To the Editor:

We appreciate Dennis Wrong’s good opinion of The Fabric of Society, as stated in his review in the December COMMENTARY, but we should like to correct some factual errors.

Contrary to his impression, we share Mr. Wrong’s doubts about the possibility of a unified social science. We make that clear in the Introduction and later in the text (e.g., page 1 and page 246).

We did not try to settle “issues of psychological theory” by “theological metaphors.” But we pointed out at length that the issues in question cannot be settled because they are not genuine psychological issues—and we traced them to their theological sources. We do not believe that either neo-Freudian or Freudian theories have yet been formulated in sufficiently concrete empirical terms. Calling attention to this, we confined ourselves to a basic exposition stressing the inconclusiveness of the evidence. We thought that exposition necessary, simply because our readers should understand an immensely influential theory.

It is true that Professor Machlup, whose article we reprinted, presents a purely deductive argument. That is why we supplemented it with empirical evidence (e.g., pp. 510-514 and the whole previous chapter), which Mr. Wrong somehow overlooked. We reached the conclusion that trade unions fulfill a useful social function. But we did not find respectable material to rebut Machlup’s economic conclusions.

Nowhere do we assert or imply that Stalinism is the “inevitable embodiment” of Marxism. Unlike Marxists, we do not believe in historical inevitability. But, unlike Khrushchev, we think that Stalinism was due to more than Stalin. We treat Soviet totalitarianism as one of the possible developments of Marxism, no less logical a development than social democracy. (In fact, the more democratic socialists are, the less Marxist.) We have been careful throughout to distinguish Communism from Socialism.

It is disturbing that Mr. Wrong ignores our justification of the “intellectual urgency” of analyzing Marxism in a book addressed to Americans. Much of the world’s population lives within Marxist systems and many additional millions in Europe and Asia are strongly influenced by Marxism. Should Americans be ignorant of Marxism, then, simply because it is not urgent (i.e. popular) here? Should they be unprepared—as Mr. Eisenhower was when he met Zhukov—for Marxist arguments? Further, such American ideas as “poverty breeds Communism” are Marxist ideas (as well as false ones), even if their proponents do not know it.

Although we do not agree with all of Mr. Wrong’s interpretations, we are grateful for his care and thoroughness. But, whatever the defects of our book, we do not think it has the defects, factually, that Mr. Wrong believes.

Ralph Ross
Ernest van den Haag
New York City

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Mr. Wrong writes:

1. On pages 1 and 246 Messrs. Ross and van den Haag merely state that a unified social science does not at present exist.

2. Of course Messrs. Ross and van den Haag do not invoke theology to decide the numerous and varied disputes between Freudians and neo-Freudians, nor did I accuse them of doing so. But when they are less than fair to neo-Freudian views while giving the benefit of every doubt to Freudian conceptions, the passage in which they associate the former with Pelagius and the latter with St. Augustine strikes one as an effort to preempt for psychoanalytic orthodoxy the prestige attached to Christian orthodoxy in many contemporary intellectual circles.

I cannot agree with their claim that they confine themselves to a straightforward exposition of Freudian and neo-Freudian theories “stressing the inconclusiveness of the evidence.” One example: on pages 30-31 they summarize Freud’s well-known view of the Oedipus complex as the source of culture and, much more briefly, the objections to it raised by “some cultural anthropologists.” Virtually all cultural anthropologists, however, and many psychoanalysts as well reject the thesis of Totem and Taboo. Freud’s theory of culture, Messrs. Ross and van den Haag conclude, is a “bold speculation” of great “explanatory value” although the evidence for it “is not likely ever to stand up in criminal courts.” The authors next review in three sentences the criticism of Freud’s views by Malinowski, which, unlike Totem and Taboo, was based on close empirical observation of a non-Western culture. Several alternative explanations of Malinowski’s findings which are more consistent with Freud’s thesis are then suggested and Malinowski’s understanding of psychoanalysis is questioned. The authors conclude that “the anthropological evidence can hardly be said to have disproved Freud’s views.” Whether they again mean disproved by the somewhat artificial standards of criminal courts is not specified.

3. I still doubt that Professor Machlup’s article, reprinted from a U. S. Chamber of Commerce pamphlet, adequately represents the views of economists. Messrs. Ross and van den Haag themselves concede this on page 511 of their book.

4. I did not argue that social democracy was the “logical” outcome of Marxism. I doubt that it is ever legitimate to regard large-scale historical processes as “logical developments” of ideas. And neither in their book nor in their letter do Messrs. Ross and van den Haag clearly discriminate between Marx’s ideas and the Kremlin’s debased versions of them. Surely this century has taught us that any system of ideas, except perhaps other-worldly religions, is capable of being corrupted to serve as the ideology of a totalitarian movement.

I certainly do not think that Americans can afford to be ignorant of Soviet ideology. Messrs. Ross and van den Haag, however, go out of their way to inject sideswipes at “Marxism” into their text and such a procedure hardly seems justified, even as an intellectual hygiene, by the present state of American opinion. Nor do I find anything specifically Marxist about the slogan “poverty breeds Communism.” One could, I suppose, call it a “vulgar-Marxist” notion, but it finds little support in Marx’s writings and is used by many people who, knowingly or unknowingly, have not been exposed to Marxist thinking. Crude forms of economic determinism which attribute all social evils to poverty abound in modern thought and popular belief, some of them antedating Marxism and others uninfluenced by it.

Since this is the second time in recent months that I have been moved to censure sweeping and indiscriminate condemnations of Marxism, let me hereby swear on the collected works of Max Weber that I am not now and never have been, either politically or intellectually, a Marxist. But like Weber, Joseph Schumpeter, Hannah Arendt, and other critics of Marxism who have influenced my thinking, I have never doubted that Marx was a great and important thinker to whom we all owe intellectual debts.

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