Volume 2, Number 1 · February 20, 1964
Grand Illusions
By Robert L. Heilbroner
The Politics of Hysteria
by Edmund Stillman, by William Pfaff
Harper & Row, 273 pp., $4.95
The obsession with politics, not in the immediate sense of an absorption in the governmental processes close at hand, but as a much deeper trait of character—an inability to see the unfolding of world history other than in passionate moral terms—is the concern of this coruscating and unsettling book. For it is the author's contention that precisely this obsession with politics, this insistence on forcing the events of history into preconceived and dogmatic 'meanings' gives to our age so much of its special capacity for historic mischief. Other ages have had their share of misery and brutality, their conquests, disasters, successes, disintegrations. But only in the modern age has the process been sanctified by pleading that these terrors and tragedies were justified in terms of their political (i.e., historic and ideological) content.
Review, 1222 words
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