440
PARTISAN REVIEW
crises in our society. But, strangely enough, this theoretical part of their
argument remains to he worked out.*
Mrs. Sweezy's own study is no great shakes theoretically. Her theor·
etical comments are meager, and the few scraps do not fit together very
well. Thus she seesaws between the statement that the final end of the
German
ec~nomy
is war (pp. 4, 50, 123, 233, 235) and the conclusion
that this war itself is a means to expansion and the continuation of profits
(p. 24). She phrases her results generally in Keynesian jargon (marginal
efficiency, liquidity preference, propensity to consume, etc.), but none of
the Keynesian hypotheses figure in the investigation. The book's virtue,
however, is, as I have said, its careful collation of official materials and
its measurement of German economic behavior.
Yet this careful empiricism is a virtue sufficient to cut the ground
from under the feet of the theorists of the New Order. For they stirred
excitement, not because of the clarity or deductive elaborateness of their
theoretical constructions; they caused a stir because of the sensational
factual statements which they offered in evidence. These empirical state·
ments, it is now clear, were either one·sided or just plain false. And they
were offered in support of an economic theory which was never made
explicit. But before continuing to argue the newness of the New Order,
it
would be good to know its order. The only thing left its exponents is to
try to make sense of their theory, to offer a coherent political economy, an
analysis of what makes things tick in the new order as distinct from in
the old. To do this would be to lift the level of discussion considerably
above that of words and slogans. Otherwise we can go on matching simi·
larities and differences and definitions for another ten years.
J.
R.
STANWELL
WITH
THE LITTLE
MAGS
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The appearance of the first issue of
VVV
brings up the question of an
art movement. To what extent does it "inspire" to creation? To what
------..rhis lack is what makes their definitions of "capitalism" arbitrary. The defini·
tions are not part of a
theory
of either the occurrence of crisis in the "old" order or
!ts non-occurrence in the "new": yet susceptibility to crisis is the point actually at
ISSUe.
