THE COLD WAR AND THE WEST
67
by combatting the radical Right rather than seeking itself to move
onto rightist ground-an illusory operation since the Right can al–
ways go still further right and will.
3. By implication I have already indicated my hope that a variety
of democratic socialisms can be encouraged in the world as alterna–
tives both to traditionally exploitative developments in capitalism
and in Communism. The former would seem dearly inappropriate
and unlikely in the underveloped areas; the latter appeals to many
intellectuals in those areas as a way to power and purpose when they
cannot discover less violent and fanatical modes of achieving col–
lective national goals. And in the overdeveloped countries, such as our
own, it would seem essential to define new utopian goals that do not
depend on the cold war as an imperative for our national existence.
In quest of these goals, what is best and most humane in democratic
socialism must be rescued from the Communist label and subjected to
reformation and reinterpretation. The national economy must be or–
ganized in such a way that neither disarmament nor automation are
costs borne by a few displaced workers, businessmen or stockholders.
And the reinterpretation must tackle problems of social organization
and mass culture that are often debated in the pages of this review.
4. I do believe that private property-and I don't mean large
corporate property- furnishes direct and indirect support for civil
liberties and cultural freedom. Private property enables some men to
be independent of bureaucratic and organization pressures. The op–
portunity to start a small business, whether it be a publishing house,
a magazine, a shoe store, or a construction company,
is
a genuine
freedom. Moreover this freedom, by preventing monolithic control of
employment, makes possible pluralistic centers of power and hence
of opinion. (In the present cultural climate, private property alsl)
has far less benign aspects in encouraging surly aggressiveness and
greed, and it is a task of enormous proportions-as I need hardly
say-to envisage how one might separate those aspects of property
that nourish the human spirit from those that corrupt it.)
Moreover, I believe strongly in the importance for civil liberties
of an independent judiciary and of a bar not wholly committed to
the defense of the ideological and economic status quo. A pluralistic
pattern for academic organization is also a support for freedom;
one could only wish that our public and parochial secondary schools
