DANIEL BELL
635
understandably, politics maintains a primacy over economics. But
what happens when ideology becomes the battering ram of politics?
And what happens to a society when one begins to acquiesce in a
Weltanschauung
of "who-whom"?
.
I have not dealt with foreign policy, even though this is a highly
charged issue within the intellectual world today . As Kristol wrote in
1967: ". . . it is the peculiarity of foreign policy that it is the area of
public life in which ideology flounders most dramatically. Thus
while it is possible- if not necessarily fruitful- to organize the po–
litical writings of the past three hundred years along a spectrum
ranging from the ideological Left to the ideological Right, no such
arrangement is conceivable for writings on foreign policy . There is
no great radical text on the conduct of foreign policy- and no great
conservative text either. What texts there are ... are used indif–
ferently by all parties as circumstance allows."
The liberal doctrine- using liberal in the historically-rooted
sense of the term- believed in the "non-intervention" of the state
because of its desire to reduce the role of
politics
in all areas of life,
from free enterprise within to free trade without. Yet Hobbes, also a
liberal, in his reduction of society to the individual as the relevant
social unit, felt that the political role of sovereignty had to be para–
mount, lest the civil society be a war of each against all and all
against each, the logic of which would lead, in an era of international
interdependence, to a world state. But when in the political world,
the idea of national interest becomes paramount and legitimate
(even with Kant), the assessment of an enemy becomes primarily
not an ideological, but an empirical matter. (Is Communist China
today an "evil empire" or "totalitarian"?) Perhaps the most thorough–
going realist theorist of international affairs, Hans Morgenthau, op–
posed the United States role in the Vietnam War because of the
*Since I believe that friendship is more important than ideology, I resigned as co–
editor of
The Public Interest
in 1973 , and from the publications committee in 1982. As
Kristol wrote about our early years at the City College of New York forty-five years
ago: "Daniel Bell . .. was that rarity of the 1930s: an honest-to-goodness social–
democratic intellectual who believed in 'mixed economy,' a two-party system based
on the British model , and other liberal heresies.. .. Over the years, his political
views have probably changed less than the rest of us, with the result that, whereas
his former classmates used to criticize him from the Left, they now criticize him
from all points of the compass."
