Book Review: International Politics and Economics, The Politics of Hysteria, Suicide of the West
| Date | 01 December 1964 |
| Published date | 01 December 1964 |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070206401900409 |
| Author | John C. Cairns |
| Subject Matter | Book Review |
Book
Reviews
International
Politics
and
Economics
THE
POLITICS
OF
HYSTERIA.
The
Sources of
Twentieth-Century
Conflict.
By
Edmund
Stillman
and
William
Pfaff.
1964.
(New York:
Harper
&
Row.
Toronto:
Longmans.
x,
273pp.
$5.95)
SUICIDE
OF
THE
WEST.
An
Essay
on
the
Meaning
and
Destiny
of
Liberal-
ism.
By
James
Burnham.
1964.
(New York:
John
Day.
Toronto:
Longmans.
312pp.
$7.50)
Surely
no
people
was
ever
catapulted
to
the
heights
of
world-wide
power in
such
an
agonized
state
of
mind as
that
of
the
Americans.
Their
responsibilities
are
matched
by
their
self-doubting.
The
good
old
Fourth
of
July
oratory
seems
to
have
slipped
away
with
the
less
complicated
past.
Messrs.
Stillman
and
Pfaff
believe
that
the
American
failure
to
come
to
grips with
the
real
problems
of
the
contemporary age
is
only
the
most
striking manifestation
of
a
generalized
failure
of
all
nations
to
see
that
the
ideologies
and
dogmas
of
another
time,
like
the
hopeless
materialistic
concern of
our
own,
cannot
set
things
aright.
Western man
is
Janus-faced,
both
Promethean
and
fanatically
violent. Having
subdued
the
rest
of
the
world
and
degraded
other
cultures
than
his
own,
he
has
now
brought
down
upon
himself
the
westernized
reaction
of
the
non-
Western
victims:
the
search
for
power,
the
taste
for
ideology.
The
once
careless
contacts
of
civilizations
have
led
through
war,
conquest
and
revolt
to
a
mighty
upheaval
in
which
the
inadequate
"truths"
of
the
Enlightenment
have
become a
universal
incantation,
and
the West
offers
as
its
sole
panacea
for
the
world's
strife
a
massive foreign
aid pro-
gramme
wholly
incapable
of
taming
the
ideological
monster
unleashed.
With
many
illustrations
and
much
common
sense
argument,
these
two
authors
put
their
case
convincingly
and
a
little
gloomily.
They
conclude
that
repentance
for the
West, as
for
Faust,
may
not
suffice.
Mr.
Burnham
is
also
unhappy, as
indeed
he
has
been
for
a
long
time
now. He
also
regrets
the
ideology
of
the
Enlightenment,
and
while
he
considers
liberalism
in
general
to
be
the
prevailing
sin ("a
swan
song,
a
spiritual
solace
of
the
same order
as
the
murmuring
of
a
mother
to
a
child
who
is
gravely
ill"),
it
is American
liberals
specifically
whom
he
puts
on
his
operating
table.
His
dislike of
Arthur
Schlesinger,
Jr.,
and
Walt
Whitman
Rostow,
seems peculiarly
marked,
and
his
references
to
Eleanor
Roosevelt
are
to
be
located somewhere
between
Pegler
and
polite.
He
certainly
does
not
consider Negroes
potentially
equal
to
whites.
And
his
sense of
evidence
permits
him
to
call
upon
Allen
Drury
as readily as
Michael
Oakeshott.
A
good
deal
of
what
he
says
is
to
the
point,
and
strikes
nicely
at
weak-minded
liberal
baloney
of
the
kind
this
Canadian
society,
like
its
U.S.
counterpart,
serves
up
as
food
to
the
young minds
who
have yet
to
arrive
at
the
generalized
ideological
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