Word: herberg
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Died. Will Herberg, 75, leading Judaic scholar and sociologist; of heart disease; in Chatham, N.J. Herberg was a professor of philosophy and Jewish studies at New Jersey's Drew University. In his 1955 study Protestant-Catholic -Jew, an innovative interpretation of the role of religion in America that is still widely used in college sociology courses, he noted a religious revival in the U.S. but warned that the major faiths had become secularized, that "believing" was now simply a way of "belonging" in society...
...society, have proved to lead in the opposite direction, we have remained loyal to the aim, you to the means." Dos Passos despised Communism for the same reason he hated corporate capitalism--he detested organization and bureaucracy. He ended up yearning for a misty Jeffersonian order of agrarian individualism. Herberg's conversion was religious in nature, and the most enigmatic of all. Burnham, like Eastman, rejected the "scientific" claims of Marxism and finally concluded that the goals it held up made no sense...
...their inability to accept the whole of the 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...
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...
...book has other flaws. While Diggins is capable of a sophisticated discussion of Eastman's critiques of Hegel, he is also prone to the most inane nonsense, as when he asks, "If communism ultimately brought Herberg to religion and to William Buckley, should Buckley thank Stalin for doing God's work?" What difference does it make? In his concluding chapter, "Conservative Paradoxes", Diggins remarks that "In Nixon's heralded detente with Russia and China, one sees that a politician nurtured on McCarthyism can be anti-communist without being anti-totalitarian." Is Diggins saying that Russia and China are totalitarian...