BOO KS
639
PLUS CA CHANGE
THE LIMITS OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM.
By
Robert
L.
Heilbroner.
Harper
&
Row. $4.95.
Robert Heilbroner writes a highly stylized book. He is like an
abstract painter who executes a Real One for private consumption; and
then hires himself out, so to speak, to translate it into a predigested
version for a substantially less capable audience, offering just what
- imagining the central drift of the
New York Times
for the coming
period - is exactly necessary, no more and no less, for the deeper pur–
poses of Good Citizenship. (He says he spent four years writing the thirty
or forty thousand words comprising the present collection of two essays.)
In this effort, equally interesting and misguided, no one can touch him.
I admire his talent as a rhetorician, although he is not of a size
with
J.
K. Galbraith. But Heilbroner is the acknowledged Prince of
Popularizers in tl1at special field of awareness in which, it has been
thought, the audience must be hog-tied in order even to
be
brought
to sit still long enough to listen:
economics.
A fascinating fact that, in
a country where the very souls of self, children and predecessors are
regularly sold at bargain prices for inadequate reasons, the Subject Itself
must be presented in pidgin or pious English.
There are undoubtedly thousands of educated people in this coun–
try -
perhaps tens of thousands - who could and should read this book
with profit.
If
I was certain that I was talking to anyone of them,
I would not have the slightest hesitation in recommending it in a loud
voice. But in one area after another, who knows what who knows? One
either accepts the coerced presumptions of some professionalism or other
(especially coerced as to language), or one confronts the very dark fact
that the common language has suffered vast deterioration, and we are
nearly become strangers mumbling incoherently each about his own non–
professional past. (In
1959,
Adolf Berle published a brilliant study of
our altered political economy in which he allotted twenty-six of one
hundred and fifty-eight pages to four prefaces, one each for Business–
men, American Liberals, Scholars and the Uncommitted Public.)
I am suggesting that the audience has collapsed.
This - and not
the more widely remarked isolation of the artist or other communicator -
is the central consequence of modern disruption. The modern "audience"
