Author Interview: Jonathan Rauch on his reissued 'Kindly Inquisitors'

Jonathan Rauch

Twenty years after it was first published, a new, expanded edition of Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought is now available as an ebook, with an ink-and-paper edition coming out in March 2014.

Jonathan Rauch, the author of Kindly Inquisitors and other books (including Demosclerosis and his 2013 memoir, Denial: My 25 Years without a Soul), spoke to me recently following a panel at the Cato Institute, in which he discussed his book and what has happened with regard to free speech and censorship in the last two decades with Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and Brian Moulton of the Human Rights Campaign.

After the panel, Rauch explained what inspired him to write the book in the first place.

When, in the late 1980s, “Salman Rushdie wrote The Satanic Verses and received a fatwa (essentially a death sentence) from Ayatollah Khomeini,” he said, “I thought that the West did not know how to respond to that. It could defend the laws of free speech but it wasn't defending the ideas of free speech. People were saying things like, 'Well, a death sentence on Rushdie is certainly offensive and wrong but Rushdie himself was offensive to Muslims,' and so forth. And I realized that a lot of people didn't understand why we have this idea of letting people say offensive stuff.”

One of the concepts Rauch introduces in Kindly Inquisitors is what he calls “liberal science.”

He explained that “most discussions of free thought and speech start and end with the U.S Constitution” but he tries “to go a little deeper and look at society's method for producing knowledge and adjudicating disputes about fact, which is in some ways the most important thing we do” – for instance, disagreements about whether Christianity or Islam is “the right religion.”

Historically, he said, the method of “settling disputes like that was war.”

By contrast, “liberal science substitutes an open-ended, rule-based, social process in which everybody throws out ideas all the time and we subject them to criticism. We kill our hypotheses rather than each other. This turns out both to be spectacularly good at mobilizing intellectual talent to find and promote good ideas and spectacularly good at defusing what otherwise would be political, often violent, conflicts.”

Liberal science, he said, is the term he coined “for the whole intellectual network we have that seeks truth in Western liberal cultures.”

He compares it to two other major social institutions for “allocating resources and adjudicating social conflicts.”

In economics, he said, “market systems are in the business of allocating resources and they use open-ended rules of exchange to do that.”

In politics, he noted, “democracies are in the business of allocating coercive political power and they use the exchange of votes and compromise to do that.”

Parallel to those two systems, he added, “liberal science is in the business of adjudicating questions about who's right and wrong and they use the exchange of criticism.”

These three systems, Rauch explained, “all have in common that it shouldn't matter who you are. Anyone can participate, there's no special authority, and no one gets the final say. No one can stand outside the system and say, 'Here's the final result.'”

The result is “always subject to change. It's a big rolling social consensus.”

Since Kindly Inquisitors was first published in 1993, there has been a major, positive change in the intellectual environment, Rauch said.

“In the last twenty years there's been a retreat by active ideologues who favored censorship and speech controls,” he said. Those views have “been replaced with a more refined case that focuses more specifically on how minorities can be hurt when hate speech rises to a certain level of prevalence in society. It's called the 'hostile environment doctrine.'”

In preparing the new edition of his book, Rauch “decided to take a really hard look at that because I think it's right now the biggest and most serious challenge to people like me who advocate very robust freedom of speech.”

He wanted to find out, “from a minority point of view, which is better: a wide open system where people are free to say hateful things about me and often do, or a more controlled system where you've got some people in charge trying to protect me from that?”

His conclusion, “based on the history of the last twenty years for gay rights” is that “there's no contest. We're much better off as minorities when our speech and the other side's speech are [both] protected because we win those arguments, and we're worse off when that process is interfered with.”

The expanded edition of Kindly Inquisitors includes a new foreword by syndicated columnist George F. Will and a new afterword by Jonathan Rauch. It is available now in both Nook and Kindle formats and a print version will be released next year by the University of Chicago Press.

(An earlier version of this interview appeared on Examiner.com.  A complete audio recording is available as a podcast through Bearing Drift.)

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Author Interview: Grove City Political Scientist Paul Kengor on His Latest Book, 'DUPES'

Research in the archives of the Soviet Comintern led Grove City College political scientist Paul Kengor to write his most recent book, DUPES: How America's Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century.

