208
-1 venture to suggest-is one important
reason why so many people took the
piece seriously. Political thinking has
been conditioned toward this approach
to such an extent that even Lord Eldon
is welcomed with open arms into the
ranks of the fighters for democracy.
Having emerged from a period of
debunking we seem to have entered a
period of resurrection. Because Soviet
Russia constitutes an undoubted threat
to the West and because the optimism
of the nineteenth-century Liberals is
hardly applicable to the present situa–
tion, we tend to praise and hold up as
examples figures of the past simply be–
cause they were pessimistic about man's
progress, because they recognized evil
in the French (and thus presumably
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also the recent Russian) Revolution,
because they opposed excessive state
power, or because they were religious.
T wo cautions suggest themselves: (1
am no longer confining myself to Mr.
Viereck. )
(1)
We cannot with impunity di–
vorce ideas from their intellectual and
institutional setting. This does
not
mean
(for instance) that we have to take all
0/
Burke when we praise his political in–
sights, but it means that we must al–
ways consider these insights in the
framework of a system both Romantic
and theocentric. Similarly, it is haz:ard–
ous to talk of Original Sin and to leave
out God, or to put Freud
in
its place
and to leave out Sex.-The same ap–
plies to institutions: Political ideas, to
be worth anything, must be tied up
with an institutional structure which
can give them reality. And this makes
ideological cross-pollination from one
century to another a very dangerous
procedure.
( 2) (This with a preliminary storm–
warning of irony to come. )
Our Navy recently discovered the
immorality of indiscriminate bombing
as carried out by the Air Force. In sim–
ilar fashion, intellectuals of today, near–
ly all of whom agree on the inadequacy
and some of whom bewail the wicked–
ness of the Marxist theory of history
and of ideas might ask themselves what
they are
supposed
to think according to
the Marxist analysis of the present
world situation. And if this amounts to
(say) a conservative revival as an in–
tellectual counterpart of the supposedly
last-ditch stand of bourgeois capitalism,
they might carefully ponder before tak–
ing such a line, lest they do anything
to help prove Marx less wrong!
John Clive
Cambridge, Mass.
