The New York Review: A Close Look
Goodheart, Eugene
THE EDITORIAL CREDO of the New York Review of Books, which began publication in February 1963, was what one might expect of a highbrow journal. ... Neither time nor space ... have been...
...Admirable sentiments, to be sure, but unless they are attached to genuine observations about what goes on and what could go on in the disciplines, the sentiments turn to mere rhetoric...
...The non sequitur about structural changes and structural preservation cunningly concludes the paragraph without a single shred of evidence...
...In the light of the scientistic piety about objectivity, the view of Noam Chomsky, Christopher Lasch, Eugene Genovese, and others that irresponsibility to truth may be the result of moral failure or insensitivity is valuable...
...A conscious guerrilla," Hayden tells us with all the authority of new revolutionary theory, "can pull police away from the path of people engaged in attacking stores...
...The practical difference between the liberal and the avowed racist in their views of the Negro was seen as so small that the professed concern of liberal whites for the Negro's plight in America could be viewed as hypocrisy...
...The liberals often named in the charge are men like Daniel Bell, Arthur Schlesinger, J. K. Galbraith, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, and Daniel Moynihan, some of whom were associated with the New York intellectual world out of which the New York Review emerged...
...13, 1969) . There is so much moral and aesthetic ugliness in American life at present, especially in the cities, that it is hard to see how the politics of unthinking resentful confrontation will make the necessary radical changes—though one can imagine how it could make changes for the worse...
...He meant that the French Communist party was valuable as the only real party of the working class and therefore as the Left in French political life...
...Some of the articles published in 1967 (e.g., those by Andrew Kopkind and Tom Hayden in August '67) are painful to read now...
...It is the style of the unpolitical fifties, to which the NYR is heir...
...The disaffection from the conduct of the war, enforced by the feeling of domestic injustice, turns into an allout assault on the Liberal Establishment, allegedly the responsible party...
...It is not enough for a movement consciously to disavow authoritarianism...
...Almost immediately it achieved its modest though difficult ambition of becoming the only serious review of books in America...
...It is to the great credit of the NYR that it gave Stone, Jean Lacouture, Bernard Fall, and others an early opportunity to give their version of the war to a wide and important audience in America...
...If "Bolshevism and Western liberalism have been united in their opposition to popular revolution (in its anarchist manifestation)," it seems to me misleading to assign simply the blame to "contemporary liberal ideology," unless one wishes to extrapolate bolshevism from liberalism...
...Anyone who has spoken to one of the "bright young men" of political science is struck by his problem-solving attitude to all issues...
...Against middlebrow art and taste, the NYR insisted on the necessity of making intellectually and aesthetically scrupulous judgments and of being invidious and dismissive when necessary—which was often, given the plenitude of bad and mediocre works...
...Thus on the theme of the New Left demand for relevance, they wisely perceive its selfdefeating character: The demand for "relevance" is . . . selfdefeating...
...EUGENE GOODHEART Left attack on liberalism at its face value...
...The computer-based decisions to devastate a certain area he regarded as more humane and more efficient than the "personal" style of Vietcong terrorism...
...But this kind of "sellout" is by no means unique to Western liberalism...
...The moral insensitivity that Chomsky and others have dramatized is a feature of the complacency of privilege, whether the explicit political commitment is Left or Right...
...The view of Eric Hobsbawm, for instance, that the anarchist movement in Spain during the Civil War was a "disaster" for the Loyalist cause, may be motivated by a false estimate of the pragmatics of conducting an efficient military campaign against Franco or by an elitist mistrust of the spontaneous action of the masses, but it is hard to see that this is a peculiar phenomenon of liberalism...
...Only a card-carrying Yippie could be expected to respond to the histrionic hysteria of Jerry Rubin, that is unless people feel that to be "with it" they have to respond (see THE NEW YORK REVIEW: A CLOSE LOOK NYR, Feb...
...They are symptoms, not diagnoses...
...He has put whatever intelligence and technique he has in the service of an interventionist foreign policy...
...but it was reprehensible when it became an evasion of unambiguous evils in our society, as it did in the denial by "revisionist" liberals in the fifties and early sixties that poverty was a substantial fact in this country...
