The Intellectual in Mass Society (The New Radicalism in America, by Christopher Lasch)
Thernstrom, Stephan
THE NEW RADICALISM IN AMERICA, 1889-1963; THE INTELLECTUAL AS A SOCIAL TYPE, by Christopher Lasch. Alfred A. Knopf. 349 pp. $6.95. This is an exciting book—though not at all the book its...
...followers of DISSENT may find these sections harsh, perhaps unfair, but they seem close to the bone to me...
...they entered the mainstream of Ameri can historical writing via Hofstadter's The Age of Reform (1955...
...The characters who appear on Lasch's stage are driven as much by their own inner conflicts as by the injustices "out there" in the world, and I suspect that some of us on the left will find it all too easy to dismiss Lasch as a parlor psychoanalyst...
...a long, brilliant concluding chapter which neatly dissects the cold war liberalism of Niebuhr, Sidney Hook and Schlesinger, Jr., and the intellectual establishment of the fifties and sixties...
...Lasch uses "liberalism" and "radicalism" interchangeably, on the curious grounds that "in the heyday of the new radicalism, men of advanced social opinions had used the terms 'socialism,' 'radicalism,' 'liberalism,' and 'progressivism' with a certain disregard of their various shades of meaning...
...Alfred A. Knopf...
...their "confusion of politics and culture...
...The experience of McCarthyism generated in Hofstadter and many another American intellectual a new Stevensonian complacency about our legal and constitutional heritage, a deep fear of "working class authoritarianism," and a Freudian suspicion of the motives of reformers who challenged the established order and excited the unruly passions of The Mob...
...After his pungent, truly radical reappraisal of American reform in The American Political Tradition (1948), Hofstadter shifted his ground in a highly symptomatic fashion...
...Let us hope it succeeds...
...I would concede, therefore, Mike Harrington's point that the book is disappointingly narrow and hermetic, and William Phillips' complaint that it is confused...
...Lasch is a former student of Hofstadter's at Columbia, and he writes in a very similar vein, but from a quite different perspective, a perspective which suggests how quickly the younger generation has left behind "the cult of ideology...
...To these origins Lasch traces a number of the defining traits various of his subjects display: their eager identification with outcast groups, be they workers, immigrants, Negroes, or Indians...
...For a careful investigation of the social context which shaped these movements Lasch has substituted deductions from the theory of mass society...
...a probing but surpris ingly appreciative portrait of Lincoln Steffens...
...This led to "a cultural crisis," a revolt against "that combination of patriarchal authority and the sentimental veneration of women which is the essence of the genteel tradition...
...Lasch makes no systematic attempt to isolate clusters of these traits, to define subtypes of the species "radical," and to explain these variations in terms of his general thesis...
...In the opening decades of the twentieth century, Lasch argues, the fragmentation of American society increasingly set the intellectuals apart from the old middle class from which most of them sprung, and gave them a sense of themselves as a distinct social group...
...He is interested not in radicalism as a tradition of disciplined, ideological politics, but rather in a complex of ideas and emotions common to a great many men and women "of advanced social opinions" in twentieth century America, ideas and emotions which can only loosely be described as "radical...
...a biting analysis of the ambivalence of The New Republic over American entry into World War I, with the development of a liberal "cult of the hard-boiled" and the debasement of pragmatism into a political religion...
...Lasch's selection of presumably "archetypal" characters is very much open to challenge, given his intention to generalize about "American radicalism," and there is the further difficulty that not all of the men and women on display here embody all of these traits...
...Lasch includes as well profiles of Dwight Macdonald and Norman Mailer which are intended to illuminate the difficulties of the radical in our era...
...some shrewd observations on the pre-World War I feminist movement...
...Nor does Lasch's interest in "the intellectual as a social type" lead him to any scrutiny of the relationship between the intellectuals and the rank and file in the history of American social protest—in the Socialist party in the age of Debs, in the IWW, in the industrial unions of the thirties...
...fully two thirds of The New Radicalism in America deals with the period before 1920...
...Lasch is one of the first American historians to explicitly employ the concept of "mass society," relating the struggles of his characters to the growing fragmentation of the society in which they lived, tracing their revulsion against "the tendency of the mass society to break down into its component parts, each having its own autonomous culture and maintaining only the most tenuous connections with the general life of the society—which as a consequence has almost ceased to exist...
...Despite its title, the book doesn't begin to fulfill this aim...
...These prejudices were given the sanction of academic sociology in Daniel Bell's The New American Right (1955...
...If Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., for instance, hungers for political influence, he can hardly be accused of feeling any deep kinship with oppressed minorities...
...A good deal, I think...
...And the subtitle, "the intellectual as a social type," suggests a sociological concern with such problems as that of generalizing from particular intellectuals to the class, which is in fact conspicuously absent...
...their excessive politicizing of cultural issues and simultaneous propounding of nonpolitical solutions for essentially political problems...
...The New Radicalism should be read as a collection of dazzling fragments, superbly-written vignettes of people we know or should know: a sensitive account of what brought Jane Addams to the slums of Chicago...
...Nor is the "1889-1963" of the title, intended perhaps as a concession to the appetite of the reading public for contemporary subjects, a fair index of the book's contents...
...two superb chapters on Randolph Bourne and Mabel Dodge Luhan as prophets of "the experimental life...
...Lasch gives us is a gallery of sparkling portraits of a host of discontented Americans, woven together by sometimes disjointed, sometimes misleading general observations about the larger social setting in which they operated...
...This is not an utterly despairing book—some of Lasch's keenest remarks are aimed at fatalists of the left and right alike—but it is a profoundly critical one...
...What Mr...
...The New Radicalism" is a phrase woefully ill-suited to characterize so diverse and bizarre a cast of characters as Jane Addams, Randolph Bourne, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Colonel Edward M. House, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Norman Mailer...
...There are places where the author's zeal to penetrate the psyches of his subjects and to generalize their neuroses does seem excessive, especially in Chapter 7, "Lincoln Colcord and Colonel House: Dreams of Terror and Utopia," where a minor insight is made the occasion of a lengthy, pretentious clinical exercise...
...But it is noteworthy that The New Radicalism displays none of the conservative bias which pervaded Richard Hofstadter's use of much the same method to reexamine Populism, Progressivism and the New Deal...
...What, then, remains to rescue it...
...If this yields far from a systematic analysis either of "the emergence of the intellectual as a social type" or of what most of us think of as "American radicalism," it does nonetheless provide a fascinating and illuminating survey of some of the dilemmas of the intellectual in a mass society...
...their longing to be politically "relevant," whatever the price...
...Lasch's harsh appraisal of radical intellectuals is intended not to impugn or stifle radical social criticism, but to stimulate more effective social criticism...
...This is an exciting book—though not at all the book its title seems to promise...
...If he casts a cold eye on the failings of the men and women with whom he deals, he casts a still colder eye on the society they struggled to change...
Vol. 13 • January 1966 • No. 1
