REVIEWS
Mitzman, Arthur & Lekachman, Robert & Wrong, Dennis
AMERICAN POWER AND THE NEW MANDARINS, by Noam Chomsky. New York: Pantheon Books. 404 pp. $7.95. NoAM CHOMSKY dedicates these essays "to the brave young men who refuse to serve in a...
...The temper of the country and the quality of Presidential leadership—related phenomena—made it quite certain from the outset that the unconditional war against poverty would be a sham...
...To understand how the United States became involved in Vietnam surely requires an analysis of the Cold War and of the ideological assumptions developing out of it—an account of how the effort to resist Soviet expansionism in Europe was extended to Asia with the victory of the Chinese Communists and the outbreak of the Korean war, and subsequently became worldwide in scope when the Communist powers gave material or verbal support to insurgent movements in the Third World...
...What condemned to ineffectiveness the War on Poverty at least as much as Vietnam was the fiscal strategy chosen by John F. Kennedy and extended by Lyndon Johnson...
...and, most tedious query of all, whether there is a genuine culture of poverty as few economists and many other social scientists believe...
...But why should he expect us to believe that only the cameralist position was sullied by identification with extra-academic interests...
...His sincerity and moral earnestness are altogether convincing...
...History need not always be written from the point of view of the winners, but it does tend to concentrate on the main event, and the anarchists were the losing side on the losing side of the war in Spain...
...Chomsky is probably thinking of manifest destiny at the turn of the century, for later in the book he attacks in some detail American political imperialism in the Philippines and Latin America and commercial imperialism in China...
...Chomsky first attracted attention as a political figure with his 1966 essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals," which is included in the present collection...
...whether they believe the same or different things from the middle class...
...If it did no more, the War on Poverty exposed the poverty of social science...
...The particular context in which actually or potentially elitist doctrines are put forward then becomes all-important...
...Nor has involvement in Vietnam ever had much appeal to popular jingoist sentiment, as opposed to actions in the Caribbean and along the Canadian and Mexican borders throughout American history...
...This is of course no more than a reasonable liberal program...
...Those who wished like Cloward and Ohlin to revise the opportunity structure were accorded their chance in projects like New York City's Lower East Side Mobilization for Youth...
...Let us first examine his indictment of American power, for while the second accusation receives greater attention in the book and has won him prominence as a kind of Savonarola of the academic world, it is relevant only if the first charge is sustained...
...Sombart wrote extensively in the nineties for the journals of Heinrich Braun, a moderate socialist, and his closest friend before 1900 was the Swiss socialist Otto Lang...
...This dedication reflects the tone and mood of the entire book, which is a record of Chomsky's increasingly outraged response to the Vietnam war...
...13.50...
...Lionel Abel is entirely justified in complaining of Chomsky's "obstinate refusal to draw any consequences from the fact of Communist power...
...On the one hand, there wasthe charge that the factory system and economic rationalization in general posed a threatto the individual spirit in search of self-expression...
...Those who were concerned primarily with thespiritual dangers inherent in industrial organization faced more difficult problems...
...Still, basic questions go unanswered and are probably unanswerable within his framework...
...The United States has no important material interests there...
...They tell tales of promises broken, resources denied, and Presidential favor withheld...
...They "had no roots in the capitalist middle class—felt no commitment to proletarian socialism...
...A century earlier Karl Marx had, right or wrong, promulgated a theory of poverty far more powerful than anything currently available...
...No doubt the most appropriate method of scholarship in a large number of fields is to measure a detailed, often technical, analysis of a particular case against the implications of an established generalization and to conclude that the generalization is either valid or needs qualification or more rigorous formulation if it is still to stand...
...In the context of this conflict, similar to the one that haunts our own increasingly bureaucratized society and that is the source of so much of our student unrest, we can best understand the concern with Nietzsche and Marx—otherwise neglected within the German academy—by those who inherited their critical role: Tonnes, Sombart, Weber, and Simmel...
...Those who like Gregory Farrell in Trenton emphasized jobs and training over structural change were not unduly pestered when maximum feasible participation of their poor somewhat flagged...
...The war in Vietnam was of course a major complication but not in itself an adequate explanation of the preferences of a conservative country led by conservative politicians...
...In either case comparison with Nazi Germany would indeed be more appropriate than with the more "rational" imperialisms of the past...
...But when Left liberals and radicals actually working on poverty programs converted maximum feasible participation into assaults by the poor and their OEO allies upon local officials and agencies, they were predictably brought up short by Presidential wrath, admonitions by the Bureau of the Budget to deemphasize community action programs, and outcries from such puissant big-city mayors as Richard Daley and Sam Yorty...
...Since much of what Chomsky says is eloquent and forceful, he succeeds in drawing blood from many of his adversaries, and since his advice to the antiwar movement is frequently wise (he advised war resisters in 1967 to avoid any semblance of violence), one is tempted to overlook his errors and rhetorical excesses and simply to praise the book as a record of the partially successful campaign against the war...
...Apparently it's hard to tell the elitists without a scorecard...
...Still, if we accept Ringer's depiction of the bureaucratic identification of the orthodox, it is only reasonable to assume some kind of tie between the modernists and the middle- and working-class opposition to the bureaucratic empire...
...For Chomsky's primary reason for discussing Spain is to expose "the elitist bias that dominates the liberal-Communist interpretation of the Civil war," although he wishes also to place on record his general sympathy with anarchism and a non-Leninist populist Marxism...
...As a case in point, Chomsky turns to the treatment by American historians of the Spanish Civil War, calling attention to their neglect of the anarchist revolt in Catalonia and their acceptance of the Stalinist version of how that revolt was suppressed by the Republican government...