...Its political rationale is that the truth is too complex and elusive to be contained by simple activist formulas...
...It is the strong feeling that liberals have betrayed their own ideals that has made liberal philosophy itself seem indefensible...
...I don't mean to suggest that genocide and the urban riots are morally commensurable, but simply that Hayden is uttering dangerous nonsense, which we are supposed to take seriously because he has prestige as a "revolutionary...
...Here an abstract relation to killing provides immunity from the pangs of conscience...
...The willingness of intellectuals to join the Establishment proceeds (as critics have often remarked) from motives deeper than ideology, such as the desire for status, prestige, 2 An excerpted version of the essay appeared inthe NYR in the January 2, 1969, issue with the title "The Menace of Liberal Scholarship...
...The NYR is too fashionable, too much "with it" to be characterized as I am sure it would like to see itself: the conscience of the intellectual community in political, intellectual, and aesthetic matters...
...The NYR continues to publish Hannah Arendt, Hans Morgenthau, George Lichtheim, but it becomes increasingly responsive to the New Left, the "moral" stance in politics, the apocalyptic view...
...Indeed the demand for "relevance" amounts to a capitulation to the enemy's world view...
...Reviewers like Rahv, Gombrich, and Haskell have responded with intelligence and authority to the current scene...
...Moreover, there was an in-group atmosphere to the magazine, which encouraged "provincial" paranoia about the New York literary establishment...
...The hospitality to irrational forms of disaffection should be accounted for in the magazine...
...Liberal guilt and radical powerlessness have combined to make a strange political drama of the sixties...
...M M Y COMPLAINT IS NOT that the NYR has changed...
...Imagine dealing with radical activity and scholarship by continuously identifying radicalism with bolshevik perversions of truth...
...On the positive side, the reviewers exercised that capacity for discrimination and judgment which is the best of highbrowism...
...What the New Left critic believes he is attacking is not a version of liberalism or liberalism at a certain moment in history, but the very idea of liberalism itself: its supposed incapacity to understand, in Chomsky's words, "moral truths about political life...
...Opposition to the American role in Vietnam does not require our blinking such hard facts...
...One would sooner expect such a view from an antiliberal bolshevism, with its open commitment to revolutionary elitism...
...There was good reason to respond to the sudden radicalization of the youth in the mid-sixties, but the quality of the response has too often been unresisting and uncritical, often lamely excused by an unwillingness to rock the boat...
...The danger of "counterrevolutionary subordination" may be greater than that of revolutionary subordination in a society in which the Left has no power, but this doesn't lessen the need for unremitting self-honesty in the Left...
...Who then would these remaining guerrillas be...
...Measured by Kopkind's standards, it is difficult to see what separates King from the new militants...
...But suppose one or two white Americans are not intimidated, suppose someone coolly asks what it means to believe in death...
...The attitude toward apocalyptic activism, that is exemplified by Dupee's review, becomes increasingly more difficult to maintain...
...The new radicals depend on those in power to make social changes, the need for which radicals can only dramatize...
...The passage on the Spanish Civil War is in the unabridged version printed in Chomsky's American Power and the New Mandarins (New York: Pantheon, 1969...
...In recent years, the journal has featured the essays of Noam Chomsky on Vietnam and the culpability of the Liberal Establishment, Stokely Carmichael on Black Power, Jason Epstein on Community Control of the Schools, Andrew Kopkind on Radical Politics, Tom Hayden on the Newark riots...
...This commitment to "the complex truth" was honorable when sincere and necessary for resisting Stalinist distortions of political reality...
...Moreover this imputing of `real reasons' for EUGENE GOODHEART the behavior of entire populations is selfdefeating, to put it mildly...
...In "The Responsibility of the Intellectual" Chomsky cites with contempt Heidegger's pro-Hitler declaration in 1933 that "truth is the revelation of that which makes a people certain, clear and strong in its action and knowledge...
...Those who did not become conservative or militantly anti-Communist during the fifties became depoliticized, generalizing from their disenchantment with radical politics to politics generally...
...Radicals ought to be resisting the pressure to denigrate learning and to ignore the ethical implications of every discipline...
