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PARTISAN REVIEW
ect of remaking human nature is less feasible than they suggested ;
and that totalitarianism in the pure sense is inherently unattainable .
The totalitarian states are brutal despotisms , riven by internal feuds
and antagonisms, inefficient in their use of labor and in their alloca–
tion of resources . They practice systematic and appalling barbarities;
but so have despots through the ages. Twentieth-century totalitarian
states, far from representing a change of phase in social organiza–
tion, as I believed then, are hardly more than Tartar courts equipped
with modern technology.
I did have the sense in 1949 to detect the rising conflict within
the Stalinist empire between Soviet control and national communism
and even to predict the Sino-Soviet split . The emergence of polycen–
trism in the years since has of course greatly changed the character
of the Soviet threat to the West. I did not think then and do not think
now that the Cold War is amenable to a military solution, though I
did not foresee the salience of nuclear weapons (the Soviet Union did
not achieve its first atomic explosion until later in 1949, and the
United States did not decide to make the hydrogen bomb until the
next year). The control of nuclear weapons I now regard as the su–
preme problem of our time. I continue to think that military power
is essential, but as a means of deterrence and therefore of assur–
ing the play of diplomacy and ideas. I considered Averell Harri–
man and George Kennan reliable guides to Soviet-American rela–
tions in 1949, when they were denounced as cold warriors, and I still
consider them reliable guides today, when they are denounced as
soft on communism.
Probably I should apologize for not being able to claim disillu–
sions, revelations, conversions; but in fact I have not been born
again, and there it is.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. is Schweitzer Professor
of
Humanities at the
Graduate Center of the City University ofNew York. H e is completing a work
on the history of the New Deal and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
