term actually used by Marcuse is "repressive tolerance' Many of Johnson's critical barbs seeno nave peen cuce asccone name mostly, one would guess, from the Fontana Modern Masters series. Since Johnson's book is selling at four times the price of a Modern Master this seems bad value, even where he manages to get his quotes straight.
ANIMOSITY His inaccuracy seems to be the product of a generally distempered view of the world rather than of a special animosity against the Casual mistakes or misattributions like *Madam Blavatsky's (page 124) 0Г 'Freud's melancholy posthumous book Civilisation and its Discontents (1930) are washed down the reader's gullet by the free-flowing polemic.
who have become intoxicated by When his historv of the Literar Suplement that work contains.
For some reason standards nave not Enemies of Society.
the left. as a palladin of Tory Scientology' retorical excess and false bathos.
LaDOUT Thus already In For mouciale the Johnson's methylated cocktail is the book. likelv to give a bad hangover to those it.
Church was noticed in the Times the CXDCIL reviewer thought it wise to caution the reader by citing a sample of the howlers such critical been tougni necessary by those who have acelaimed Both in his days as Labour editor of which Statesman. and 1UW freedom, he displayed a similar talent for ignored;
Last year he resigned with a flourish from the Labour Party on the grounds that he would not travel one miserable inch down the path towards Auschwitz and Gulag upon which the Callaghan considered. government was embarked.
In an carlier article he had described Shirley Williams and her friends as 'a ver mim succ or acmocrane meal ind very thick totalitarian sandwich (i.e.
the Labour Party). Compare this with the following from a New Statesman article written in June 1970:
To look down from the galleries onto a crowded House of Commons is to me a moving experience. There are plenty of good men on the benches; but it is the solid ranks of LaDou men and women situne benne their ministers, which to me is ocular and indisputable proof that - so long as they remain there — the country will not Eu lar astlay. ual we wl connnu freedom tha somentere in e ain combine justice world there will still be a major nation, of great influence and potentiality, to uphold civilised principles.
•...the truth is that there is no greater guarantee of this country's internal stability and security than a solid majority House Commons. It is not a formula for mean that the objectives of social TUSUCC WIll ona occasons ana in every issue, be pursued. But it is an absolute and cast-iron defence against adventurism.
OBSESSION Evidently Johnson has moved all the wav from being a reactionarv radical to being a radical reactionary.
Johnson's OOSESSIOn
"internal stability and security' was evident, along with the overblown style and patriotic blather, This conversion to the official right wing of British politics. Before becoming a neo-Conservative Blimp, he was a Fabian socialist Blimp.
both guises it has been characersuc or nis orose nalne bace. his own person in direct juxtaposition questions of the day, whether moved by the sight from the gallery of the House of Commons or refusing to travel even one miserable inch to Auschwitz and Gulag.
Johnson politics and social philosophy are there to refleet and express his emotions. His longing for absolute guarantees of order designed to ward off a chaos he feels all about him.
Unfortunately for the rest of us, the doses of authority required to protect Johnson s concept or trecaom are becoming progressively stiffer.
illiberality Callaghan and Merlyn Rees no longer suffices and is jettisoned in favour of vigilantes of the National Association for Freedom.
The ostensible unifying theme of Enemies of Society, that of the historical and social conditions which support freedom, is entirely dissipated by the scattered polemic of the latter half of There is no examination of what contemporary socialist writers like C.B. MacPherson. levenukeso George Novack have had to say about une relanonsmp octweek Capitansın and democracy.
GUARANTEE There is no attempt to prove that either capitalism or a propertied middle class represents a sure guarantee of liberty. It is simply asserted. Evidence suggests that, in certain conditions, capitalism fosters powerful anti-democratic forces simply for example, the fate of Europe in the Thirties or of South America today.
ne imporance ora vey and independent labour movement for any democratic political order is not even The freedoms we now enjoy were in large part the fruit of intelectual dissidence struggle, established ideology which systematically identified liberty with property.
Yer Johnson appears to believe that freedom can be protected by returning to this identification, browbeating the more troublesome tethering the labour movement to the state, and strengthening the powers of Tory the police and courts.
UTOPIA This is a recipe not for conserving or extending freedom but for confining it to a comfortable and intolerant elite, suspended above a docile, atomised and demoralised mass. It is the sort of reactionary utopia which could only be realised at the expense of drastic social Attempts to give right-wing politics a contemporary philosophical basis are not in themselves to be despised. The left needs conservative thought, against which it can develop its own ideas - think of Marx's debt to Hegel, or, to take a more recent British example, Raymond Williams's debt to English conservative traditions.
But in Johnson the left has not found an antagonist it can take very seriously.
represents has a strident, paranoid style that muddies the waters of political argument.
It is the intellectual counterpart of the red-baiting and McCarthyism that is returning to fashion in some Western European states.
It springs not from the intuitions of the older school thought, community and the particular, but panic at perceived from an awakened labour movement and a heterodox younger generation.
There is a further moral to all this. In the long departed days of radical chic a wiuc suonc was suducny oscrca up1oi critical ideas which had led a long The popula. leading to rejection of an critics, transcend certain body of zovernmen bosses voters exacerbate •POr Ol conservative concern for activists subterranean existence.
Movements developed which had major impact on tne way people nve their lives. Whatever the excesses of those davs they have eft a lasting impact on society.
Todav. the new right eniovs the modishness that once altached to the lett. Reactionary pundits now have the ear of a sizable public, in France and in the United States as well as in Britain But on the evidence we have seen so far their message seems likely to be a negative and barren one. Rarely do they the limitations we have identified in Johnson's writings.
In intellectual terms Johnson's work may ve snoday, our nat does noi deprive it of political impact In the last few years the Labour Party has lost much of its following among tives, whose living standards have beer ravaged by inflation, who resent paying for welfare services which they have deserted for the private sector, and who the symptoms disintegration they see about them Johnson argues that these plagues are the responsibility of a Labour wnien is innitrated by Marxists and subservient to the union He pitches his argument at a leve which is unlikely to interest the mass of though his articles are frequently reprinted in the popular tabloids - but even if he only helps to the disaffection of the Dera mode casses connson wil have made an important contribution victory in the near future elain. the case that Conservatism in Britain is on the attack, and that there is a dynamic union on the right between ideologists like Johnson and the leadership of the Conservative Party Labour's weakness is that leadership is alienated from socialist and devoid any convincing political vision. Thus it is the Conservatives who profit from the DUDIK opinion adeptly exploited by the Blimp pundits. Socialist Challenge 26 October 1978 page 9
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Gad. sir. Henry Ford is right. Trades Unianism is just a plot of the worker to stop employers from treating them well of Their own free will. I0 To I BLIMP