Rose-Colored Glasses: What even disillusioned Marxists missed.

• Author: Kors, Alan Charles
• Position: Culture and Reviews - The God That Failed

FEW ANTI-COMMUNIST works have had more influence or a longer shelf life than The God That Failed (1950), edited by Richard Grossman, a leftwing Labour member of the British Parliament. Its essays of political disillusionment by eminent authors-- Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Richard Wright, Stephen Spender, Louis Fischer, and Andre Gide--portray the varied appeal of communism to its intellectual devotees. The contributors make vivid and credible the growing ambivalence of their involvement in the interwar communist movement, the cognitive dissonance of remaining allied long after they should have recognized the betrayal of their ideals, and the pain and ethical necessity of their final break.

In English, the book has evolved from testament to historical artifact. The first American edition of 1950 was reprinted almost without pause in hardcover and then paperback until the late 1970s. In the 1980s, Regnery published the collection with an introduction by Norman Podhoretz, who decried the authors' failure to choose the liberal West as the logical alternative to communism. The latest edition comes from Columbia University Press, with a scholarly introduction by historian David C. Engerman.

Because of the tactical importance of left-wing anti-communism, many of the book's authors were favored during the early Cold War by a CIA that found them of great value in weaning the international left from the pro-Soviet communist movement. Engerman is mesmerized by U.S. government support of The God That Failed, and his "Foreword" is historically misleading, claiming that the book "defined a new paradigm for Western intellectual life in the Cold War: American-centered, closely tied to political power, and staunchly anti-Soviet." Only the last characterization is correct.

Not one essay in The God That Failed is remotely pro-American or written in defense of what remained of American liberalism, let alone the "political power" of liberal forces. Grossman, a leader of the "Keep Left" movement, argued that the appeal of Marxism was that "it exploded liberal fallacies-which really were fallacies." Seeing the intellectual underpinnings of free enterprise as the belief in "automatic Progress" and the denial "that boom and bust are inherent in capitalism," Grossman wrote that "no intelligent man after 1917" could have chosen liberal "dogma"; given only two choices, any honest mind would have chosen communism. Fortunately, as Crossman saw it, "two world wars...