Word: harrington
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Traditional Optimism. Harrington's point of departure is the 1964 election and the legislation that followed from it in 1965, which at long last completed the program of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. "Everyone except the Neanderthals agreed on Federal management of the economy, the goal of full employment, Medicare, formal legal equality for Negroes and, above all, economic growth." As a result, traditional American liberalism lost its innovative thrust, argues Harrington, and is unable to cope with the persisting problems of poverty, urban blight, inadequate education and racial hostility. To Harrington, nothing is more dangerous than...
Creating the Sums. Harrington argues that the distressing future the figures portend can be forestalled only by a radical transformation in both economics and politics. The profit motive must give up its place as the primary mainspring in American life, yielding to "a cooperative, rather than a competitive, ethic." To solve the nation's problems, money must be allocated "uneconomically," in the historical sense of the word, and "wasted" on such uncommercial values as "racial and class integration, beauty and privacy...
...Harrington's plea for a cooperative ethic comes, curiously, at a time when the enforced cooperative societies around the world-the Communist countries-are rediscovering the necessity of the profit motive as a solution to their own internal problems. More important, he fails to suggest what force could replace the profit motive and still produce the vast sums the U.S. needs to solve its problems...
Planning for the Future. Harrington in effect demands a change in human nature-and an American willingness to accept the taxes and the "well-intentioned, genteel totalitarianism" of a Government giving first priority to the "criteria of social need." He does not say exactly so, but seems to be well aware that no such large cooperative society has ever been achieved without strong coercion. The political transformation he envisions is a vast, new coalition of the Left-most likely taking over the Democratic Party-made up of the poor, both white and Negro, a "reinvigorated labor movement," and the Galbraithean...
...this, Harrington does not write with the conviction of a man who believes that his vision will come to pass. But as in The Other America, his book does ring with an urgent and passionate concern about problems that deserve serious attention...