of it is the worrisome link between a political culture of repression and the rights-oriented individualism that simultaneously attacks and sustains it...
...And he is interested in hard facts...
...One senses that what Berlin so admires about Herzen,is the passionate intensity of the tensions at the center of his relationship to the world and his noble refusal either to deny the complexity of his perceptions or to yield to that species of liberalism which takes a certain bittersweet pleasure in being stalemated by its habitual ambivalence...
...He fleshes in fully the options to the present method of financing Social Security...
...The most impressive of them little resemble the monomaniacal professional revolutionaries of a later generation...
...it seems clear that the significance of all the opposition groups within the Bolshevik party, both Trotskyist and non-Trotskyist, was primarily as a series of ill-related efforts to stop or slow the trend towards totalitarianism...
...Or he might spend a few weeks in his Wisconsin cabin, reading newspapers, Shakespeare, or the Bible, singing selections from Gilbert and Sullivan with the family, or reciting his favorite poem, Abou ben Adhem...
...When, in the summer of 1917, he and a few colleagues joined the Bolsheviks it was because Lenin prodded his own group into an acceptance of Trotsky's viewpoint...
...The pattern is familiar by now...
...He notes that while radical unions were suppressed, unions that accepted capitalism, and the economic subordination of their members, were accommodated...
...His tragedy, as Berlin shows in his brilliant portrait of a great mind divided against itself, is that his moral aspirations were frustrated by his unerring analytic powers and his genius for perceiving the world in all its irreducible variety: "Tolstoy's sense of reality was until the end too devastating to be compatible with any moral ideal which he was able to construct out of the fragments into which his intellect slivered the world, and he dedicated all of his vast strength to the life-long denial of this fact...
...The operation always is a success (the assertion of rights has been vindicated), and the patient always dies of due process...
...7.95...
...Norris's life, then, does not bring us high adventure, intellectual or otherwise...
...intervention in the war in 1917, saving Muscle Shoals, the Norris-LaGuardia labor act, the Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution, and the Tennessee Valley Authority...
...144 pp...
...He is still an acknowledged amateur, but music has become an important part of his life...
...Lawler dissects the heredity theories of intelligence of Jensen, Ey-senck, Herrnstein, and Schockley with scientific rigor and minimum jargon...
...Despite our self-congratulatory national rhetoric, we have at best an ambiguous legacy of freedom: support in principle for civil liberties and dissent, combined with persistent, virulent anti-radicalism...
...Yet Social Security is so important, and affects so many people, that the work of reading Ball's book is, in the end, extremely rewarding...
...By 1942, the year of Norris's astonishing defeat by the forgettable Kenneth Wherry, everyone conceded that Norris was one of the Senate's great figures...
...To Goldstein's credit he poses some of these problems, even if the abundance of detail occasionally submerges his analytical themes...
...He treats Social Security as it deserves to be treated: It is the overarching social insurance program in the nation...
...but increasingly these Bolshevik-dominated workers' councils were the rubber stamps used to give a legitimate air to Lenin's and Trotsky's new regime...
...Norris was to the end a progressive...
...Both the Senator and the biography emerge with high and lasting reputations...
...In an effort to be fair to those who mustered the courage to oppose Stalin, Howe writes...
...The study of Tolstoy is profoundly moving...
...More than 108 million Americans are paying into the Social Security program...
...Ball's charts and the appendices help somewhat, but there is still a lot of detail which cannot be skimmed...
...Sadly, American radicals, like American conservatives, are American individualists who, learning nothing from the past, seem condemned to repeat it...
...Even to see, as Goldstein does, the relentless conservatism that suppresses radical deviance, is to slide past the ways by which a conservative, legalistic, individualistic culture compels its enemies to play according to rules which ultimately assure their repression...
...By the mid-1920s the Communist Party was dominated by a new class of bureaucrats, and the number one bureaucrat was its general-secretary, Joseph Stalin...
