Scarcity

[Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema]

Excellent sources indeed, and, many thanks Michael, for leading me back to the
shelves for my copy of Richard Wurmbrand's WAS MARX A SATANIST? I read it in
1979, and, as I recall, it isn't as insane as you might think. He actually read
Marx, and bases himself on some of the undergraduate surgings Karl wrote. One
was a drama that he thinks had Satanic themes. Maybe he's right. Marx might also
have had his tongue in his cheek. After all, Heine, one of my favorite writers,
who was a great ironist, and who knew Marx well, said he feared only Marx'
sarcasms. Wurmbrand starts from the fact that Marx was a Christian at the start,
at least formally, and then became a humanist. His humanism led to his socialism
and his opposition to Christianity. Though there are various objections to this
argument it is not exactly a stupid one.

Wurmbrand actually seems more interesting than Raymond Aron, who always seems to
me like a kind of French Lipset.

Wurmbrand seems to be from Rumania, and probably was from one of those old
German colonies that used to thrive there.
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema

Michael Pugliese wrote:


> >As I recall the conservative French commnentator Raymond Aron
> was among the first to note Sartre's reliance upon what were
> essentially Hobbesian premises.
>
> Jim F.
>
>     Given the full scale assault on Sartre in his previous book (and being a
> fan of well written polemical assaults on heros...though, heh,  I'll doubt
> I'll ever read a book on Karl Marx and Satanism by Robert Wurmbrand, "Marx
> and Satan, "
> http://www.google.com/search?client=googlet&q=Marx%20and%20Satan%20 course
> it is bound to be atrociously sourced and argued!!!...), "Past Imperfect, "
> I picked up the newish book by Judt at the library the other day.
> Surprisingly critical of the latter stage of Aron's career, esp. the
> autobiography and the book Jim Farmelant alludes to, "History and the
> Dialectic of Violence, " out of print, I think from Harper & Row.
>    "The Burden of Responsibility : Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French
> Twentieth Century
> by Tony Judt."
> http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWsrch.cgi?form=all+articles&auth=Tony+Judt&ti
> tle=&rauth=&rtitle=&rpub=&text=&sdate=all+dates&edate=all+dates&details=Sear
> ch
>    BTW, a more objective look at the same figures examined in Past Imperfect
> is a book by S. Collini, published by either Oxford U.P.or Cambridge U.P..
> Title is something like, "Arguing the Revoltion: The French Intellectual
> Left.
> http://www.informinc.co.uk/LM/LM50/LM50_Books.html ('Anti-intellectualism
> has always been available on tap in the saloon bar, of course, but it is sad
> to find a professor of English who is so desperately keen to buy his round.'
> (S Collini, Times Higher Educational Supplement, 17 July 1992)
>   And, another book unfortunately o.p. but, available online is by Mark
> Poster.
> http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/ "Existential Marxism in Postwar France."
> For those like me that have had, "Adventures of the Dialectic, " by
> Merlau-Ponty for at least 15 yrs. and have not read more than the chapter,
> "Sartre and Ultra-Bolshevism, " it is a great intellectual, history and
> critique, of Sartre, Merlau-Ponty, Lefebvre, Lefort, Castoriadis.
> Michael Pugliese
>
> P.S. Jeffrey Herf, author of, "Reactionary Modernism, " and, "Divided
> Germany: The Nazi Past in the Two Germany's ",
> http://www.hup.harvard.edu/reviews/HERDIV_R.html
> also has written on Aron. Herf, though with subsequent misgivings (I
> e-mailed him on Horowitz some time back, he has qualms on Horowitz'es ethics
> and politics), as a SDS activist, participated in the "Second Thoughts"
> conference of Horowitz and Collier back in the Reagan era. His paper is
> either in a volume edited by John Bunzel of neo-connery, "
> Political Passages: Journeys of Change through Two Decades, 1968–1988, "
> http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/BIOS/bunzel.html or the collection of the
> Second Thoughts speeches that wewre published later by Horowitz and Collier.
> http://www.frontpagemag.com/archives/leftism/herf.htm
> " I was so wrong and now I'll be as arrogant as I was before on the other
> side of the barricades...." (what was the phrase of Isaac Deutscher
> reviewing Orwell? Inverted Stalinism? The Stalinism of the anti-Stalinists?
> see the Verso volume, Marxism, Wars and Revolutions, I'm too pressed for
> time to get the quote...)
> Few more cites in the bibliomania, "Logics of failed revolt :French theory
> after May '68, "
> by  Peter Starr, Stanford U.P. (Maybe I'll be able to understand Kristeva?
> Found her book on Melancholia, a great read. "On Abjection.") "French
> Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism, "
>     Luc Ferry and A. Renaut. (see also, "New Ecological Order, " by  Luc
> Ferry and his, "We Are Not Nietzcheans!"  both from Univ. of Chicago Press.
> New Left Six Critical EX-Mozilla-Status: 0009urice Ed Cranston  (from www.powells.com website, there are some
> howlers on the spelling there powells!~ anyway, Cranston used to write for
> Encounter, the CCF CIA rag, is the book on them from the New Press ever
> gonna appear in paperback, 'sez I?)  New Negro, Old Left: African-American
> Writing and Communism Between the Wars
>     William J Maxwell