THE LIBERAL DILEMMA

The term ""liberal"" may well be one which has been so stretched and squeezed to fit disparate circumstances that it no longer retains any useful shape at all; however, this author, an Associate Professor of Business and Public Policy at Iowa U., as done a notable job here in his attempt to search out the source of every difficulty now confronting the modern American. This search has taken him from Periclean Athens through the rise and decline of Christianity, the Age of Reason, the course of ""that magnificent abstraction"" Capitalism, and into an examination of how Jeffersonian democracy has become a matter of ""group rather than individual politics"". It is a long, long way around, one productive of few truly new ideas, but a fascinating tour just the same, conducted with considerable ease and skill. The dilemma, as Mr. Bunke sees it, as the eternal one whose horns are the ""real"" and the ""ideal. We need a new ideology, he says, and a prophet with the ""imagination and courage to ask a question that will make intelligible a whole new universe,"" because ""muddling through"" is just not enough. Of special interest here are the critical reviews of recent economic theories, beginning with those of ""a Luther named Keynes"".