Harvey Neptune in Aeon:
In late 1949, the West Indian intellectual C L R James sat down in his residence in Compton, California and, in a burst of creative energy, composed what turned out to be a frightfully prophetic analysis of the historical fate of democracy in the United States. Titled ‘Notes on American Civilization’, the piece was a thick prospectus for a slim book (never started) in which James promised to show how the failed historical promise of its unbridled liberalism had prepared the contemporary republic for a variant of totalitarian rule. ‘I trace as carefully as I can the forces making for totalitarianism in modern American life,’ explained the then little-known radical. ‘I relate them very carefully to the degradation of human personality under Hitler and under Stalin.’
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