...The writer and his book were always in danger of becoming a mere occasion or object for use...
...1 There has been a curious complicity between the "radical" and "the liberal," which suggests that one should not take the New 1 One might also note in this connection a certain relaxation in political vigilance on the part of writers like Mary McCarthy who was a main figure in the period of disillusionment with Stalinist radicalism— as when she accepts uncritically the admission of the North Vietnamese that they weremistaken in killing 50,000 people in the collectivization program...
...Kopkind then goes on to show his political clairvoyance when he declares that the new militancy has shattered the old order...
...Dupee's statements about Baldwin have not been superseded by the new reality, but the effect of the political journalism in the NYR of the past two or three years has been a somewhat arbitrary recasting of the reviewer and the reviewed: it is as if Baldwin is now reviewing Dupee...
...THE NEW YORK REVIEW: A CLOSE LOOK security, and in some cases the more admirable desire (deluded as it may be) to "make a difference...
...If King's goals are unexceptionable, why the absurd innuendo in "to what they may lead...
...Since when have wisdom about political tactics and a clear vision of the emergent political order been characteristic qualities of the political guerrillas Kopkind celebrates, they who have in fact distinguished themselves by their principled refusal to provide programs...
...EUGENE GOODHEART unself-critical indulgence in ideological passion...
...The turn from Stalinist radicalism was accompanied by the mixed emotions of bitterness toward the movement and self-congratulation about having preserved one's integrity or about having emerged from political immaturity...
...The style of a book reveals its intelligence, its grasp of truth...
...It is difficult to envisage permanent success for a movement that tries to sustain itself simply by preserving its moral purity, its idealism and courage, that does not formulate an adequate theoretical account of political reality...
...Happily, the literary and art criticism has not been overwhelmed by the latest "audacities" of the avant-garde...
...Science and engineering must become once again a branch of philosophy, a means not simply of solving predefined problems but of raising questions about the ends of human life...
...The reviewer must cultivate style in his sensitivity to the style under review—and therefore inevitably call attention to himself...
...In holding an opinion, one could be risking one's life...
...Dupee's review is especially illuminating when one considers the achievement of the NYR, because it helps mark the distance the journal has come from its original attitudes...
...When Lasch says that "scholarship has to give up its pretensions to scientific objectivity and root itself in moral commitment" (Nov...
...The high, dismissive tone of the NYR, especially in its first two years, was an equivocal virtue...
...The temptation to betray the ideals may be an unwitting feature of the ideology, but this must be demonstrated...
...It does reflect an awareness that humane learning has been transformed into a harmless and degraded object of consumption and almost totally banished from industrial production and statecraft...
...11, 1965), he is using "moral commitment" in a vague and polemical way, for the test of the validity of this assertion is what one means by "moral commitment...
...It is the work of a "moral elite" to use Chomsky's surprising phrase...
...The real reason that non-violence is considered to be a virtue in Negroes...
...The insurgence of the New Left in the pages of the NYR can be seen as an "act of conscience," an awakening of the liberal intellectual to a sense of his own moral and political culpabilities...
...The Fire Next Time is a document of the emerging apocalyptic radicalism...
...Through government contracts and even participation in the formulation of policy and the operation of government, the liberal intellectual has forgotten that his first responsibility is to truth...
...I recall a French leftist friend of mine saying in 1956 in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Hungary, "Thank God for the Communist party—out of power...
...Fortunately, the New Left has not been exclusively represented in the NYR by the likes of Kopkind, Hayden, and Rubin...
...By its very nature it reinforces the vulgar bourgeois ideology and practice...
...But according to any genuine radical critique, the failure of a society is precisely its inability to live up to its ideals...
...The essays constitute a sort of summa of one trend that has developed in the pages of the NYR since 1965...
...The liberals themselves had been doing that job...
...Again Baldwin:) "'In order to survive as a human, moving, moral weight in the world, America and all the Western nations will be forced to reexamine themselves and release themselves from many things that are now taken to be sacred, and to discard nearly all assumptions that have been used to justify their lives and their crimes so long.'" Dupee remarks: "Since whole cultures have never been known to `discard nearly all their assumptions' and yet remain intact, this amounts to saying that any essential improvement in Negro-White relations, and thus in the quality of American life, is unlikely...