...Jamie Kalven (Jamie Kalven is a free-lance writer based in Chicago...
...Berlin writes of him: "What made him unique...
...J. Edgar Hoover's anti-social register of deviants, and Richard Nixon's enemies list in our own time...
...he supported Theodore Roosevelt against William Howard Taft, Robert M. LaFollette Sr...
...I repeat these fundamentals of Norris's historical importance before reporting that his life story is not a very exciting one...
...The consequences have been dismal: political repression retarded the labor movement...
...Tn retrospect," as Howe correctly assesses, "it seems no exaggeration to add of all the Marxists it was Trotsky who best foresaw the course of events in Russia...
...The 'gentle knight' GEORGE W. NORRIS: THE TRIUMPH OF A PROGRESSIVE, 1933-1944 by Richard Lowitt University of Illinois Press...
...f A policy encouraging early retirement does not make sense, either for the individual or the economy...
...528 pp...
...He has an extraordinary ability to embrace the mind behind a body of work and to animate its ideas even as he subjects them to sharp criticism...
...In exile, Trotsky continued to be mired in some of the rigidities of his own and Lenin's logic...
...It represents a fifth of the current national budget and will pay out about $108 billion in fiscal 1979...
...against Calvin Coolidge, Al Smith against Herbert Hoover, and Franklin D. Roosevelt against all rivals...
...It led to the October seizure of power by the Bolsheviks — in the name of the Soviets...
...Students of liberty — and its precarious status in our society — now have the full historical record for the modern era before them...
...he rarely said anything quotable, prophetic, funny, or noticeably profound...
...He was one of our genuine heroes, back when we had them...
...Without his gritty tenacity as a guardian of TVA during its administrative evolution, the agency might not have survived its early years...
...they don't see the whole picture...
...Yet Lowitt's three biographical volumes, especially this final one, make a lasting impact by marshaling the weight of Norris's character, conscience, and unfailing sympathy for both middle and lower classes...
...This was the stuff of a responsible Senator's life, and the reader at least gains some sense of what Norris endured...
...Norris was a progressive who evolved into a liberal, while other progressives turned hesitant or sour, and if the moods of the 1970s tell us that this was a sad mistake rather than a triumph, then Norris still can stand with the best on the virtues of honesty, disdain for material wealth, refusal to use or be moved by flattery, tenacity in all worthy struggles, an attractive humility, and an addiction to duty...
...our non-feudal past, our limitless social mobility...
...From his forty years of experience Ball has distilled this authoritative book, Social Security Today and Tomorrow, which includes a foreword by Senator Gaylord Nelson, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Social Security...
...In Political Repression in Modern America from 1870 to the Present, Goldstein is properly critical of those who bestow the benign label of "consensus" on our paper-thin range of political discourse...
...He traces the history, nature, and reliability of such tests, examines the research on group differences in IQ scores, and compares hereditary and environmental factors...
...Around Washington, politicians and journalists stick their fingers in the wind and suddenly announce a new trend, usually with incomplete understanding of what they are doing or saying...
...His book is the most comprehensive study we have of political repression...
...312 pp...
...Norris, whom FDR had with justification called "the very perfect, gentle knight of American progressive ideals," could only define a liberal as "a man with an open mind who sees the changes that are taking place in the world about him and realizes that our system of government must keep pace with those changes...
...Drawing equally on logic and history, he has sought to demonstrate that such monist doctrines — no matter how noble the absolute value on which they are founded — lead ultimately to the purge and the mass grave...
...With this large book, historian Richard Lowitt completes his three-volume biography of George W. Nor-ris of Nebraska...
...He was not selected...
...Throughout his career he urged — without any success at all — a stiff progressive inheritance tax, and he was a formidable and unwearying foe of what used to be called "the power trust...
...Most liberal observers were ill-prepared to accept the stark truths which his writings then revealed — how long it has taken, for example, to persuade them that a revived anti-Semitism is a Soviet reality...