At the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, Kengor autographed copies of DUPES and his previous book, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism. (See "Author Interview: Professor Paul Kengor on ‘The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism,'" published March 3.)  He also took a few minutes to talk to me about his research.

Collusion
Looking at the Communist International’s files on the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), Kengor said, “I got to the very first reel of microfiche and it was obvious” that “there was a very close collusion between the American Communist Party and the Soviet Communist Party,” corroborating the views held by anti-Communists throughout the twentieth century.

“In fact,” Kengor pointed out, “the very first document you get in the microfiche are the comrades in Chicago in September 1919 sending a letter to the comrades in Moscow at the Comintern, saying, basically, ‘We did it, we did it!’”

The document he cites is included in his book, and it celebrates the founding of the Soviet Union by the Communist Party and predicts that “America will be communist soon.” Those who wrote that letter, Kengor said, were “thrilled about this.”

As he continued in his research, he explained, he discovered “an eye opener.”

Cynical, shrewd, conniving
It showed that the Communist Party USA “very carefully, cynically, shrewdly, in a very conniving way, targeted American liberals and progressives for manipulation.”

Kengor was careful to note that “the liberals and progressives weren’t communists.”

They were, however, “also on the Left” and were therefore targeted in “a very deliberate campaign that went on for a long, long time and, I would argue, even to some extent takes place today, where the communists would lie to the liberals and progressives.”

The communists “wouldn’t tell them that they were communists. They very intentionally tried to mislead and manipulate them and with tremendous success, especially among academics (Columbia University, in particular), and also sadly among the religious left, the social-justice religious left,” Kengor said.


‘Biggest suckers of them all’
He added that, “as one veteran investigator of the American communist movement told me for this book, the religious left were the biggest suckers of them all, especially the mainline Protestant denominations.”

Groups like the National Council of Churches, he said, “fell over and over and over again for the wolves in sheep’s clothing.”

Kengor plans to do more research on the churches during the Cold War, and his next project will “probably be a follow up to DUPES -- but I need to people need to buy DUPES for me to have the incentive to follow it up.”

‘Sad state’ of reading
The author then took an opportunity to lament the current state of publishing and reading.

“It’s a very frustrating thing right now,” he said. “People are not buying books, so you’ll spend years researching all this information” but even enormous publicity for the book “doesn’t always translate into sales.”

The problem is, Kengor said, “if people aren’t going to read these things, you wonder if you should even bother writing them.”

Consequently, he is evaluating his next project based on how well DUPES does.

“I’m finding that to get the word out there,” he said, “to spread the word on what’s in the book, you have to do countless op-ed pieces, countless media interviews, countless radio interviews, [and] do Q&As because people aren’t buying books.”

Instead of buying books, he said, people are “watching TV and reading things off the internet.”

That, he concluded, is “a very sad state.”

(This article appeared in a slightly different form on Examiner.com on February 27, 2011.)

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'In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government'

This review appeared in the New York City Tribune on December 28, 1988.


R1CHARD SINCERE
Charles Murray’s Latest Common Sense Answers To Burning Questions

In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government, by Charles Murray, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988; 341 pp., $19.95.

Question: If money can’t buy happiness, what can? Answer: Read Charles Murray’s new book, In Pursuit. It may not provide the definitive answers to this question, but it certainly focuses the argument.

This foll\ow-up to Murray’s successful critique of Great Society social policy, Losing Ground, demonstrates that Charles Murray is probably the most lucid and readable writer on questions of social policy since Jane Jacobs. Eschewing a florid or dense academic style, In Pursuit flows from one topic to another with fluencv and ease, tying together strands of seemingly unrelated arguments to create a cohesive and comprehensible whole. Unlike so many “scholarly” texts on this and related topics, Murray makes accessible to any interested reader the issue of the role government may have in enabling individuals to pursue happiness. And since the questions he addresses are those that have badgered us since the beginning of speech -- What is the ultimate meaning of life? What is virtuous behavior? Where do we go from here? -- it seems few readers could be uninterested.

