Imperialism

Title: Imperialism (vii+183p)
Author: George Lichtheim
Publisher: Praeger
Year Published: 1971

George Lichtheim represents a vanishing species –a truly cultivated journalist, with an elegantly perceptive mind, whose forays into scholarship can put to rout professionals on their own ground.

Lichtheim trace imperialism’s diverse historical manifestations up through the present postwar period. En route, he provides a cogent explication of those concepts –nationalism, capitalism, liberalism, among others–that have often mistakenly been identified as integral to imperialism. With the deftness and lucidity that mark all his work, Lichtheim explores the writings on imperialism of such major thinkers as Marx, Lenin, and Luxemburg and ends with a scathing attack on the New Left, especially the Maoist. Condemning them for their naïveté and theoretical ineptitude, Lichtheim concludes “Marxism is too important to be left to the post-Leninist sects –tiny ferocious creatures devouring each other in a drop of water.”