Volume 19, Number 5 · October 5, 1972
Radical Conservative
By Robert L. Heilbroner
Reflections on the Causes of Human Misery and upon Certain Proposals to Eliminate Them
by Barrington Moore Jr.
Beacon, 201 pp., $7.95
Intellectual 'moods' are mysterious. How they arise, how they spread, we cannot easily say either at the time or afterward. Yet who would deny that they affect intellectual life with enormous intensity while they last? We knew such a mood in the 1950s—bland, self-assured, pragmatic; again in the 1960s—violent, self-lacerating, visionary; and if I am to judge by the tone of those writers with whom I feel a particular sympathy (and indeed, by my own tone), we are experiencing the onset of a new mood in the 1970s. This new mood is conservative, although not in the usual sense in which that word is used in political debate. I would describe it as the rediscovery of a perspective on human events that highlights certain aspects of history—of 'human nature,' if I may risk the term—to which both the liberal mood of the 1950s and the radical mood of the 1960s paid insufficient attention, if in fact either paid it any attention at all.
Review, 2421 words
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