Books in Brief

The Industrial Society: Three Essays on Ideology and Development, by Raymond Aron. (Praeger, $4.96). Dry and salty as a fresh cracker, Professor Aron pursues his mission of hunting down clichés of contemporary thought. Marxism bit the dust in The Opium of the Intellectuals. The chief baddies in this short collection of essays: Walt Rostow’s theory of how underdeveloped countries “take off’ into the industrialized stratosphere, the “convergence” theory that the U.S. and the Soviet Union are bound to come to resemble each other more and more closely, and the “fashionable malady of alienation.” Aron argues that to infer any but the most tentative general rules about the behavior of nations and economies leads only to blindness and error. Aron’s scepticism has been denounced by the Left as melancholy pessimism, but NR readers may find it refreshing. The book contains hardly a silly sentence— a rare claim for a politico-economic polemic. Words of warning: Aron writes in that involved intellectualese, bred exclusively in French Academe. Well-honed machetes are needed to hack through the abstractions. Also in so short a book is it giving the reader value for money to summarize the Marxist theory of history twice and to repeat the destruction of poor old Walt? F. MOUNT

In the Clutches of Homo and Sapience, by Mark Graubard. T. S. Denison & Co., $2.45 (paperback). The Absurdists (among others) are clobbered with their own club in these mind-rambles of a gentle bedlamite. His fellow-inmates trurnpet all the cherished intellectual shibbolctis of our indeed absurd age; Education, Enlightenment, Alienation, Science, Progress, Reason and all the rest flourish in the madhouse-microcosm like strange monstrous plants. They are reduced to genuine absurdity because Something (right reason? You figure it out . . .) is missing. Dr. Graubard (who teaches science at the University of Minnesota and therefore knows all about madhouses) neatly avoids finger-pointing, moral-mongering and tub-thumping; he nudges gently, arches an eyebrow occasionally, has fun with it all and pauses every so often for a sweet restful moment in the bosom of Nature. Romp along with him.

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The Industrial Society: Three Essays on Ideology and Development, by Raymond Aron. (Praeger, $4.96). Dry and salty as a fresh cracker, Professor Aron pursues his mission of hunting down clichés of contemporary thought. Marxism bit the dust in The Opium of the Intellectuals. The chief baddies in this short collection of essays: Walt Rostow’s theory of how underdeveloped countries “take off’ into the industrialized stratosphere, the “convergence” theory that the U.S. and the Soviet Union are bound to come to resemble each other more and more closely, and the “fashionable malady of alienation.” Aron argues that to infer any but the most tentative general rules about the behavior of nations and economies leads only to blindness and error. Aron’s scepticism has been denounced by the Left as melancholy pessimism, but NR readers may find it refreshing. The book contains hardly a silly sentence— a rare claim for a politico-economic polemic. Words of warning: Aron writes in that involved intellectualese, bred exclusively in French Academe. Well-honed machetes are needed to hack through the abstractions. Also in so short a book is it giving the reader value for money to summarize the Marxist theory of history twice and to repeat the destruction of poor old Walt? F. MOUNT

In the Clutches of Homo and Sapience, by Mark Graubard. T. S. Denison & Co., $2.45 (paperback). The Absurdists (among others) are clobbered with their own club in these mind-rambles of a gentle bedlamite. His fellow-inmates trurnpet all the cherished intellectual shibbolctis of our indeed absurd age; Education, Enlightenment, Alienation, Science, Progress, Reason and all the rest flourish in the madhouse-microcosm like strange monstrous plants. They are reduced to genuine absurdity because Something (right reason? You figure it out . . .) is missing. Dr. Graubard (who teaches science at the University of Minnesota and therefore knows all about madhouses) neatly avoids finger-pointing, moral-mongering and tub-thumping; he nudges gently, arches an eyebrow occasionally, has fun with it all and pauses every so often for a sweet restful moment in the bosom of Nature. Romp along with him.