3 Quotes by Daniel Oppenheimer

I stopped arguing about religion long ago,”67 Burnham said to one of his comrades, when asked whether he was going to respond to Trotsky’s defense of dialectical materialism. The remark rippled quickly through the revolutionary grapevine to Trotsky, who was so infuriated by it that he fired off another long essay, “An Open Letter to Comrade Burnham,” almost before he’d come down from the last. And with that the last pretenses of comradeship fell away.

He read Kolakowski on the danger, implicit in all utopian movements, that if the material of human nature proved too weak or brittle to withstand the stresses that the utopian architecture tried to impose upon it, then the architects might prefer to discard the humans rather than their precious blueprints. He.

The other novel aspect in the essay was the shift in his attitude toward America. No longer was he willing to take as a given that the nation’s flaws, which he acknowledged were many, added up to a totality that was deserving only of condemnation, critique, and revolution. That attitude made sense, he wrote, when you were comparing it to a socialist utopia that existed only in the imagination. It.