FRENCH PERIODICALS
the Politburo member charged with shadowing what passes for philoso–
phical thought in the Soviet
Union~n
a textbook on Western phi–
losophy by one Alexandrov. He writes:
The revolution is in power for thirty years already, for thirty years
it
has
been fashioning thought. . . .
If
Russian philosophers still cling en masse to
"formalism and apolitical thought," to "admiration for what is foreign" and
"take refuge in the past,"
it
is rather difficult for Zhdanov to reduce all this
resistance to "subjective factors"; one should reason according to good Marxist
criteria and conclude that there must be something very wrong in the objective
situation. Does one not note this paralysis which the powers-that-be impart to
thinking when, immediately after asking of the philosophers more self-criticism
and independent research, Zhdanov says: "Your discussion of Hegel is rather
strange.... The question of Hegel has been resolved a long time ago. Therct is
no reason whatsoever to pose it anew...." One has to call things by their name:
we
are here faced
with
a mortal error of Russian Communism, a radical de–
formation of revolutionary humanism. . . •
The author ends his piece by an appeal to the Communists of the West
to assume a task of education in respect to their comrades of the East.
He thinks that it is precisely in the Catholic countries, which-according
to the very Catholic Mounier-have always contained a fruitful melange
of orthodoxy and liberty, that this new Western Stalinism has most
chances
to
develop. It would seem rather difficult to push confusion
further, and yet Mounier is considered an eminent representative of
progressive thought in the France of today....
Louis Clair
....Me41..Me41..Me41..Me41..Me-eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee–
Announcing publication of
The
Story ol
Benja..,in
by
Joseph Kling
Edition limited to 500 copies
$3.50
Available
at
THE JNTERNAJ110NAL BOOK AND ART SHOP
1.7 West 8th Street
end other New York bookshops
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