BOO KS
717
can think of nothing inherent in the principle of collaboration that pre–
ordains them to dismalness. In essence, the division of labor is the same
on a job like this as on an encyclopedia, and there have, after all, been
some good encyclopedias. One thinks, coming to a genre several steps
closer, of the great collaborative projects of the British universities, most
notably of the Cambridge histories, which, if they never gain the force
or reflect the luster of a single great mind or personality, at least manage
to get all the way around their subjects and to achieve a kind of uniform
penetration. What is revealed by the doughiness and malformations of
similar work in this country is not so much that American scholarship is
damaged by excessive organization as that
it
is impossible to organize.
In the British works, the whole takes its character from the common
assumptions, the common sense of proportion, and the common style of
those who fabricate the parts. In our research and scholarship, the
standards of simple literacy vary so widely from place to place and in
particular from one discipline to another that it is apparently hopeless
to try to achieve the kind of communication and integration that work of
this type requires. Far from standing in danger of being deadened by
attempts to impose consistency, we suffer from a lack of any system of
intellectual assizes that would allow the imposition.
,At all odds, this showy, expensive production comes to very little.
The distinction of a few pieces like Daniel Bell's, which, happily, is very
long, scarcely makes up for the aridity and downright foolishness of
much of the rest. Socialism in American literature is treated in a feeble
parlor discourse by Willard Thorp. Professor Hartman leads us through
the forests of the academic psychologist's jargon in order that we may
be blinded by such illuminations as: "Voters do not invariably indicate
their wishes with optimum clarity." (Elsewhere he informs us that "it is a
grave misfortune that so useful a linguistic and ideological term as
'totalitarianism' now has the significance of an all-inclusive despotic
tyranny whereas it could profitably and neutrally have been employed
to characterize an internally harmonious culture operating on the same
principles throughout its institutions.") There is more jargon and junk
from the preserves of sociology, economics, theology, and antiquarianism,
to say nothing of bibliography. The pity of it is not that one book is a
disappointment but that it will forestall the writing of books that might
be better. A good study of the impact of socialism on American life
would be a useful thing, but if anyone should care to undertake it now,
he would learn from publishers and foundations that the subject had
already been disposed of by Princeton and Rockefeller,
in
two volumes.
Richard H. Rovere
