The Radical Renewal

...No new deal lies on the horizon...

...Thus it is never really clear what Birnbaum means to endorse by invoking feminism...

...Yet the projects of these writers are not of a piece...

...Birnbaum needs to sort out whether social theory, as one feature of a politics that will save us, should take radical democratic directions (as Lasch recommends) or whether it requires, instead, a beefed-up and ever more powerful state...

...Unlike most thinkers on the left, for whom Catholic social thought is anathema or merely beyond the range of serious consideration, Birnbaum treats-the tradition from Rerum novarum through Labor emexercens and Sollicitudo rei socialis with cautious respect...

...But why should social theory aim at "mastery...

...And, as well, he knows that what looks from one perspective like a "reversal" may, in fact, be a fruitful rethinking of how to engage and reap-propriate traditional values and verities rather than jettison them entirely...

...Most importantly, Lasch challenges the progressivist teleology of the Western left, including Marxism, and sees in the bureaucratized nation-state-any modern state-a danger to democracy, not an instrument for its completion...

...In other words, Birnbaum needs to move from "the politics of ideas," with its intensive focus on "who, whom," towards "ideas of politics" in contemporary America...

...To set one's sights in that direction-if radical renewal is at stake- seems incompatible with worries about centralized power, the growth in managerial, unaccountable elites, and all the rest...

...Yet in the paragraph that follows fast on the heels of the one in which degradation and cretinization are signaled, Birnbaum chastises "these critics" who lament the fact that modern populations increasingly refuse "to treat elites with deference and to take their orders.'' Who are we modern citizens, then...

...Thus "Hartz, Hofstadter, Diggins, Lears...

...Perhaps I'm packing more into the term than Birnbaum intends...

...My hunch is that Birnbaum himself wavers concerning this prospect, hence he deflects this discursive challenge...

...When Birnbaum notes that "If these feminists are to be believed, we will all have to speak with a different voice," he overassimilates Gilligan's perspective to the views of others...

...It might offer an alternative to capitalist consumerism and state socialism alike...

...For Lasch is on record in numerous essays and books as a skeptical, at times mordant, critic of many of the presumptions and political actions of feminists, anti-nuclearists, environmentalists-that is, of the movements and attitudes Birnbaum embraces...

...The plot thickens in light of Birnbaum's frequent laudatory references to the work of Christopher Lasch...

...There are just too many references in his text to "the degradation of public discourse, the cretinization of the public" (a most unhappy locution) to assure us that any sort of renewal is possible, let alone one deserving the sobriquet "radical...

...As a bibliographical survey it is helpful and Birnbaum obliges by compressing much of the text into a twenty-page "Bibliographical Note...

...The Radical Renewal is additionally vexing because Birnbaum frequently attaches no names to modes of thought he chides or, alternatively, he overstocks his pages with a series of names-often last names-of thinkers whose work he finds helpful or exemplary...

...We have experienced, in other terms, too many reversals...

...Here Birnbaum misses a real opportunity to enlarge the scope of academic and political debate...

...He seeks a "new New Deal...

...Ehrenreich has been scathing in her indictment of feminists who elaborate women's difference...

...A cretin-ized public...

...All the more reason, then, for him to tell us what this "mastery" entails and why social thought and political action should aim at it...

...The reason is not simply the lack of political mobilization, right-wing reaction, or "false-consciousness," but a growing awareness on the part of social critics of the limits to state-engineered, liberal reform...

...Jean Bethke Elshtain Norman Birnbaum is a witty, erudite thinker and observer...

...Feminism gets compressed into the names Carol Gilligan and Barbara Ehren-reich, with Ann Douglas and Jean Baker Miller treated glancingly...

...Although we are treated to a number of sparkling Birnbaumian bons-mots, the book is repetitious and has about it an air of incom-pletion...

...Birnbaum offers up a smorgasbord of contemporary social thought and thinkers rather than a sustained, in-depth treatment...

...But The Radical Renewal is a frustrating book...

...But, as a man wise to the tumult and tragedy of the twentieth century, Birnbaum recognizes that the future is never open to any and all forms of experimentation...

...I, for one, hope he undertakes this task...

...He writes: "We are wiser now, and have learned that the past is a matter of interpretation and the future open: historically, we do not put our trust in progressive sequences of a philosophically or politically irresistible kind...

...Birnbaum insists, rightly, that a "social theory'' is not and can never be "an articulated set of propositions subject to verification or falsification by experiments ." But his alternative is problematic...

...Or savvy unmaskers of the machinations of self-interested elites...

...Birnbaum comes close to acknowledging this conundrum in a poignant passage...

...I wish he had turned his analytic skills to an elaboration of this alternative - mode of social thought...

...Mastering" experience, whether as social thought or political action is an imperative many of our most important contemporary social critics, including several Birnbaum cites with approval, regard as one of the most problematic fruits of post-Enlightenment rationalizing hubris...

...As an admirer of Birnbaum's presence and spirit, I hope he will move from this prolepsis to an in-depth exegesis of that mode of social thought he believes offers the best prospect for a decent future...

...Yet Bimbaum's own point of political yearning flows from the New Deal-heady days of social experimentation and reform that canalized multiple political energies in and through a "positive State...

...He deems social theory a product of a group reflection-itself a notion that needs parsing-and then goes on to insist that such theorizing is "not a record of experience alone but an effort to master it...

...The academic reader will certainly recognize Hartz and Hofstadter but Diggins and Lears (and they are just two in a very large, unwieldy company) will not immediately be recognized by nonspecial-ists...

...That, finally, is the heart of whether there is to be renewal and, if so, what sort...