...and the two are not identical...
...In their interest in free and spontaneous association, their belief that the state bureaucracy was the nemesis, not the savior of the community, the sociologists merely "represented the Humboldtian side of the tension between intellectuals and bureaucrats which never entirely disappeared from mandarin consciousness...
...Chomsky's view is not, as some critics of American policy would have it, that out of a misguided sense of mission the United States has assumed the role of world policeman and overplayed it...
...In a certain sense, we young writers and teachers are the most advanced posts of the greatproletarian army, and the most suspicious onesto the enemy...
...needs "denazification" but quickly adds, "the question is a debatable one" on which "reasonable people may differ...
...ONE MIGHT ASSUME that, if the orthodox Mandarins espoused cameralism mainly because they identified with the bureaucratic social order of Imperial Germany, the modernists, who opposed cameralism in the name of some kind of political and social pluralism, might have identified to a degree with the social forces that stood to gain by their position...
...Most Americans displayed little or no inclination to endorse Sundquist's liberal agenda...
...During the brief heyday of the Great Society, circa 1964-65, Congress voted at least three dollars BOOKS of tax relief (largely for the benefit of middleand upper-income recipients) for every additional dollar of expenditure upon poverty, education, health, housing, manpower training, and community action...
...Thinking of Marx and ofBertolt Brecht, of Nietzsche and of Freud, one begins to suspect that idealism has always produced its own enemies...
...A useful feature of the first volume is an extensive summary by Peter Rossi of the current status of research in the causes of poverty, the characteristics of the poor, and the impact of programs designed to diminish poverty...
...In Ringer's view, the mandarins can become and remain a functional ruling classonly during a particular phase in the materialdevelopment of their country...
...Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press...
...Could it be that the language of "idealism" had something to do with all this...
...But, without necessarily endorsing Bell's view, one should at least note that his technocratic arguments presuppose the existence of a functioning democracy which imposes definite constraints on the managerial aspirations of intellectuals and scientists— in complete contrast to the revolutionary messianism of "discontented intellectuals" that Machajski prophetically indicted as early as 1899...
...Before 1900 Simmel published half of his articles in nonscholarly journals...
...yet the reverse is true...
...became arrogant and humorless until their moralisticrhetoric was impenetrable...
...In tacit recognition of these contradictions, Chomsky broadens his attack on the intellectuals, charging them with a long-standing "elitist" bias revealed in their Stalinist sympathies in the 1930s as fully as in their more recent affiliations with American power and their attraction to a technocratic world view...
...But without the lapsing of the antisocialist laws, Bismarck's dismissal, the transient desire of the young Wilhelm II to open a new era in German social relations, and the consequent emergence of socialist reformism—without all these, Sombart's outspokenly prosocialist stand, the emergence of Naumann's group as an effort to link moderate socialists and liberals, Simmel's leftliberal interests, in general the spasm of hope that then passed through the radical constituency in Germany would seem improbable...
...256 pp...
...Max Weber, for example, believed that paternalism implied a degree of bureaucratization thatposed a far more serious threat to the vitalityof modem social life than capitalism itself...
...Since Chomsky is not primarily concerned to argue that Vietnam violates the uncertain canons of international law, his epithet contributes as little to understanding the origins and nature of the war as Daily News fulminations against the "criminal gang in the Kremlin" contribute to the understanding of Soviet Communism...
...the substance was the conflict between the old Adam in us all—spontaneity, art, play, and emotion—and Prussian bureaucratic absolutism...
...The myth of Wilsonian selfdetermination...
...The mandarins (Ringer has borrowed the term from Max Weber's description of the Chinese literati) were the ideological voice of the university-trained, largely bureaucratic elite, whose mingled feudal and bourgeois status goes back to the 18th century...
...IF RINGER'S MANDARIN HYPOTHESIS were correct, one would expect Simmel, Weber, and Sombart, after their phase of radical engagement, to be more attached to the academy and its traditions than before...
...He is partly to blame for the time those of us who teach social science find ourselves forced to spend convincing suspicious students that we have never done classified research for the Pentagon nor been on the CIA payroll...
...Weber and Sombart were also on the margins of the academy before World War I. Weber, through a combination of overwork and guilt about aspects of his personal life, suffered a complete nervous collapse between 1897 and 1903 and could not accept teaching responsibilities until 1918...
...The extensive documentation he appends to his longer essays has impressed several reviewers as a considerable scholarly achievement, even though it is employed not to support a new analysis of American or world politics but merely to buttress the passionate moral accusations that are the substance of all Chomsky's political writings: that the United States is hypocritical and has in the past as well as the present pursued policies in Asia belying the lofty goals proclaimed by its official spokesmen, that some American scholars have justified the horrors of the Vietnam war in euphemistic terms, and that liberal intellectuals have an "elitist" outlook that makes them willing servants of the powerful...
...Again, Ringer's portrayal of the basic positions in the modernist-orthodox quarrel is excellent...
...As either a traditionally liberal or an unexpectedly radical enterprise, the War on Poverty was a failure...
...That these hopes were then strangled with BOOKS the conservative ascendancy of the mid-nineties does much to explain why the political engagement of our three sociologists gave way to profound pessimism after 1900...
...The German sociologists of the fin-dc-siècle, the principle group of mod BOOKS ernists in the social sciences, though they echoed some of the concerns of romantic political theory, were themselves simon-pure mandarins...
...Politically, it is the gradual transformation ofan essentially feudal state into a heavily bureaucratic monarchy which favors the developmentof a strong and self-conscious mandarin elite...
...but several of his preferred examples of new mandarins, notably Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell, are, whatever their limitations, vigorous critics rather than partisans of the "behavioral persuasion" in social science...
