Pfaff versus Wills

Pfaff versus Wills

William Pfaff, dans sa chronique du 19 janvier, (http://www.williampfaff.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=462) brise quelques lances avec «the imposingly versatile Garry Wills» à propos de la perspective à adopter pour faire l'histoire de la “présidence impériale” américaine.

[…] «…Garry Wills, Northwestern University historian, political polemicist, sometime philosopher, theologian, and church historian, has just published a book inspired by liberal disappointment with President Barack Obama, blaming his faults as well as other American presidential disorders on the atom bomb.

»He argues that possession of the bomb, product of an enormous and secret scientific undertaking, the Manhattan Project, launched by Franklin D. Roosevelt, has ever since given American presidents an intoxicating degree of unchecked personal power, so that there is “no constitutional check on his actions...[which amounts to] a violent break in our whole governmental system.”»

Je n'ai pas lu Garry Wills , mais il semble bien que la querelle porte aussi sur la compréhension du technologisme. Pfaff ne nie pas que des technologies puissent avoir un impact historique déterminant, il refuse une saisie mécanique et pauvre de cet impact. Il semble voir dans cette pauvreté mécanique une sorte de ”technologisme historique” (comme on disait matérialisme historique; telle technologie, telle histoire.) et non une histoire du technologisme (qui reste à faire.).

«It is impossible to see these all as the responsibility of individual presidents, intoxicated by their possession of nuclear power. I see it as developing out of an American millenarianism, kept in check in the past by isolationism and hostility towards imperial Europe, which during the World War underwent a vainglorious globalization under Woodrow Wilson – who believed, literally, that God had entrusted both him and the American nation with missions of peaceful global reform.

»That was a half-century before the nuclear bomb. Rather than inspiring war, it inspired the League of Nations, which the U.S. Senate refused to join, and later the UN: not the military-industrial state.

»Franklin Roosevelt was committed to the Wilsonian mission well before Albert Einstein sent him the fateful letter in which Einstein warned that a nuclear bomb might be feasible, and that German physicists might be working to construct one.

»That – and Bolshevism, a program of secular utopianism based on sectarian power and ambition, which provoked the Cold War that ensued – are the sources of America’s imperial presidency. And however Barack Obama may eventually be judged, he is today anything but an imperial president.»

L'histoire du technologisme a ses liens avec celle-ci, elle n'a pas de cause technique.

“GEO”