Books in Brief

Youth, University and Democracy, by Gottfried Dietze (Johns Hopkins, 117 pp., $6.50).

Now that scores of bewildered liberals have had their say (“wha’ hoppen?”), it’s time for a defense of the university against the new student Left written from a specifically conservative standpoint. Professor Dietze’s little book is that, in spades. Of course the student movement isn’t new at all: the author brings in Rousseau, the Stürmer und Dränger, Mazzini’s Giovine Italia, the Russian nihilists, the Wandervögel of pre-World War I Germany and the youths who flocked to Lenin’s and Hitler’s revolutions, to demonstrate that it has all happened before— which is not another way of equating student political terrorism with goldfish-swallowing. Youth has always had its discontents, and has always sought to break out of shackles, but today “the longing of youth has become an automatic, soulless mechanism—an empty shell that can be filled with any content at any time. It has become devalued into something that can be everything and nothing. . . . The often daring dreams of freeing definite values from bondage have become indiscriminate, ever-changing designs freed of all value.” This thanks to the positivist Zeitgeist, and to the fact that in the age of mass democracy, the university has democratized itself right along with the world outside and discarded the concept of paideia in the process. But for all its defects, says Dietze, the university is worth saving—must be saved, as one of the few defenses left against the tyranny of democracy.

CS

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C. H. Simonds

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Youth, University and Democracy, by Gottfried Dietze (Johns Hopkins, 117 pp., $6.50).

Now that scores of bewildered liberals have had their say (“wha’ hoppen?”), it’s time for a defense of the university against the new student Left written from a specifically conservative standpoint. Professor Dietze’s little book is that, in spades. Of course the student movement isn’t new at all: the author brings in Rousseau, the Stürmer und Dränger, Mazzini’s Giovine Italia, the Russian nihilists, the Wandervögel of pre-World War I Germany and the youths who flocked to Lenin’s and Hitler’s revolutions, to demonstrate that it has all happened before— which is not another way of equating student political terrorism with goldfish-swallowing. Youth has always had its discontents, and has always sought to break out of shackles, but today “the longing of youth has become an automatic, soulless mechanism—an empty shell that can be filled with any content at any time. It has become devalued into something that can be everything and nothing. . . . The often daring dreams of freeing definite values from bondage have become indiscriminate, ever-changing designs freed of all value.” This thanks to the positivist Zeitgeist, and to the fact that in the age of mass democracy, the university has democratized itself right along with the world outside and discarded the concept of paideia in the process. But for all its defects, says Dietze, the university is worth saving—must be saved, as one of the few defenses left against the tyranny of democracy.