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From International Socialism, No.19, Winter 1964/5, p.30.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Haunted Fifties
I.F. Stone
Merlin, 42s.
Many radicals and socialists are reluctant to verify their theoretical assumptions with new facts. They pay no attention to the need for a constant interaction between theoretical generalisation and empirical investigation. I.F. Stone does not pay attention to this need either, but for the opposite reasons. He is a journalist — and a good one at that – and excels in a fine perception of the news. He has the intelligent radical’s perception for new politically relevant events. But he often fails to integrate these events into a coherent over-all world view. He expresses radical attitudes and sentiments together with a liberal methodology. In England he would have found a niche in Michael Foot’s Tribune. This political confusion allows Stone to be sometimes basically pro-West, at other times to provide cheap apologies for Castro’s totalitarianism, and still at other times to make a vigorous defence of the 1956 Hungarian revolution. His inability to relate single individual facts to a more general political framework led him into such traps as supporting Eisenhower as the ‘peace candidate’, his main rationale for this being the fact that Stevensonian liberals supported the cold war.
This is a collection of Stone’s writings, in the weekly that bears his name, during the fifties and early sixties. Many of these writings deal with his vigorous defence of civil liberties and his concern with the question of peace. Many readers may find it profitable for the purpose of getting an idea of what US politics were like in the fifties and how much they have changed in the sixties. In doing so, the reader may also see the workings of the mind of a good journalist who is mushy and mediocre as a political thinker.
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Last updated on 4.9.2007