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PARTISAN REVIEW
social experimentation. Its own ambition is to become what the Radical Party
was in the Third Republic, to exercise power in the state because it has power
in the society, in unions, nationalized industry, and the civil service . That
kind of power, however, is just what the newer forms of socialism question.
As the train from France traveled down the Rhine to Bonn, I thought
about the differences between the countries . Perhaps either the Socialists or a
Communist-Socialist alliance would in time resemble the German Social
Democrats, a stolid party with its base in the unions, the civil service, the
intelligentsia. The Social Democrats' strength was their weakness. It was so
integrated with West German society that it kept putting reforms on paper–
and kept them there. Forry percent of its parliamentarians were civil servants,
its Finance Minister has told its left that talk of changing the market economy
was noosense ("Quatsch") . Its ideology is a compound of technocratic
socialism, paternalism, and the inimitable German idea of the extension of
democracy through
Bi/dung
('
'education" is not the right translation , " cul–
tivation" might be better) . Its ties to the serious sectors of the cultural in–
dustry are close. At the moment,
to
be sure, it is internally divided: Helmut
Schmidt worries much more about his own party's left than about the
Christian Democratic opposition . To a recent demand for state control of
banks and investments, he replied with supreme pragmatism : the problem
was that there was no money with which to invest, so the question of control of
investments was irrelevant.
My own view of the Federal Republic has always been quite positive. The
cultural recovery from Nazism seemed to me authentic, the political recovery
not much less so . An enlightened Social Democracy, despite its defects of
imagination and daring, did seem able to provide social advances of a pro–
found kind . The provision ofpublic services was large and efficient, there was
a proposal for participatory democracy in industry (serious enough to worry
American firms in the country), there were new equalities for women .
J
uergen
Habermas, Germany's most distinguished social thinker, had said that the
process ofovercoming authoritarianism in social institutions could now begin.
Germany's first democratic student generation since 1848, the generation of
the student revolt of the past decade, in his view would achieve a democrati–
zation of society. Alas, I found little that was encouraging during my visit.
The economy was in serious difficulty. In France and Italy, a socialist
opposition confronts governments identified with capitalism . In Germany,
the Social Democrats have found that they are no longer administering a
welfare capitalist society. They are managing (with no conspicuous success) an
economic crisis which leaves very little room for more welfare. The strategy of
both wings of the party has assumed continued economic expansion . The left
wing thought that this would provide resources for redistribution, areas for
