Hallucinogenic Elisions

Marx and Burke: A Revisionist View, by Ruth A. Bevan (Open Court, 197 pp., $7.95)

Now what exactly are these strange bedfellows doing between the same covers? Under what rubric do Marx and Burke belong to the same communion? At first it looks as if down in the Political Science Department of Yeshiva U., where Professor Bevan instructs, they pass the time by playing the old party game of Consequences, in which the mirth froths from the improbability of the names conjoined: Pope Paul and Lenny Bruce, Jane Austen and Jack the Ripper, Marx and Burke. Yet the purpose of this essay emerges as neither frivolous nor entirely perverse. It is daring, engrossing, and I’d like a few second opinions on it.

FM

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Ferdinand Mount

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Marx and Burke: A Revisionist View, by Ruth A. Bevan (Open Court, 197 pp., $7.95)

Now what exactly are these strange bedfellows doing between the same covers? Under what rubric do Marx and Burke belong to the same communion? At first it looks as if down in the Political Science Department of Yeshiva U., where Professor Bevan instructs, they pass the time by playing the old party game of Consequences, in which the mirth froths from the improbability of the names conjoined: Pope Paul and Lenny Bruce, Jane Austen and Jack the Ripper, Marx and Burke. Yet the purpose of this essay emerges as neither frivolous nor entirely perverse. It is daring, engrossing, and I’d like a few second opinions on it.