Like Jacobs, who in her books The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Cities and the Wealth of Nations wrote about urban planning and economics in such a common-sense fashion that most readers were moved to ask, Why didn’t I think of that?. Murray applies an interdisciplinary approach to problems of poverty and prosperity, dignity and dependence, and the proper role of government in formulating social policy. He draws on the best works of political philosophy (Aristotle to John Rawls), psychology (Maslow and Csikszentmihalyi). history (Macaulay to Himmelfarb), sociology (James Q. Wilson and Nathan Glazer) and economics (Adam Smith to Milton Friedman).

Although so much of what he has to say seems self-evident, the fact is that no one has said it up to now. It took the special effort of Charles Murray, who is unafraid of the demons of received wisdom and conventionality, to break down the barriers between these disciplines and to point out that simply giving money (or food stamps, or housing vouchers) to poor people will not break the cycle of poverty. Nor can it make people happy. Money is just one of a number of “enabling conditions” that allow people to put-sue happiness in their own fashions. The proper role of government, Murray argues, is to build the base for these conditions and then stand out of the way.

Murray draws on the work of psychologist Abraham Maslow for his categories of “enabling conditions for the pursuit of happiness which is to say, if all of them were met, it is difficult to see how a person could claim that he was prevented by external conditions from pursuing happiness.” These conditions are: material resources or physiological needs (food, water, shelter, sex), safety (predictability, order, protection from physical harm), intimacy (friendship, relations with spouse or children). self-respect or self esteem, and self-actualization or, in Murray’s terms, “enjoyment.”

In Murray’s argument, government is more likely to stand in the way after these enabling conditions are laid down, impeding the pursuit of happiness rather than facilitating it. The basic difficulty is that we deal with social problems in a fashion that either leads to no solution or to making the problem worse. He cites sociologist Peter Rossi, who has formulated the Iron Law of Evaluation and the Stainless Steel Law, which say, respectively, “The expected value of any net impact assessment of any large scale social program is zero,” and “The better designed the impact assessment of a social program, the more likely is the resulting estimate of net impact to be zero.” In other words, social planners are like dogs chasing their tails. They run and run and bark and bark, but they don’t get anywhere and they don’t catch anything.

Drawing examples from the real world -- the 55-mph speed limit and the task of attracting good teachers to public schools, for instance -- Murray demonstrates that conventional ways of thinking are wholly inadequate for the issues we confront. New questions must be asked, he says, questions that do not necessarily have quantifiable answers. Much of what comprises “happiness” and the “pursuit of happiness” cannot be expressed in terms of dollars, gallons, or percentiles. The metaphor for their work used by social planners should be changed from engineering to healing. As a result, Murray says, ‘the world would not be perfect; it would just be better.”

The essence of Murray’s message is that individuals alone can best determine their own destiny, can best decide how they shall pursue happiness. He emphasizes, however, that this message cannot easily be categorized as “conservative” or “liberal” or ‘libertarian.” Adherents to these political philosophies may read into Murray what they will, and sometimes, citing him, will end up proposing just what they have proposed for the past 30 years. The exciting thing is, though, that enough people -- politicians, social planners, economists, sociologists -- might read this book and awaken to the fact that they have been asking the wrong questions and that the future demands new questions, new answers and new thinking. New thinking -- could Charles Murray have written a prospectus for perestroika for U.S. social programs?



Richard Sincere is a research associate at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

'The Struggle' and "Dialogue in Williamsburg'

This review essay originally appeared in Volume 3, Number 4 of International Freedom Review (Summer 1990).

Book Review
NEGOTIATING IN SOUTH AFRICA:
NEW TIMES DEMAND NEW APPROACHES
The Struggle: A History of the African National Congress
by Heidi Holland
(New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1990, 256 pages, illus., cloth. $19.95)
and
Dialogue in Williamsburg: The Turning Point for South Africa?
edited with commentary by Michael Briand
(San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies Press, 1989, 165 pages, paperback, $10.95)
Reviewed by Richard E. Sincere, Jr.

The people who write books on South African issues, and their American publishers, must be quite pleased these days. Since the election of F.W. de Klerk as South Africa’s president in September 1989, political conditions in that country have been changing at a dramatic, if not literally breathtaking, pace. The legalization of the African National Congress and other banned anti-apartheid groups in February 1990, along with the long-awaited release from Victor Verster Prison of Nelson Mandela, brought South Africa back into an international spotlight it had successfully tried to avoid for several years.

