LETTERS
Editor: In his thoughtful review of my Decline of the German Mandarins, [DISSENT, January—February 1970] Arthur Mitzman argues that I do not sufficiently connect the writings of the great...
...I do not know Tom Curtis, and I had no way of judging his intent...
...I thought my passages on Weber, Simmel, and Tonnes were often quite enthusiastic...
...Mitzman would rather see them as spokesmen for a nonacademic world of popular radicalism...
...Please accept my apology, futile and inadequate though it is at this point...
...Otherwise one would find it difficult to comprehend why he should suggest that I see the radical modernists as "spokesmen for a nonacademic world of popular radicalism," or that I believe intellectuals should be "immersed in a popular-radical context," or have "too great a determination to find popular-radical contexts for [my] favorite thinkers...
...If you refuse to publish a retraction, you should at least publish my letter of October 7, 1969...
...IV October 13, 1969 DRAPER to CURTIS I am intrigued by the psychology of this case of mistaken identity...
...I had assumed some minimum of honor and ethical principle on your part...
...I am quite concerned by your response to Tom Curtis' article in our Summer issue, and by the information you provide in regard to the appearance of your name in the context of the passage you quoted...
...Professor Marcuse may speak for oppressed groups in contemporary society...
...I have never even remotely held any government position...
...This is my obligation to pure Geist...
...GORAN BENGTSON Stockholm n LETTERS Letters to an Editor Mr...
...In his letter to me of October 10, 1969, Tom Curtis wrote: "I am asking Larry to note the error in the next issue...
...It was in a section added hurriedly after the manuscript was turned in: I meant Roger Hilsman and through a lapse I cannot explain somehow wrote your name instead...
...Mitzman must make some consistent theoretical choices...
...I do argue that the most sensible framework for understanding the "radical modernists"—especially the sociologists Tunnies, Weber, Simmel, Sombart, and Michels—is not the Mandarin academy, in which before World War I they were a marginal group (most of them with poor appointments or no appointments for most of the period from 1890 to 1914), but rather the extra-academic milieu of bourgeois radicalism, which on the whole was hopeful and political before 1900, and despairing and largely aesthetic after 1900...
...Lawrence Grauman, Jr., Editor The Antioch Review 136 Dayton Street Yellow Springs, Ohio 45387 Dear Mr...
...What is more puzzling, considering Ringer's "stress" on the extra-academic side of the radical modernists is the paucity of references to Stefan George and Nietzsche...
...For the German sociologists, that situation was above all an academic community and tradition, not just a bureaucracy (another of Mitzman's simplifications), and only rarely and tangentially a world of popular left-wing politics...
...In the cases of Tonflies, of Sombart and of Mannheim, I pointed to more or less enduring sympathies for aspects of the German labor movement or of Marxism...
...He cannot be content with Huguenot ancestries or other presumed occasional sources of heterodoxy...
...I was curious wherethis information came from, and on April 24, 1970, I wrote a letter to the editors of this publication to theeffect that there was not a word of truth in the role ascribed to me, and I asked where they had obtainedthis utterly false information...
...I have never been appointed to anything by President Kennedy or by any other President...
...One well-known "New Leftist" charged that I was "politically" responsible for the death of Che Guevara...
...Mitzman, curiously enough, calls for additional emphasis in the case of Sombart, a political changeling whose later views encompassed an immoderate enthusiasm for the bureaucracy and something close to a flirtation with fascism...
...3. There is something sad and ludicrous about the implication that I have supported the Vietnam war the way or parallel to the way others supported "Wilson's war...
...One final point: Ringer now claims that he "shamelessly make[s] Weber's intelligence a factor in his near-total liberation from his heritage...
...His impassioned criticism ofcontemporary liberal intellectuals recently in gov ernment, such as Kennedy-appointees Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Walt Rostow, Richard Goodwin, Theodore Draper, and others, parallels that of Bournefor men like Dewey, Charles Beard, ColumbiaUniversity's Dean Frederick Keppel and the New Republic's Walter Weyl—all of whom enlistedtheir talents in Wilson's war (p...
...to THEODORE DRAPER Thank you for your inquiry of 7 October...
