716
PARTISAN REVIEW
whole is toneless, ungainly, and cursed with the defects of the virtues it
prizes.
The word "socialism" turns out to be a trap, and part of the
complex trouble is that the editors know it. They seek to be free of it
with a chapter, their own handiwork, on "Terminology and Types of
Socialism," an example, I fear, of how the semantics mania can create
employment without increasing production. While they separate the
types readily enough, they construe relationships between them that
are either non-existent or tenuous enough to be overlooked. Committed
to an inventory of the entire stock, they overlook nothing that bears the
label but a plenty that doesn't. Well over a hundred pages are devoted
to the religious and secular utopian
socialis~s
of the nineteenth century,
while the attention devoted to labor organizations, to patterns of im–
migration, and to the development of the general economy is about one–
tenth of that. I have no objection to one more guided tour through
the Oneida community-God knows, the rediscoverers of America
have limbered us all up for this sort of outing during the past fifteen
years-but the idea that it will throw much light on the socialist ex–
perience of my own time seems almost preposterous. (That it can con–
tribute
something
I will not deny- particularly after reading the essay
on the psychology of socialism by George W. Hartman, an old-school
socialist and an old-school psychologist.
It
is his contention that radical
politics and economics are expressions of the primal urge toward the
prettification of environments, exterior and interior, that occasionally
blesses even the degenerate society of the present with well-kept gardens,
trim kitchens, and orderly minds and spirits.) I would hazard the guess
that more of the roots of twentieth-century American radicalism are to
be found in Princeton itself than in New Harmony or Hopedale.
Some critics have taken
this
work as a text for sermons on the
futility of collaborative projects in general. The editors more or less
invite this, by asserting, in defense of the method, that "the subject of
the relation of socialism to the various aspects of American life and
thought is too complex to be treated adequately by anyone man or from
any single standpoint"-an extraordinary profession that leads one
eventually to come up with such names as Gibbon, Burckhardt, Renan,
and, for that matter, Marx. There is no doubt that these big collabora–
tive projects, so greatly favored by the foundations, almost invariably
come to bad ends. I find it difficult, however, to believe that it is
really the principle of collaboration that is at fault. Though it is self–
evident that pooling the talents of twelve or fourteen scholars is not the
way to make a single Gibbon-and that
if
there chances to be a Gibbon
in the lot, he will very likely be crushed by the weight of the others-I
