War and Democracy
by Paul Gottfried
Arktos Media Ltd
170 pp., $21.00
In this slender volume Paul Gottfried addresses everything from the influence of ancient Greek thought on Oswald Spengler, to the influence of Zionism on US foreign policy, to the influence of leftist theorist Herbert Marcuse on Gottfried himself. Quite aside from its therapeutic value in a world excruciatingly saturated by chatter, War And Democracy is educational: Gottfried’s wide range of intellectual interests ensures that the attentive reader will learn quite a bit about the West, past and present.
The diversity of topics notwithstanding, there is nonetheless unity to be found, insofar as most of the essays relate at least tangentially to the book’s title. Whether Gottfried is contemplating the Molnar-Benoist debate over Christianity’s relationship to messianic secularism, or pondering diplomat George Kennan’s fascination with the Kriesau Circle and July 20 Plot, there is always in the background a grim underlying theme: “[T]he US is moving along the same trajectory as Western and Central Europe, away from a bourgeois or older Western civilization, toward some form of post-Christian, postmodern culture presided over by a vast administrative apparatus.” Coming as it does from a man familiar with the work of James Burnham – the political philosopher whose 1941 The Managerial Revolution helped inspire Orwell’s 1984 – this pessimistic conclusion is no surprise.
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