Economy, Liberty and the State. By Professor Calvin Hoover. Pp 445. New
BOOKS RECEIVED
Arms and the State: Civil-Military Elements in National Policy. By Walter Millis (with Harvey Mansfield and
Harold Stein). Pp 436. New York (The Twentieth Century Fund), 1958.
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL
York (The XXth Century Fund), 1958
Professor Calvin Hoover has been for a long time a student and so-called "specialist" on the Soviet economy. He also has had some direct experience with the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship in Germany. Personal exPavorable to seen it that emp especially if the expelays contrary to what empiricists think, is not always is limited and the subject very vast in scope. So Professor at a loss about it.
Like so many liberals, Professor Hoover tries to solve the trick by giving to the category of "class" a loose subjective definition which enables him to deny that both the modern welfare state and the Nazi dictatorship italist states in any is no workers' state either, and is mixed together the fascist dictatorships in the same category of "totalitarianism, " ¡e, states ruled by one dictator or a small dictatorial clique. That the Soviet totalitarianism just happened to have destroyed private ownership of the means of production and the bourgeoisie as a ruling class (and phywell), whereas the same bourgeoisie and the private ownership of the means of production flourished under Hitler as never before, does not make a decisive difference to him. He speaks about a "ruling bureaucracy" in
81 $ 5.00 Nazi Germany, about the "enormous amount of government control over industry" — but does not specify that this control was exercised by agencies headed by the main in-
Of course the economic importance of the New Deal in the USA, of government control, of the
Where is are cat a mi eng l one toes tor " etc, is taken for
and of Western a handbook of liberal illusions, prejudices, fears, and simplifications, one can get it right here, not without a scholarly touch (the discussion of Russian real wages, for example, is very interesting and illuminating: Hoover arrives at the conclusion that these wages were in 1957-58 50% higher than before the war and will rise continually through the coming years).
Professor Hoover's conclusion? It is necessary to "control" and "regularize" the economy (including a solution for the problem of cyclical fluctuation and endemic inflation) without giving the state too much power and having it become totalitarian. He does not know exactly how this can be done, but his ideal is somewhere in between a Labour government Britain and a Rooseveltian America. About the tremendous power the monopolists retain and exercise in these societies he doesn't worry VeG
"MOTIVATIONS"