...And Dupee goes on to demonstrate this: "'White Americans do not believe in death, and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them...
...Instead the New Left has merely inverted the terms and sought to have the universities serve the poor rather than the rich...
...The New York Review's need to be "with it" weakens its professed (highbrow) dedication to the making of discriminations and judgments...
...Baldwin...
...To say that science must be humanized is not much of an advance on the demand for relevance...
...As provocation, however, it has played an important role in our cultural life...
...The New Left was hardly needed to score against out-and-out reactionaries...
...On the evidence of a good deal of recent militant Left ideologizing (e.g., the Cultural Revolution in China, black mythologizing), Heidegger's statement serves equally for Left and Right...
...But the self-congratulation was not entirely warranted by the facts...
...led only to the cynical conclusion that all scholarship is subjective and `ideological'—the conclusion which some critics are only too eager to draw...
...Lasch and Genovese in their recent essay on THE NEW YORK REVIEW: A CLOSE LOOK education severely criticize the New Left attack on the universities with the hindsight of its failure but without any foreknowledge or understanding of how it can be remedied...
...Baldwin...
...By "coolly" asking what it means to believe in death, by catching Baldwin out in his exhortation to White America that it "discard nearly all [its] assumptions," Dupee is effectively deflating the pretensions of the apocalyptic political style...
...The appeal to authority became the fatal style of intellectual life under Stalin...
...In an excursion in his essay on liberal scholarship, Chomsky does a survey of liberal historiography on the Spanish Civil War, and he uncovers "a failure of objectivity" in representing "revolutionary movements that are largely spontaneous and only loosely organized, while rooted in deeply felt needs and ideals of dispossessed masses...
...As it is in Tom Hayden's "report" on Newark in the same issue...
...What was needed was an assault from the Left on the complacency of the American liberal conscience and the New Left, intimate with the failures of liberalism because in part at least it represented the disaffection ec tion of liberalism from itself, served the purpose...
...Anarchism (one inspiration of the New Left) is doctrinally antiauthoritarian, but the problems of sustaining genuine spontaneity in political life and that of controlling authoritarian types who tend to take control in "spontaneous" situations have never been solved...
...For the habits it develops out of power will condition what it becomes if and when it ever achieves power...
...The level of exposition is above anything we might call the popular level (since the audience is sophisticated), but the impulse is to break out of professionalism, to speak about subjects in the common language of discourse...
...I. F. Stone, the American journalist with a special gift for telling the untold story, is among the first to note "a steady degeneration in the conduct of the war...
...The argument goes like this...
...It has with some success performed the needed task of haute vulgarization for more than 90,000 readers...
...have been spent on books which are trivial in their intentions or venal in their effects, except occasionally to reduce a temporarily inflated reputation or to call attention to a fraud...
...But this wisdom is accompanied by empty platitudes about reconciling science and humanities...
...But in this view there is an illicit confusion between the idea of moral commitment (telling it like it is, regardless of the consequences) and leftwing ideological partisanship...
...The fault of the New York Times Book Review (which in part provoked the existence of the NYR) was that it showed an undiscriminating hospitality to books good and bad...
...Dupee responds in characteristic highbrow fashion...
...Sensitivity to injustice is generally a characteristic either of men who are the objects of injustice or of men who have the imagination, compassion, and courage to put themselves in the place of those who suffer injustice...
...Fascists resentful about the new justice and hungry for power...
...The rightness of the New Left attack becomes less important than doing what is fashionably right...
...However, the content and tone of the disaffection do not follow automatically from the event...
...Do they or don't they mean the words they use...
...Given the open commitment of the NYR to critical writing and thinking (i.e., the deflation of a temporarily inflated reputation), the presence of these articles invites suspicion about the political seriousness of its editors...
...So does war or genocide...
...And given the diffuse unrevolutionary content of much "radical" action, liberals can afford the feeling of guilt...
