In Tablet, Michael Walzer writes that the “communist regimes of Eastern Europe pretty much abolished the petty bourgeoisie, taking it to be the class enemy. In the cities, the small shops mostly disappeared, replaced by big state stores with standardized products and frequent shortages.” Small shops are under attack today in the West, but they are the touchstones of a diverse and humane urban life:

I remember a Zionist poster from pre-state days: two figures, a young man and a young woman, side by side, handsome faces, sturdy, muscular bodies, a little squarish; he is holding a shovel, she a hoe; they are looking across beautifully planted fields into the future.

There has never been a revolutionary movement whose new man was a shopkeeper. Even the bourgeois revolution flew under different colors. How can this be, given the crucial role of shopkeepers in urban life?

One of my grandfathers was set up on a farm in Connecticut by the Baron de Hirsch Foundation. De Hirsch was devoted to returning Jews to the land, not so much in Eretz Yisrael as across the diaspora—in Argentina, for example, and in Connecticut and New Jersey. My grandfather lived and died on the farm, but the next generation not. His sons moved to New York and ran grocery stores, I think, in the Bronx. His daughter, my mother, married a guy in the fur business, who later managed a jewelry store. I am a child of the petty bourgeoisie, together with a good many of the left intellectuals and activists I have worked with over the years—all of us celebrating this new man or that new woman and neglecting our ancestors.

In the old days, some Marxist writers argued that the class base of European fascism consisted of the lumpen proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie. Maybe so, though fascism could never have triumphed without support from the haute bourgeoisie—and, in Germany, without the Communist Party’s war against the social democrats and its delusional belief that nach Hitler, uns. The class history of the petty bourgeoisie is more complicated than Marxism allows. There were, as expected, shopkeepers and artisans among the members of the Jacobin clubs in the French Revolution and among the revolutionaries of 1848. But these same people were on both sides of the Democrat/Federalist divide in the early days of the American republic and they were for and against Jacksonian democracy. I am pretty sure there were shopkeepers among the Spanish anarchists in the 1930s—and also among the Jewish anarchists of New York City.

In other news: Joe Pompeo writes about a forthcoming book on Matt Drudge that will also be turned into a movie: “You think you know Matt Drudge, but the truth is you really don’t.”

Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the London Review of Books, talks to Tim Lewis: “We keep going. And I particularly like to think that it’s because we have a sense of humour that you can see without it necessarily being declared. We’re not po-faced, as it were. So, I don’t know… I could just say that it’s because it’s a good paper!”

Jeffrey Meyers reviews Paul Theroux’s book on Mexico: “Mexico, exotic and sinister, inspired travel books by major authors in the twentieth century: D. H. Lawrence’s Mornings in Mexico, Aldous Huxley’s Beyond the Mexique Bay, Evelyn Waugh’s Robbery Under Law, Graham Greene’s The Lawless Roads, and Rebecca West’s Survivors in Mexico. Now Paul Theroux’s timely, fascinating, and humane book challenges them all. He finds Lawrence unrealistic, Huxley supercilious, Waugh rancorous and bilious, Greene exasperated and hostile, West spirited and perceptive but incomplete. Waugh, in a work commissioned by the British-owned Mexican Eagle Oil Company, attacks the nationalistic expropriation of foreign investments. Greene, condemning the persecution of the Catholic Church, reeks of propaganda and piety, and expresses a pathological hatred for the country and the people. Theroux follows Lawrence’s precept, ‘When in doubt, move.’ He prefers a spontaneous to a planned trip, rough to comfortable journey, popular to high culture, colloquial to formal style.”

– – – – –

Did you see this letter to the editor in the New York Times? “I never thought I’d turn to The American Conservative for comfort, but at least it has the guts to publish controversial opinions that run counter to conservative orthodoxy.” TAC is in the midst of its summer campaign—and as a nonprofit, 92% of our revenue comes from donations. Give $250 or more, and we’ll send you a signed copy of Brad Birzer’s In Defense of Andrew Jackson. Support our independent-minded conservatism by donating here.

– – – – –

Andrew Roberts reviews John Campbell’s Haldane: “Why have we not all heard of Richard, Viscount Haldane? The list of his achievements is extraordinarily long, yet beyond a blue plaque outside his home in Queen Anne’s Gate there is no memorial to him. As this well-researched and well-written 350-page love-letter to him proves, he was indeed, as the subtitle argues, ‘the forgotten statesman who shaped modern Britain’. Indeed, not just Britain — much of today’s Canadian constitutional arrangements between the provinces and federal government were his work too. So why was Haldane forgotten?”

In praise of cemeteries: “The British were once very good at cemeteries. I know of at least three towns in Britain in which the cemeteries (one of them a churchyard) are by far the most attractive and agreeable places in the whole town, and certainly the best-kept. In one ancient town, turned into a visual hell by criminally-bad British architects, only the municipal cemetery, founded by the Victorians and still intact, provided some aesthetic relief. The cemetery gardener I spoke to said he liked working there because the residents were so well-behaved, something that could not easily be said of the residents of the rest of the town. In another town, while resident for a few weeks there, I used to walk in the cemetery for pleasure. The Victorian chapels, overhung by yew trees, acted as a kind of balm to soothe my outrage at the surrounding functionalist ugliness. If form follows function, as the modernists claimed, goodness knows what horrible function they imagined that their buildings served. In this cemetery was a section set aside for the graves of children. There was here a little grave of a child aged two who had died nearly fifty years before. On this grave was a vase with a single fresh flower in it; and two years later, when I visited again, the vase was still there, and still with a fresh flower. What a wealth of grief and suffering this simple sign suggested, that (I surmise) of a hopeful newlywed couple who perhaps had no further children to comfort them in what must now have been their old age!”

George H. Nash recalls the founding of the University Bookman: “Kirk named his new publication the University Bookman, partly in honor of a once notable literary magazine called the Bookman, to which his maternal grandfather had subscribed in the 1920s and early 1930s. Before the Bookman folded in 1933, it occasionally published (and lauded) work by the eminent academic Irving Babbitt, whose New Humanism and conservative educational philosophy eventually—and profoundly—influenced Kirk. By his very choice of title, Kirk signaled that his new venture would have a distinctive worldview and mission.”

Photos: Sarajevo

Receive Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.