I am writing to avert any possible confusion between a book recently reviewed in your magazine (January 1990) and a work of my own. To be sure, no one who actually read my book, The Other God That Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism, would be likely to confuse it with the one reviewed in Chronicles. Your reviewer, Lee Congdon, says I “clearly” identify with Peter Collier and David Horowitz, and that I am transfixed by American neoconservatism. My book mentions neither of these writers and barely touches upon the radicalization or deradicalization of Americans in the 1960’s, though it does deal more broadly with patterns of political radicalization and deradicalization among intellectuals on the left and right since the French Revolution. Later in the review, a purported flaw in the book’s characterization of its subject’s political role during the Third Reich is accounted for via a long and loose deductive chain, somehow running from a murky attack by Russell Kirk against those who are too fond of democracy through a rhetorically exaggerated self-characterization by Norman Podhoretz, on to drugs in contemporary America, and finally reaching the purported relationship of contemporary American neoconservatives to the Enlightenment. The reader is told that I am among those who maintain that a historicist critique of the Enlightenment “must be fatal” and “despise the Counter-Enlightenment and the historical thinking that questions the universality of reason’s dictates and insists upon the relativity of political and social arrangements.”

My book, by contrast, asserts that “the correlation between the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment traditions and subsequent political ideologies is by no means tidy. If liberalism, cosmopolitanism, socialism and communism owed more to the Enlightenment, and conservatism, nationalism, and fascism more to the Counter-Enlightenment, it was also possible to deploy arguments based upon the universalist rationalism of the Enlightenment tradition to coerce the recalcitrant at home and abroad, just as it was possible to draw upon the intellectual arsenal of the Counter-Enlightenment to promote tolerance based upon a respect for diversity. . . . Both traditions were susceptible to totalitarian reformulations by their twentieth-century legatees.”

This is only one example of the many divergences between the claims of my book and the one reviewed. Should the historical problem of the relationship of intellectuals to the stabilization and destabilization of liberal-democratic governments interest the editors of Chronicles, they may want to assign my book for review to the Lee Congdon whose careful scholarly work on Georg Lukacs is treated as such in The Other God That Failed, rather than to the hatchet-man who apparently read my book in search of some hook on which to hang an attack on contemporary American neoconservatives.

        —Jerry Z. Muller
Department of History
Catholic University of America
Washington, D.C.

Lee Congdon Replies:

Professor Muller’s angry letter puzzles me. In my review I commended his “exhaustive research,” “honest account,” and “fair description.” But I argued that, consciously or not, he had read the American neoconservative experience back into the history of German conservatism. Like many deradicalized (“second thoughts”) New Leftists, Hans Freyer, we were told, “emerged as a spokesman for a brand of conservatism reconciled with liberal democracy.” (p. 317) In the United States, we call that brand “neoconservatism,” because it maintains that a totalitarian logic informs the older—historical and anti-democratic—conservatism. According to Professor Muller, who frequently contributes to Commentary, America’s leading neoconservative magazine, “the intellectuals who pinned their hopes on movements on the totalitarian left and those who looked to the totalitarian right often drew from common traditions and from one another in formulating their radical critique of liberal democratic capitalism. Hans Freyer and Georg Lukacs, for example, both had their intellectual roots in neoromanticism and neo-Hegelianism. . . . “

In light of that declaration, one wonders why he writes of the “purported” relationship between neoconservatism and the Enlightenment. Everywhere in his book he suggests that the Enlightenment provided a fertile soil for liberal democracy, while Freyer’s historicist critique of the Enlightenment “lay behind the works of his radical conservative phase.” (p. 333) To be sure, he concedes that Enlightenment can also arrive at despotism, but he hastens to add (p. 17) that those who repented for carrying its ideas to extremes experienced little difficulty in making themselves over into liberals and social democrats. “Radical” (historical, anti-democratic) conservatives such as Freyer, on the other hand, accepted liberal democracy grudgingly, if at all.

Professor Muller writes that his book deals “more broadly with patterns of political radicalization and deradicalization among intellectuals on the left and right since the French Revolution.” That, surely, is a large and worthy theme—and one all too familiar in contemporary America. In treating it, he constructed a chain of reasoning that led to the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment. Having raised reasonable, if not unanswerable, objections to his analysis and historical judgment, I regret that he has elected to make name-calling do duty as a rejoinder.