...Is it not curious that Mitzman accuses me at one and the same time of leaning too much on pure Geist and of "denigrating" the work of the sociologists by linking it to a context...
...True, he does devote half a page to Sombart's relation to the German labor movement, and more briefly links Weber and other scholars to Friedrich Naumann's left-liberal Protestant party...
...More important, I did stress the extra-academic involvements of some of the men I called "radical modernists...
...If Professor Ringer "did stress the extra-academic involvements" of the sociologists before and after the turn of the century, he must have done so in an edition other than the one sent to me...
...This reference to me is nothing but gratuitous and ignorant malice...
...VI Seven months passed...
...Grauman: I have just seen the summer 1969 issue of The Antioch Review...
...If it seems that he mistakenly identified you in the context of that quote I will do whatever I can to acknowledge the error...
...Either the tracing of thoughts to "situations" is always in part, or it is never in part, a denigration...
...So do I, but Ringer might have pointed out that we have fundamentally different notions of what we mean by "heritage" and "liberation...
...III October 10, 1969 LAWRENCE GRAUMAN, JR...
...I now recognize that I was wrong...
...There were a mere handfull of socialists among German academics after 1919, and practically none at all before that time...
...In your letter to me of October 10, 1969, you wrote: "If it seems that he mistakenly identified you in the context of that quote I will do whatever I can to acknowledge the error...
...I cannot offer an explanation for this "stupid and malignant nonsense"—if indeed it should prove to be that...
...n Kudos from Sweden EDITOR: Just a line to let you know that the March–April issue, which I've recently been reading, may well be the best one I've seen during several years as a subscriber—just the thing, of course, to make me eager to remain one...
...What justification can there be for this stupid and malignant nonsense...
...however I have been in touch with Curtis and he has agreed to write you directly as soon as he has checked the notes and reading he used in the preparation of his article...
...PREVENTIVE DETENTION — AND PSYCHIATRY (continued) V October 13, 1969 DRAPER to GRAUMAN Many thanks for your prompt reply...
...282...
...After World War I, "The Nietzsche revival . . . on a popular level...
...Yet all he talks about is Sombart's temporary, distant and one-sided sympathy with revisionist Social Democrats or unionists, and Weber's certainly more serious and selfcritical attempt to approach and inspire an honest bourgeois liberalism...
...I still remember the formidable case you made against our invasion of the Dominican Republic, and I thought your long article on Black Nationalism in the recent Commentary was the most persuasive and authoritative analysis of the subject I have read...
...To state his case as efficiently as possible, Mitzman uses the perfectly respectable techniques of exaggeration and simplification...
...And if it is always partly a denigration, then where are we but back with pure Geist for thinkers we approve...
...Most inappropriate, however, is Ringer's implication that I believe intellectuals should be "immersed in a popular-radical context...
...In my account, the extra-academic connections of the radical modernists merely help to account for the maverick stance, the critical spirit through which these men achieved self-conscious distance from their own "mandarin" tradition...
...In any case I shall await a copy of Curtis' explanation...
...but one can hardly associate his thought with the experience of a black family in an American slum...
...Theodore Draper has asked us to print the following exchange of letters: October 7, 1969 Mr...
...Now he says it was a case of mistaken identity...
...It so happens that I personally have a great deal of respect for your work...
...I assumed that Tom Curtis' explanation and apology had satisfied your understandable concern, and that you no longer cared about a printed retraction...
...Incidentally, since you have been reading the Review so faithfully lately, I would very much appreciate your candid opinion of our general effort...
...If Tom Curtis has learned anything from this incident, something good will have come out of it...
...But before the war Georg Simmel, Heinrich Rickert, Arthur Salz, Alfred Weber, Friedrich Gundolf, Ernst Kantorowicz, and E. R. Curtius all were either friends or adherents of the George circle...
...I will still print such a retraction if you insist...
...I am asking Larry to note the error in the next issue...
...Not the slightest hint, then, of Nietzsche's influence on virtually all the important prewar sociologists, most of them radical modernists: Simmel's book, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Tunnies' Der Nietzsche-Kultus, Scheler's Ressentiment, Sombart's Der Bourgeois, Weber's sophisticated use of Nietzschean themes, especially in "The Social Psychology of the World Religions," all seem to have escaped Professor Ringer's "stress" on the "extraacademic involvements" of the modernists...
