Wei has certainly put the cat among the pigeons. I am a little put out that
he has elicited such a fire storm of postings because it is keeping me away
from the work I want to do on Eliot and Stevens.
    But I do want to add my kudos to Bill Freind's. Wei has conducted
himself with grace and displayed impressive learning--as well as patience.
    The book I would have him read is POUND IN PURGATORY Illinois UP 1999
(actually 2000).
    I have already apologized for confusing Torrey and Tytell. I didn't mean
to endorse Torrey's book, but his account has to be considered if one is
taking a psychological tack.
    I also want to thank Carrol for his lucid posts on the Sophists. It is
an assessment I have encountered before, but never put with such brevity and
clarity. It is something of which we need to be reminded. Certainly Pound
thought he was carrying out the Sophists program--that he was educating a
public to the principles of good government and good economic policy. The
unfortunate aspect of that project was that he was incompetent in both
areas. In my recent book I detail his desperate efforts to get guidance from
any source at all, and his failure to take some very good advice when his
mentors Orage and Douglas told him to reject it.
    When I say that Pound was not an ideologue, I mean that his thought did
not follow a coherent set of principles as would that of an ideologue. I was
aware that people use the term, "ideologue" only in a negative way, but what
I take it to mean is not necessarily negative. St. Thomas Aquinas, Hegel,
Marx and Heidegger were all ideologues in that sense.  Ideologues, in other
words, are those who argue from a priori principles--especially with respect
to political theories. Like many others, I think that human behaviour is too
complex and variable for a priorism to have any chance of success in the
political sphere.
    Pound often tried to proceed as an ideologue, but he just didn't have
the horses to do it. His mind was a mare's nest of competing thoughts, bits
of information, touchstones, scraps of wisdom, etc. etc. A most fascinating
mare's nest in which one can find quotations to support almost any
imaginable position. One thing that I find consistent in his writing and
thought is the conviction that the cultural scene in which he found himself
was a mess and that it was his destiny to straighten it out. He firmly
believed--like the Sophists--that if the cultural scene were straightened
out, the political one would follow naturally. This might be seen as his
version of Confucian political thought--that if the emperor is pure and
clear headed, the empire will be so as well.
    Like the Confucian scholar, Pound saw himself as the bearer of wisdom.
That wisdom was handed down through the ages--for Confucius, I suppose it
was in the rites, for he was a priest, that is, one who performed the rites.
For Pound the wisdom was in poetry and the arts generally. Unfortunately, he
decided that the way to that wisdom was blocked. He knew it was blocked
because people didn't take his advice, follow his route, accept his
transmission of the wisdom as they naturally would on his understanding of
the world. He decided that bankers and Jews were conspiring to mislead the
public.
    Of course, all sorts of institutions and individuals ARE misleading the
public all of the time--some unwittingly, some deliberately, some malignly,
some benignly. Noam Chomsky is eloquent on this topic in MANUFACTURING
CONSENT and many other works. Pound was neither crazy nor stupid to think
that people were being misled. But he was spectacularly wrong in determining
who originated the lies, and whose lies were most malignant. And his
solutions--Social Credit and benelvolent dictatorship--are ones that are
erroneous and undesirable, respectively. That he thought Mussolini, Hitler,
and the Japanese oligarchy more benign than Churchill and Roosevelt--and he
did think so--is surely a spectacular error. But we should not forget that
many respected and moral individuals thought Stalin to be a benevolent ruler
preferable to those same Western leaders.
    Such an account requires that we accept a high degree of naivete in
Pound. The other options are evil intent and psychosis. The main line of
Pound scholarship since Kenner, of course, has been to deny that Pound
endorsed any evil. That position as not been tenable for a long time--though
the intensity of the response to Wei's postings and articles suggests that
many people still adhere to it.

Leon Surette
English Dept.
University of Western Ontario
London, Ont.
N6A 3K7