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Past as Prologue: American Redemptive Activism and the Developing World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Lewis A. Dunn
Lewis A. Dunn
Affiliation:
Hudson Institute
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Abstract

Packenham's Liberal America and the Third World, although a needed response to more radical critics, does not cut sufficiently deeply into the ambiguities, roots, and patterns of thought of liberal redemptive activism. The problem is to tame rather than to exorcise the redemptive activist belief in a “larger” American interest in the developing world. Modification of the reorientation of American policy articulated by Packenham and the Overseas Development Council is required to: (1) take account of limited agreement upon a conception of global economic equity; (2) develop a more refined response to the excesses of reformist interventionism; (3) avoid the risks of reliance upon a “will and capacity” strategy of developmental assistance. “Proximate pursuit” of the longstanding vision of a world in which the values of liberal democratic order are being increasingly realized constitutes a preferred alternative to both the liberal reorientation and past redemptive activism.

Type
Review Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 27 , Issue 4 , July 1975 , pp. 612 - 627
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1975

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References

1 A stimulating discussion of this recurrent theme is found in Cushing Strout, The American Image of the Old World (New York: Harper & Row 1963), 1–61, and passimGoogle Scholar.

2 Hartz, Louis, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World 1953)Google Scholar.

3 See, for example, James, Henry, The American (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston 1960)Google Scholar; Bourne, Randolph S., War and the Intellectuals, Essays by Randolph S. Bourne, 1915–1919 (New York: Harper & Row 1964)Google Scholar; Niebuhr, Reinhold, The Irony of American History (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons 1952)Google Scholar; Stillman, Edmund and Pfaff, William, Power and Impotence: The Failure of America's Foreign Policy (New York: Random House 1966)Google Scholar.

4 Fulbright, J. William, “The Price of Empire,” North American Review (November (1967), 12–18, esp. p. 13.Google Scholar

5 Kolko, Gabriel, The Roots of American Foreign Policy (Boston: Beacon Press 1969), 83Google Scholar.

6 Compare, on these questions, Seabury, Paul, The Rise and Decline of the Cold War (New York: Basic Books 1967), 37–53Google Scholar; Brown, Seyom, The Faces of Power (New York: Columbia University Press 1968), 1–27Google Scholar.

7 See, for example, Ball, George, “The New Diplomacy,” Department of State Bulletin, LII (June 28, 1965), 1046–47Google Scholar.

8 Niebuhr (fn. 3), esp. 39–40, 130–50; Stillman and Pfaff (fn. 3), 15–59.

9 On this American self-image and its varied later manifestations, see Strout (fn. 1), 12–17, and passim.

10 See especially the chapters by James W. Howe, James P. Grant, Roger D. Hansen, and Charles Paolillo, as well as the introductory summation entitled “Agenda for Action 1974.” Given the basic similarity of outlook among these authors, it is valid to refer to the argument as being that of the Overseas Development Council.

11 Richard Cooper, as well as Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, for example, note that the costs to the United States of a break-up of economic interdependence would be significantly less than for other industrialized countries. See Cooper, Richard N., “Economic Interdependence and Foreign Policy in the Seventies,” World Politics, XXIV (January 1972), 160–61, 178–79Google Scholar; Keohane, Robert O. and Nye, Joseph S., “World Politics and the International Economic System,” in C. Fred Bergsten in association with Mathieson, John A., ed., The Future of the International Economic Order: An Agenda for Research (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath 1973), 124–26Google Scholar.

12 I have developed this argument more fully in “Fortress America and the Promise of American Life: The Contours of American Responsibility” in Kaplan, Morton A., ed., Isolation or Interdependence? Today's Choices for Tomorrow's World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 1975).Google ScholarPubMed

13 The theme of overambitious American idealism runs throughout Levinson, Jerome and de Onís, Juan, The Alliance That Lost Its Way (Chicago: Quadrangle Books 1970)Google Scholar.

14 The Nixon Administration's choice is well defended by Harrison, Lawrence E., “Waking From the Pan-American Dream,” Foreign Policy, V (Winter 1971–72), 163–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 See the discussion of the Johnson approach to American food aid for India in Rostow, W. W., The Diffusion of Power (New York: Macmillan 1972), 422–23Google Scholar.

16 Bourne (fn. 3), 51.

17 Packenham, it may be recalled, does distinguish between “form and substance.” He uses this distinction, however, only in his discussion of the relative acceptability of authoritarian political order. And, as argued above, that discussion has serious limitations.