Volume 6, Number 4 · March 17, 1966
Modern Times
By Alasdair MacIntyre
An Introduction to Contemporary History
by Geoffrey Barraclough
Basic Books, 272 pp., $4.95
Power and Human Destiny
by Herbert Rosinski
Praeger, 224 pp., $5.95
Historical optimism and pessimism can be equally sentimental. Until recently pessimism seemed to be, in this century, the more likely sentimentality. For the sentimental optimism of the last century, apparent in such writers as Macaulay and Mrs. Markham, was based upon an assumption which, it seemed, could scarcely survive the brutal realities of contemporary history: the assumption, seemingly banal, but actually somewhat sinister, that power and right coincide. We have had to learn to live in an age in which power and right, far from converging, are inexorably set in opposition. The only appropriate attitude has been a kind of tough-mindedness, exhibited in the past by writers as different as Stendhal and Trotsky, which could well be called a 'tragic optimism'; this is surely the appropriate antidote to historical sentimentalism of either kind, but it has had few contemporary adherents. Instead, Pangloss's old doctrines of the lesser evil, the larger good, and the long run, have been enjoying a revival.
Review, 1769 words
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