642
DAVID
1.
BAZELON
to be the chief issue that can
be
resolved without a radical reordering
of society.
Still, the depressive mood of the book is consistent, overwhelming and
self-inflicted by reason of the author's willful presumptions of clarity.
But the author is better than this; and this result was unnecessary.
Why popularize gloom
in
a reasonable tone of voice? With this method,
even the Dark Forces are clarified to an unconscionable degree, and we
are served up a future without potential disaster. What is presented here
is history so well-managed for purposes of clear exposition that conflict
appears only as bits and pieces of nominalism. But the main point is not
that some of us may personally prefer a frantic cry to reasonable gloom,
but that the dynamism and variety of the present (whether or not destruc–
tive) are sacrificed to the idea of an audience that does not even exist
in the absence of that idea. Clarity of this high order is useless, or worse.
For example, at page 90 he writes: "An economic transformation of
capitalism of such magnitude that its big businesses become,
in
effect,
public agencies is not a serious possibility for the foreseeable American
future...." This is offered in disallowing the possibility of nationaliza–
tion. But an accurately dynamic depiction of the present would require
the writer to note the variety of ways in which the big corporations
are
public agencies - and treat themselves, and are treated, as such. And it
might be added that nationalization, because of changes in the property
system, is quite unnecessary; it was propounded by the socialists mostly
because they were anti traditional private property. (I have chosen
to criticize Mr. Heilbroner's rhetoric, rather than what 1 divine to be
his understanding.
If
1 had been discussing the latter, I would suggest
that his academic training has given him too much to unlearn concern–
ing the centrality of free markets; and he has not learned as much as
he could have from Adolf Berle with respect to the revolution in
property forms which more fundamentally underlies the American cor–
porate ·order.)
The two essays are united not only by mood and mistaken method,
but by a theme as well, that as capitalism supplanted feudalism, the
new technological order will supplant capitalism. "When" and "how"
are the questions. When? Not for fifty years, says Mr. Heilbroner. How?
By "a subversive process of historic change"
in
which the privileged
groups of the old order are attracted, in spite of themselves, to the
qualities of life of the new order.
A.dd:
as and when these are created,
and made attractive and so on. Mr. Heilbroner finally says: "Veblen
was too impatient for his engineers to take over; Schumpeter more
realistic when he advised the intelligentsia to
be
prepared to wait in the
