Was it his fundamental middle-class nature, as Marx would have argued, or his socialist instinct for despotism, as Flaubert had it, that led [Senecal] to sell out his comrades on the barricades, put down the June Riots and, 'like certain radicals turned fascists,' realise that 'strong centralization of government is already a kind of communism and that authority is in itself a great thing'? By 1948, Wilson, as we shall see in a moment, was firmly in Flaubert's camp on this question.Not to play up neocon/Marxist consonance more than absolutely necessary, but Allan Bloom's definition of the bourgeois man might be important here: "the man who, when dealing with others, thinks only of himself, and on the other hand, in his understanding of himself, thinks only of others."
Thursday, September 11, 2008
How about a compromise: middle-class men and Marxists both trend totalitarian.
From Michael Weiss's Democratiya piece on Edmund Wilson's politics, an interesting question about totalitarian tendencies among socialists:
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