Book Reviews

The romantics were subsequent ly joined by the Fabian liberals, who sought to use government as a "planning" instrument to re fashion society in accordance with supposed scientific principles. Call ing themselves intellectuals, the romantics and the Fabians (or Progressives, as they were known in America), were actually short on analytical ability. They couldn't understand the emerging capital ism that had unshackled the pro ducer after Napoleon had com pleted the wrecking of the old feudal world. That was how things stood when, at the end of World War I, the Bolsheviks grabbed the levers of power in Russia, quite in defi ance of Marx's theory that the "revolution" would first come in the industrialized countries. The scene was set for the rise of the Fellow-Traveller. The noncompre hending intellectuals (who was it said "thinking is too important to leave to the intellectuals"?) re573 574 THE FREEMAN September acted to the emergence of the So viet State in a variety of ways, but on one thing they were agreed: the "experiment" in the land of the muzhiks was something to be coddled and protected.