...But take his characterization of Vietnam as a "criminal war," a designation he uses not only in the dedication but throughout the book...
...The first volume consists mostly of papers written by the academic warriors, among them Herbert Gans, Oscar Lewis, Lee Rainwater, Harold Watts, and Stephan Thernstrom...
...When in the post-Nixon era the times become more propitious for social change, one can only hope that no new attempt will be made to substitute muddled social science for difficult social choices...
...From a radical perspective, still more crippling were the political inadequacies of the War on Poverty...
...NoAM CHOMSKY dedicates these essays "to the brave young men who refuse to serve in a criminal war...
...One gathers not, for, while he expresses admiration for A. J. Muste's "revolutionary pacifism" and is properly appalled by the misery and destruction wrought by modern weapons, he is sceptical that unilateral pacifism as an absolute moral commitment is defensible in all historical situations...
...Chomsky attributes the derelictions of the academic intelligentsia to their pragmatic, technicist, and behaviorist conception of man and society, which in its claim to specialized expertise both provides a rationalization for the power aspirations of intellectuals as an elite and minimizes the importance of reflection on moral values...
...The problem is still to accountfor the peculiarly sharp antagonism between thecritic and the conventional academic...
...Presumably the objectives would themselves emerge from the increasingly frantic activity of the poverty officials...
...There was expert support available for the asking for almost any position or program which a given politician might find it convenient to promote...
...But this case-study method hardly seems to be the best way in which to make a political argument based on historical events, for any set of particulars we refer to are likely to be interconnected and the universe from which we select our particulars is a "closed" one rather than an open one containing a potentially almost infinite number of possible cases...
...There is a time and place for the expression of moral indignation and a time and place for analysis of our situation...
...The financial limitations of the program were never relaxed...
...Dwelling on these matters might suggest that American policy was no more than "criminally mistaken" rather than "merely criminal," or even that there was a partial inadvertence in our Vietnam involvement as argued by Chomsky's bete noire, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...Faced with their self-assurance, the would-be challenger wasforced into the technique of radical debunking...
...nor do I believe that our policy-makers are as plainly guilty of evil intentions and bad faith as they would have to be to deserve Chomsky's characterization of them as "criminal," "morally degenerate," "depraved," and the like...
...The raised voices of Daley and Yorty echoed far more loudly down the corridors of power in Washington than the sounds of poor people maximally participating in a thousand community action programs...
...Still wedon't all believe in miracles, but in a slow education and transformation, even of minds...
...Thus Chomsky cleverly cites Daniel Bell's support of the Machajski theory that modem revolutions are made by intellectuals for their own ends in the name of the masses, and then chides Bell for ignoring this insight when he approvingly assigns a leadership role to the technical intelligentsia in "postindustrial society...
...He passes a sweeping moral judgment or makes a far-reaching generalization and then, without further elaboration or qualification, plunges into compiling a massive body of evidence on some highly specific event or situation that may or may not be directly and unquestionably relevant to the initial judgment or generalization...
...Chomsky wishes to avoid such suggestions in order to present the Vietnam war as a morally unambiguous case of a big nation brutally coercing a defenseless small nation in a surrounding international vacuum...
...Chomsky concedes that none of the self-interested imperialist motives for which the Cold War provided a propaganda cover in Iran, Guatemala, and elsewhere were operative: in the 1930s "Japan's appeal to national interest . . . was not totally without merit" but a like appeal "becomes merely ludicrous when translated into a justification for American conquests in Asia...
...8.50...
...But Ringer himself is aware that the guarantor of the claim of idealist rhetoric to a monopoly on spirit was the claim of Germany's bureaucratic state to the monopolistic control of bodies...
...The ideological mobilization of American public opinion to support small-scale wars and foreign interventions, as well as a permanent draft and huge defense expenditures, followed so closely on the heels of World War II that Russia and China could easily be substituted for Germany and Japan as aggressive totalitarian powers threatening world peace...
...In linking together scientism, technocracy, and Vietnam apologetics, Chomsky has created a politically explosive "amalgam," at least on the campus...
...His career as a scientist and his political sensibility remind one of the late J. Robert Oppenheimer...
...After documenting the antirevolutionary bias of liberal scholarship on the Spanish Civil War, he suggests that, whether the "classical left-wing critique of the social role of intellectuals" is true or not, "at least this much is plain: there are dangerous tendencies in the ideology of the welfare state intelligentsia...
...The mandarin tradition bred in its representatives the arrogant presumption that they held a monopoly on pure Geist, a disdain for worldly matters, and a condemnation of those who challenged them as "materialists" and "positivists...
...But a critique of the work of contemporary historians of the Spanish war strikes one, to say the least, as a roundabout way of trying to show that Western liberal intellectuals harbor an elitist distaste for mass movements and popular revolutions which, in turn, also accounts for their support of the Vietnam war or their foot-dragging in opposing it...
...425 pp...
...In contrast, if we examine three of the principal modernists discussed by Ringer—Simmel, Sombart, and Weber—we find that in the nineties all three derived their political hopes not from the excellent Wilhelm von Humboldt, but from contemporary, extra-academic movements of a left-liberal or socialist character...
...This book, then, is primarily an indictment and an anthology of agitational manifestoes...
...In retrospect the fateful domestic choice of the 1960s was Kennedy's decision to take Heller's advice rather than Galbraith's during the months in 1962 and 1963 when the debate over the best way to stimulate the economy raged within the Administration...
...The myth of "manifest destiny" in the Caribbean and the Pacific...
...Not so, according to Ringer...
...But when he presents the basic difference between the orthodox and the modernist position in social policy, he discusses only the mandarin tradition: the German academic heritage simultaneouslysuggested two rather different objections tomodern capitalism...
