Word: lynde
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This final twist-Lynd ends his slim outline at the Civil War-brings American radicals surprisingly close to what he regards as the final spiral in their evolution, "a frontal assault on the authority of the state." Enter the radicals of the 1960s right on cue, taking literally the nearly 200-year-old advice of the influential English political philosopher William Godwin, who declared that established authority has no more right to regulate an individual's actions than to regulate his thoughts...
...Lynd concedes that the ultimate risk of this position invites "generalized disrespect for law," but he slides away from consequences. When in doubt, he radiates an unqualified trust in the natural goodness and perfectibility of man that makes such an early wishful-thinker as Rousseau look like a cynic...
Morality Politics. First and last, Lynd is a moralizer. For all his meticulous scholarship, his instinct is to reduce American history to a series of black and white questions. Ought we to tolerate slavery? Should we fight unjust wars? Are we revering property more than people? To these questions, the reader seems to hear echoing between the lines Lynd's own answers: Civil rights. Pacifism. Socialism. Seeing less the tangled events than the abstracted issues, Lynd has composed not so much a position paper as a posture paper for the New Left. This is the politics of righteousness...
Despite his evangelical fervor, Lynd leaves a final impression of ambiguity, partly justifying the Yiddish proverb that Irving Howe recently directed at him: "He wants to dance at all the weddings." Lynd winces before the untender either-ors of history. He cannot settle flatly even on Viet Nam. "Were I in Viet Nam, I think I might be an anguished neutralist Buddhist some place," he has confessed to an interviewer...
...yogis and the commissars of the New Left, he falls back on a semimystical vision of the world as town meeting, proposing an ideal society that stresses religion rather than politics. With his transcendental interpretation of history, his uncompromising rectitude, and his wobbly ambivalence in the face of actuality, Lynd seems like a 19th century Brook Farm Utopian who has wandered nobly but by mistake into the 20th century...