Word: herberg
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...four--Max Eastman, Will Herberg, John Dos Passos, and James Burnham--differ in almost every way except the direction of their intellectual development. Eastman, a genial, flamboyant libertine, translated Marx's Capital into English, as he did many of the works of Trotsky, his intellectual mentor. He edited two communist journals, The Masses and The Liberator, and became a learned exegete of Hegel. Herberg, a lower-class Jew whose parents emigrated from Russia, received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia in 1932, by which time he had gained a reputation in radical circles as a complex and formidable thinker...
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...
...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 a path to socialism different from that envisioned by Marx. Dos Passos was a pragmatist who never joined the Party...