Indeed, after the U.S. Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986. which imposed severe economic sanctions against South Africa, American interest in events there languished. Since Americans had the sense that Congress had already “done something,” there was no need to think about South Africa or apartheid, the system of separate development and racial discrimination, or to “do anything” else. Despite the best efforts of some American anti-apartheid groups, South African Issues played only a marginal role—if any at all—in the 1988 presidential campaign. College campuses became quiescent as demands for divestment In South Africa-related stocks slowed and then ceased. Ritualistic protest demonstrations in front of the South African embassy in Washington failed to get covered on the evening news, except on such occasions as Nelson Mandela’s birthday, when media interest could again be aroused.

All that has changed now. With negotiations beginning in earnest after a several-month period of hesitation and—to put it bluntly—grandstanding among all the parties involved, the legalization of the ANC is beginning to have its full impact. De Klerk’s National Party government has announced that it is willing to share power but unwilling to submit to majority rule. Nelson Mandela has been named Deputy President of the ANC for purposes of leading the negotiating team. With the parties around the table, the question becomes: What are they negotiating about?

It is in this context that two recent books become relevant and informative. One, Heidi Holland’s The Struggle, helps to answer the question of who (or what) is the ANC. The other, Michael Briand’s Dialogue at Williamsburg, provides a microcosmic insight into what the negotiating process itself is all about and what we might expect during the long bargaining period ahead.

Holland’s new history of the African National Congress was published in the same month as the ANC was legalized after nearly thirty years in exile and underground in South Africa, and as President F. W. de Klerk released ANC leader Nelson Mandela after twenty-seven years in prison.

The African National Congress has long been recognized as the pre-eminent voice of South Africa’s blacks in the struggle against apartheid, imposed by the National Party in 1948 and now being disowned by that same party.

However, the ANC is not the only voice. Many black South Africans vehemently disagree with the ANC’s policies and dislike its personalities. For instance, Dr. Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Chief Minister of KwaZulu and leader of the Inkatha organization, argues that the ANC is wrong in calling for economic sanctions against South Africa. Buthelezi shares this view with many blacks displaced from their jobs when American and other foreign companies left the country after the 1986 sanctions.

On the other side, the Pan-African Congress takes issue with the ANC because the ANC believes in a non-racial South Africa, a country where both whites and blacks have a home. The PAC believes only blacks should have political, civil, and economic rights in South Africa. This belief is shared with the Azanian People’s Organization and the followers of the late Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement.

Currently, the PAC—also unbanned by de Klerk in February 1990—is actively opposing negotiations, saying that whites should have no role in shaping the future South Africa. This is a curious mirror-image of the position taken by members of the (white) Conservative Party, whose MPs walked out of Parliament on the day negotiations began (May 2, 1990), protesting what they called an “act of treason” by President de Klerk.

Holland, a South African journalist, chronicles the birth and growth of the ANC In a readable, non-academic fashion. Her narrative could easily be understood by a high school student. This simplicity, however, might be considered a drawback to its rendering a realistic account at a desperate, intense moment in history.

In the early chapters especially, Holland’s history reads like a hagiography of Mandela and Walter Sisulu, two of the founders of the youth wing of the ANC In the 1940s and of the military wing (Umkhonto We Sizwe, or “Spear of the Nation”) in the early 1960s. Holland tells stories of Mandela that echo Parson Weems’ story of George Washington and the cherry tree: how ten-year-old Nelson saved pennies for his school fees, how teenage Nelson participated in a tribal puberty rite, or this description of Nelson the young man when he first arrived in Johannesburg:

Crowing roosters scuttled away to clear a path for Nelson in the hour before sunrise when, as a budding boxer, he jogged around the houses In his daily fitness routine.

Even the animals make way for this messianic leader! This type of presentation makes it difficult to accept Holland the author as Holland the unbiased journalist.

Still, she does offer some unexpected Insights. Though she does not draw the connection herself, there are some interesting parallels between the (white) Afrikaner Nationalists, who openly sympathized with the Nazis during World War II, and ANC activist Walter Sisulu. After war was declared in 1939, Sisulu “helped campaign to stop Africans from volunteering for the army. He became an admirer of the Japanese, hoping they might someday invade South Africa.”

