Intellectual Underbrush

On Dealing With the Communist World, by George F. Kennan The Scientific Revolution and World Politics, by Caryl P. Haskins Foreign Aid and Foreign Policy, by Edward S. Mason Harper, $3.50 each The Council on Foreign Relations, of which I am a local committee member, has just published three slim books containing the Elihu Root Lectures of Edward S. Mason, Caryl P. Haskins and George F. Kennan. These lectures have many things in common. The first is that they all prove the old truth “the only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.” All three books are filled with wishful thinking, unsupported opinion, waggly logic and arrant nonsense.

In his Foreign Aid and Foreign Policy, Mason says he agrees that “a political theory and political rationale for aid is almost completely lacking.” He goes on unreservedly to support the whole foreign aid idea, proposing some modification of administration and paying almost no attention to the fact that foreign aid has not achieved its objective either of protecting national security or of bringing undeveloped countries into development.

JC

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Jameson G. Campaigne

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On Dealing With the Communist World, by George F. Kennan The Scientific Revolution and World Politics, by Caryl P. Haskins Foreign Aid and Foreign Policy, by Edward S. Mason Harper, $3.50 each The Council on Foreign Relations, of which I am a local committee member, has just published three slim books containing the Elihu Root Lectures of Edward S. Mason, Caryl P. Haskins and George F. Kennan. These lectures have many things in common. The first is that they all prove the old truth “the only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.” All three books are filled with wishful thinking, unsupported opinion, waggly logic and arrant nonsense.

In his Foreign Aid and Foreign Policy, Mason says he agrees that “a political theory and political rationale for aid is almost completely lacking.” He goes on unreservedly to support the whole foreign aid idea, proposing some modification of administration and paying almost no attention to the fact that foreign aid has not achieved its objective either of protecting national security or of bringing undeveloped countries into development.