...What does he do with this theme...
...Right now its prospects seem so distant that talk of a radical revision of wealth and power seems utopian...
...New York: Basic Books...
...Chomsky is also clearly right in contending that several American administrations have made use of the Soviet danger to justify old-style imperialist actions: in Iran early in the Cold War where the security of oil supplies (chiefly British) was the issue, in Guatemala to support private business interests, in Cuba as a response both to pressures from private business interests and for domestic political reasons, and in the Dominican Republic solely out of a panicky fear of the domestic political consequences of even the appearance of a repetition of Castro's takeover in Cuba...
...it can be of great use if the German universitiesby and by are filled with a new spirit...
...And one might add, as Chomsky doesn't, the Marcusean theory of repressive tolerance, New Left justifications of disruptive political action by militant minorities, and the hero worship of figures like Mao, Ho, and Che by student radicals...
...Whoever ultimately has the better of the culture-of-poverty debate, it should not be hard for all the partisans to identify the virtues of generous income maintenance, expanded housing, and public employment for those unable to find jobs in the private sector...
...But others understood the phrase to mandate a sharing of control between official agencies and the "indigenous" population...
...After Korea no moderately astute American politician could cherish any illusions on that score...
...Simmel was not politically active in the nineties, but his extra-academic attachments are made clear by his record of publication...
...Galbraith preferred to maintain taxes and increase social spending...
...Viewing the war in a larger historical and geographical context than Chomsky, they are unable to see it as the unmitigated deed of international banditry, the obvious "obscenity," that is all it amounts to in his view of it...
...Whoever had the better political judgment, the consequences of Kennedy's chosen course were severe...
...and how President Johnson, lacking Eisenhower's first-hand knowledge of the fallibility of generals and Kennedy's chastening experience at the Bay of Pigs, allowed the Joint Chiefs of Staff to "lead him down the garden path on Vietnam" (as Dean Acheson now reports he informed the President in early 1968 after having discovered that he himself and other top advisers had been similarly deceived...
...Chomsky's two major arguments are that American world power is an unqualified evil and that American intellectuals have abdicated their moral responsibilities by serving its aims as a corps of "new mandarins...
...Nor are those critics of the war with whom Chomsky has engaged in interminable controversies, such as Schlesinger, Hoffman, and Abel, necessarily less righteous than he, more corrupted by the relativist ethic of pragmatism, or more cowardly in their readiness to give the devil his due...
...Nobody in the statehouses and the city halls cared to surrender power to the poor...
...Chomsky opposes the war because he considers it a nakedly imperialist venture, an attempt by a large and powerful nation to impose by force a puppet government on a small nation against the wishes of the latter's citizens...
...Chomsky asserts that "twenty years of intensive cold-war indocrination and seventy years of myth regarding our international role make it difficult to face these issues in a serious way...
...To Chomsky, behavioral science provides indispensable ideological support to a new technocratic intelligentsia deeply implicated in the excesses of American militarism...
...But it is striking that Chomsky barely mentions this familiar background to our Vietnam involvement...
...Who but a masochist or an academic hooked on social research could avoid depression at the spectacle of the endless academic debate over whether the poor are just like the rest of us only broke...
...BOOKS Chomsky relies heavily, though by no means exclusively, on both books...
...Ringer largely ignores the political climate of the early nineties and its relationship to the modernist challenge in social policy...
...The devoted men and women who consumed their energies in this forlorn cause were granted neither the chance to induct the poor into the political process nor the resources to support classic liberal programs of income maintenance, public housing, job training, and job creation...
...they will seek to constitute a kind of nobility of the educated to supersede the "merely traditional" ruling class...
...f LIISI41 His conviction that the war must be condemned as intrinsically evil follows at least in part from his chosen role as prosecutor of the academic community, which he accuses of a new trahison des clercs...
...where we obviously also played an international role...
...In the face of these developments, he becamemore and more committed to the pluralisticclass politics of overt parliamentary bargainingas an alternative to hypocrisy and stagnation...
...The myth of what George Kennan in American Diplomacy called America's "legalistic-moralistic" approach to international relations...
...As Kravitz observed of the Act that established the Office of Economic Opportunity, It contains only modest program elements toeffect a structural reorganization of the American community to serve the poor more effec tively...
...His suspicion of the social sciences is so deep that he pointedly fails to mention the active participation of political scientists and sociologists in the earliest protests against the war, asserting that they were largely initiated by physical scientists and literary intellectuals...
...He suggests that the U.S...
...Chomsky's account of the popular revolution in Spain in 1936-37 is a fascinating historical excursion...
...Most of the book consists of articles denouncing official justifications of the war and those scholars and intellectuals who either supported it, failed to oppose it with sufficient indignation, or opposed it on grounds other than outright moral condemnation...
...Such ties are easy to document...
...Therefore it is worth exposing the exaggerations and the weaknesses in both fact and rational argument with which it abounds...
...For the orthodox, such as Schmoller and Wagner, whose main fear was social conflict, the bureaucratic program of cameralist paternalism— which provided legal and ethical rationalizations for the unlimited power of the sovereigns—supplied the answer...
...The longer essays amount to a backward look at American foreign policy in this century and the role of intellectuals in relation to government— all in the light of Vietnam, which is seen as the unspeakable climax of modern American history, rather as historians of Germany after 1945 reexamined the German past solely as a prelude to the Nazi era...
...Ringer's portrayal of the "crisis" of the mandarins between 1890 and 1933 shows how their ideology produced a conservative anti-"positivist" cast in the social sciences and humanities...
