From Philip Rahv's review of Deutscher's Trotsky biography in the NY
Review of Books:
One can nonetheless predict that The Prophet Outcast, like the two
volumes that preceded it, will be read by few and given little serious
attention. The reason for this is that Deutscher is an unrepentant
Marxist whose approach acts abrasively on the sensibilities of most
political intellectuals, some of our ex-Stalinists and ex-Trotskyites
still enjoy a privileged status: their expertise is drawn upon and they
are praised for their repudiation of Left-wing ideals. Having abandoned
not only the theory of socialism but even the very notion of its
desirability, they naturally have no use whatever for someone so
stubbornly against the Left’s collapse into vague middle-class
“liberalism” or an outright alignment with the status quo—if not worse.
From their point of view Deutscher has committed the unpardonable sin
of writing about Trotsky with admiration and not with the intention of
exposing and degrading him. Moreover, he has compounded his sin by
openly adopting the conviction, which Trotsky held all his life and
which caused him to lose a good many of his followers, that it is
necessary to distinguish in principle between the
“socialist-progressive” and “bureaucratic-retrograde” trends in the
Soviet Union. Ex-radicals find this position unacceptable. Thus both
Trotsky and his gifted biographer are consigned to the outer darkness.
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