Reviews

...A participatory democrat must ask himself how far he can meet and how far he can resist the counter-evidence while still adhering to his position...

...Ortega saw that an unprecedented social aimlessness was in the process of displacing traditional bourgeois aspirations...

...The apparent incompatibility of esthetic modernism with traditional humanistic cultural standards is a problem that contemporary humanists have been reluctant to face but can no longer avoid...

...But these are hard problems, and since it is difficult to think of many modem thinkers who have dealt successfully with them, it would be unfair to dwell on Lukacs's failure to do so...

...Two criticize what she calls the "contemporary theory of democracy" (from Schumpeter through Berelson, Dahl, Sartori, Eckstein, and others) by considering the role of participation in the theories of Rousseau, Mill, and Cole —seen by Schumpeter as proponents of an irrational theory of democracy...

...THIS BOOK MAY INITIATE an effort to formulate and gather the evidence in support of "participatory democracy" as its advocates confront contemporary democratic theorists...

...like a mythology...

...Nor, further, does she do more than mention the problem of making clear the nature of the "needs" men have which are to be met by the act of participation...

...Yet Pateman seems to confuse here the holding of authority with the legitimacy of authority— and her identification of the two shunts aside the problem of the role of leadership in an applicable theory of participation...

...Nor does she consider the application of participatory democracy to the extraindustrial spheres of life and particularly to higher education—from where the cry first arose—except for a cursory sentence or two...

...122 pp...

...Similarly, her stated but unargued opposition to Isaiah Berlin's strictures against Rousseau in Two Concepts of Liberty is not convincing...

...In this Lukacs is surely correct...

...THERE IS NO SHORTAGE at the moment of publications proclaiming the end of the bourgeois age and the advent of Postmodernism, the New Sensibility, the Revolt of the Body, and a variety of Breakthroughs—cultural, psychological, or psychedelic...

...the theory further holds that values, traditions, and the sense of the past itself are "historical," i.e., temporary and variable constructions superimposed by the subjectivity of each epoch and lacking any permanent foundation in human nature or the nature of things...

...But it was this belief in the impossibility of objectivity, when carried to its logical conclusions, which helped bring about the senselessness and meaninglessness in the arts that Lukacs condemns...

...THE OBSOLESCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION is now widely alleged, and the publication of John Lukacs's book gives occasion for some reflection on this subject...

...They fail to consider that many of the "bourgeois values" embodied in the more significant forms of our culture are not exclusively or necessarily tied to any social class but are part of a more general human inheritance...

...The pessimists are correct in viewing the present crisis as a sign of "the dissolution of learning," but Lukacs assigns the primary responsibility for this dissolution to professors and intellectuals in all disciplines who, on one level, have dismembered the world of knowledge by cutting it up into unrelated specializations and, on another level, have responded all too readily to the thirst for facile syntheses...

...Despite the justice of this by-now-familiar indictment of Western "Faustian" man, the argument ignores the tradition of rational self-criticism of which Faust itself is a prime expression and it overlooks the fact that the barbaric and merely functional "rationality" admired by motivational researchers, systems analysts, and missile technologists is a travesty of this tradition...

...One respect in which Lukacs's work differs from most of this fashionably apocalyptic writing lies in the distinction he makes between bourgeois civilization and the essentially antibourgeois technocracy that has displaced it...

...Beyond a fine examination of contemporary democratic theory and an equally good development of the conceptual and empirical aspects of participation, she has given us little detailed analysis of the implications and deficiencies of the data she presents...

...Ironically, the lapse of confidence in bourgeois values was in large part the result of the force of bourgeois self-criticism...

...Such statements define the contradiction that has invaded virtually all contemporary institutions: never have they seemed so oppressive, yet never have they so lacked confidence in themselves or experienced so acute a sense of their impotence—in fact, their oppressiveness may almost be said to be a reflection of their impotence...

...She accordingly condemns contemporary democratic theory as elitist and even antidemocratic...

