I want to thank Leon Surette for his kind and generous remarks regarding my
posts. Thanks also for giving me the name of your book.   I am in full
agreement with the thoughts put forward in the following paragraph, which
sums up very nicely both the value of certain aspects of Pound's approach,
and the essential problem:

>     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.

These expressions are very much to the point.  I endorse them fully, and
with no reservation.

Leon Surette also said,

>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.

Yes.  I agree with Carrol's analysis of the significance of the historical
role of the Sophists.  I wonder if he has read I.F. Stone's book, "The trial
of Socrates", which lays out some very similar ideas.  I assume he has, but
if not, I would highly recommend it to him.

As to the question of whether Pound was an ideologue, I understand much
better now your conception, if we are speaking from a purely intellectual
and philosophical viewpoint.  However, if we factor in emotion, I would
still maintain that Pound was constitutionally an ideologue (a person who
sticks to a world view inspite of the facts and the evidence).  In this the
broad sense: Marx, Hegel, and Aquinas, I would say were not really entirely
ideologues, inspite of the fact that ideologies have been erected upon or
reinforced by their written works.  But this is probably a source of a very
minor disagreement in our overall evalution of Pound, which need not be
elaborated here.

You conclude by saying,
>
>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.
>

So you are saying that Pound deliberately endorsed evil, knowing that it was
evil?  Maybe.  I am not sure what my reaction to that proposition would be.
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