474
HENRY DAVID AIKEN
Principle" for understanding the American power structure is that
it is a "grouping of gangs." So be it. But he doesn't deal with the
major gangs. There is nothing here, nothing I repeat, about the
armed f.orces, nothing about the military-industrial complex, nothing
about the corporations or about the unions. This is Hamlet without
the Prince, a
bouillabaisse
without seafood.
As for the rest, dear reader, do not despair, you too are part of
the cream that has separated from the curd, you can identify with
the core-slice of the apple pie, obey the life-force and join the Reform
Democrats in Scarsdale. By and' by you will even elect a congressman
who will help reorganize the House and aid in overcoming the con–
fusions and contradictions in the American system. There is no need
to
get all worked up about the obscenity of LBJ, the lying of Dean
Rusk and the strutting of General Westmoreland. Just follow Bazelon,
get off that transatlantic ship, join the suburban elite and know that
you too can be among the New Samurai.
Lewis Coser
THE FREEDOM TO WILL
THE FREEDOM OF THE INDIVIDUAL
By
Stuart Hampshire. Harper and
Row. $3.95.
In an age of monstrosities, it is natural that even analytical
philosophers should address themselves to problems of free will. Unfor–
tunately the human relevance of their probings into the logical anatomy
of our ideas of freedom and necessity, choice and action, what is and
what ought to be and the rest is usually left for others to divine-not a
safe course at a time when to overwrought activists clarity suggests shal–
lowness and understanding merely a lack of concern. The remarkable
fact remains, nonetheless, that the activists, who fancy themselves as
the
exponents of free action, have acquired allies of a sort in a quarter
where most of them would disdain to look: that is, among some
lin–
guistic philosophers who for a good many years now have been desultori–
ty sorting out forms of language indispensable to the conduct of our
daily affairs. In fact, the philosophers of ordinary language, as they are
called, argue convincingly against their own elder "analytical" oppo–
nents-in particular, the positivists, the physicalists and logical behavior–
ists, and, more generally, the , "scientific" philosophers-that what we
