|
|
|
|
|
|
Resources |
|
|
|
A Qualified Defense
| Article
# : |
12925 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1987 |
1,238 Words |
| Author
: |
Paul Gottfried
Paul Gottfried is a senior editor of the Modern Thought
section of The World & I and author of The Search for
Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American Right. |
Benoist's critique of imperialism has two parts: one of them intellectually sound and timely, and the other flawed and trite. The stronger part of his critique concerns the leftist sources of European imperialism. Benoist reveals the already half-forgotten record of liberal democratic and socialist support for Western colonial expansion, from the last quarter of the nineteenth into the third decade of the twentieth century. Without the political support and intellectual assumptions of self-styled progressives, Benoist maintains, Western imperialism would have been a far less thriving enterprise. It was those who hoped to achieve universal social and material advancement, from the bourgeois democrats of the French Third Republic to the English Fabian socialists and the mature Karl Marx, who had perhaps the least difficulty seeing the positive side of imperialism.
Benoist piles text upon text to demonstrate the leftist sources of imperialist thinking. He does not claim that there were no grizzled aristocratic officers or other social reactionaries among the advocates of imperialism. Rather he criticizes the theory of Joseph Schumpeter - who challenged Lenin's association of imperialism with advanced capitalism. Schumpeter tried to refute the Marxist-Lenist account of imperialism by introducing an explanation that turned out to be equally dubious. He blamed imperialism (which he assumed was wicked) not on capitalists (whom he defended as soft-hearted democrats), but on a resurgent military aristocracy. Using nationalism to take back power from an overly rationalistic and pacifistic middle class, the military, the church, and feudal monarchy, according to Schumpeter, were the true driving forces behind imperialist expansion.
The
... (1995 of 8303 Characters)
Read Full Article
|
|
