According to Mitchell Cohen, writing in the latest issue of Dissent, George Lichtheim, ….
…..didn’t write out of the least sympathy for imperialism, but because he was out of sympathy with the clichés (and the political implications of the clichés) espoused by Maoists or third-worldists, Trotskyists or neo-Marxists, neo-Leninists ….. Influential neos such as Paul Baron, Paul Sweezy, Harry Sweezy, and those in comparable orbits insisted on a necessary link—chain might be the better term—between capitalist exploitation of the third world and the third world’s inability to “develop.” For Lichtheim, this is one formula substituting for another: “bourgeois versus proletariat” becomes “imperialist versus anti-imperialist.” (Nowadays, it’s “Empire versus Multitude.”)
Now that has some contemporary resonance. Cohen also notes that:
Lichtheim was an independent intellectual spirit—the real thing, not the self-announced sort. His histories of socialism and Marxism are among the most intelligent that we have. They are works of learning, insight, critical engagement. Even if you would dispute him on something or many things, you’ll feel smarter for the disagreement. He didn’t just gobble a few secondary sources and then blurt “expertise”; he didn’t seek to display theoretical acumen by spry style and self-congratulating “irony.” Footnotes didn’t frighten him. His friend Walter Laqueur reports an idiosyncratic but appealing quality: Lichtheim would not quote a book he didn’t own.
