120
PARTISAN REVIEW
and the fear of total meaninglessness. So that their poetry is already
partly an answer to the tough wind's warning. But they have as yet
to be gnawed and strengthened by a deeper disorder before their con–
trivances and resolutions have the look of earned and genuine rewards.
Edwin Honig
THE LONG ORDEAL
THE PATTERN OF WORLD CONFLICT.
By
G.
L.
Arnold. Diol Press.
$4.00.
In a period of profound social disorder such as the present,
perhaps the most useful function of the political analyst and in any
event his indispensable first task is to subject the fears and passions
engendered by the crisis to the discipline of reason. Unless passions can
be domesticated, analysis is impossible; unless the paranoid tendencies
inherent in the situation can be checked, discussion will become a for–
gotten luxury.
C .L.
Arnold's
The Pattern of World Conflict,
like Ray–
mond Aron's
Century of Total War,
performs this necessary function
with impressive success. Both works, to be sure, have in common a cer–
tain bloodless quality, a tendency to reduce complicated and anguished
dilemmas to something less than life size, and an overvaluation of the
rational at the expense of the demonic, but these minor defects are almost
implicit in any effort to restore the supremacy of reason. One has the
heartening sense in reading Arnold, as with Aron, that the many diverse
forces are comprehensible and to that extent manageable.
If
there is no
"pattern" to the world conflict, we must hypothesize one. This not only
serves as a preliminary to discussion but also counteracts the failure of
nerve that is always incipient in a time of constant strife and seeming
chaos. As Arnold observes, a world in flux and reflux has "given rise to
defeatism and even to a species of panic." When confidence is widely
shaken and old myths no longer sustain, only reason can outwit panic and
nourish faith. Indeed, the exercise of reason becomes itself an act of faith .
Arnold's forte is economic analysis, and his hypothesis is predicated
on the play of economic forces rather than on moral or political factors.
A dedicated advocate of planning and an emancipated Socialist who
makes use of Marxist insights in discriminating fashion, he is at his
strongest in plotting those points where economics, politics, and ideology
intersect.
H e offers a dual thesis : the need for the reorganization of the At-
