Word: deterministic
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Castles to Indians. How did U.S. fiction get deflected onto this strange and sometimes morbidly haunted path? Like the good psychological determinist he is, Author Fiedler feels that it all began in the womb of English letters some two centuries ago. Pioneering American novelists had two English models-the sentimental novel of love embodied in Richardson's Clarissa and the gothic novel of crumbling castles and mental phantoms invented by Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto). Eventually housewives and what Hawthorne called "female scribblers" took over the sentimental novel; as a romantic fantasy it has paced U.S. bestseller lists...
...reader wonder why the old man should have been prevented for so long from rattling his dead bones. Today Mark Twain's often irreverent notions about God, Bible and his fellow men seem no more fearsome than a day in a college classroom. By the lights of modern determinist psychology, for instance, there is scarcely anything startling in this statement: "Sometimes a man is ... a born scoundrel-like Stanford White*-and upon him the world lavishes censure and dispraise; but he is only obeying the law of his nature. [The human race] did not invent itself...
...slave labor camps, the Katyn massacre, the mass deportations should have been enough). Says Aron: "Both American liberals and the Left in France and Britain share the same illusion: the illusion of the orientation of history in a constant direction . . . Marxism is only one version, a simultaneously cataclysmic and determinist version, of an optimism to which rationalists are professionally inclined...
...help Steve to reforge his faith in business and himself. Author Swiggett understands the paternalistic embrace in which the large, modern corporation holds its employees-but he vastly exaggerates it. His notion that the corporation makes or unmakes the man is on a par with all the determinist devil theories of history which hold that every evil of human life flows from the capitalistic "system," or from the machine, or from sunspots...
...History was always goose-stepping its way through the centuries in Spengler's vision. Compared with his German mentor France's Amaury de Riencourt, 38, a freelance writer and lecturer who now lives in the U.S., is more amiable, less apocalyptic. Compared either with Spengler or other determinist philosophers of history- Toynbee, Pareto, Marx-Author de Riencourt works on an intellectual shoestring...