...Can allegiance to the historical mode of thinking be reconciled with a dedication to traditional values of culture...

...Can the assumption of the historical and subjective nature of truth be squared with the search for values capable of compelling general conviction and giving content to authority and to social relations...

...4.95...

...From this point of view, however, her analysis of Mill as an advocate of participation in government and elsewhere seems mistaken in light of some recent evidence to the contrary...

...This contradiction weakens Lukacs's attack on materialistic philosophies, which he holds largely accountable for undermining the traditions of autonomous rationality and moral seriousness...

...New York: Harper & Row...

...Lukacs argues that despite its roots in the older bourgeois concept of rationality, the social pattern which has recently emerged, marked as it is by social engineering, technical "problem-solving," permissiveness in morals, and faith in management, bureaucracy, and administration, is radically alien to the moral traditions of bourgeois humanism...

...Oddly anachronistic in this respect, current radicals continue to undermine patrician standards already woefully weak in order to achieve a liberation from constraints that lost their effective strength long ago...

...This reviewer was struck by the clarity and simplicity of Pateman's reasoning...

...Without denying the enormity of social and political injustice in our age or the need for action to remedy it, Lukacs goes well beyond this to the deeper problems of boredom and loneliness, which cannot be understood or remedied simply in material terms...

...The essential point seems to be that it requires that authority be individuated by each and every citizen—as Rousseau, for instance, argued...

...PATEMAN'S EXAMINATION of participatory democracy is dual in character...

...It is possibly no coincidence that Ortega, too, in his writings on the dehumanization of art, provided a rationale for an antirealist esthetic, antithetical to the standards of culture and learning Ortega elsewhere defended...

...and that their indiscipline and arrogance are but the reverse sides of their insecurity and fear...

...Lukacs restates some of the main points of their diagnosis, a diagnosis given classical formulation by Ortega in The Revolt of the Masses (1930...

...The mistake, Lukacs implies, is to think that what we want most is liberation, when what we really want, or need, is a sense of meaning and justification that would give liberation a measure of dignity...

...Applying these ideas to the turmoil on university campuses, Lukacs rejects the conservative view that sees no more in the disorders than "the indiscipline and the arrogance of a generation that no longer wants to learn anything," as well as the leftist celebration of such events as challenges to repressive authority...

...Despite its unprecedented power to coerce, contemporary authority is pathetically weak in its ability to provide a compelling moral and philosophical justification for its existence...

...In his analysis of the decline of the bourgeoisie, Lukacs draws upon a tradition of European social thought extending back to Tocqueville and Burckhardt and including Ortega y Gasset, Jan Huizinga, and the contemporary theorist Jacques Ellul...

...Such a move tends in turn to subvert the authority of cultural standards, and it aligns Lukacs unwittingly with such apologists for counter-culture subjectivism as Theodore Roszak, who asserts that "objective consciousness...

...Lukacs deplores the "primitivism," contempt for standards of craftsmanship, and abdication of moral authority, which have resulted in "the senselessness of the arts" and "the meaninglessness of letters...

...PARTICIPATION AND DEMOCRATIC THEORY, by Carole Pateman...

...is an arbitrary construct in which a given society in a given historical situation has invested its sense of meaningfulness and value...

...In thus cutting themselves off from cultural traditions which had given intellectual and moral substance to the earlier radical critique of society—and which could vitalize contemporary radicalism—such radicals have no choice but to promote romantic, irrationalistic, and primitivistic alternatives...

...Yet Lukacs refrains from joining his voice to the call for psychic liberation sounded by the so-called "Freudian Left" and numerous other "cultural revolutionaries," whose diagnoses, though he does not take them up, he would doubtless see as beside the point...

...How the impermanence of goods has rendered their possession unsatisfactory...

...By "the passing of the modern age" Lukacs means the passing of the age of the bourgeoisie, whose dominance he sees as having expired some two decades ago with the triumph of technocratic and bureaucratic society in the West...

