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PARTISAN REVIEW
that the forces of revolution and disintegration showed
themselves most clearly.... No: It is in the apparently in–
nocent lucubrations of David Hume that the real Reign of
Terror began: the beginnings of a nihilism that has reached
its full development only in our own times.
This
wret~hed
piece of sophistry is only pallidly matched by the con–
tention that Darwin "justified man's contemporary inhumanity to man
by pinning the whole process on nature." Freud, Dostoyevsky and
Spengler, Mumford cannot leave without insinuating their guilt in the
promotion of fascism. In the space of 14 lines on page 377, we find
Proust, Eliot, Joyce, American gangsters and European fascists all fog–
gily lumped together as evidence of disintegration and decay. This is
presumably an example of the "art of co-ordinated thinking'' which will
characterize the coming age of renewal.
The coming age of renewal, says Mumford, will be the age of the
whole personality. We shall live in a state of "dynamic equilibrium" and
we shall devote ourselves to "cultivation, humanization, co-operation,
symbiosis." In a "world civilization" we shall see "systematic cultivation"
of lands and the "internal recolonization of every country"; but despite
these vast projects (or in order to carry them out?), we must "decen–
tralize power in all its manifestations." I cannot see that Mumford is
offering us anything very plausible. Nor do I understand how it is pos–
sible, let alone desirable, for the "ideal personality" to be in "dynamic
interaction with every part of his environment and every part of his
heritage."
This book is Lewis Mumford's most ambitious work, and I suppose
it will be officially accepted as an important, prophetic book, perhaps a
little weak logically, but, morally, worthy of the great traditions of social
thought. From the author of a book like this, however, we ought to de–
mand evidence of historical intelligence and social passion. We ought
not to accept as substitutes these armed raids upon history; this crude
cultural coercion; this compulsive vilification of serious thinkers tem–
peramentally different from oneself; this setting oneself up as judge of
corruption and decadence, as accredited protector of art, truth and the
nobility of man; this denial that any human being can fulfill his pos–
sibilities without first being locked up in the past and coordinated into
the organic present. I have found very little understanding of man and
his activities in
The Condition of Man.
RICHARD CHASE
A MAN IN HIS TIME
DANGLING MAN.
By Saul Bellow. Vanguard.
$2.50.
H
ERE,
for the first time I think, the experience of a new generation
has been seized and recorded. It is one thing simply to have lost
one's faith; it is quite another to begin with the sober and necessary
