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...Eastman criticized the polite liberal reformer who could not see the "beauty" of the revolutionary deed; Dos Passos looked upon liberal intellectuals as a "milky lot" armed only with "tea-table convictions"; Herberg dismissed liberal pragmatism as the ideology of the bourgeoisie; and Burnhad saw liberalism as a philosophy of hope without a philosophy of power...

Author: By Stephen J. Chapman, | Title: Renegades from Radicalism | 3/26/1976 | See Source »

...doubt this common attitude is significant, but more important is the fact that all four men were rather unorthodox Communists. None of them felt entirely comfortable with the corpus of Marx's thought, much less with the Stalinist Communist Party of the USA. Eastman and Burnham were both Troskyists who regarded Stalin as a Slavophilic counter-revolutionary, and neither accepted the Marxist account of the inevitable progress of history. Herberg was a member of the small Lovestoneite faction of the CPUSA, a bitter anti-Stalinist, and an exponent of "American exceptionalism"--the view that the US would have to follow...

Author: By Stephen J. Chapman, | Title: Renegades from Radicalism | 3/26/1976 | See Source »

...fact, the conversions are not easy to explain, although one can perceive traits in the young Marxists that might have been critical in the transition to the old conservatives. Diggins acknowledges such traits, while regarding them as secondary. Eastman was a skeptic who rejected Marx's dialectic view of history even as he remained committed to establishing the kind of order that Marx regarded as inevitable. He later became convinced that workers would fare better under capitalism than they had in Stalin's Russia, which as the years passed became harder and harder to dismiss as an aberration. Eastman wrote...

Author: By Stephen J. Chapman, | Title: Renegades from Radicalism | 3/26/1976 | See Source »

...Marxist conception of the world. None of them were convinced of the validity of Marx's interpretation of history, which Marx regarded as central to his entire construction. They had other doubts--Burnham and Dos Passos about the role of art, Herberg about the existence of objective, material reality, Eastman about Marx's epistemology, among others. If there is a single explanation for their conversions, it is that each man began with substantive disagreements with Marx and only gradually worked out the logic of their implications...

Author: By Stephen J. Chapman, | Title: Renegades from Radicalism | 3/26/1976 | See Source »

DIGGINS HAS PROVIDED a lucid and accurate intellectual biography of Eastman, Herberg, Dos Passos and Burnham, as well as a useful picture of the temper of the age in which they lived. If his interpretation of the reasons for their conversions is faulty, his book nonetheless presents a complete picture of the material facts. If Diggins fails, it is because he ignores his own evidence, and because he prefers a neat, all-encompassing solution to a more complex and perhaps less satisfying...

Author: By Stephen J. Chapman, | Title: Renegades from Radicalism | 3/26/1976 | See Source »

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