I recently spent a guilty Saturday, when I ought to have been skiing, reading U.S. Ends and Means in Central America: A Debate (Plenum Publishing, 233 Spring Street, New York, N.Y. 10013; $19.95), by Ernest van den Haag and Tom J. Farer. Although like most debates this one seems to have been ultimately frustrating for both parties (“Professor Farer Cannot Be Persuaded: I Should Have Known”), the event is highly entertaining, even satisfying, for the reader: real suspense comes from trying to foresee how Mr. Farer will defend a seemingly indefensible proposition or assumption, and even more from anticipating Mr. van den Haag’s counterattack. In the present confrontation, Farer (a professor of law and international relations at the American University in Washington, D.C.) is cast in the role of the establishment expert under fire from a freewheeling common-sense intellectual able to see the wood as well as the trees. For Professor Farer, who comes across in the exchange as a humane and rather charming man (as well as a good writer), the world is an exquisite rational construction in which violence operates as an unnatural force; for van den Haag, it is more or less controlled chaos, in which whatever order exists depends mainly upon violence, or a willingness to use it. At the end, when all has been said, each of the participants appears still to be mystified by the other’s premises, while the reader—this reader anyhow—is aware of having had distilled for him the essence of two broadly opposed points of view.
Farer’s argument, succinctly stated in conclusion by the professor himself, is as follows:
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