Volume 9 Number 2 1996
The strength of Stanislav Andreski's essays lies in one word of his sub-title, namely 'comparative'; conversely, a weakness in some at least of Talcott Parsons' work is that the comparisons he makes are insufficiently broad and his work tends to be rooted in sociological theory and American idealism (in both senses of the word) rather than empirical observation. It does not seem to have fully occurred to Parsons (e.g. see Parsons p. 19), for example, that a key aspect of the National Socialist bid to impose their evil empire on the rest of the world was the superior fighting capacity of the German army. Parsons recognized, in passing, the horrid consequences of a National Socialist victory, and the strength of their military organization (Parsons pp. 155-6) and also noted the way in which the development of Western civilization had in long past previous eras hinged on particular crucial battles, but he then failed to consider the matter any further, as if such coarse material considerations might interfere with the platonic purity of his cultural analyses based on values. One cannot help feeling that Parsons' work reflected his war-time role as an intellectual giving advice (on the whole reasonable and sensible advice when compared to that of their other advisers) to the American government. By contrast, the writings of Stanislav Andreski have the down to earth realism to be expected from a man who served in the Polish army in World War II, was captured by the Russians during the Nazi-Soviet pact, escaped and came to Britain to join General Anders' free Polish army. Such an experience must have led Andreski to supplement Parson's basic question about war, 'What are we defending? (Parsons pp. 189-20) with the equally important question 'Who wins wars and why?' It is not enough for a free society to be virtuous and united if it is going to be defeated and overturned by the Nazis or the Communists, who are then able to destroy the very bases of its virtue and unity.
Accordingly, Andreski has tried to solve a particular example of a central problem that most sociologists have failed even to address, in his essay 'Italian military inefficiency: an explanation' (Andreski pp. 147-62) . He is able to show that despite two decades of fascist propaganda extolling war, the Italians remained as unwilling to fight for Italy in World War II as in World War I, a striking phenomenon that calls for a sociological explanation. Andreski's account, which stresses the inner tensions of 'Italy (as)... the only case where the Church to which almost everybody belonged opposed the existence of the state' (Andreski p. 162), is plausible and well argued, using comparisons with the armies of other countries which continued to fight on doggedly under difficult conditions and poor generals and with inadequate supplies and equipment. Andreski and I have disagreed previously about this explanation, which I feel is tied too closely to the peculiar conditions that prevailed during the short period between Italian unification at the expense of the Papal States and Mussolini's concordat with the Pope. After all, the Italians fought very badly both before and after these events. However, Andreski's method is clearly the right one to follow, rooted as it is in the making of comparisons between actual societies in search of possible causal factors, rather than being blindly driven by an abstract theory.
The same method has served Andreski well in his analyses of revolutions, fascism and military rule. His essay 'Fascists as Moderates' provides an essential link joining Lipset's essay in Political Man on fascism as the extremism of the centre with Skidelsky's much later description of them as proto-Keynesians. Many fascist parties were both moderates in their economic policy situated between the extremes of laissez faire and state socialism, and appealed to the classes of the centre located between big business and the proles. Andreski rightly notes that their true antithesis (which also defines the dimension along which they were and are extreme) is to be found in the pacifist liberals (using liberal in John Stuart Mill's sense of the word).
Equally provocative and to the point is Andreski's essay 'The Peaceful Disposition of Dictators', which he explains in terms of the 'incompatibility between the internal and external uses of the armed forces' (Andreski pp.103-4), i.e. if you need the army to hold the local population down, it is in general neither available for, nor effective at, external aggression. The view of dictators taken by people living in a democracy tends to focus on those who either ignore this tension and are first defeated abroad and then overthrown at home (such as Argentina's Galtieri), or those who can take rash risks abroad because their government is a successfully repressive and mobilising one-party state (such as Saddam Hussein's Iraq) and not mere pretorian government by a junta. Andreski's model accounts both for these cases (Andreski pp.l 12-3) and for the shrewd old kleptocratic dictators in Africa and elsewhere, who have stayed within their borders, whom he contrasts with bellicose populists who have come to power in a democracy. I have an uneasy feeling that Andreski will be proved right yet again by the future adventurism of Papandreou's new and excitably nationalistic government in Greece. Gaddafi by contrast will die in his bed, though possibly with American assistance.