Holland does not hide the fact that the ANC has been heavily influenced by Communist ideology. She traces Communist infiltration of the ANC to 1928, soon after the South African Communist Party led white workers in the Rand Rebellion under the banner, “Workers of the World, Unite and Fight for a White South Africa.” Seeing that this proletariat form of class struggle was bound to fail, the Communists joined forces with black activists. Ultimately this probably set back the cause of democracy in South Africa by several generations, giving paranoid Afrikaner nationalists an excuse to deny blacks their civil rights.

Holland does, however, suggest strongly that Mandela and his close friends—including current ANC president Oliver Tambo— fought the Communists. This is strange, because Mandela in the 1960s proclaimed himself a Marxist. Tambo, until very recently, embraced the assistance of the Kremlin, speaking glowingly of Communism as the cure for South Africa’s ills.

Now out of prison, however, Mandela seems a changed man— more moderate, more conciliatory, more dignified than the terrorist who was sent to prison In 1964. Tambo, incapacitated by ill-health, is out of the picture. Those who sat glued to their televisions on February 11, 1990—the day of Mandela’s long-awaited release—know that a new day has dawned in South Africa, and that Mandela’s cooperation with Nationalist leader F. W. de Klerk is key to a peaceful, permanent settlement to South Africa’s long struggle to create a democratic system for all its citizens.

Mandela’s commitment to peaceful change and the deeper understanding he may have regarding the issues involved was indicated by his remarks about guaranteeing the rights of Afrikaners in a Cape Town press conference on May 2, 1990. As if to demonstrate the sincerity of his pledge, he made his remarks in Afrlkaans rather than English or Xhosa. Perhaps out of the woodwork, operating as a political party alongside the Democrats, the Conservatives, Labour, and others, the ANC can find its place in South African society without recourse to violence.


At the Negotiating Table: Where Do We Go from Here?
Of course, as they say, the proof is in the pudding. On what experiences can South Africans draw for achieving compromise after so many years of severely dichotomized conflict?

One is the negotiating experiment conducted in Williamsburg, Virginia, by Michael Briand, president of the Center for Public Philosophy. Based on his experience at this meeting—which brought together South African thinkers, politicians, and activists—Briand believes that substantial constitutional change can occur in South Africa and that an end to the conflict there can be achieved through negotiation, not violence.

It was no accident that the meeting took place in Williamsburg, one of the cradles of American democracy. The earliest American politicians learned the art of compromise at Williamsburg and, when pressed against the wall, resolved to fight against tyranny. It was there that Patrick Henry proclaimed. “Give me liberty or give me death!” The spirit permeating Williamsburg had to be felt among the participants.

Briand’s concept of the gathering was a small-scale practice session for eventual constitutional discussions—indeed, even negotiations—that will require the participation of representatives of all competing groups in South Africa. This meeting itself was not designed to negotiate a settlement, nor to pass resolutions that would be trumpeted by the participants upon their return to South Africa. It was instead a low-key affair, and those who participated did so in an almost anonymous fashion: no names of participants were published in the book that resulted from the meeting, Dialogue In Williamsburg: The Turning Point for South Africa?.  However, those familiar with the South African political scene can probably guess the identities of some, if not most, of the participants quoted.

Twenty-seven South Africans participated at the meeting. They ranged from Conservatives wanting the country partitioned along racial lines, to liberal Afrikaners and English-speaking whites preferring a federal or unitary system with a universal franchise and free market economics, to black South Africans in accord with the African National Congress, calling for universal suffrage, multiracial representation in a single parliament, and nationalization of major industries.

In a paper circulated among participants before the meetings, Briand set out the conditions necessary for a successful constitutional settlement, not only in South Africa, but anywhere that seemingly irreconcilable conflict prevents peaceful disposition of political matters. The most important point to remember, Briand says, is that:

a simple majority cannot suffice to establish a society’s fundamental legal framework. At this level—the constitutional level—something approaching unanimity is both a theoretical and a practical requirement, at least In the first instance. Thus delegates to a constitutional convention might agree to adopt provisions of a new constitution by majority vote. But the legitimacy of the decision would depend on a prior unanimous agreement to relax the unanimity requirement.

