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PARTISAN REVIEW
THE PRIVATE PHILOSOPHY
THE PUBLIC PHILOSOPHY. By Wolter Lippmonn. Little, Brown
&
Co.
$3.50.
REALITIES OF AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY. By George Kennon.
Princeton University F'ress. $1 .50.
The transatlantic dialogue today consists for the most part of
European exhortations to America to brace up, get busy, and resume
the march of progress; and of American admonitions to Europe to sit
still, reflect on the past, and consider the merits of tradition. Each side
plays devil's advocate to the other. For every European admiringly en–
vious of America's success in mastering technology there are two Ameri–
cans anxiously fretting over their countrymen's reluctance to build Gothic
cathedrals and read Papal encyclicals. Propagandists are busy crossing
the ocean in both directions, urging socialized medicine on Americans,
or Thomist education on Europeans, as the case may be. With so much
intellectual cross-fertilization going on, it would seem at first sight that
the publicist's task ought to be getting easier; in fact it is becoming
more difficult. Each side not merely has its favorite nostrums, but its
own way of misunderstanding the other. Europeans see a potential Hit–
ler in Senator McCarthy, while Americans mistake the parliamentary
system for a version of their own democracy. Americans, too, are either
for or against something called liberalism which has no counterpart in
Europe; as European conservatism is quite different from the American
brand.
Intellectuals are among the chief agents in this multiplication of
problems. Politicians know from experience that almost any doctrine
can be pressed into the service of a workable cause, and that once a
course of action has been decided it will not be long before it acquires
some theoretical sanction. Most writers by contrast are strong for the
opposing view: that policy is determined by preconceived notions about
the nature of the universe. Mr. Walter Lippmann for example argues
that the growing debility of modern democracy is due to loss of faith
in natural law. Let there be a revival of such faith and society will
recover its vigor. Political health and sickness are traced to intellectual
currents. Philosophers are not perhaps all-powerful, but "the decline,
which is already far advanced, cannot be arrested if the prevailing phil–
osophers oppose this restoration and revival"
(The Public Philosophy,
p. 178) . This is orthodox Platonism.
It
became the fashion in Greece,
if we remember rightly, after democracy had broken down, and it proved
unable to arrest the further disintegration of society.
