Volume 15, Number 3 · August 13, 1970
Communist Dropouts
By Neal Ascherson
The Search for a Third Way
by Heinz Brandt, with a Foreword by Erich Fromm
Doubleday, 333 pp., $6.95
Our Own People
by Elisabeth K. Poretsky
University of Michigan, 278 pp., $7.95
Men in Prison
by Victor Serge
Doubleday, 256 pp., $5.95
The faster political evolution proceeds, the commoner becomes a sinister mutation in young men and women: polymorphism of the personality. In Japan, we read, it is frequent for a man in his late twenties to have been successively a docile pupil and son, a national-revivalist fanatic, an armored student stamping through the gas clouds for Marx and Mao, a whiteshirted executive soothing the computers of a new electronics corporation. In West Germany, similar quick-changes of the personality can be observed as the authoritarian, libertarian, contemplative, and engaged modes of life are buttoned on, paraded, and then exchanged. The mutation is defensive: what value, it is implicitly asked can consistency of personality have in a century constructed like an evening of ancient music hall?
Review, 2734 words
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