Roots of Radicalism: Jews, Christians, and the New Left
Lichter, S. Robert & Rothman, Stanley
ROOTS OF RADICALISM: JEWS, CHRISTIANS, AND THE NEW LEFT Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter/ Oxford University Press/ $27.95 Erich Isaac and Rael Jean Isaac Stanley Rothman and S. Robert...
...One possibility is that the authors, having exposed the shoddiness of earlier research, set out to show that their rejection of that work is not based on their own political beliefs or on denial of the core psychoanalytical assumpr tions of earlier research, but is based rather on the way in which that research was carried out...
...Within the professoriate, ideals of scholarship have been abandoned by committed Marxists...
...The students, moreover, many of them from upper-middle-class backgrounds, knew the "right" answers even to less obvious questions...
...Indeed, Rothman and Lichter might have noted that the "quiet" on campuses conceals the subversion of the academic enterprise that has continued unchecked...
...Given existing trends, it is hard to fault their conclusion...
...But while Billington may be right that the secular faith in revolution may give rise to a new form of faith, it may not be a faith which informs and revalidates democracy...
...ROOTS OF RADICALISM: JEWS, CHRISTIANS, AND THE NEW LEFT Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter/ Oxford University Press/ $27.95 Erich Isaac and Rael Jean Isaac Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, authors of some of the most imaginative and important public-opinion studies undertaken in recent years, have made an ambitious effort to analyze the etiology of the student upheavals of the 1960s...
...From marginality we move to narcissism, from political socialization to Freudian stages of development...
...Even if this analysis described the psychodynamics of the subjects studied (James Billington in his study of the origins of revolutionary faith, Fire in the Minds of Men, observes that Freudian analysis seems "more appropriate for the period of the historian than for the historical period"), it would be of little benefit...
...Rigid rebels are prone to "ego diffusion," the attempt to override boundaries between self and other, rather than to maintain them...
...We believe that these young people exercised an influence far beyond their numbers, but our study does not enable us to explain why many young people, who did not differ from conservatives or liberals in any way that we could measure, chose a different political path...
...Since the New Left was not wholly Jewish even at the outset—roughly 30 percent of the initial group seem to have been Protestant—and became progressively less Jewish over time, the authors might have gone on to examine the social-psychological and historical factors that explain why Protestants and Catholics from the Midwest and South took over the leadership role and stamped quite a different character upon the radical student movement...
...The situation is worse in some other democratic countries, especially in West Germany to which Rothman and Lichter devote a chapter...
...Rael Jean Isaac is author, most recently, of Party and Politics in Israel {Longman...
...While this is not wholly the result of the influence of the New Left—the adversary culture has deep roots in the intellectual culture—that movement certainly had a major impact in making the college-educated resonate to the critique of the adversary culture...
...They note that the institu-tionalization of more radical attitudes on college campuses was facilitated by an influx of radical academics into social science and humanities departments and that this professoriate continues to nourish critical tendencies among college youth who are far more skeptical than they used to be about the traditional values of their society...
...Instead they embark on a new kind of study...
...The advantage of such a strategy is that the powerful psychoanalytical contingent in the social sciences, which would have reflexively closed ranks against a purely historical or cultural analysis, might be won over or at least neutralized, particularly if (c) only emerged once (a) and (b) were fully demonstrated...
...Rothman and Lichter do not do this...
...To be sure, not all students of revolutionary movements are as pessimistic as Rothman and Lichter...
...So bad has the situation become in some areas that Latin American Studies Association President Jorge Dominguez in the Summer 1982 issue of the Association's Newsletter referred to academic leftists who "are tolerated passively by other members who disagree with those views, but who are cowed into passivity and thus become irresponsible partners in the subversion of the standards of what claims to be a learned society...
...The New Left's influence has extended far beyond the university...
...Comparisons of radical and nonradi-cal youth were thus to a considerable extent unintentionally comparisons of Jewish and non-Jewish family styles...
...All we can say is that we found a larger number of authoritarians among the student radicals than we did in our comparison groups...
...Traditional and vital academic subjects have been discontinued while political or ideological operations in various guises and forms have been grafted onto the academy...
...Rothman and Lichter point out that while the Kohlberg scoring system was widely praised on the ground that moral reasoning scores were derived not from the substance of the individual's conclusions but from the structure of his moral argumentation, in fact what Kohlberg did was to transform ideological stances into psychological categories...
...They rightly point out that campuses have not been restored to what they were before "the revolution...
