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Article: The Statist Temptation.(Review)
- Article from:
- National Review
- Article date:
- August 14, 2000
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2000 National Review, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States, by Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks (Norton, 379 pp., $26.95)
Almost twenty years ago, just as Francois Mitterrand's Socialists were about to come to power with the promise of "Bread and Roses," I was sitting in a Paris auditorium listening to a debate on the question, "Why is there no socialism in America?" Today the better question might be, "Why is there no socialism in Europe?" but at the time the question that had haunted generations of American and European intellectuals was still on the table. The speaker was Seymour Martin Lipset, a tall, stocky, enormously learned middle-aged man ...