...The second volume, featuring men who played active roles in either the design or the operation of the poverty program, contains essays by, among others, Robert Coles, Sanford Kravitz, Robert Levine, Adam Yarmolinsky, and John Wofford...
...Thus he objects when Stanley Hoffman even mentions such things as costs and consequences, ends and means, in connection with the war—as if the very words were tainted with the technicist ethos that induces men to do "with utmost efficiency, that which should not be done at all...
...Nevertheless, Ringer's work is extremely valuable...
...Also, for the hilarious spectacle at the meeting of the American Sociological Association last fall of young radicals acclaiming as one of their ancestors the late Pitirim Sorokin, author of Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology but also a refugee from Lenin's Russia and a thorough-going reactionary in most of his social and political opinions...
...Here too he confines himself to denunciation, which hardly suffices to make him the devastating critic of positivist social science some have seen in him...
...A page later he comes back to it: there were always two totally different and unrelated groups of intellectuals in Germany: thehighly respected, official establishment of theuniversity professors, and a volatile, "bohemian," and almost indiscriminately acid minority of radicals...
...But I do not agree that these consequences are the only relevant ones in evaluating the war and understanding its origins, though I think they must now be considered in themselves sufficient to obligate withdrawal from Vietnam...
...10.00...
...Nevertheless, the authors arouse even sadder emotions...
...To him America is as aggressively and selfishly imperialist as Japan or Britain ever were, and morally even more culpable because we are more outrageously pharisaical in our rationalizations and,, in the case of Vietnam, do not have important material interests at stake such as the foreign investments, markets, sources of raw materials, need for migration outlets, or realistic concern with national security which motivated the older imperialisms...
...I did wonder as I conscientiously followed the debate whether all the resources of American social science have advanced us much beyond the distinction made by the dustman in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion between the deserving and the undeserving poor—the first the humble slaves of middle-class morality and the second the blatant expositors of their own values...
...For the antimodernism of the orthodox mandarins was undermined, at least before 1918, by their trust in the academy and the bureaucratic state as defenses against the masses...
...If the war were a clear-cut case of brutal imperialist aggression by a great power against an isolated small country, and if American policy-makers had perceived it as such while trumping up high-sounding slogans to sell it to the public, Chomsky's charge that references to the overall costs and consequences of our policy amount to moral evasion would be entirely justified...
...Why, then, are we in Vietnam...
...THIS BOOK on the German academy in the Wilhelmian and Weimar periods is a monument to scholarly craftsmanship, flawed only by the author's infection with a disease similar to one he diagnoses in his subject—an excessive concern with pure Geist...
...The last seventy years have shown us many opposing myths rather than a single unchanging one...
...To all intents and purposes the War on Poverty is in 1969 quite dead, although as usual a bureaucratic ghost lingers on...
...Judging by a let ter to Lang of 1893, we might conclude that Sombart felt a stronger commitment at that early point in his career to socialism than to the academy: We are all standing behind you, more than youthink...
...This may appear to be trivial quibbling...
...When Ringer explains the position of the orthodox scholars, he does so in terms of both the mandarin tradition and their identification with the imperial bureaucracy...
...The initial $1 billion never grew to as much as $2 billion of actual appropriations in a single year...
...Ringer treats this cultural pessimism as part of the crisis of mandarin culture, and he seriously neglects its extra-academic social and political context...
...Chomsky's discussion of Spain, however, is typical of a general style of argument that is evident in his exchanges with his critics...
...Galbraith might, however, have been wrong in his judgment that if Kennedy had fought early and hard to create a national constituency for public spending instead of wasting his political capital on the passage of the Trade Expansion Act, he would have carried his countrymen with him...
...THESE VOLUMES, the product of extensive meetings by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Seminar on Race and Poverty, are just about the best items in the copious literature on poverty, which has been a minor growth industry ever since Lyndon Johnson in 1964 declared unconditional war on poverty...
...For after their surge of political engagement in the nineties, the sociologists elaborated theories of cultural decadence which reflected not so much mandarin estrangement from mass society and bureaucratization as the estrangement of once-radical bourgeois intellectuals from the social rigidity of both modern Germany and the academy, their intimate nemesis...
...And he writes of Herman Kahn as if Kahn were a highly esteemed and influential figure among academic social scientists rather than a physicist who has never held a permanent university appointment...
...By comparison, the perspective of Weber and the sociologists was indeed disenchanted, for in their view the bureaucratic state and the academy were themselves only manifestations of the rationalization of all spheres of life...
...But if all these are instances of the elitism of intellectuals, the concept explains too much to be very useful...
...In most of the disciplines concerned with social theory, a minority position favoring accommodation to the new industrial order chal lenged the orthodox...
...In France, where the Vietnam war is not a political issue, technocracy, as George Lichtheim recently reported in The New York Review, is the subject of intense debate within the Left between "technocrats" and "humanists," debate of a far higher order of intelligence than the angry tirades directed by Chomsky and the New Left against our own homegrown equivalents of technocrats...
...At the end of his assessment, he asserts that he remains uncertain about the truth of the original proposition but that the evidence he has assembled must be taken into account and seems to be at least consistent with it...
...The purity and unassailability of such a moral verdict seems of major importance to Chomsky, as is indicated by his insistence (in the letters columns of The New York Review) to so confirmed a dove as Stanley Hoffman that he and Hoffman, the latter's claim to the contrary notwithstanding, are in fundamental disagreement about the morality of Vietnam because Hoffman's notion of the war's immorality includes reference to the use of means that corrupt ends and entail excessive costs instead of the simple judgment that the war is immoral in and of itself...
...At thatintermediate stage...
...I think Chomsky fails to analyze the Cold War background of the Vietnam war because to do so would inevitably temper the absoluteness of his condemnation of the United States...
