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From International Socialist Review, Vol.23 No.1, Winter 1962, pp.27-28.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Philosophical Anthropology and Practical Politics
by F.S.C. Northrup
Macmillan Co., New York. 384 pp. 1960. $6.50.
Professor Northrop contends that an understanding of political reality requires a grasp of the deeply ingrained philosophical ideas dominating the world outlook of every people. This view, whatever partial truth it may contain, is highly contestable; but in this presentation any content there may be is so thoroughly buried under a mass of high-flown verbiage as to be virtually undiscoverable. For example, this is Northrop’s definition of the word “Nation”:
“Stated as briefly as possible, a ‘nation’ is any group of concrete, particular human beings who possess in the hierarchically ordered neural nets of their trapped impulses (which are the physiological epistemic correlates of con-ciously or unconsciously memorized elementary ideas and postulates) for firing or inhibiting their motor neurons and thereby mechanically causing a similar cognitive behavioristic living law response to any given stimulus.”
“As briefly as possible?” Perhaps, but three pages further on he can restate his view thus:
“All that is being affirmed when it is said that a nation exists is that a statistically large group of its people hold at least some elementary philosophical beliefs in common.”
This is scarcely a book whose content repays the effort required to overcome its style.
Live and Let Live – A Program for Americans
by Stuart Chase
Harper & Brothers, New York. 146 pp. 1960. $3.50.
This book is apparently a by-product of the Fund for the Republic, and though that institution has helped the creation of several important works, this is scarcely one of them. Mr. Chase tries to indicate the major problems newly posed by the modern world and to put forth some new approaches to them.
He goes over the long list of vital problems of which any educated person is presumably well aware – such things as the exterminating nature of modern war, the “population explosion,” the exhaustion of natural resources, the need to overcome the disintegrating effect of nationalism, the importance of maintaining full employment, the disaster of American unplanned urbanism, the differential rate of growth between the “Western” and Soviet economies. But on all these questions his comments are confused and vastly oversimplified, written in a childishly “popular” style whose reference sources are mainly newspaper and magazine articles.
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Last updated on 21 May 2009