It’s a Wonderful Life, Professor

The Culture of Contentment, by John Kenneth Galbraith (Houghton Mifflin, 184 pp., $22.95)

IT IS FORTUNATE for Professor Galbraith that he was born with singular gifts as a writer. It is a pity he hasn’t used these skills in other ways than to try year after year to bail out his sinking boats. Granted, one can take satisfaction from his anti-historical exertions—the reader gets subversive pleasure out of his Sisyphean labors, and some wholesome pleasure from his yeomanry as a sump-pumper. Indeed his rhythm and grace recall the skills we remember having been developed by Ben Hur, the model galley slave whose only request of the quartermaster was that he be allowed every month to move to the other side of the boat, to ensure a parallel development in the musculature of his arms and legs. I for one hope that the next time a nation experimenting with socialism or Communism fails, which will happen the next time a nation experiments with socialism or Communism, Ken Galbraith will feel the need to explain what happened. It’s great fun to read. It helps, of course, to suppress wistful thought about those who endured, or died trying, the passage toward collective living to which Professor Galbraith has beckoned us for over forty years, beguiling the sub-literate world, here defined as those whose knowledge of what makes the world work is undeveloped.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review magazine in 1955.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

The Culture of Contentment, by John Kenneth Galbraith (Houghton Mifflin, 184 pp., $22.95)

IT IS FORTUNATE for Professor Galbraith that he was born with singular gifts as a writer. It is a pity he hasn’t used these skills in other ways than to try year after year to bail out his sinking boats. Granted, one can take satisfaction from his anti-historical exertions—the reader gets subversive pleasure out of his Sisyphean labors, and some wholesome pleasure from his yeomanry as a sump-pumper. Indeed his rhythm and grace recall the skills we remember having been developed by Ben Hur, the model galley slave whose only request of the quartermaster was that he be allowed every month to move to the other side of the boat, to ensure a parallel development in the musculature of his arms and legs. I for one hope that the next time a nation experimenting with socialism or Communism fails, which will happen the next time a nation experiments with socialism or Communism, Ken Galbraith will feel the need to explain what happened. It’s great fun to read. It helps, of course, to suppress wistful thought about those who endured, or died trying, the passage toward collective living to which Professor Galbraith has beckoned us for over forty years, beguiling the sub-literate world, here defined as those whose knowledge of what makes the world work is undeveloped.