...The English in the second volume is a good deal pleasanter than the academese in which the culture of poverty argument is couched...
...Tins APPROACH certainly gives the appearance of being refreshingly undogmatic and open to the claims of the evidence...
...The essays are no fun to read...
...Indeed, Ringer acknowledges at one point that "the modernists sought support for their own program from the middle-class National Liberal and Progressive parties...
...Nor does Southeast Asia, in contrast to the Caribbean, fall within an openly or tacitly recognized American "sphere of interest...
...He found his intellectual home after 1900 not in the academy but in the literary circle around Stefan George...
...The adjective undoubtedly expresses the intensity of his moral repudiation of the war...
...I do not propose here to rehearse the power BOOKS ful arguments on both sides of the culture-ofpoverty argument...
...Though this conflict has been covered before in earlier studies, it has not been discussed, to my knowledge, in the context of German scholarship as a whole, nor with the breadth of Ringer's explanatory hypothesis...
...On the other hand, there was a widespreadfear of the socially disjunctive forces releasedby industrialization...
...CHOMSKY'S DOGGED PERSISTENCE in de bating the grounds of opposition to the war with fellow-intellectuals who have opposed it no less firmly than he is not the result of a holier-than-thou attitude...
...The 1964 tax slash of some $11 billion drastically curtailed the resources available for other purposes, quite aside from the relentless demands of senseless Asiatic war...
...BUT WHY DOES HE SEE the war in Vietnam as indicative of the total moral bankruptcy of American foreign policy, past and present...
...on the contrary, he grimly staked his Presidency on it in full knowledge of the risk, and lost...
...But if this book is meant to initiate a reorientation in American foreign policy and the relation to it of the intellectual community, it would be patronizing to treat it simply as a stump crusade against the Vietnam war...
...He would be drawn into consideration of such subjects as the Korean war (on which he correctly insists in an exchange with Abel he "said hardly a word in the book") ; the mind of Dean Rusk fixated on the international situation of the early 50s...
...He makes a strong and eloquent case that liberal historians, especially Gabriel Jackson, are guilty of lack of objectivity in their ready acceptance of the Communist line at the time, which denigrated the Catalan anarchists as naive, incompetent, and undisciplined in order to justify forcibly suppressing them...
...Those who were mostafraid of social conflict tended to seek harmony and order through bureaucratic social reform...
...Unlike Miss McCarthy, he thinks that Orwell would have found "little comfort" in the uses made of his books as Cold War propaganda, and surely he is right in this...
...Much of what I write is familiar to Ringer, yet he fails to find an adequate context for it...
...Chomsky himself continually implies, usually by rhetorical questions, that the American government and its world role are comparable to Nazi Germany, although he draws back from fully equating them...
...Simmel's father and grandfather were merchants...
...I think he grossly minimizes Chinese Communist aggressiveness, both in the past and as a future possibility, but he does effectively rebut invocation of the Chinese threat as an argument in favor of American policy in Vietnam...
...Sombart's father was for a time the owner of a sugar-processing factory...
...He notes that the radical modernist "was typically an outsider in some way...
...THE DECLINE OF THE GERMAN MANDARINS: THE GERMAN ACADEMIC COMMUNITY 18901933, by Fritz K. Ringer...
...Considering the extent and weight of such contacts among the modernist mandarins, the point would seem to merit elaboration...
...The social origin of all three men was as heterodox as their social views...
...Proceeding from Hans Rosenberg's analysis of the Prussian bureaucracy in the eighteenth century and Karl BOOKS Mannheim's sociology of knowledge, Ringer defines a deeply conservative mandarin ideology which, independently of the folkish nationalism analyzed by Fritz Stem and George Mosse, molded the dominant social attitudes of German university professors in the humanities and social sciences before the Third Reich...
...I recall being pleased with myself at the age of fifteen for BOOKS repeatedly quoting a judgment that the Munich agreement was not, as some critics contended, "criminally mistaken, but merely criminal...
...Nor do Chomsky's admirers seem much concerned about inaccuracies in his assembled mass of quotations, although it seems to me more than a trifle to have twice grossly misquoted a President of the United States (Truman...
...But it is nonetheless "their own program," presumably derived in lineal descent from Humboldtian liberalism...
...As the term was explicated to Adam Yarmolinsky, it was no morethan a promise to provide actual jobs in the poverty program for the poor...
...Yet it should have given him pause that the four figures whose theories of cultural decadence he chose as most representative of mandarin pessimism were all modernists, indeed, three of them "radical modernists" (von Wiese, Simmel, and Alfred Weber...
...If Sombart, in 1899, underscored his contempt for his colleagues' fondness for rural virtue with the remark that "Flowers and delicatessen are the only contributions of agriculture to the refinement of life's pleasures," Weber, a decade later, expressed a similar scorn for the bureaucratic servility of his time: Frightful as the thought may be, that the worldmight someday be full of nothing but professors— we would flee to the desert were that to occur—yet more frightful is the thought thatthe world should be filled with nothing butthose cogs, those simple men who cling to alittle post and strive for a somewhat greater post—a condition which we rediscover both inthe papyri and, increasingly, in the spirit of thecontemporary bureaucracy and above all in itsnext generation, our present students...
...His opposition to the war, therefore, derives fundamentally from his denial of any possible moral justification for American intervention in Vietnam, or indeed virtually anywhere in the world...
...Certainly it was easier to persuade Congress to reduce taxes than to increase urban appropriations...
...And a determination to avoid the appeasement and unpreparedness of the 1930s became the idee fixe of our policymakers...
...They thrive between the primarily agrarian level of economicorganization and full industrialization...