...The civil rights movement in the late fifties and early sixties created a new activist atmosphere in the intellectual life of the country, and the sudden escalation of the war in Vietnam in 1965 became a main cause for the "radicalizing" of people of "moderate" persuasion...
...And the war in Vietnam is such an event...
...An atmosphere has been created in which the refusal to accept the escalation of political attitude and tone becomes embarrassing and awkward...
...Harrison Salisbury's reports in the New York Times in the winter of '66 on the terrible effects of American bombing in Vietnam were old news to readers of the European press, who did not have to cope with the American government's challenge to freedom of information...
...Dupee...
...David Levine's destructive caricatures of writers with their large heads and little bodies —a traditional denigrating device of cartooning— are perfectly appropriate to this attitude...
...The essay is entitled "Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship," 2 and the failure of objectivity, it turns out, includes Communist intellectuals...
...It is true that a given ideology may provide the rationale and terms of the "sellout": in the Soviet Union, the scholasticizing of Marxism gave an inquisitorial cast to political actions and discussion...
...How seriously are we to take a confession of error when it should have been a confession of crime...
...One has only to reverse the situation to see what is wrong...
...Moreover, the NYR THE NEW YORK REVIEW: A CLOSE LOOK showed a sure instinct for little-known books that revealed the sordid aspect of the American operation: for instance, Air War: Viet Nam, by Frank Harvey (reviewed by Robert Crichton, January 4, 1968), a book commissioned by the Air Force, which nevertheless documents the deadly use of napalm against Vietnamese civilians...
...There were the temptations of position and prestige in or related to government, a possibility for the liberal intellectual since the days of the New Deal...
...The fact is that style (the ideal of highbrowism) has little to offer as a guide to political life...
...3 Radicalism and liberalism are not necessarily antagonistic...
...It was also in part a matter of style...
...But worse than the intellectual failure of Kopkind's "argument" is the animus that the article reveals...
...THE ACHIEVEMENT OF THE NYR has been real, though seriously flawed...
...Kopkind concludes: "At least we know now that even if all Martin Luther King's programs were enacted, and all Jerome Cavanaugh's reforms were adopted, and the Great Society as it is described materialized before our very eyes, there would still be guerrillas...
...Dupee...
...If one means by moral commitment sensitivity to injustice, then one is beyond ideology...
...It is nevertheless misguided...
...The Left, when it comes to power, loses much of the sensitivity to injustice that gives it its moral strength out of power —which is why liberalism has kept insisting on democratic liberties in all societies...
...29, 1969), Lasch and Genovese admit that "it would be disastrous if the attack on the irresponsibility of `objective' scholarship...
...Indeed, the terms become opaquely "abstract" when their ideal content as well as their historical reality at a given moment is ignored...
...But they fail to make clear why the conclusion cannot be derived from their own attack on "objective" scholarship—or why they obscure the issue by putting quotation marks around objective and ideological...
...It is not liberalism per se that has been discredited but certain programs and attitudes...
...To say the liberal is the real enemy has, for intellectuals, the shock and fascination of paradox...
...Although he speaks of structural changes, he assumes structural preservation...
...It is strong evidence against Mannheim's view, for instance, that intellectuals by virtue of their hard-earned knowledge and self-understanding have achieved a disinterestedness beyond ideology...
...One sensed from the beginning an editorial impulse to exhibit the reviewer at the expense of revealing the book...
...If American society achieved the humaneness and decency dreamed of by Martin Luther King, poverty, racism, adventurism abroad would disappear...
...These are unexceptionable goals, but King has no real notion of how they are to be attained, or to what they may lead...
...The vices of the liberal intellectual— his elitism, his technocratic relation to political problems, his affinity for the establishment— are all seen as springing from the essential character of liberalism itself...
...Against this is the fact thatthe mistake was recognized and amends were made where still possible [The Rectification of ErrorsCampaign] and the point about an acknowledgedmistake is not to repeat it" [January 18, 1968...
...As a description of what has occurred, this argument made by Chomsky and others has much to recommend it...
...A young, much published political scientist at a Northeastern University told me that my failure to see Vietcong terrorism as worse than the much wider devastation of Vietnam by the Americans was an indication to him that I did not have a proper conception of humane warfare...
