Reviewed in Brief

Imre Nagy on Communism: In Defense of the New Course (Praeger, $5.50). The necessity of choosing between an affirmation and its denial, detested of Marxian “dialectics,” is the first condition of formal logic and rational behavior. Imre Nagy realized as much only in his last moments of public life, when the two articles of his secular faith —Communism and the people of Hungary—stood revealed in unalterable contradiction. In this fragmentary collection of essays— composed, apparently with great urgency and little care, during the author’s 1955-56 days of political exile—Nagy argues the merits of consumer-goods priorities against heavy industry, attempts to reconcile “moral” sentiments with nakedly amoral premises, and reveals that his dilemma was precisely that of Bernstein and other Marxists of the “Social Democratic” persuasion. May Social Democracy profit from his agony.

C. LOGAN

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Imre Nagy on Communism: In Defense of the New Course (Praeger, $5.50). The necessity of choosing between an affirmation and its denial, detested of Marxian “dialectics,” is the first condition of formal logic and rational behavior. Imre Nagy realized as much only in his last moments of public life, when the two articles of his secular faith —Communism and the people of Hungary—stood revealed in unalterable contradiction. In this fragmentary collection of essays— composed, apparently with great urgency and little care, during the author’s 1955-56 days of political exile—Nagy argues the merits of consumer-goods priorities against heavy industry, attempts to reconcile “moral” sentiments with nakedly amoral premises, and reveals that his dilemma was precisely that of Bernstein and other Marxists of the “Social Democratic” persuasion. May Social Democracy profit from his agony.

C. LOGAN