372
PARTISAN REVIEW
revolutionary, model of development for the Third and Fourth Worlds .
l
Lasch:
Any more than there is a polarized structure of international power,
dominated by the superpowers. At one time the dissolution of the wartime
alliances and of monolithic Communist and capitalist blocs would have
seemed an eminently desirable development. But now it is no longer clear
that a politically fragmented world will be any more pleasant or safe to live
in than one dominated by two or three great powers .
Birnbaum:
If the picture of struggle is in fact a Hobbesian one, international
society has been reduced to the state of nature from which we thought it
had begun to emerge . The creation of a world market has not been
accompanied by the creation of a world culture or a world polity .
Lasch:
I'm wondering about the theoretical implications of that statement.
We might view American history as a precedent for this curious situation .
It
wouldn't be a bad sketch of American history to say that the creation of a
national market wasn't followed by the creation of a national or public
culture or even, perhaps, of a very securely grounded political order.
Birnbaum:
That's not an interpretation of American history I am prepared to
dispute, but if it is accurate, imagine then what the chances are for a
political or public culture in a world dominated by multinational
corporations. Nor, as the left assumes, would the overthrow of the
multinationals produce a better world polity, or restore the polity or culture
that existed before . There is also a pseudo-evolutionary theory which argues
that the spread of a certain kind of technology and economic psychology
will modernize everything , that is , make every place more like the United
States . Am I right in saying that we hear less of " modernization " in our
universities these days-it seems to me one last use of it was made by
Samuel Huntington, who argued that "modernizing" rural Vietnam
would deprive the national liberation movement of its popular basis .
Perhaps that was a clue to some of the ideological sources of a certain kind of
vacuity in academic social science.
Lasch:
Unfortunately this vacuity has been enthusiastically inherited by the
1The editors have asked us
to
comment , separately, on the Cambodian Revolution . Even this brutal,
distant, and strange revolution has been accompanied by a comedy, a grotesque distortion of some of our own.
[n the last hours of the seige of Pnom-Pehn, a group of young bourgeois "revolutionaries" (their leader, a
"general " in his twenties, was a playboy in the capital, son of one of Lon Nol's generals) put on red scarves,
commandeered some armoured cars and took rhe surrender of the last 30,000 "Republican" troops .
The comedy ended, of course, when the peasant army of the Khmer Rouge entered the city- and
promptly evacuated it. Now [read of a decree that only Cambodian is henceforth
to
be spoken in the nation.
Revolutionary purity and national cultural integrity,alike, are to be attained by an agrarian society, encapsulated
from the world . The Maoists hold that the countryside will encircle and conquer the city, but they have not
thought of emptying Peking or Shanghai or of renouncing industrialization. [n a world of centrally fabricated