...Moral purity" without honest realism tends to corrupt itself into self-righteousness and to be tempted to mindless violence...
...it can acquire meaning only in the terms the New Left has too often ignored or rejected—those that stress the defense of humane learning and its extension into every field of technical and scientific work...
...Liberal intellectuals in America have paid an enormous price in intellectual and moral conscience by becoming part of the political and economic Establishment...
...In America the pragmatic bias of American life generally may have helped set the scene for the treason of the clerks...
...Not only has the liberal become hospitable to the New Left attack, but the doctrinaire unwillingnesss of the new radicals to formulate, let alone implement, programs suggests an almost cheerful acceptance of their own powerlessness...
...People, including editors, have the right to change their minds indeed, have a moral obligation to change when events reveal a reality they have not perceived before...
...There was the sorry spectacle of equivocation and fear in the face of McCarthyism, which could not be justified by anti-Communism...
...These articles are of the moment, not about it...
...He has been concerned to make the execution of policy more efficient rather than to consider the EUGENE GOODHEART morality and wisdom of the policy...
...April 22, '65...
...The act of conscience is not the whole story, however...
...The history of the intelligentsia in the Soviet Union is hardly a history of radical disaffection and responsibility to the truth...
...The susceptibility of the NYR to politi cal fashion reflects in part the depoliticizing of the intellectual in the fifties...
...Scientific and technical subjects must come to be informed by ethical and philosophical concerns...
...Thus, Andrew Kopkind's mindless attack on Martin Luther King: He likes the idea of a guaranteed annual income, more Negro elected officials, better schools, more jobs, and protection of rights...
...Articles on philosophy, art, economics are not simply responses to recent developments, but attempts to give in microcosmic form a picture of what is alive and relevant in a whole field...
...One wonders what will happen when the New Left loses its cachet for the intellectuals: will the NYR turn to the next new thing...
...The lead article in the first issue was a review by F. W. Dupee of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, which caught the strengths and weaknesses of Baldwin's politics through a perception of his style...
...When Baldwin replaces criticism with prophesy, he manifestly weakens his grasp of his role, his style and his great theme itself...
...Of course they don't, especially their lives...
...On the negative side, the reviews tended to be self-congratulating and condescending, and the acrimony in the correspondence columns often went beyond the bounds of normal intellectual aggressiveness...
...Behind the uncertainty of view is the absence of a theory to account for American political behavior, indeed for political behavior generally—and, one might add, to envisage political possibilities...
...It is difficult to account for the curious "masochistic" hospitality of liberals in the past few years to the New Left in any other way...
...Clearly the standards of exposition usually demanded of contributors were relaxed in the cases of Kopkind and Hayden...
...There have been notable exceptions of course, but that is precisely the point: responsibility to the truth is finally a matter of intellectual capacity and moral perspicacity and courage, whatever the going ideology might be...
...THE EDITORIAL CREDO of the New York Review of Books, which began publication in February 1963, was what one might expect of a highbrow journal...
...To have the right style, to be in the fashion means that one must be in tune with the Zeitgeist...
...It is possible that [the purging of50,000 people in the agrarian reform of 1955-56] could repeat itself in South Vietnam, if collectivization is attempted...
...The real focus of his article is on the government's unwillingness to tell the truth about the war, which Stone rightly sees as a challenge to the citizen's freedom of information, and consequently to his freedom of deciding and correcting policy through his elected representatives...
...All this verges on platitude, but it is a mark of the extremity of the disaffection from liberalism that this no longer seems evidently true...
...As a general formulation, the demand that the university serve the people is meaningless...
...The feeling of resentment is painfully strong in Kopkind's piece...
...L L IBERALISM BECOMES AN ABSTRACTION in the New Left attack, a convenient handle for attacking the adversary...
...In his essays "The Responsibility of the Intellectuals" (February 23, 1967) and "The Menace of Liberal Scholarship" (January 2, 1969) Chomsky makes a serious and articulate attack on liberalism...
...Chomsky remarks that "it is a convention of scholarship that the use of such terms as those of the preceding phrase demonstrates naivete and muddle-headed sentimentality," a convention "supported by ideological conviction rather than history or investigation of social life...
