Word: herberger
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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...
...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...