...The exception is Robert M. Ball, who was Commissioner of the Social Security Administration from 1962 to 1972, capping a career with the SSA that began in 1939...
...It was not only his Congressional record that vaulted Norris to the top, though this was substantial enough: During Norris's forty years of service in both houses, that record included his memorable battle with Speaker Joe Cannon over the Rules Committee, objection to U.S...
...Students of American political history and civil liberties will encounter few surprises in Goldstein's compendium of repression victims: anarchists, Wob-blies, Socialists, pacifists, and unionists in the good old days...
...Herzen's critical intelligence did not constrict his human sympathies or undermine his commitment to radical change...
...Norris voted against entering World War I...
...he was vetoed by Senator Styles Bridges...
...And his moral passion did not stupefy him, but rather, in alliance with his intellect, deepened his understanding of the social issues of his time...
...This is especially true of the portraits of Tolstoy and Herzen — two figures who, in very different ways, deeply engage Berlin...
...He is interested in the philosophical implications of his subject, in equity, in what is good for the nation...
...He wants to trim some Social Security benefits and at the same time roll back some Social Security tax increases scheduled to go into effect in January 1981...
...The great theme which has preoccupied him is the impact of ideas on history...
...His leading role in the Bolshevik takeover and the subsequent repressions of freedom made this difficult, however, and left him saying that the productive system is socialist but not the political superstructure...
...He is at once an historian, a philosopher, and a literary critic...
...The political splinters that sport his name will add nothing to his luster...
...then individual rights of dissent are asserted, and political issues are transformed into legal issues which are argued in court...
...IfThe cost of the disability insurance program should be controlled...
...Skeptical about the possibility of general solutions, he insisted that "all that is ultimately valuable are the particular purposes of particular persons," and that the only true goals are concrete and specific — "at the very least the laborer's wage or pleasure in work performed...
...He does not confine himself strictly to Social Security...
...Given the mistaken decisions of Bolshevism — of which the seizure of power was foremost — Irving Howe views the authoritarian elements in Bolshevism proceeding through arrogance, and the adversity of historical circumstances, to a totalitarian end...
...He is an eloquent spokesman for what Aileen Kelly in her excellent introduction calls a "tough-minded and intellectually bold" pluralism: a view of the world which rejects the notion that all human ideals are 56 / april 1979 ultimately compatible, accepts the burden of moral uncertainty, and hence places high value on individual freedom of choice...
...What is intelligence...
...Amid the depressing mass of detail compiled by Goldstein, there is a discernible blurring of distinctions between political eras, Presidential administrations, and party affiliations...
...Russian Thinkers is the first of four volumes of his selected essays...
...Built on the conservative principles of self-help, with the protection growing out of the work that people perform, it has nevertheless created a revolution, transforming life for millions of our people from poverty and insecurity to relative economic well-being...
...He details Social Security's relationship to other major Federal social programs such as food stamps and veterans' pensions...
...Anti-communism, "free enterprise" (with government subsidies for the privileged), and super patriotism are legitimate, but critiques of any of them constitute subversion for which repression is the appropriate response in the name of national security...
...Lloyd Harrington(Lloyd Harrington is a free-lance writer...
...When the Senate recessed, he returned to a modest frame house in little McCook, where nothing ever happened (unless Norris addressed the Rotary Club...
...A "definitive" biography, as this is, must necessarily place more on the record than we really want to know...
...He is the most tragic of the great writers, a desperate old man, beyond human aid, wandering self-blinded at Colonus...
...The worst that he could bring himself to say, in spite of his revulsion, was that it was a "degenerated workers' state...
...Ball divides his book into dozens of questions which an intelligent questioner might ask and gives his answers...
...He wrote "The Great Campaigns: Reform and War in America, 1900-1928...
...In an analysis of Trotsky's role and his writings which no one is likely to better in so brief a compass, Irving Howe, critic and editor of Dissent magazine, provides us with a democratic socialist view of the whole business...
Vol. 43 • April 1979 • No. 4