...As it gets to be used ritualistically, the term "liberalism" introduces an opacity into political discussion and debate, which avoids complication...
...And if their reviewing was often refractory, that was in part because reviewing became an exercise in thought, not a mindless report on the contents of a book...
...The historical reality of liberalism is another matter, for like any other political type a liberal in practice may betray his ideals...
...And of course the liberal in and out of power in the re coil from the Stalinist movement could hardly be expected to be specially sensitive to the aggressions and self-interestedness of American foreign policy...
...The NYR simply changed with the times, reflecting the political evolution of a large portion of the intellectual and academic community...
...Or the writer might prefer to be reviewed by the NYR to the simple pleasure of being read...
...In the impulse to quantify and measure everything, to eschew all "soft-headed and sentimental" approaches to political questions is the American version of the banality of evil...
...There are other instances of this low-level political writing in the NYR...
...He is dispassionate, intelligently discriminating, sensitive to style, graceful, but without any strong political commitment...
...for it has occurred in a compromising atmosphere of fashionableness...
...The absence of the critical faculty is so obvious that one can only surmise that the editors had relaxed their customary rigor because they wanted to be where the action was...
...If terms like "liberal" and "radical" have any meaning they unavoidably contain an element of abstraction, of definition: they stand for certain things...
...In 1965 the truth is not entirely out...
...For instance, it takes courage to see and express an unfashionable truth, and courage is a moral emotion...
...A A S THE TRUTH ABOUT VIETNAM came out in the next three years, the attack on the system, that permits and fosters the war, became more radical and comprehensive...
...The arts and humanities must be rescued from their present degraded, essentially ornamental position and established on an equal footing with science, as studies that make their own contribution to the understanding of the objective world...
...In "The Education and the University We Need Now" (Oct...
...Can we trust a revolutionary who offers us the extraordinary formulation that "a riot represents people making history...
...It has also been suggested that elitism is a bias of the intelligentsia, and that the opportunity given to intellectuals to make and execute policy merely encourages the normal self-righteousness and arrogance of intellectuals, who assume that they know better than the people of an underdeveloped country, for instance, what is good for them...
...The political criticism has been much more erratic, more responsive to the fashion...
...But he would never trust the party in power...
...Thus Chomsky can't seem to decide whether American foreign policy is inane or selfish and rapacious...
...is that white men do not want their lives, their self-image or their property threatened...
...But it strikes me as short on theoretical understanding and even seriously misleading in certain respects...
...The review was to be so impressive, it might even satisfy the appetite for the book itself...
...The NYR is one of the few places where art criticism is at once unfashionable and unsquare...
...And again: The ultimate goal should be to humanize the conditions of industrial apprenticeship by restoring the unity of all learning...
...For it is implicit though not admitted in the current argument that in its ideal commitment to maximizing the moral and rational elements in political life, in its belief in democratic procedure, liberalism is or should be a feature of every humane political philosophy...
...Even at its best the new radical critique rarely gets beyond moral repudiation...
...The result has been, in Conor Cruise O'Brien's phrase, "counterrevolutionary subordination...
...The journal has published serious and important articles by Noam Chomsky, Christopher Lasch, and Paul Goodman among others— that is, by men of first-rate intelligence and character who were radical before the fashion...
...Her sharp sensitivity to the rhetoric of Stalinism shouldhave made her suspect the term "error...
...Attitudes that several years ago had been considered reasonable by NYR writers now are peremptorily dismissed as indefensible...
...Such a confusion easily becomes an excuse for an 3 I am attributing these qualities to liberalism as an idea...
...Moreover there is a deep connection between style and fashion...
...On the face of it, the term moral commitment is less adequate as a guide to truth than the objective standards of a discipline...
...The motives for the intellectuals' complicity with the Establishment range, according to the critics, from bad faith—i.e., the pursuit of status, prestige, and security (of which intellectuals have always been in relatively short supply)—to disillusionment with Stalinist Marxism in the forties and fifties, a disillusionment that for some led "logically" to the championing of American interests...
Vol. 17 • March 1970 • No. 2