Both inside South Africa and elsewhere, the purpose of negotiations is misunderstood. Briand writes:

Many people, South Africans not least of all, act as if a solution must be found before negotiations can begin. As one South African put it, ‘negotiate about what?’ The answer is, negotiate an end to the conflict, Sit down with the representatives of every point of view and every set of interests and try to identify proposals that would protect the most important interest of each constituency. The solution will emerge from this process of discussion and negotiation.

For some South Africans, negotiations cannot take place until certain conditions are met. For Instance, the National Party government has long insisted that the African National Congress must renounce violence before it can be admitted to the negotiating process. For its part, the ANC has called for the unbanning of certain organizations, the release of certain prisoners, and ending the prohibitions against certain forms of political activity.

The National Party representatives made clear their commitment to the concept of “power sharing,” which they argued:

is not tantamount to domination by the majority. It is not the takeover of South Africa by the ANC. Power sharing is the assurance that tone-party] domination In South Africa will not come about.

The Nationalists also see “power sharing” as a transitional phase: “Power sharing, as a basis for the future, must be exercised In such a manner as to allow that shared power eventually to grow into a proper democracy.”

Yet black nationalist groups such as the ANC fear that “power sharing” is a white ruse to hold onto power and to continue white domination over blacks. In the meantime, one black participant warned:

it is becoming riskier in black politics to remain reasonable. It is becoming more fashionable to be unreasonable. Those of us who try to be reasonable are under attack from both left and right. We are called puppets by the left. We are called revolutionaries and communists by the right.

A liberal English-speaking South African argued that:

South Africa is at the moment visionless. It is directionless. Politics is unpredictable for both Blacks and Whites. On both sides, people distrust the Government. The National Party has no credibility because it will not say clearly where it is going, and why. It tries to appease everyone by talking and acting vaguely or contradictorily.

The discussions also addressed the topic of individual rights versus group rights, and the shape a new constitution would take based upon the consensus on that issue. Dr. Briand comments:

Like Americans (who ought to know better). South Africans habitually confuse the ideas of liberalism and democracy. Liberalism concerns the degree of liberty that persons enjoy and the spheres of activity in which they are free to act (i.e., the scope of liberty). In other words, liberalism addresses the question of the relative size of the private and public realms. . . . ‘Democracy’ is not synonymous with the form of government that we in the Western political tradition have come to value so highly. Properly speaking, democracy is only one element in that tradition. The more fundamental element is liberalism.

Briand believes, as a result of the Williamsburg meeting, that “in the South African conflict, mutual understanding (which facilitation fosters) is still desperately needed.” South Africans of different backgrounds still have difficulty coming to terms with the different ways of looking at life and the different goals that their adversaries and fellow-countrymen have. He concludes that “prudence as well as justice requires that South Africans seriously contemplate—and contemplate soon—Initiating genuine negotiations for the purpose of reaching a fair and viable resolution of their conflict.” He draws from his experience of meeting South Africans of varied backgrounds and persuasions that “a fair and self-enforcing settlement is possible” if dialogue and negotiations can be initiated and sustained.

Now Briand’s predictions can be put to the test: Mandela and de Klerk are sitting across from each other at the same table, discussing the future shape of South African politics and society. A joint statement issued by the ANC and the government after the first round said the discussions were characterized by “openness and straightforwardness on both sides.” Mandela said he wanted to see the remaining obstacles to full negotiations removed “so that we can together move forward as rapidly as possible to end the inhuman system of apartheid.” For his part, de Klerk noted that “the vast majority of South Africans desire the negotiation process aimed at a new constitution to get started in all earnest,” adding that confrontation will get South Africans nowhere. Our joint destiny demands that all of us steer clear of it.”

To succeed, however, negotiations must include more parties than just the ANC and the National Party. The Conservatives, Inkatha, the PAC, churches and religious organizations, business groups, and labor unions must all be invited to take part. As Briand points out, a constitutional structure decided by anything short of consensus is almost guaranteed to fail. Neither South Africans nor Americans should grow complacent simply because Mandela and de Klerk are talking to each other.

Richard Sincere, a frequent contributor to the book review pages of International Freedom Review, is author of Sowing the Seeds of Free Enterprise: The Politics of U.S. Economic Aid in Africa (International Freedom FoundatIon, 1990) and The Politics of Sentiment: Churches and Foreign Investment In South Africa (Ethics and Public Pbllcy Center, 1987).