George Kennan: A Writing Life by Lee Congdon
(Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2008)

PAUL HALLANDER is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and an associate of the Davis Center at Harvard University. His most recent books are Political Violence: Belief, Behavior, and Legitimation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), which he edited, and The Only Super Power: Reflections on Strength, Weakness, and Anti-Americanism (Lexington, 2008).

This short, well-written, and informative
study is a welcome addition to
the growing literature on George Kennan
that includes several biographies. Congdon
focuses on Kennan as a writer, scholar, and
thinker rather than as a diplomat and foreign
policy expert. It is hardly surprising
that Kennan has been an inviting subject,
given his unusual career, complex personality,
and distinguished place in American
political and scholarly life. He was also an
intensely self-reflective man who left behind
a large volume of memoirs and autobiographical
writings that further stimulate
interest in his life, ideas, and worldview.

Kennan’s career began as a diplomat and
evolved into that of a historian and culture
critic. Numerous paradoxes marked his
personality, intellectual contributions, and
career. Through much of his life he was
both a public servant and critic of American
society and U.S. foreign policy, a major
influence shaping Cold War policies, and
subsequently, a critic of these policies; he
was both an upholder of political realism
(who distinguished national interest from
“moral crusades”) and a deeply religious
person imbued with high moral standards
derived from religious beliefs. An intensely
private and reclusive individual, he nonetheless
remained a public figure throughout
his long life—he died at age 101 in
2005—who was anxious to communicate
his ideas not only to policymakers and academics
but to the public at large. Arguably
the single major determinant of his attitudes
and his often contradictory character
was the unusual circumstance that he
was at once an insider and outsider. He
belonged to the foreign policy establishment
(in the earlier part of his life), was
in demand by elite academic institutions,
and was the occupant of a lifelong position
at the prestigious Institute for Advanced
Studies at Princeton—all the while feeling
isolated, ignored, and excluded from the
higher reaches of power. He was ambassador
to the Soviet Union under Stalin and
later to Yugoslavia, recipient of many honors,
and influential throughout his life, but
not as infl uential as he had wished to be.
He combined a self-effacing, modest persona
and high aspirations with a desire to
mold decisively American foreign policy
and especially American-Soviet relations.
He was a critic of both the political Establishment
and American policy-makers
and politicians, as well as those who challenged
and reviled the Establishment: the
young radicals of the 1960s. Many of his
critiques of American society, foreign policy,
and culture overlapped with those of
the radicals but—needless to say—sprang
from different sources. Both the Right and
the Left could make claims on his ideas
and positions: he appealed to the former as
an unwavering conservative and as an upholder
of traditional values and beliefs, of
moral rectitude, and of a certain Puritanism.
Those on the Left shared his rejection
of American messianism and imperialism,
his critiques of American capitalism and
commercialism, of the excesses of individualism,
and of the numerous manifestations
of inauthenticity in American life.
Those on the Left also shared his aversion
to modernity and his concern for the natural
environment.

Another key to understanding his seemingly
contradictory positions and attitudes
was his unusual blend of conservatism
and romanticism at odds with widely held
American values and beliefs. Kennan was
an unembarrassed elitist who entertained
serious doubts about the benefits of political
democracy, especially in the conduct of
foreign policy. He was generally unsympathetic
to policies fostering egalitarianism
because he believed (as Congdon puts
it) that “each new step in the direction of
equality would lead to greater restrictions
upon liberty. That was so because equality
had to be coerced…. Like other critics
of democracy…[he] viewed the passion for
equality as the product of envy and resentment.”
While one may readily agree to the
proposition regarding the inherent conflict
between equality and freedom (and even
between equality and justice, when meritocratic
criteria are sacrificed to the pursuit
of equality, as in the policies of reverse
discrimination also known as affirmative
action), I am inclined to believe that a misguided
idealism has been the major inspiration
of these attitudes and policies rather
than envy and resentment.

Especially distinctive of Kennan’s outlook
was a tragic view of human life and
human nature that set him apart from most
Americans and their ingrained beliefs, including
the enthusiastically optimistic
view of human nature and modernity. The
latter has been equated with the blessings
of progress and a sanguine view of the role
of reason in human affairs. By contrast, as
Congdon writes:

Kennan articulated a tragic sense of
life that mirrored that of Freud….
Man’s animal origins, according to
Kennan, set clear limits to his ability
to civilize himself…. To elevate
himself beyond animal instinct was a
constant struggle…. Nor, as Marxists
and other utopians believed, could
radical changes in economic and social
arrangements put an end to the
struggle.