...In reacting against the positivist's separation of the knower from the object, which results in a divorce of science from morality, those modern thinkers who have reduced objectivity to the status of myth do not notice that in doing so they deny the accessibility of truth...

...Doubtless a writer must be judicious as to the extent of his investigations, but a philosopher who merely sketches an argument, particularly one involving ambiguous empirical data, may be said to have lost his way in the social world...

...Such radical critics as Susan Sontag only confuse matters when they condemn "the damage that Western `Faustian' man, with his idealism, his magnificent art, his sense of intellectual adventure, his world-devouring energies for conquest, has already done, and further threatens to do...

...He writes, "I believe, on the contrary, that the young are engaged in a desperate search— not very intelligently, or even consciously, to be sure—for some kind of authority...

...This book does not go very far into the argument, but it does a service by presenting a clear outline of the arguments for and against both versions of democracy and of the empirical studies to be undertaken if the contemporary theory of democracy is to be shown to be faulty and the claims of participatory democracy to be verified...

...By contrast, current radicals who reject the whole of this culture as a product of an inhuman rationalism or an ideological instrument of class exploitation or elitism are turning their backs on their radical origins as well...

...In a series of densely packed chapters, Lukacs enumerates the aspects of institutional demoralization which, since Ortega wrote, have occasioned an even more extensive withdrawal of mass confidence from governments, economies, schools and universities, churches, the sciences, arts and letters, and social and sexual relations...

...Lukacs argues that for all its conformity, snobbery, and class selfishness, bourgeois civilization at its best incorporated the higher values of the classical and aristocratic social orders it had superseded—the passion for rationality, justice, and order, the respect for discipline and self-knowledge...

...Finally, her simplification of the issue of depoliticalization resulting from the ordinary man's inability to understand, much less discuss, the means and ends of high technology— a problem highlighted most recently by Jurgen Habermas—seems questionable...

...We may be justified in regarding Pateman's reluctance to amplify her points as evidence that participatory democracy has not yet come of age as a viable alternative to the present democratic system...

...Though resigned to the termination of bourgeois culture as such, Lukacs finds reason to hope that through progressive extension of historical consciousness, itself the chief legacy of the bourgeoisie, some of the ethical and intellectual achievements of the defunct civilization will survive the present upheavals and fertilize the society of the future, whatever form it should assume...

...This failure, moreover, should not destroy one's respect for his positive achievement in advancing the discussion of the contemporary predicament well beyond conventionally received ideas...

...A second respect in which Lukacs's argument differs from many contemporary analyses of these issues lies in the distinction he recognizes between those bourgeois values that do reflect narrow class interests and those having more broadly human applications...

...Pateman holds that the essence of true democracy is the full participation of every member of a society in the tasks and decisions of the polity, of every association, national or local...

...If, as Lukacs suggests, some values persist after the social and material matrix that gave rise to them has passed away, perhaps this indicates that these values can be claimed as permanent norms of experience...

...The contemporary theory of democracy represents a considerable failure of the political and sociological imagination on the part of recent theorists of democracy...

...If, as seems to me likely, this dilemma proves unresolvable within the framework of the theory of historical consciousness, then there may eventually be no choice but to reopen the question of the possibility of transhistorical values...

...The values of bourgeois civilization, according to Lukacs, started to take hold at the beginning of the 16th century, reached their culmination in the European haute bourgeoisie of the first half of the 19th century, and since then have steadily declined, although only recently has the total eclipse of these values become general...

...But he then turns and praises Symbolist poets and Impressionist painters for recognizing "that an objective representation of reality was impossible, that external reality was to a great measure formed from the inside of the viewer, that the object of his observation was not independent of the observer...

...To define values as historical in this sense is to concede their arbitrariness, thus draining them of the authority necessary to satisfy the modern need for a self-transcending purpose...

...Pateman believes that the issue of the applicability of participatory democracy—in industry and elsewhere—is a live and pressing question in our day, indeed for any society seeking to be humanistic...

