> Hirshman's book Is called The Rhetoric of Reaction. Hirshman writes well
> and his books are exceedingly concise. .. JS
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Thanks. It better be concise. I'll get to it after Trotsky
It took me something over thirty-five books to pin LS down to a political-social milieu and his reactions---in a way that I can understand. I've written about fifty plus pages just to get through 1929 Most of the material was on Weimar, Jewish factions intertwined with radical and reactionary elements and developments German philosophy after Kant..
Thank god LS froze in place right after that in his early thirties. One interesting thing (where I left off) was the cultural-academic shock of getting to NYC from Berlin, via Paris and London. He lands in the middle of the NYC `intellectuals' who were supposed to be leftists and who turn into various flavors of reactionary---with very few exceptions like Arendt. They had two major problems. They didn't do their in-depth intellectual homework and they were elitist to the core.
Actually, I think Trotsky will come in handy in his lists of who's who since some of these characters seem like perennials In the ever shifting spectrum that LD inhabits he runs into a lot of these types. Professional chatterboxes in literary circles who have almost no direct long term contact with the unwashed He meets them in Vienna, Berlin, Paris, and NYC before 1917. The other ingrediants are the waves of nationalism where in Russia it is used by the liberals to limit the scope of revolution, but its works differently although in similar ways in each country.
This is related to something that Chris Hedges wrote about Death of the Liberal Class (haven't read it) that WWI broke the back of the US progressive movements. The Wilson government deliberately used nationalist propaganda to stop the strikes and labor problems and growing leftist awareness especially in the industrial sector.
CG