Books, Arts & Manners: New Soviet Man

The Other Establishment, by Thomas B. Smith (Regnery Gateway, 205 pp., $18.95)

Ever since Lincoln Steffens returned from the Soviet Union to burble, “I have been over into the future, and it works,” Westerners on all sides have assumed there was something wonderfully (or deplorably) “modern” about the Soviet system. The term “modernity” itself is a compact designation for all sorts of aspirations, from the scientific and technological to the religious, and it arouses opposite reactions in different people. For a while it was plausible to think that a man’s attitude toward the Soviet Union was a rough index of his attitude toward “modernity.”

JS

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Joseph Sobran

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The Other Establishment, by Thomas B. Smith (Regnery Gateway, 205 pp., $18.95)

Ever since Lincoln Steffens returned from the Soviet Union to burble, “I have been over into the future, and it works,” Westerners on all sides have assumed there was something wonderfully (or deplorably) “modern” about the Soviet system. The term “modernity” itself is a compact designation for all sorts of aspirations, from the scientific and technological to the religious, and it arouses opposite reactions in different people. For a while it was plausible to think that a man’s attitude toward the Soviet Union was a rough index of his attitude toward “modernity.”