Word: chamberlin
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...what and how they write and think these two authors are poles apart. Chamberlin's thinking brings him out at an isolationist position which strangely underestimates the crushing military, economic and political power of Naziism. Max Lerner is a left-handed interventionist because he sees Naziism as a dangerous perversion of a world revolutionary process which he calls the "socialization of democracy." World War II, he believes, must be fought until this perversion is cleared away so that the revolution can go on. He is also aware that the war itself is a pretext for stepping up the revolutionary...
...mood of both books is the same. The common bleakness of their titles -Iron Age, Ice Age - is no accident. It springs from the bewilderment of men who are living through the apparently irrational collapse of a great civilization, "the happiest," says Chamberlin, "and certainly the most creative in the history of Europe." The sense of irrationality is all the greater because this civilization did not decay like Rome or Byzantium by agelong stages of dry rot, but apparently cracked up suddenly and catastrophically, like an incomparable machine shak en to pieces by the super-power of its own superb...
...supposed wreck is an almost universal claustrophobia, a feeling that everybody is trapped by the debris, and that the ways out are worse than the fact of being trapped. The alternative posed by Author Lerner, for example, is totalitarian socialism as an escape from totalitarian fascism. Author Chamberlin, on the other hand, deems it wiser simply to lie low, meanwhile poking in the wreck age, in the hopeless hope that some clue will somehow lead to some other escape...
Autopsy. Author Chamberlin doubts "whether most Americans realize the ex tent of the fall of liberal civilization in Europe, the thorough sweep of old stand ards and values." In chapters like The Russian Revolt Against Civilization; Ital ian Fascism: Middle Class Bolshevism; The German Power Machine; The Clash of Revolutions in the Orient; The Fall of France; America Faces the Iron Age, he makes sure that they will...
...Author Chamberlin finds four reasons: 1) the spread of industrialism; 2) the growth of population due to the progress of science and medicine; 3) inequalities of wealth between classes and between nations; 4) and "most important," the inability of "collective human intelligence and good will" to cope with these problems. Hence the "infernal cycle"-wars and revolutions. "War breeds revolution as the natural response to its miseries and dislocations. Revolutionary regimes in turn make for new wars. And the wastage of human, cultural and material resources during this infernal cycle soon eats up the indispensable reserves of civilization...