University of UtahWestern Political Science Association

The American Condition by Richard GoodwinReview by: Ken MasugiThe Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Dec., 1975), pp. 745-746Published by: University of Utah on behalf of the Western Political Science AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/447992 .

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BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES

with both mastery and balanced goodwill throughout, despite the sharpness of the critique.

ELLIS SANDOZ East Texas State University

The American Condition. By RICHARD GOODWIN. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1974. $10.00.)

Currently an editor of Rolling Stone magazine, Richard Goodwin, former speechwriter for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and other Democratic politi- cians, has produced a logorrheic polemic on the ideal of freedom in the American polity.

The American Condition presents a challenge to its reviewer because on its own merits it does not deserve treatment as serious scholarship. Goodwin eschews rigorous analysis in favor of unsubstantiated generalizations about contemporary American life such as its lack of "community" and "shared values." However, Goodwin's observations become interesting to serious students of American politics because they appear to represent a typical viewpoint. Hence our seriousness re- garding this book come about because of its pathological character.

The author maintains that the moder liberal notion of freedom has resulted in a polity which has suppressed true freedom and created alienation, the subor- dination to autonomous authority. His "argument" consists of a twofold assertion: The American version of the ideal of freedom has produced a political and eco- nomic structure which alienates men. True freedom, as opposed to Madison's obsolete definition, is the "use and fulfillment of our humanity... the statement of our historical possibilities"; oppression is defined by the gap between potentiality and actuality. So the great task for post-modern politics or the politics of the future is the elimination of alienation through the recreation of community, "the restraint which liberates." (It may be superfluous to note at this point that the unclarity of Goodwin's style, enhanced by his fondness for the oxymoron, has a reciprocal effect upon the unclarity of his "argument.")

Goodwin's deficiencies are best seen when comparison is made between him and another, incomparably superior student of American democracy, Tocqueville. Both critics note the great changes wrought by the modern age - in particular the loss of a sense of order, which gave citizens of the classical and medieval polities a moral purpose. However, any points of agreement between the two critics - the ignobility of American materialism, the growth of centralization, and the dangers of an aristocracy created by industry, to name just a few instances - are swept aside by Goodwin's superficiality. Whereas Tocqueville knew well what sort of world modernity had forsaken and perhaps as well what it was embracing, Goodwin, who speaks from a utopian perspective, lacks understanding of either. For example, he attributes to Plato "an assumption of unchanging material reali- ties" and ingenuously admits "latent" moral difficulties regarding existentialism's will to freedom.

What is the noble life which ought to be lived in a good polity? Like Marx's failing to describe life after the withering away of the state, Goodwin fails to ex- plain what life would be like after the end of alienation, the attainment of com- munity, and the realization of true freedom. On the other hand, Tocqueville thought that in the age of equality men of taste and ability should pay special at- tention to the classics. Perhaps Goodwin thinks that the extensive treatment given

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THE WESTERN POLITICAL QUARTERLY

the subject of alienation, which has "dominated all serious thought and philosophy, along with much of literature [!], for about two centuries," relieves him of the responsibility of describing what exactly men do in a non-alienated condition.

One problem of the modern age which Goodwin does approach is the rela- tionship between technology and politics, the classical problem of the relationship between the arts and the polity. He nears the problem through a questioning of the liberal ideology: How is the public good to be secured in the clash of private interests? In Tocqueville's terms the doctrine of self-interest correctly understood may not be enough. However, Goodwin's analyses and solutions-for example, "nationalization of the major sources of capital" and decentralization of economic organization-will leave the inquiring reader unpersuaded. Only a reader al- ready convinced that, for example, corporations as a whole have a common interest which keeps them together - "the corporations" - stronger than individual inter- ests which keep them in competition will find Goodwin persuasive.

It is distressing to read a speechwriter for leading politicians of a major party crafting such sentences as "It is not necessary to forgo the pursuit of pleasure, only to understand what pleasure is, and liberate ourselves to pursue the true source of happiness, which is freedom"; or "Either madness becomes sanity, or the world becomes mad." One conjures up visions of, say, Senator Humphrey quoting Nietzsche.

The author believes that the corruptness of the American condition can be attributed to the domination of bureaucratic economic and political organizations and their alleged repression of individual freedom. But far more interesting ques- tions regarding the American intellectual condition should be asked on the publi- cation of this mirror of banality.

KEN MASUGI Chapman College

Ethnic Alienation, The Italian-Americans. By PATRICK J. GALLO. (Cranbury: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1974. Pp. 222. $10.00.)

The appeals on the part of the Nixon campaign strategists to the white ethnic vote in the 1972 election campaign, coupled with the evident attraction of George Wallace's pseudo-populism to many descendants of European immigrants, has caused a refocusing of interest on ethnic political behavior on the part of political scientists. It should be by now apparent to even the most zealous advocate of the "melting pot" concept of American society that ethnicity persists in our culture unto the third and fourth generation and even beyond. Patrick Gallo's book represents a laudable effort to ascertain whether or not the American political system has tended toward the integration or exclusion of the Italian-American ethnic group.

Gallo has deep roots in the Italian-American community and therefore gained an entry difficult for non-Italian Americans to attain into this exclusivist ethnic group. His approach was to interview in depth a limited number of Italian- Americans of immigrant, first-, second- and third-generation status without making any pretensions concerning the representativeness of this group as being character- istic of Italian-Americans as a whole.

Drawing on his contacts within Italian-American communities in New York and New Jersey, Gallo selected potential respondents as to their socioeconomic

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