430
F. W.
DUPES
whose sufferings exceed those of Marcus the Jew until, realizing that they
are beyond assimilation by his own ethos, he experiences the supreme
suffering of despair and gives up the ghost. There is real "madness" in
this story-the madness not of Fiedler but, as Henry James would have
said, of great art.
F. W. Dupee
VARIET IES OF REVOLUTIONARY EXPERIE NCE
ON REVOLUTION.
By
Honnoh Arendt. Viking Press. $6.50.
The neo-conservative vogue in political writing is now almost
exhausted. Like other intellectual fashions it drew its strength from
passing circumstances, while resting its appeal upon supposedly self–
evident truths and eternal principles. The circumstances were bound
up with the Cold War in the particular form that it assumed in the
1950's, when the Soviet-American antagonism called for a statement of
principles, at any rate on the Western side (the Russians already
possessed a coherent body of dogma and only needed to refurbish it
in a few particulars). The principles then invoked were substantially
those which had validated the Anglo-American war effort against
Germany, save that in those innocent days the USSR had officially
counted as a "democracy." The discovery that Soviet totalitarianism
represented something definite, not to be conjured away by the
enunciation of Four Freedoms, Atlantic Charters, or United Nations
platitudes, came as a disagreeable shock. Worse .followed when some
of the new nations went over to the Sino-Soviet camp and others
assumed a stance of spiritual neutrality. Faced with these disappoint–
ments liberalism fell silent, while its critics were able to ring the
changes upon the half-forgotten theme of traditionalism: revolutions
(unless consecrated by religion) are subversive of the natural order.
The Russian Revolution, being self-avowedly atheist, not only lacked
such consecration, but .had from the start condemned itself to absurdity
by trying to found a commonwealth of unbelievers-something even
Robespierre had thought impossible. To resist its claims was to re–
discover the perennial truths that inspired the founders of the Greek
polis
and the Roman Republic. In our epoch the only surviving