Word: absolutistic
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Mind's Eye. If Twain the patriot was a cultural absolutist, Henry James the expatriate was a cultural relativist, full, as he put it, of "the baleful spirit of the cosmopolite-that uncomfortable consequence of seeing many lands and feeling at home in none." The virtue of that defect, as James saw it, was tolerance. Compared to Twain's polemic, The Art of Travel, Critic Morton Dauwen Zabel's splendidly edited sampling of James's travel pieces on England, France, Italy and the U.S., is sunny-tempered and severely self-controlled...
...more than the will of the sovereign. Sir Edward Coke immortalized Bracton's words-"Rex non debet esse sub homine, sed sub Deo et lege" (The king ought not to be under man, but under God and the law)-by flinging them in the furious face of absolutist James I. Then Coke fell to his knees in terror of losing his head-yet his doctrine lives today as the wellspring of the rule...
Darkness at Noon has managed to appeal to the mind in the theater, and not simply to inflame the emotions; to ask whether absolutist ideas can exist without absolutist methods, whether life which systematically ignores the human factor can preserve a human form. As a play, Darkness at Noon manages, by means of flashbacks and a divided stage, to convey Rubashov's relations with various party members and inquisitors. What is chiefly lost in the theater is Rubashov's relations with himself. The story also slumps here & there, and the love elementthough politically pertinentoften...
...Newton's is one; the geometricians' distrust of Euclid is another. Bentham refused to accept the "natural laws, natural rights," theories of previous economists; Susan B. Anthony skeptically disagreed with the idea that only men could vote. None of these people claimed to be right or wrong in the absolutist sense of Father Feeney; they simply questioned the status quo. And in every case their questioning has helped mankind along. As long as man keeps on scratching his head and asking questions, he will go right on doing himself some good...
Generally speaking, Red Gloves lacks bias-and takes on a certain breadth-by dealing with political types rather than political tenets, and by suggesting that it takes a good many kinds of people to make up even a Communist world. The essential struggle between idealist and realist, absolutist and compromiser, is indeed common to all movements; what might be considered "anticommunist" about the play is its picturing a lack of charity that begins at home...