...It strikes me that intellectuals have seldom been truly immersed in a popular-radical context...
...But I do not wish to make a mountain out of a molehill...
...I recently came across a publication called Subliminal Warfare: The Role of Latin American Studies, issued by the North American Congress on LatinAmerica...
...Editor: In his thoughtful review of my Decline of the German Mandarins, [DISSENT, January—February 1970] Arthur Mitzman argues that I do not sufficiently connect the writings of the great German sociologists with the "middle- and working-class opposition to the bureaucratic empire...
...I will not make the mistake again...
...Nietzsche, whom in 1918 Weber listed with Marx as one of the two men who had most shaped the German intellectual world, also receives short shrift in Ringer's "stress" on the extra-academic connections of the academy...
...before World War I he was suspect, together with "his simplifiers and distorters" among the "radical modernists...
...What really impresses me in Weber, Simmel, and other modernists among German academics is their capacity for self-criticism, their ironic distance from their own role as intellectuals...
...The reference to you in my Antioch Review article is flatly wrong...
...I was irate because this was not the first case of its kind...
...IX June 30, 1970 DRAPER to GRAUMAN I have come across cases of shameless effrontery, but your letter of June 25, 1970, sets a new record in my experience...
...surely radical roots alone are not exempt from this alternative...
...I have received a letter from Tom Curtis of which you no doubt have a copy...
...Simmel wrote essays on George...
...Popular, no, since as Barrington Moore recently suggested, a scholar who cannot on occasion say "the people be damned" when they support injustice is no freer than one who cannot say "the government be damned...
...I was irate because this was not the first case of its kind.* In the present political climate, I do not expect it to be the last...
...At least two more issues have come out without a word on the matter...
...I have not, however, read any of your recent work on national policy, so I did not think to question Curtis' reference when I edited the article...
...had no marked repercus sions in the German academic world...
...Although he notes briefly that Nietzsche "disliked the official role which the universities had come to play, their subservience to the bureaucracy and their excessive nationalism," and places Nietzsche among the cultural critics of the Wilhelmian era, he locates him in an intellectual no-man's land...
...Could it be that the interest of such men in Nietzsche does not support Ringer's view of the "situation" of the sociologists as "above all an academic community and tradition...
...And now you tell me that you thought Tom Curtis' purely private explanation to me was enough and that a printed retraction was not necessary...
...Sincerely, THEODORE DRAPER II October 10, 1969 TOM CURTIS to THEODORE DRAPER Larry Grauman has shown me your letter...
...Of course if you wait for three or more issues to pass, your readers will find it hard to connect a retraction with the original issue...
...I can also shamelessly make Weber's intelligence a factor in his near-total liberation from his heritage...
...And it could be a mere oversight that the name of Heinrich Braun, the revisionist socialist who published the journal which served in the nineties as a link between liberal-left intellectuals and the labor movement—a journal in which Weber, Sombart, Tunnies, and other radical modernists published extensively and which Weber and Sombart jointly edited after 1903—does not appear in Ringer's index...
...George appears in Ringer's book only once, in connection with the postwar intellectual scene...
...As far as I can make out, he refers only once to me in what appears to be an appreciative footnote (p...
...251...
...It is sometimes uncomfortable being shot at from both sides...
...It is, incidentally, this kind of "unpopular" radicalism with which I associate Herbert Marcuse, whose most important work when I was his student was Eros and Civilization, hardly an attempt to "speak for oppressed groups in contemporary society...
...Mitzman's requirements, though, are far more extensive, and I wonder whether he sees that clearly enough...
...VII May 29, 1970 DRAPER to GRAUMAN I am puzzled by your apparent failure to publish an acknowledgement of the error about me in the Summer 1969 issue of The Antioch Review, as promised in your letter of October 10, 1969...
...VIII June 25, 1970 GRAUMAN to DRAPER I'm sorry it has taken me so long to answer your letter of May 29th...
...Congratulations...
...If his reference to you turns out to be nonsense, I feel sure that it was not the result of malignant intent...
