To the Editors of The Crimson:

In the Crimson of March 2, 1976, there is a purported review of my book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, and of the Tenth Anniversary issue of The Public Interest, the magazine of which I was co-founder, by Jim Kaplan.

Mr. Kaplan writes:

...taken together, these two volumes reveal the emergence of an American intellectual Right on the European model, basing its conservatism on a collective--rather than an individualist understanding of society.

If I had to rate his essay for philosophical acumen and historical knowledge, I would have to, in these days of inflated grades, give Mr. Kaplan a C-.

He begins with an astonishing historical mishmash:

For two hundred years and more the United States has been generally free of what Europeans would call 'Men of the Right.' An amalgam of radical individualism and nativist Main Street values--antiblack, anti-foreign, fundamentalist--has historically passed as a unique American conservatism.

But this was never--in the writings of an Ignatius Donnelly or the politics of a Tom Watson--conservatism; it was radical populism. Mr. Kaplan has not read, would probably not even recognize, the names of American conservatism--a long and deeply embedded tradition in this country. This would include Charles Eliot Norton, co-editor of the North American Review and James Russell Lowell, the editor of The Atlantic; Henry James and Henry Adams; Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More; Leanth Brooks, co-editor of the Southern Review and John Crowe Ransom, editor of the Kenyon Review; or more recently in political philosophy Russell Kirk and Leo Strauss. He seems to be singularly unacquainted with the history of Harvard, since four of the men, Norton, Lowell, Adams and Babbitt were professors here. And on more recent developments he should read George Nash's forthcoming The Conservative Intellectuals, based on a Harvard Ph.D. thesis, to get the right scorecard.

Mr. Kaplan writes:

Their philosophical goal, as Bell makes clear in his book, is the separation of the capitalist system of production, which the group thoroughly endorses, from the liberal theory of politics and economics--a theory which postulates absolute freedom [sic!] and the pursuit of each individual 'unit's' self-interest.

I don't know whether "the group" thoroughly endorses the capitalist system, no vote was ever taken; but if anything it is clear, it is that Mr. Kaplan has not read my book and the only thing I can do is to present the relevant quotations and ask Mr. Kaplan to read this again--and slowly.

I wrote, following Kant's distinction of public and private:

What these four arguments add up to, in their sociophilosophical consequences, is the rejection of bourgeois hedonism, with its utilitarian emphasis on economic appetite, yet the retention of political liberalism with its concern for individual differences and liberty. Historically, political liberalism has been associated with bourgeois society.... But economic liberalism has become, in corporate structure, economic oligopoly, and, in the pursuit of private wants, a hedonism that is destructive of social needs. The two can be sundered. We can reject the pursuit of bourgeois wants, as lacking a moral foundation for society, and insist on the necessity of public goods. [p. 277]

And, in the concluding section of the book, which is entitled "A Reaffirmation of Liberalism." I wrote:

The centrality of the public household...is, to go back to Aristotle, a 'concern more with the good condition of human being than with the good condition of property.' It is a recognition of the distinction between ends and means and the reinstatement of social purposes as the 'good condition' which public policy has to seek. It is the centrality of conscious decisions, publicly debated and philosophically justified, in the shaping of directions for the society. Where bourgeois society separated the economy from the polity, the public household rejoins the two.... The public household requires a new socio-economic bill of rights which redefines for our times the social needs that the polity must try to satisfy. It establishes the public budget...as the mechanism whereby society seeks to implement 'the good condition of human beings.'