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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
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
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), 161, 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.

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

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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), 16061, 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.

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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.

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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.