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PARTISAN REVIEW
Probably the dichotomy between 'communism' and 'capitalism' is
meaningless. One may suspect that the great failing of left-wing intel–
lectuals in capitalist democracies is
to
undervalue their own societies
and to romanticize populist or socialist one-party states further afield.
The comparable failing on the Right is to maintain a shabby silence
about the chain of skulls which Moloch carries around his distended
neck.
As
is so often the case, moral symmetries dissolve on closer inspection
to reveal a far greater sense of indignation aimed at the right than the left.
The right is "shabby" and associated with "the chain of skulls" ; the left may
only be "suspected" of the fuiling "to undervalue," although it
is
not difficult to
think of comparable, indeed far more substantial chains or mounds of skulls
the left kept silent about, produced by the political systems it supported.
Perhaps the deficiencies of the whole enterprise appear more glaring in
the new edition than in the old because of the halfhearted attempt to make it
a more ambitious project, a chronicle of fellow travelling that transcends the
Soviet case. But if so, the author never quite made up his mind whether or
not the recent generation should be considered "fellow travellers" or some–
thing else; he emphasizes in the preface how they differed from their prede–
cessors, being youthful political activists committed
to
revolutionary change in
their own society, rather than famous intellectuals quite tolerant of the status
quo in their own country. And while the postscript-to-enlightenment theme
does not work too well for the new cases (China, Cuba,Vietnam), there is no
coherent or sustained attempt to offer a new theory for these episodes.
Caute is strangely inhibited from taking a more analytical and probing ap–
proach, one which would shed light on the entire question ofwhy these peo–
ple became "mends ofcommunism" as the new subtitle describes his subjects.
I suspect that Caute thinks of himself as "a man of the left." This mod–
est hypothesis makes it easier to understand why in his survey of the
infatuation ofWestern intellectuals with communist systems, he steadfastly
declines to entertain the possibility that the delusions of these intellectuals
were produced in equal measure by the questionable character of the objects
of their devotion (including the ideals these systems sought to implement) and
their own needs which had little to do with the objective realities of the soci–
eties "further afield."
PAUL HOLLANDER
