The Root Is Man

An anarchist classic. In these essays, Macdonald turns his back on every doctrine that treats humans as objects, whether implicitly or explicitly. “We must emphasize the emotions, the imagination, the moral feelings, the primacy of the individual human being, must restore the balance that has been broken by the hypertrophy of science in the last two centuries. The root is man, here and not there, now and not then.”

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"Dwight Macdonald warned of the ideology of permanent war in his 1946
essay The Root Is Man. He despaired of an effective counterweight to
the power of the corporate state as long as a state of permanent war
continued to exist. The liberal class, like the Marxist cadre from which
Macdonald had defected in favor of anarchism, had, he wrote, mistakenly
placed its hopes for human progress in the state. This was a huge
error. The state, once the repository of hope for the liberal class and
many progressives, devoured its children in America as well as in the
Soviet Union. And the magic elixir, the potent opiate that rendered a
population passive and willing to be stripped of power, was a state of
permanent war. The political uses of the ideology of perpetual war
eluded the theorists behind the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
reform and social movements, including Karl Marx. The reformists limited
their focus to internal class struggle and, as Macdonald noted, never
worked out “an adequate theory of the political significance of war.”
Until that gap is filled, Macdonald warned, “modern socialism will
continue to have a somewhat academic flavor.” (Chris Hedges, Death of the
Liberal Class)

About the AUTHOR:

DWIGHT MACDONALD (1906–1982) was born in New York City and educated
at Exeter and Yale. On graduating from college, he enrolled in Macy’s
executive training program, but soon left to work for Henry Luce at Time
and Fortune, quitting in 1936 because of cuts that had been made to an
article he had written criticizing U.S. Steel. From 1937 to 1943,
Macdonald was an editor of Partisan Review and in 1944, he started a
journal of his own, Politics, whose contributors included Albert Camus,
Victor Serge, Simone Weil, Bruno Bettelheim, James Agee, John Berryman,
Meyer Schapiro, and Mary McCarthy. In later years, Macdonald reviewed
books for The New Yorker, movies for Esquire, and wrote frequently for
The New York Review of Books.