Herberg as Political Philosopher

Will Herberg was among the company of those, like Arthur Koestler, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Ignazio Silone, whose political philosophy was shaped by a total immersion in the Communist movement, from which they emerged, over long painful years, through a religious mode of thought. Will used to speak of how he had participated in the “entrapment” of others into works of evil. Only toward the end of his life did he allow himself to grow sentimental toward the “movement” as it had been in the Twenties.

Herberg asked himself the question that Koestler’s protagonist raised in Darkness at Noon—“Rubashov, what about the infinite?”—and it sent him off on a life-long intellectual search. At first, in the early Forties, he tried to salvage from his experience what he called a “personalist socialism.” Like others, he recognized that political organization, collectivities, and power are required in order to achieve human betterment, but when these means are perverted into ends, what ensues is hierarchy, bureaucracy, and totalitarianism.

LF

About the Author

Lewis S. Feuer

Featured Tags

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Adolf Hitler

Joseph Stalin

Fifth Amendment

Will Herberg was among the company of those, like Arthur Koestler, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Ignazio Silone, whose political philosophy was shaped by a total immersion in the Communist movement, from which they emerged, over long painful years, through a religious mode of thought. Will used to speak of how he had participated in the “entrapment” of others into works of evil. Only toward the end of his life did he allow himself to grow sentimental toward the “movement” as it had been in the Twenties.

Herberg asked himself the question that Koestler’s protagonist raised in Darkness at Noon—“Rubashov, what about the infinite?”—and it sent him off on a life-long intellectual search. At first, in the early Forties, he tried to salvage from his experience what he called a “personalist socialism.” Like others, he recognized that political organization, collectivities, and power are required in order to achieve human betterment, but when these means are perverted into ends, what ensues is hierarchy, bureaucracy, and totalitarianism.