Word: lichtheim
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Noted the late George Lichtheim, an internationally respected historian of socialism: "The kind of central planning that vests all control in a political bureaucracy is unlikely to be efficient, and it is certain to be destructive of freedom ... If socialism were to become permanently identified with the kind of life imposed after 1945 on Eastern Europe, few sane people would want it." Quite apart from Eastern Europe, any attempt to achieve egalitarianism poses a threat to freedom. Since people are not equal in ability, the naturally gifted minority cannot be expected to voluntarily forfeit the extra rewards earned...
...Lichtheim, to paraphrase Brecht, would have to sweat to get the common people into his book and he doesn't take the trouble. So history becomes the battle of great thinkers, each a bit self-conscious in this un-Hegelian day and age, looking over his shoulder now and again to see if the rude folk are in fact trailing along behind...
...Lichtheim's comments on German history, then, will serve as a nice demonstration of his fundamental idealism. "The basic fact about German history since the eighteenth century," we are told, "has been the failure of the Enlightenment to take root." Why did it fail to thrive? In an essay entitled "The European Civil War," we learn that "national attitudes in the three countries [France, Germany and Italy] were different, and that the difference went back to the impact of the French Revolution." This is some help, but not much, for we now want to know what factors determined the reception...
...closer Lichtheim comes to the Nazi catastrophy, the more outlandish his observations seem. Nietzsche's influence is to be set down to the fact that he "had the advantage of addressing himself to readers already predisposed by a century of literary romanticism to come down on the irrationalist side." What predisposed the reading public to romanticism is never disclosed. At any rate, this German, with his "course mind," had broken the rules of the game by shouting that it all might not be comprehensible after...
Without some history and sociology, then, Lichtheim's notion of a "dialectic between the French Revolution and German Counter-Revolution" is not overly helpful. Nor do his unfortunately diffuse comments on ideology represent a theoretical advance: in the 20's Mannheim was rejoicing at the possibilities for intellectual advance provided by the collision of cultures and the dissolution of old systems. Still, look the book over. Even when Lichtheim loses his battles, which is far from always, he does it with panache...