Kennan also shared with Freud, as with
Calvin, the unfl inching recognition of the
“darker side of human nature.” He was
“particularly irked by those radical students
who evidenced ‘no appreciation of
the element of tragedy that unavoidably
constitutes the central component of man’s
predicament and no understanding for
the resulting limitations on the possibilities
of social and political achievement,’ ”
Given these convictions about a largely
immutable human nature, Kennan was
highly skeptical of the benefits of modernity
and its equation with moral progress.
This well-grounded skepticism contrasted
strikingly with his unrealistic, indeed, romantic
view of the benefits of traditional
society, the remnants of which he discovered
while in Soviet Russia. As Congdon
quotes Kennan:

It was a preindustrial life that I was
privileged here to observe: a life
in which people were doing things
with their hands, with animals and
with Nature, a life little touched by
any form of modernization…. How
much richer and more satisfying was
human existence, after all, when
there was not too much of the machine!

Kennan was also inclined to believe
that suffering and material deprivation
had an ennobling effect on human character
that he professed to discern among the
poor Russians who experienced “the kind
of suffering and struggles that Americans
could scarcely imagine, but who as a result…
had been purged ‘of so much that is
vulgar and inane in the softer civilizations.’
He thought that…their suffering had made
them particularly sensitive to the great and
perennial issues of human existence.” In all
probability these questionable assessments
originated in his animating religious beliefs.
Given such deeply held notions of human
nature and his skepticism about both the
fruits of Western-style modernity and politically
inspired social engineering (such as
he observed in the Soviet Union), Kennan
had little doubt that human beings needed
and craved order more than justice.

Kennan also had an excellent grasp of
the relationship between the personal and
political realm and defied conventional
liberal wisdom by asking “whether it was
really the misery of others that troubled”
the young radicals of the 1960s. He further
asked, “Was their outrage at injustices, real
and imagined, not ‘the expression of some
inner need, to which the objects have only
a casual relevance?’ If the war in Vietnam
should end and the draft be eliminated,
would these restless youths not remain on
the prowl for causes?” Raising such questions
was a breach of the widely held taboo
that forbade casting doubt on the unalloyed
idealism of young people in America
who protested the war and a wide range of
social inequities. Kennan’s knowledge of
history immunized him against such idealization
of youth (and of human nature
in general). He wrote on the young idealists
in nineteenth-century Russia, “It was
out of just such radical students, frustrated
in their efforts to help the Russian peasant
,that Lenin forged his highly disciplined
faction. It was in part from people of just
this desperate and confused state of mind
that Hitler recruited his supporters.”

Kennan’s violations of the left-liberal
canon also included the unembarrassed
questioning of the opening of our borders
“to all those…who wished to enter. To do so
would be to risk replicating in the United
States those conditions which obtained in
the lands from which the immigrants had
taken flight.” He believed that these new
immigrants were difficult to assimilate,
and that they contributed to the decline of
the cultural identity of the country. Correspondingly,
he was also critical of moral
and cultural relativism (that was among
the factors—in addition to the demand
for cheap labor—that stimulated a permissive
attitude towards immigration and the
resistance to assimilation). As Congdon
writes, Kennan “assumed that there were
better and worse ways of living, that the
notion that nothing was better or worse
‘but only different’ was false and pernicious,
and that the principle of hierarchy
was indispensable to the maintenance of
civilization.”

The only criticism this reviewer may
offer of this study concerns the numerous
digressions from the main subject of
the book, namely Kennan and his ideas.
Extended discussions of matters relating
to Prussia, Bismarck, the unification
of Germany, Hans Morgenthau’s views of
American foreign relations, the ideas of
Reinhold Niebuhr, and those of Edward
Gibbon could have been dispensed with
(especially in a short volume) as they only
tangentially relate to Kennan. On the other
hand, it could be argued (less convincingly)
that these digressions provide a broader
context for understanding and appreciating
Kennan’s ideas and positions. It seems
to this reviewer that digging deeper into
the sources of Kennan’s estrangement from
American society and a closer examination
of the relationship between his alienation
and his increasingly embittered critiques of
American foreign policy might have been
a better use of space. Notwithstanding such
reservations, readers will learn a great deal
from this lucid and well-documented volume
about the most important aspects of
Kennan’s career and thinking.