Henwood in Baffler #11

James Farmelant farmelantj at juno.com
Fri Dec 25 06:14:48 PST 1998


Today's NY Times has an op-ed piece by, you guessed it, Alan Wolfe, titled "America Flunks Civics." Wolfe gives his now usual communitarian spiel and bemoans the erosion of American institutions by both the president and the Congress.

Take note, Doug, there can be a lucrative future in writing shlock like this.

Jim Farmelant

On Thu, 24 Dec 1998 21:08:11 -0500 (EST) "Michael Hoover" <hoov at freenet.tlh.fl.us> writes:
>> A funny thing about Alan Wolfe is that he used to be
>> a Marxist. Back in the 1970s he wrote or co-authored at least
>> a couple of Marxist-oriented textbooks on politics. This all
>> Jim Farmelant
>
>Wolfe was part of 'insurgency' in US poli sci in late 60s & early
>70s that resulted in Caucus for a New Political Science...he was
>also part of Kapitalistate collective (if memory serves) which put
>out a good journal for awhile...I benefitted from a number of his
>works from that period, including:
>
>An End to Political Science (ed. with Marvin Surkin)
>Political Analysis: An Unorthodox Approach (written with Charles
>McCoy)
>Seamy Side of Democracy: Repression in America
>Limits of Legitimacy: Political Contradictions of Contemporary
>Capitalism
>Rise & Fall of Soviet Threat: Domestic Sources of the Cold War
>Consensus
>America's Impasse: Rise & Fall of the Politics of Growth (premature
>subtitle?)
>
>by late 80s, he was a 'civil society' guy (see Whose Keeper? Social
>Science & Moral Obligation)...basic argument: principal responsibility
>for human development muust be assigned neither to the market (US),
>nor
>to government (Scandinavia), but to moral and social relations of
>said civil society...where market or gov't ceases being servant of
>civil society and begins to replace its essential functions, loss of
>moral agency and weakened human bonding results, life becomes less
>tolerable...Wolfe includes family. commnity customs, rituals of
>friendship & mutual concern as part of civil society...in US, he
>finds family breakdown stemming from invasion of commercial values
>at expense of mutual commitment while in Scandanavia, children &
>elderly becomes wards of impersonbal bureaucracy...Wolfe says
>latter is preferable to former, but question of personal moral
>responsibility and loss of 'something essential' to society via
>institutional appropriation remain...this begins to sound like the
>smarmy communitarianism of Amitai Etzioni...Michael Hoover
>

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