...In showing persuasively a common thread within Gestalt psychology, idealist neo-Kantianism, historicism in economics and political theory, and conservative educational theory, Ringer provides for the first time in English, and perhaps in any language, a systematic survey of German scholarship in the Wilhelmian and Weimar periods, and an interpretation in terms of the professors' need to find in their disciplines absolute and eternal normative principles with which to combat the developing threat to mandarin supremacy from the new industrial order...
...Chomsky wrote before the latest twist given this argument, advanced the other day by Barry Goldwater: we must win in Vietnam in order to deter the Chinese, not from attacking us or our Asian allies, but from going to war with Russia, a war into which we could not avoid being drawn...
...It is scarcely illuminating to call even the Nazis "criminal"—Nazism perhaps represented criminality raised to the level of principle, but the qualification is crucial if we wish to understand it as a political mass movement...
...Which 70-year-old myth does he have in mind...
...Heller, who won the argument, chose tax reduction...
...But in some quarters Chomsky is being celebrated as an important and original political thinker...
...Much of the elite's history istherefore the history of a bureaucracy...
...Thus the professors, who possessed a considerable degree of autonomy as those "concerned with the educational diet of the elite," both molded and reflected the opinions, hopes, and fears of the bureaucratic order as a whole...
...A second, somewhat smaller tax reduction in 1965 further narrowed the prospects for the funding of urban and poverty projects...
...Occasionally he attributes our Vietnam policy to sheer "paranoia," a manifestly irrational fear of a nonexistent "World Communism" inducing the most powerful nation on earth "to pound into rubble a tiny Asian country," etc., although he remains doubtful as to whether the fear is genuine, and thus a sign of "true" paranoia, or merely a fabricated excuse for our actions...
...THE ACTUAL ADMINISTRATION of the War on Poverty was a splendid example of activity in search of criteria and objective...
...Robert Lekachman The Poverty of Antipoverty ON UNDERSTANDING POVERTY, edited by Daniel P. Moynihan...
...This is by no means to imply that the sociologists were simply the ideologists of the liberal middle class...
...It has only a small part of the responsi bility for dealing with the immense problem that crisscrosses federal, state, and local respon sibility...
...The Cold War he regards simply as an ideology providing a flimsy pretext for American intervention, which he prefers instead to view as continuous with the occupation of the Philippines and the landing of marines in the Caribbean earlier in the century, rather than with the great decisions of World War II and the confrontation with Russia that was its aftermath...
...Chomsky's answer is that ideology, which "can have a life of its own," has dictated Amer 'IA BOOKS ican actions...
...Nor do I assert this out of any commitment to the "value-free" behavioral science that Chomsky assails...
...Weber's political attachment in the nineties to the group of left-liberal pastors around Friedrich Naumann is amply documented and not unfamiliar to Ringer...
...Many of the poverty fighters, as aware as Sanford Kravitz in this symposium that Congress had enacted neither an income redistribution scheme nor a large-scale public employment program, nevertheless hoped that somehow a legislative measure, which has been consistently poorly understood by the general public, meagerly financed by Washington, politically overpromoted by all participants, and jealously watched by its natural enemies in the bureaucratic thickets, would accomplish large objectives...
...For if there is one fundamental criticism I would make of Ringer's massive work, it is that by reducing the critical social theory of these men to a variety of mandarin ressentiment, he both obscures the social reality with which they were dealing and denigrates as little more than maudlin rhetoric a body of social theory whose assimilation by contemporary radical thought is at once imperative and long overdue...
...Yet in the end there is much that is attractive in Chomsky's outlook...
...And what keeps us at the lectern is forone thing a matter of disposition—I, for example, would make a very poor party man— and partly, a healthy objective opportunism...
...Oddly enough, Lasch in The Agony of the American Left brings up Borkenau as a horrible example of the very elitist mentality to which Chomsky attributes the distortions in historical scholarship on the Spanish war, yet Borkenau is one of Chomsky's main sources refuting the accepted version of the conflicts within the Loyalist camp...
...For example, he may well be right in contending that intellectuals are peculiarly susceptible to elitist political doctrines and that liberal scholarship on Spain, the Leninist vanguard concept of the Party, Stalinist fellowtraveling in the 30s, and a technocratic-managerial view of industrial society are all manifestations of this elitism...
...The radical banner "maximum feasible participation" of the poor, over which so many polemics continue to be expended, meant different things to different people...
...What is less known is that Weber's scholarly work of the nineties on the East Elbian land problem was permeated with a mixture of Jacobin-tinged revolutionary nationalism, identification with the strivings for liberation of the rural proletariat, and generational revolt against the curse of epigonism with which his father's generation of scholars and politicians had burdened him...
...Nor is it surprising that the "modernists" provided the most coherent critique of modernity...
...I don't know very much about Chomsky's field of linguistics, but I strongly doubt that moral and ideological judgments of American foreign policy in the past century can be tested or supported in the same manner that is appropriate to, say, a theory of consonantal shifts in the structure of a spoken language...
...Aster's fury and Weber's irony were in part the result of frustration...
...And he does so, of course, from a position of academic eminence —and successful federal "grantsmanship"— that few other New Left heroes can match...
...His involvement in what Paul Honigsheim has called "the unofficial Berlin culture" ("materialism, mechanism, and similar concepts of primarily English origin") was manifested by his articles in the socialist journals Die Neue Zeit and Vorwarts, in Braun's Socialpolitisches Centralblatt and in the left-liberal Die Zukunft...
...Yet there is, after all, a simpler explanation of why "from the left-liberal point of view that Jackson shares with Hugh Thomas and many others, the liquidation of the revolution in Catalonia was a minor event...
...What a hope...
...Whatever Congress thought it was writing into the law, there was simply too much haste and too little legislative history for anyone to be very confident...
