Word: vierecks
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Spokesman for the Athenaeum organization committee Hugh J. Schwartzburg '53 said last night that Peter Viereck, Pulitzer prize winning poet and author of the controversial "Shame and Glory of the Intellectuals," will address the Sunday meeting. Entitled "Have the Intellectuals Sold Out America?" the meeting will debate the resolution "that this house feels intellectuals have not opposed Stalinism as ardently as other brands of totalitarianism and thus encouraged a double standard of morality...
Indoctrination? Surely. But there are some things that should be indoctrinated, and one of them is that man's nature can be permanently improved, not through an economic leveling, but through an moral uplifting. And Viereck, like Niebuhr, stresses the recognition of evil as a positive force...
Ortega y Gassest's "mass-man" is one such evil. Viereck's method for conquering that bogey is "not to retreat into un-American class lines in order to make some men aristocrats," but "to subordinate economics to cultural values, and to subordinate external coercion to internal self-discipline, in order to make all men aristocrats...
...that Viereck urges a return to catch-as-catch-can capitalism. The New Deal had its faults--and he delights in confronting his intellectuals with them--but its conservative contribution to the idea of a mixed economy far out weighs its blunders. However, Viereck feels that government can go too far, and that this limit is now being approached...
This summary indicates one of the book's weaknesses. Viereck bounds from topic to topic, scattering epigrams and insights in his wake. Sometimes the epigrams fall flat, and often the insights are marred by Viereck's sense that he alone has seen the light. His sense of possession in the "the new conservatism" is so blatant that one might forget that Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., had been over much of the same ground in his more-convincing "The Vital Center." There is also the feeling that this book is at least two years too late, that first Czechoslovakia and then Korea...