604
PARTISAN REVIEW
dren to be upright, hard work, care in one's use of language, altruism:
and morality's various projects, feeding and sheltering the helpless,
ecology, opposing stupidity and waste, work toward peace as weIl–
and clearly rests on the first elements and cannot proceed without
them - but life is so unclear that we must admit that immorality works
toward peace too, and not only the peace of entropy, although that
too is part of its nihilistic appeal; but the wicked extension of the
American empire, for instance, works for peace as does the wicked
extension of the empire of the Eastern Bloc. I believe we are far closer
to the intentions of Marxism and some of its realities in this beset
and troubled country than any socialist state is, although we are in–
finitely farther from it, or less close to it I should say, than we were
twenty years ago.
I propose to correct Marx by proposing a program of imperfec–
tion. Marx, in a sense, continued the processes of thought that sprang
from the notion of the Christian state in the time of Constantine, the
notion of a moral state conceived as a world state, a successor to the
Jews' idea of a moral state, to their idea of what a state must be and
do to be considered moral, to hold God's favor. Part of what is so
flawed in Marx is that as someone beginning a process of thought he
was, in order to be comprehensible, rooted in the past he sought to
replace .
He modified the notion of public morality that sprang into the
world in the eighteenth century here and in France. We are told that
Marx is descended from Hegel, but I find it more useful to think of
him as a descendant and rival to Voltaire and Napoleon. I would say
the line of political philosophers goes from Voltaire to Jefferson to
Lincoln on one side; and from Voltaire to Napoleon and Marx on
the other. A third line arises with Tolstoy and Gandhi from the same
roots in Voltaire and Napoleon, and from the same need to correct
them and rival them and to correct Marx and Jefferson and Lincoln.
In our own moment in history, in our current predicaments with lan–
guage and reality, and peace, when public conscience, public power,
public intelligence have become mass phenomena powerfully enough,
it seems to each generation now that the world can be modern finally
if the right leaders and right programs arise and are followed .
In this program involving language and information, imperfec–
tion and thought and study, at the moment, and for some time now,
in most areas of existence having to do with day-by-day realities in
these matters oflanguage and peace and survival, William Shawn of
