PARTISAN REVIEW
the style and the voice really are now inadequate, that the greatest and
most valuable and living criticism, from Carlyle through Arnold and
Lawrence and Leavis, was written in a very different mode, out of dif–
ferent values. The energy behind
this
book is an energy in defense of the
lesser folk who need judiciousness in the absence of more intense and
dangerous and creative energies.
Inevitably then, this book does seem to be about itself, about the
possibility and the value of its being written at all. The rhetorical strate–
gies ultimately fail to avoid the trap of self-indulgence that writing about
writing about writing forces, and judiciousness-whose apparent virtue
is
an alertness to complexity which will help avoid simplification-be–
comes another device of simplification.
George Levine
POWER AMERICAN STYLE
AMERICAN POWER AND THE NEW MANDARINS.
By
Noam Chom–
s~.
Pantheon. $7.95.
AMERICAN IMPERIALISM: A SPECULATIVE ESSAY.
By
Ernest R. May.
Atheneum. $5.95.
A NEW FOREIGN POLICY FOR THE UNITED STATES.
By
Hans
J.
Mor–
genthau. Praeger. $6.95.
Now that opposition to the Vietnam debacle has become
popular, it is easy enough to forget that Noam Chomsky and Hans Mor–
genthau spoke out long before most of their university colleagues had
the will or the wit to stop parroting stale rationalizations and face up
to
the tragic errors of American policy. Academic intellectuals, no dif–
ferent from others in that respect, are now busily engaged in acts of
selective recollection, in persuading themselves after the fact how really
discerning and courageous they were between 1965 and 1968. Most of
us have played that game; only a few, like Chomsky and Morgenthau,
have had little need for it.
One approaches their recent work, therefore, with respect and
sym–
pathy. Chomsky's book is made up mainly of essays already published,
among them "The Logic of Withdrawal" and "On Resistance" which
attracted so much attention when they first appeared. The argument for
withdrawal from Vietnam was cogent in 1967. It
is
all the more com–
pelling at present, whether in terms of the "national interest" defined
in cold-blooded military terms or of the morality of American interven–
tion.
On
the other hand, "On Resistance" is an uncomfortable piece