...These differ from Adorno's traditional authoritarian, who deflects his hidden hostilities onto outgroups, in that they unleash their anger directly against the powers that be, and take the side of the world's outgroups...
...One of the best studies of the original French revolutionaries points out that "the future revolutionaries were almost all docile pupils of Jesuits and Oratori-ans...
...The authors waver and the reader is at a loss to ascertain what Rothman and Lichter themselves think of the value of their psychoanalytic exercise as a tool in laying bare the roots of radicalism...
...The authors do a superb job in demolishing the series of studies that portrayed the radical students as "the best and the brightest" of their generation...
...But the questions designed to tap this trait asked students to agree or disagree with such statements as "I intend to dedicate myself to doing something about eliminating poverty and inequality...
...A brief but lucid history of the rise and decline of the student Left has been followed by an analysis of the defects in the conventional social-scientific wisdom on the New Left...
...Rothman and Lichter show that the instruments and research methods which produced the data were contaminated by the socio-political perspective of liberal social science...
...They are more equivocal when it comes to the usefulness of the techniques they employ in casting light on what they rightly consider the central problem...
...What is more, the exhaustive (and exhausting) studies undertaken by Rothman and Lichter do not even show that political radicals, whether Jewish or non-Jewish, are predominantly "inverse authoritarians...
...Billington, a student of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century radicalism, writes: I am . . . disposed to wonder if this secular creed [faith in revolution as the "sunrise of a perfect society"] . . . might not ultimately prove to be only a stage in the continuing metamorphosis of older forms of faith and to speculate that the belief in secular revolution which has legitimized so much authoritarianism in the twentieth century, might dialectically prefigure some rediscovery of religious evolution to revalidate democracy in the twenty-first...
...They have become bastions of left-liberal and radical social criticism...
...It would be encouraging to think so...
...We are on page 145 of a 400-page book...
...Student radicals were the ideological children—sometimes actually the biological offspring—of those who studied them...
...Up to this point the book has internal consistency...
...The definition of radicals as "humanitarian" seemed therefore to refer to a personality trait...
...Like most other French children of their time, they were fond of their mothers, of their native regions, and of mildly sentimental, apolitical literature...
...Rothman and Lichter are pessimistic...
...Ironically a student movement without a Jewish component was able to capitalize on the guilt felt by educators and public alike for the capitulation of the universities to the Nazis in the thirties to force the capitulation of their elders to a new set of totalitarian enemies of the academy...
...The student movement succeeded in moving the entire framework of political debate sharply to the left...
...The first are "rigid" rebels, whose "power strategy is predominantly sadistic rather than masochistic," who established "negative identities" during adolescence and are "driven by a highly punitive superego...
...Those who answered "with an affirmation of their desire to help the 'poor' and the 'weak' were scored for humanitarianism...
...The authors themselves reveal that personality traits do not correlate with political ideologies...
...We are told that the fantasy productions of radicals are oriented toward phallic-assertive modes of relating to their environment, and away from genital-integrative modalities that should characterize mature individuals...
...In closing, Rothman and Lichter insist that the "burden of proof lies heavily with the optimists among us...
...But is this what Rothman and Lichter have set out to do...
...And of course, even if all the political radicals had scored as inverse authoritarians on these projective tests, what the authors identify as the central problem would not have been addressed: "to determine why at one period, rather than another, a particular combination of...
...Why do we have these hundreds of pages that summarize the results of psychoanalytical tests administered to Jewish New Left, non-Jewish New Left, and traditional (non-New Left) subjects...
...The authors note: To be sure, most student radicals were not authoritarians, or, at least, their authoritarianism was not captured by our instruments...
...But as Rothman and Lichter rightly observe, the change in government has not produced a major change in underlying attitudes...
...Readers thus might bear in mind the observation of James Billington on an earlier breed of young radicals...
...The second, "protean" rebels, are ambivalent toward power and have narcissistic impatience with boundaries that fence the individual off from the full range of experience to which he feels himself entitled...
...The widely quoted work of Kenneth Keniston was based on interviews with only 14 people, with whom he admitted he strongly sympathized...
...There have been setbacks, notably the defeat of Jimmy Carter, who had installed New Left leaders at the head of some government bureaucracies and moved them into important positions in many more...
...The students were rarely asked about the rights of fascists, racists, or others, although it is in such cases that their tolerance for deviance would have been better tested...
...b) we will demonstrate for you the correct way to use these methods...