...This is generally the case, but probably more so with a publication like the Review...
...My argument is sustained by vaguely "bohemian" influences upon the radical modernists, and these are not hard to find...
...But that merely increases my determination to see the intellectual as he really is, that is, with his own psychological attachments to his own immediate "situation...
...I partly share Mitzman's dislike for the metaphor of pure Geist, where "pure" means unrooted, unaccountable...
...1. I was not a Kennedy-appointee...
...2. As far as I am concerned, Professor Chomsky's book [American Power and the New Mandarins], to which Mr...
...Radical, perhaps, because I believe that genuinely independent social thought often brings a theorist into radical conflict with the shibboleths of his society, a position with which I think Ringer would agree, given his generally positive attitude toward the men he describes as "radical modernists...
...In it, one of your contributors, Tom Curtis, wrote: Chomsky painfully documents the role of intellectuals, in government and scholarship, who haveconcerned themselves with questions of techniquerather than morality...
...On page 19, I suddenly found my name ina list of "consultants" for the ill-famed and ill-fated "Project Camelot," with an explanation that I wasone of those who "agreed to assist in the technical development of the research design for Project Camelot" and whose "substantive contributions and criticisms were valuable in this process...
...For my part, the heritage includes but goes far beyond the academic and intellectual framework Ringer discusses, into such matters as the Victorian morality and Puritanical work ethos Weber received from his mother and the political and social feeling of epigonism which he said publicly in the nineties was the destiny meted out to his generation by his father's...
...Weber had a number of discussions with the poet around 1910, and the importance in Weber's prewar Sunday salon of Gundolf, George's closest disciple, was matched only by that of Georg Lukacs, then a Tolstoian mystic and aesthetician: neither Lukacs nor Gundolf seem to be worth mentioning in Ringer's account...
...Nevertheless, it was our mistake, and if you want us to print a correction I will try to work it out...
...Stupid maybe, even "sad and ludicrous," but not malignant...
...I have not yet receivedan answer or even an acknowledgment of my letter...
...For reasons I can only guess at, some "New Leftists" have made the most outrageously perverted attacks on me...
...Or is this another peculiar psychological slip...
...We might try to emulate some of the best of themin this respect also...
...he must uncover substantial and permanent involvements with left-liberal and working-class politics...
...Have you changed your mind...
...I suppose I misunderstood your last response of the exchange we had over the unfortunate mistake in the Summer '69 issue of the Review...
...Mitzman strengthens the point, but he also runs the risk of overestimating such tenuous connections as Huguenot ancestry (Sombart and Weber) and distant family relationships ("Weber's uncle and grandfather were capitalists in textiles...
...FRITZ K. RINGER ARTHUR MITZMAN replies: It explains much in Professor Ringer's rebuttal that he finds the techniques of exaggeration and simplification "perfectly respectable...
...Tom Curtis seemed to fall into that pattern, and I decided I had had enough...
...So would the insistence that the good intellectual necessarily deserves to be regarded as a spokesman for all social groups, or for "the old Adam in us all," as Mitzman says...
...however it is difficult for us to accommodate a request like this—we have no Letters column, nor any other convenient department for retractions—and I doubt that many people who read Curtis' article will read the retraction...
...LETTERS I do not once use the term or imply the concept of "popular radicalism" in suggesting an alternative social framework to the "Mandarin" modernists...
...Curtis refers, painfully documents and passionately criticizes exactly nothing...
...While charging, on those grounds, that I am too much concerned with "pure Geist," he also accuses me of "reducing the critical social theory of these men to a variety of mandarin ressentiment," of "denigrating as little more than maudlin rhetoric a body of social theory whose assimilation by contemporary radical thought is at once imperative and long overdue...
...I would still insist that this kind of thing is "malignant" in its practical effect...
...It is your obligation to find a way to make adequate and suitable amends for a flagrant falsification in your pages...
...I see no discussion of these questions in Ringer's book: for me they are central to an understanding of Weber and his epoch...
...Too great a determination to find popular-radical contexts for our favorite thinkers would seem to me doctrinaire, and a bit sentimental as well...
Vol. 17 • September 1970 • No. 5
