by Gunnar Myrdal,
Duckworth, 21s.
one of the lesser embarrassments of left politics is a traditional one: too much talk and too little thought. It only takes a competent stylist or publicist to turn out a suitable-sounding half-truth, to distil a more less correct insight in a glittering slogan; and years of careful analysis go by the board. Instead of digging into the structure of society, we snap up some glib and half appropriate phrase and pound it into a cliché. When we’ve drained it of all effective meaning we look round and see the unpersuaded multitude still unpersuaded. In just such a way in recent months we’ve saved ourselves from the business of actually thinking by living on “affluent society”, “private opulence, public squalor”, “I’m-all-right-Jack-attitudes”, “positive neutralism”, “the irresponsible society”, and a dozen other happy shorthand syntheses. And only when we find a Jo Grimond or an Aidan Crawley babbling in the same idiom do we realise just what a disservice we do ourselves in snapping up other people’s deft verbal afterthoughts. The valuable part of Professor Titmuss’ Fabian pamphlet was the analysis of a particular concentration of economic power, not the title. But you wouldn’t think so from the sort of woolly talk that goes on in the coffee bars. Even the leader—at the time of writing—of the Labour Party would pontificate against the “irresponsible society”: what we want to know is what he plans to do about the insurance empires.