...Rothman and Lichter also point out that the studies of New Left activists have failed to emphasize an obvious fact: the students were mostly Jews...
...Flacks defined this attribute as "a concern with the plight of others in society...
...The authors' basic thesis in this part of the book is that left-wing radicals are "inverse authoritarians...
...The hitherto insufficiently noted role of Jews has been convincingly documented, with explanations for the phenomenon sought in the social and cultural experience of Jews, especially in Eastern Europe...
...Rothman and Lichter offer no evidence that those who scored on their tests as "inverse authoritarians" were more influential in the New Left than those who did not: this is simply an article of faith...
...As David Asman notes in a Heritage Foundation study, academic freedom is subverted into "academic terrorism...
...Virtually hundreds of studies, employing survey and psychological techniques, supposedly proved, as Rothman and Lichter note, "that radical students were democratic rather than authoritarian, humanitarian and humanistic rather than pragmatic and self-interested, and generally psychologically healthy and morally advanced...
...In short, the authors show that the so-called scientific studies that established the public's image of student radicals treated left-wing political beliefs as manifestations of psychological health...
...For example, belief in civil liberties was generally tested by asking about the rights of atheists, Communists, homosexuals, and others whose rights have been favored by the Left...
...A study by Richard Flacks, one of the many New'Left founders-turned-social-science-professors, characterized radical activists as "humanitarian...
...But if that is the case, if staunch defenders and determined subverters of the status quo can be produced as a result of the same set of psychological factors, of what use is this type of analysis...
...The authors are unsparing in their criticism of the work of such influential students of the New Left as Kenneth Keniston, Lawrence Kohl-berg, and Haan, Block, and Smith...
...The questionnaires were constructed in such a manner as to ascribe praiseworthy attributes to radical students almost by definition...
...They write: "The same set of personal conflicts can give rise to either a fervent espousal or rejection of the establishment...
...From their bureaucratic strongholds they had financed "Movement" organizations around the country...
...What the authors feel they have accomplished remains unclear...
...Belief in civil liberties did not hinder many New Leftists from interfering with the speech of people they disagreed with or disrupting the classes of professors whose opinions they disliked...
...As Rothman and Lichter point out, "The scale was so constructed that radicals would emerge as humanitarians by definition, given their overt ideological leanings...
...Inverse authoritarians, according to the authors, are of two types...
...Remarkably, these normally rigorous critics of untested assumptions clearly seem to accept psychoanalytic dogmas...
...Everett Ladd and Seymour Martin Lipset in a 1968 study found that 50 percent of social and clinical psychologists with children of college age reported that their children had participated in campus demonstrations...
...Lichter and Rothman note that even positive responses to questions on tolerance for right-wing groups do not seem to have reflected deep-seated commitments or to have been predictive of behavior...
...They treat historical marginality as the single most important factor in explaining the prominent role Jews have taken in radical movements, although they point out that once established Jewish radicalism is perpetuated by straightforward parental socialization...
...T]he fact is that most of the important early revolutionaries seem surprisingly free of unusual personal characteristics...
...The New Class, the middle-class elite which includes the symbol-wielding segment of society, not merely the professors but the salaried professionals, the communicators, much of the government bureaucracy, has become part of the adversary culture, so that, as Irving Kristol has pointed out, that class can virtually be defined in terms of a "distinctive set of anti-capitalist and I would argue anti-democratic ideals and cultural values...
...and (c) the method, however, is not useful in throwing light on the essential problem, which is why a particular radical movement emerged at a given historical moment...
...And while they have been devastating critics of the hidden and unproven assumptions in studies by social scientists, they proceed to wrap themselves, without apology, in psychoanalytical mythology...
...In attempting to explain why Jewish families produced the American New Left, the authors provide an informative survey of the factors leading the Old Left to exercise an enormous attraction for East European Jews in particular...
...Sometimes studies supposedly measuring personality actually Erich Isaac is Professor of Geography at the City College of New York...
...They note that at Harvard in 1971 NewJ.eftists shouted down a group of students who tried to organize a pro-Administration Vietnam policy teach-in, explaining the right to free speech included the right to shout people down...
...ideas moved from the margins of society to the center of political controversy.'' in the end we are left with a frustrating book...
...measured political opinions...
...a desire to help others— value on compassion and sympathy— desire to alleviate suffering...
...Rothman and Lichter might be arguing that (a) you have abused your own methods...
Vol. 16 • May 1983 • No. 5