...528 pp...
...His long essay on Japanese expansionism in Asia in the 30s suggests that both the war with Japan and the intervention in Vietnam, which he compares to Japan's invasion of Manchuria, are best understood in the context of Asia alone—as if Japan's alliance with Germany and Italy and the Cold War with Russia originating in Europe had little to do with either...
...WHATEVER THE INTENTIONS of its authors, the War on Poverty ended as little more than a public relations dodge, an inexpensive appeal to the vaguely altruistic impulses of middle America, soon to be Nixon's silent majority...
...Only rarely, however, does he mention the two European wars or the League of Nations and the U.N...
...For all the extravagance of his rhetoric, his tendency to lump together as politically insupportable a variety of things he dislikes, and his inability to sustain a general line of argument, he is largely free of the doctrinaire pettiness and polemical mean-spiritedness that so often dominates ideologues of the Left...
...One inference from the contemporary argument is fairly obvious...
...But, although he flirts with it, Chomsky declines to commit himself fully to so demoniacal a view of American policy and one is left wondering why, if ideology or even "ideological paranoia" also have something to do with it, he fails to examine the Cold War background to the war in Vietnam...
...The conflict in rhetoric was shadow...
...The superior formulation of the problem by the modernists was the result precisely of their intellectual distance from the mandarin consciousness, their perception of the modern world from the vantage point of the stillborn bourgeois radicalism of 1848, the brief echo of which they perceived and identified with during the nineties...
...The only two contemporary accounts that are likely to be remembered today by those who are neither scholarly specialists nor surviving participants are Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (who was recently accused by Mary McCarthy of being a probable supporter of the Vietnam war had he not conveniently died 20 years ago) and The Spanish Cockpit by Franz Borkenau (also dead for over a decade but recently attacked by Christopher Lasch as an embittered ex-Communist possessing a "quasi-totalitarian sensibility...
...Chomsky repeatedly demands, by what right we take it upon ourselves to use BOOKS military force to determine the political institutions of South Vietnam...
...Nor is his opposition, as Lionel Abel has mistakenly contended in Commentary, based primarily on the commission of war crimes by American forces in Vietnam, for he dismisses both "those who were opposed to the war merely because of its costs or its atrocities" (my italics) as morally dubious and likely to be of little help in providing the analysis and search for new alternatives he thinks we need...
...Ringer's answer is, of course, yes...
...Even if Chomsky is often correct both in his overall generalizations and his detailed case BOOKS studies, the hiatus between the generalization and the particular exemplification of it is too great for his argument to possess much explanatory value...
...The myth of isolationism in the 20s and 30s...
...Practically all of the early mandarins are asso ciated with the state administration in one wayor another...
...Again and again he alludes to our readiness "to pound into rubble a small nation that refuses to submit to our will," "the attempt by our country to impose its particular concept of order and stability throughout the world," and the like...
...The Vietnam war has moved him to assume a political role, but he will probably make his presence felt on the Left long after that wretched enterprise has been concluded...
...Of the Crusade in Europe against Hitler...
...The orthodox mandarins...
...after 1900, nearly three-quarters...
...To challenge the orthodoxat all, the critic almost had to make a leap intoa new vocabulary, one in which interests could be considered, groups were sums of people, andthe rule of the spirit was an ideal, not a reality...
...Or, as James Sundquist simply and accurately puts it in his concluding remarks, The trouble is that there has been no decision to allocate enough of the nation's resources foremployment programs, better education, betterhousing, better health, better cities, and all theother things that must be done...
...Nor was there any substantial constituency of the prosperous that was eager to rearrange the structure of American institutions on behalf of a minority which came to appear to more and more white, middle-class Americans as shiftless, immoral, and black...
...Very often, he had contacts in the world of the nonacademic, unofficial, and unconnected intelligentsia, with artists, journalists and writers...
...His charge that "in no small measure, the Vietnam war was designed and executed" by those scholars and experts he labels "the new mandarins" accounts for his popularity with the student Left, for, more than any other leading opponent of the war, he implicates the university directly in our Vietnam policy, thus combining the two chief targets of student protest...
...In an exhaustive review of the evidence, which takes up more than 50 pages in his book, Chomsky retells the half-forgotten story of the revolt and its suppression...
...I too oppose the Vietnam war and I agree with Chomsky that its major consequences for the Vietnamese people are not very different from what they would be if the war were no more than the crude act of American aggression Chomsky supposes it to be...
...Better education" and so on cost money that too many people preferred to spend on their families and themselves...
...The modernists were most concerned with the threat posed to individualism by rationalization...
...Weber's uncle and grandfather were capitalists in textiles...
...New York: Basic Books...
...Is he perhaps a pacifist...
...Chomsky has no illusions whatever about Soviet actions in Eastern Europe, with which, in fact, he equates American intervention in Vietnam about as often as with past German, Japanese, or British imperialist ventures...
...Sombart and Weber were of Huguenot extraction, Simmel's parents were converted Jews...
...ON FIGHTING POVERTY, edited by James L. Sundquist...
...Consequently, mild criticisms of conventional notions were very hard to express...
...They were mandarins and they spoke for themselves...
...Thus, after a lengthy analysis of the events leading up to the war with Japan, Chomsky declares himself "still . . . quite ambivalent" as to whether the United States acted in legitimate self-defense or whether A. J. Muste's doctrine of "revolutionary pacifism" is applicable to the Pacific War...
...But is Vietnam comparable to these interventions...
...We can also, I hope, see the contemporary relevance of that role and its representatives...
...President Johnson did not escalate the war in order to curry favor with the electorate...
Vol. 17 • January 1970 • No. 1
