Politics (journal) - Toward A Recovered Humanism

Toward A Recovered Humanism

The accumulated horrors of total war - from bureaucratic regimentation of the home front to concentration and death camps, racialist nationalism and genocide, atomic weapons, firebombing of civilian populations, and, not least, the replacement as ruling power over Eastern and Central Europe of one, defeated total state, that of Hitler's Germany, with the newly-powerful one, that of Stalinist Russia, that had helped defeat it - combined with the ongoing fading of hopes across the anti-Stalinist left for a long-dreamed socialist dawn to put into wholesale question the sort of reflexive, confident nineteenth-century belief in an all-but-inevitable Progress that had long underwritten the political dimension of western intellectual life. As world war gave way to Cold War, a much-noted reactive turn among intellectuals in the west to such pre- and post-Marxist registers of thought as those offered by religion (Niebuhr, Barth, Tillich), existentialism (Camus, Sartre, Jaspers), or both at once (the newly-modish Kierkegaard) provided regular fare in both the highbrow little magazines of the day and the books pages of the newsweeklies.

This postwar turn from the old mechanistic secular faith of Marxism toward renewed ethical, if not always explicitly religious, commitments, took central, watershed root in Politics as well, as the uneasy postwar peace agreements and zoned division of Europe, de-Nazification of German elites and war-crimes trials cemented the Allied victory after the summer of 1945. In the magazine's April 1946 number, Macdonald published the inaugural version of one of his signature essays, "The Root is Man", whose widely-reprinted book version from seven years later would eventually find its way almost fifty years later on the lists of an American publisher specializing in anarchist and other forms of radical literature. The inauguration of a regular department in the magazine, "New Roads," heralded the quest formally, as did a regular feature devoted to "Ancestors" from across the ranks of assorted pre-20th century anarchists (P. J. Proudhon),

"EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the first of a series of articles by and about such political thinkers of the past as Diderot, Condorcet, Tom Paine, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Herzen, Kropotkin, Tolstoy, Daniel De Leon, and Rosa Luxembourg. The names, it will be noted, are mostly of non-Marxists. This is because (1) Marxism is already widely familiar to American intellectuals (perhaps disproportionately so); (2) the contemporary crisis of socialism demands that we supplement and reshape the Marxist heritage with the aid of 'Utopian' socialism; 18th century liberalism, anarchism, and pacifism."

social and political philosophers (William Godwin), reformers (Alexander Herzen), and the morally rebellious type among artists (Leo Tolstoy). And in the wake of the assassination in early 1948 of Mohandas Gandhi, Politics devoted a full-court symposium to the life, ideas, and relevance both inspirational and practical of the slain leader of Indian independence, with contributions from James Agee, Nicola Chiaromonte, Paul Goodman, Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, and Niccolo Tucci, followed by copious extracts from Gandhi's own weekly Harijan.