l OOKS
OLD REVOLUTIONISTS
MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST. By Dwight Mocdonold. Forror, Stro'Us
ond Cudohy. $4.75.
Dwight Macdonald's one-man magazine,
Politics,
meant a
good
deal to me during its brief lifetime (1944-1949), and for years
I
have stubbornly held on to certain back issues because of an in–
articulated feeling that here, at least, was a sign that radical intellectuals
were
not always so empty, so nationalistic and so obsessed as many of
them
have come to be. I was not only in sympathy with Macdonald's
unashamedly ethical attacks on political realism, on the "science" of
Marxism, on the falseness as well as the stupidity of the liberal week–
lies
and the "progressive"-New Deal front, but I was grateful above all
for
the continuing astringency of his notes on the American scene. Un–
like
so
many ex-radicals, who seemed to have given up everything in
Marxism except its cocksureness, Macdonald not only kept up his
irritable alertness to all that was becoming increasingly stultifying in
American culture, but he wrote like a man who was honestly trying to
understand a world that had outrun the expectations of
all
social
"science."
Politics,
from my point of view, was a refreshing contrast to the
petty egotism and dogmatism of those intellectuals who had grown up
inside the radical movement. Macdonald's capacity for dissent from the
majority point of view, his almost physical resistance to war slogans,
made him oppose particularly the liberals' indictment of Germany as
a
whole, the silly conceit and even sillier optimism of the New Dealers
as
world regulators. In addition to this, he had the humility to present
to
his readers, who certainly needed some fresh ideas, the insights of
European witnesses (and victims) of totalitarianism: Simone Weil,
Bruno Bettelheim, Nicola Chiaromonte, Victor Serge, Albert Camus.
Despite the hysteria of certain contributors and the sometimes intrusive
personal moodiness of the editor, the magazine gave one the feeling, in
those critical war years and after, that
Politics
signalized and encouraged
a
definite effort to think one's way back to the humanism, the experi–
mentalism and the universalism of pre-Marxist and anti-Marxist
socialisms.
