The Vital Center
Potpourri
by , Jr. Houghton Mifflin, $3.00.
The author, a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Jackson, is here engaged in a report on the re-examination and self-criticism “which liberalism has undergone in the last decade.”Mr. Schlesinger is a good man to have on your side: he is a gifted polemicist who has both the “right" and the “left" squirming on the hook when he gets through with them: at the same time, he is optimistic about “the vital center,”the reawakened liberal. Current liberalism, he believes, has been historically re-educated because of three factors: the New Deal aspirations, a deepening knowledge of man, and the exposure of the Soviet Union.
Mr. Schlesinger is most effective in his section called “The Failure of the Left,”in which the fellow traveler comes under his corrosive microscope. One questionable point in his argument is his estimation of the trade-unions as “indigenous to the capitalist system,”and his belief that, as they become more powerful, “they increase their vested interests in the existing order.” The United Auto Workers sitdown strikes, for example, challenged the capitalist concept of property. Unions can aim at establishing a kind of dual power that is, in effect, counter to vested interests. But this is a small point, and hardly conclusive. Mr. Schlesinger is expertly clear and navigates smoothly a treacherously complicated course.