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PARTISAN REVIEW
friends in European socialism. To this reviewer it seems that we are here
in the presence of a real tragedy. These people, who a generation ago
helped to bring about a deep social transformation, cannot get used to
the fact that what is practicable in this transformation has been achieved,
and that the rest is arrant utopia.
That is nowhere more obvious than in Sternberg's concluding po–
litical formula. It is very doubtful whether Europe can unite by her
own efforts.
If
she can, it will certainly not be along socialist lines, since
an important section of European opinion is anti-socialist and since a
large part of the continent is passing through a sharp reaction against
a planned economy. Rather, the insistence of one section upon a
socialist
Europe will present an additional obstacle to a work of unification
which is already threatened from too many sides. The more so since the
natural protagonists of such an idea, the British socialists, are violently
opposed to a United Europe and are actually, inside and outside Britain,
about the last Mohicans of the nation state-one more symptom of the
by now fundamentally conservative, epigonic and retrograde character
of European socialism, of the inevitable decline of a movement once
very great. But is this not the fate of all the great social myths, once
they have fulfilled their practical purpose?
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