Andreski's book is an important and insightful set of essays explaining sociologically the material world out there, in which, all too often, social and political issues are decided in favour of the group that is more competent in the use of force. Parson's essays on German National Socialism are not as incisive because (a) he rarely descends to the vulgar level of facts and when he does he sometimes gets them wrong, as when he declares that clerical protests against the deportation of Jews from France or against the Nazi regime in general were even in a relative sense effective (see Parsons p.264) and (b) he only ever really refers to two societies, namely the United States and Germany. Britain and Russia make only occasional eccentric appearances, even though it is strongly rumoured that they too were involved in World War II. For Parsons, Britain is like America (e.g. see Parsons p.317) except when it isn't (e.g. see Parsons pp. 305, 323) and Germany isn't like America but then sometimes it is like Britain. Russia is mentioned only as a source of some kind of post-war solution to the junker problem after the Soviet army gets to Prussia, since Communists don't believe in property rights (Parsons pp.384-6): whether this solution will prove unfortunately similar to National Socialism is not even considered.
Uta Gerhardt's edition of Parsons' essays is very revealing both about Talcott Parsons and about American attitudes during and immediately before World War II, and she is to be congratulated on her insightful introduction. It should also be added that despite his peculiar aversion to the use of specific concrete examples, these particular essays of Parsons are very clearly written and easy to follow. What emerges is a portrait of Parson's 'ideal' American as being a medical doctor with a sound scientific training which has given him rational detachment, yet who manages to be sympathetic towards psycho-analysis, (e.g. Parsons pp.254-67) and a member of one of the liberal Protestant denominations (e.g. Parsons see p. 106) whose attenuated but universalistic Calvinism is expressed through the 'Social Gospel' (see Parsons p.63). This 'ideal' American is an essentially decent man (or just possibly a woman) of the centre-left who dislikes both his radical colleagues' attacks on religion, (even on other people's religion in the case of Roman Catholicism, (e.g. Parsons pp.124-5, 131)) and his conservative colleague's attacks on Roosevelt and the New Deal (e.g. Parsons p.273-4); he believes strongly in the American values of egalitarian individualism, yet recognises both that many American institutions do not live up to this ideal and that the ideal can be a source of frustration as well as satisfaction to individual Americans. In some respects, but by no means all, Parsons probably was, or tried to be, his own ideal. National Socialism was its antithesis and Parsons had the courage strongly to urge Americans to take sides against the Nazis during the period 1938-1941 when many in America preferred isolation and some thought and even hoped that Britain would lose the war. Uta Gerhardt notes (Parsons p.14) that when Parsons spoke at a meeting in April 1940 in favour of America providing Britain with military equipment, he criticised the Marxists and was picketed by (inter alia) the Harvard Student Union and invited objectors from other universities and high schools, the Teachers' Union, the CIO and the AFL, the Women's Neighbourhood League and the YWCA. No doubt they were the same kinds of people who later attacked the ideological underpinnings and implications of his grand theories. In one minor sense the attacks were justified, for as Parson's makes explicit in his criticisms of National Socialism, his analytical tools such as the 'pattern variables' are value laden. Yet it must be said in his defence that the pattern variables were and are a useful and clarifying device and that they do not inevitably commit the user to taking up a particular political line on any given issue. S.M.Lipset, for instance, used them to praise America as The First New Nation, but a Hindu or a Hibernian, a Japanese or a post-Modernist, could just as easily employ them in the opposite sense.
Parsons' intuitive understanding of German society, often derived from indirect sources, such as his knowledge of Weber and the various Christian theological and ethical traditions (e.g. see Parsons pp. 182-7, 22930), led him to advocate a subtle and moderate programme for the reconstruction of Germany as the end of World War 11 and the Nazi era approached. Those Americans who had earlier wallowed fatalistically in isolationism were probably by contrast supporters of Morgenthau's plan for reducing Germany to the level of a deindustrialized pastoral economy. The banality of some American views of the time is conveyed indirectly by Uta Gerhardt's report that Margaret Mead cited the unwillingness of those Germans who lived in Transylvania to mix with and blend into the native Romanian population as evidence that the potentially deep-seated, basic, domineering tendencies of the German people could impede Allied efforts to reform Germany (Parsons p.52). What a gift to the anti-Semites at the time and later to Ceausescu! It is just as well they never got to read her opinion on the subject, which she conveyed privately to Parsons. Margaret Mead clearly understood Romania about as little as she did Samoa, but she was a moderate compared with some of the wild American psychiatrists who were clamouring to be heard. Yet Parsons was able to reply to her with a shrewd use of comparative (though undocumented) argument (Parsons p.52), pointing out that the peaceful Lutheran Swedes of today are the descendants of the warlike Swedish Lutherans of the seventeenth century. If only he had brought this approach to all his work, how much more accessible and convincing it would have been. In the end (in practice and probably for different reasons) the kind of policy that Parsons had advocated (c.f. Parsons p.56) was put into practice and led to the setting up of the peaceable and democratic Federal Republic of Germany. It is a fitting tribute to Talcott Parsons that a citizen of that country should now have provided a balanced and scholarly edition of his work on National Socialism.
Christie Davies