...Her modest outline suggests more is yet to be done if the position is to convince—as an empirical possibility for human governance...

...The theory of historical - consciousness, by presupposing the temporal and subjective character of the values it would preserve, takes away with one hand what it bestows with the other...

...How the greatest states, having accumulated unequaled powers, suddenly have found that they are becoming powerless...

...her attention to the worker's participation in industrial decisions in Yugoslavia and elsewhere is meant to support the second...

...The theory of historical consciousness (about which Lukacs has written an earlier study) entails not merely a vindication of the sense of the past and the values of tradition...

...Unhindered by such a framework, Lukacs envisions a future in which the higher achievements of the bourgeoisie have a legitimate place...

...that the main problem was no longer the denial of economic and political mobility to some groups but the spiritual emptiness of the whole of society, its lack of any collectively shared purpose that could give meaning to the life of the individual and make genuine authority possible...

...One of the important considerations for advocates of participatory democracy is the development of a theory of authority...

...That the crises which have overtaken institutions are often attributed to exclusively material causes, particularly to the unequal distribution of wealth and power, is itself for Lukacs a prime symptom of contemporary spiritual poverty...

...How, at the time when civilization has become most widespread, people have found that their aspirations are woefully empty...

...Huizinga had noted the bewilderingly "antinomic and ambivalent" character of 20th-century reality, in which "the mind finds itself as it were suspended between two opposites," and Lukacs's chapter titles suggest this sense of paradox: • How the rule of democracy made people feel powerless and weak...

...We are threatened not by the absence of justice," he writes, "we are threatened by the fantastic prevalence of untruth...

...Conceding the justice of attacks on the bourgeoisie as a class, Lukacs argues that the reflective, introspective, historically conscious mode of thought which reached its highest development in the bourgeois age is durable enough to outlast the passing of this age...

...but the search for a convincing and reassuring argument was to be inconclusive—only the skeleton is here...

...Though Lukacs is not a radical, his position on this point coincides with the older traditions of radicalism, which favored the preservation of those elements of bourgeois culture that represented universal human aspirations...

...As long as it remains ambivalent toward these issues, the humanistic alternative to the technocratic anticulture and the irrationalistic counter culture is seriously weakened...

...Pateman then outlines the arguments for participatory democracy as given by Rousseau, Mill, and Cole and in the concluding chapter intimates her own view...

...Like numerous opponents of determinism and positivism in this century, Ortega among them, Lukacs succumbs to a corresponding overemphasis on the subjective origins of knowledge, arguing that objectivity is "an invention of the human mind," i.e., no more than a regularized form of subjectivity...

...New York: Cambridge University Press...

...She wants to consider and gives support to its hypothesis that participation has an educative function to perform, and she wants to show that participation is applicable to industry—thinkers such as Eckstein notwithstanding...

...Even though her evidence in support of participatory democracy is in BOOKS conclusive and leaves us with an open question, perhaps it also has more content and more empirical support than even its radical advocates would have thought several years ago...

...If the positivist model of neutral, value-free objectivity rationalizes the immoral use of scientific achievements, the counterview that objectivity is a mere historical myth implies a relativism no less congenial to the demands of power...

...For all the brilliance of its analysis, The Passing of the Modern Age itself reflects many of the unresolved conflicts in recent humanistic thought...

...Miss Pateman presents a study in six chapters...

...that the advent of liberal democracy was fundamentally altering the character of the social problem...

...How, at a time when education has be come universal, people are discovering that their schools are teaching little or nothing...

...Lukacs's claims for historical consciousness as a potential force of continuity against the drift of cultural disintegration, though they are largely reasonable, represent perhaps the most vulnerable feature of his book...

...Her consideration of the conceptual aspects of Rousseau's, Mill's, and Cole's theory of participation is meant to support the first hypothesis...

...Four other chapters present empirical evidence of the viability of participatory democracy, particularly in industry, drawn mainly from Great Britain and Yugoslavia...