Up from Communism: Conservative Odysseys in American Intellectual History

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Biographical profiles of four American writers who moved from Left to Right. 1st comes Max Eastman, cheerful bohemian & gifted translator of Trotsky. Best known is novelist John Dos Passos. The others are Will Herberg, who became a religious convert & attacked McCarthyism as reeking of plebeian democracy, & philosophy professor James Burnham, author of The Managerial Revolution. Eastman, who was what Wilhelm Reich would have called "a phallic narcissist", tussled with Marxism, always upholding the duality of public & private life, esthetics & politics. He became a Reader's Digest contributor & free market disciple. Burnham, upper-class Catholic, eventually added to his technocratic disposition an enthusiasm for Sorel's doctrine of heroic "myth", &, after doing secret OSS studies, wrote cold war material for the Truman Doctrine. All these political migrations intersected the broader evolution of the Partisan Review stratum away from anti-Stalinist leftism toward sheer anti-Communism. As in his Mussolini & Fascism , Diggins provides a great deal of material stitched with smug commentary. The book underlines Dos Passos' protofascist elements even when he was acclaimed by the Left: his fantasies of annihilation, anti-technological spirit, & romantic view of the lost individual craftsman, as well as his "condemnation of humanity" itself for the contemporary crisis. Diggins shows how two elements--antagonism toward liberalism & fascination with Trotsky's critique of Stalin--persisted throughout these lifetimes. He concludes with an assessment of the problems of American conservative philosophy. Unlike Mussolini, this long, densely written book will daunt general readers, since it bears all the difficulties of summarizing four men's positions over decades. Nevertheless, it makes a suggestive source.--Kirkus