REVIEWS

...They include the acceptance of the binding character of the ties created by voluntary—not bloodgiven— communities...

...It provides the community and the 444 individuals who compose it with their quintessential rite of self-identification, and in so doing serves the public good, both as history and as therapy...

...In reality, no one is anonymous, but we all find ourselves in a situation of anonymity...

...A humane skepticism will find fault not with socialism but with dogmatic socialist attacks on reformism...

...As I share his rejection of any authoritarian solution of the dilemma based on the abolition of democratic group rights, I am left with his alternative—the voluntary limitation of group claims by a broad consensus on a common view of the public interest...

...10.00...

...What real weakening we observe in the ethic of work, and particularly in the sense of responsibility for work, seems to be primarily caused by a generally lessened belief in the inherent meaningfulness of one's contribution to society, aggravated by the lack of scope for initiative in working on a conveyor belt or as human annex to a computer, and secondarily to a weakening of sanctions for irregular or careless work in conditions of near-full employment and improved social security...

...The cultural crisis is not a diabolus ex machina—it is the most general penalty for failing to solve our social problems, along with such specific penalites as wars, totalitarian revolutions, mass unemployment, currency chaos, hunger, or ecological devastation...

...it is the others who are anonymous to us...

...The idea of the rights of the individual has evolved from the medieval concept of the rights of each 439 according to his station, to the "bourgeois" rights to equal political and legal status, and to contemporary ideas of the right to equal security and equal chances in the social and economic field...

...They include the affirmation of the uniqueness of the human individual, which implies some "natural" rights for that individual...

...To feel the truth of this, one need only consider the torpedo-touch formalism of The Measures Taken...

...Immortality is an illusion for thought and art, as for man...

...These values include a belief in reason, which implies the belief in a rationally intelligible order of the universe...

...and that Galileo too "deals with the baseness of man, and the baseness is not condemned...

...He writes as if these circumstances did not exist...

...Chiaromonte, however, notes that the game can involve its audience only because it has an extra dimension of necessary and, if one will grant the paradox, edifying bad faith...

...Indeed, one of Bell's main qualities as a sociologist is a capacity for describing social change in an immense variety of aspects, as if circling around his subject and throwing light on it from ever new sides...

...and he never succeeded in extricating himself from his social position as a famous writer, a landowner, and a paterfamilias...

...The culture has become an "adversary culture...

...History is therefore the domain of psychology as well as politics, and, in a world that did not confuse is with ought, clarity of program would be less desired than purity of purpose...

...As I write, even Britain shows signs of turning the corner in the struggle against double-digit inflation, and that not by an authoritarian curbing of interest groups but rather by the beginning acceptance of a common "public philosophy...

...270 pp...

...For if that is done, the question of the interaction between cultural change and other processes of social change appears in a new light...

...This is the most effective and massive form of the hedonistic breakthrough, and it is not tied to a sense of crisis but to an increase of general satisfaction...

...And they include the view of work in this world, meaning also productive physical work, as a positive merit and not an inevitable burden...

...We must include in it also the mechanisms that assure the transmission of these values from generation to generation, and that bring about their partial transformation under the impact of changing conditions...

...New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich...

...but it is the values themselves and not the symbolic expressions that constitute the core of the culture...

...That sense lies at the very heart of everything he wrote...

...Camus seems to be passing out of fashion, possibly because seriousness at his intensity is frowned upon...

...q 448...

...The story of a man is always incomplete...

...Capitalism has been successfully taken over by Japan in a cultural framework different from that of the West, while Western culture existed long before the capitalist stage in the development of Western society...

...The idea of binding communal ties has expanded from the early Christian congregation and the medieval city to binding national and potentially supranational loyalites, and the idea of law as the necessary body of rules to draw the line between individual rights and communal duties has grown with it...

...I am prepared to propose that we adopt as a principle the notion that 'truth cannot be the daughter of time' and, consequently, that we make it a rule to exclude the `temporal' element from every judgment about what is true and what is false, what is good and what is bad, what is just and what is unjust, what is useful and what is useless...

...it is sufficient to think of what could have been different—almost everything—to know that his story can never contain the meaning of a human life, but only what that existence was permitted to be and to give...

...He seems to be saying, not "Here is my mind...

...However, we know that the same thing happens to us in the eyes of others...

...In Marx, who contrasted the scientific economist's knowledge of "the final explanation" with the popular economist's subservience to "appearances," Chiaromonte is disturbed by the evident belief in truth as a single entity that is apprehended in time...

...If, however, the cultural sense of anomie is 441 caused by our failures to deal creatively with the consequences of accelerated social change—in the economic and political, international and domestic, educational and behavioral fields—the remedy, though difficult to discover and to apply, depends on our conscious activity...

...Thus "Faustian" rage to live, this ever dissatisfied and ultimately joyless form of "hedonism," is seen as expressing the postChristian individual's inability to accept his own mortality...

...But the pressure of increasing group claims in the modern democracies—the "revolution of rising entitlements," itself partly rooted in the hedonistic cultural attitude—subjects the public household to increasing strains manifested in the dilemmas of economic growth and inflation...

...The changes in the cultural sphere that form its main theme are seen as causing a loss of social cohesion rather than a constructive transformation of Western societies, and the political task of restoring the cohesion with a new "public philosophy" appears to depend on a new "Great Instauration," a creative act of religious and cultural renewal that may or may not arrive and certainly cannot be brought about at will...

...A writer is dead: you reflect upon his work, upon each book, upon their vital movement toward a deeper meaning...

...We are all indebted to Chiaromonte and Strauss, who, in their very different ways, but starting in each case from a hint in The Republic, have stressed the priority of man to what he builds so that it can never be forgotten...

...Alas, the ability has been used...

...The extent to which this goal can be reached in particular countries and in the West in general, in the overcoming of the recent inflation-recession crisis and in the longer run, will depend less on a sudden restoration of the "sacred ties among men" than on the ability of democratic leaders to develop a plausible vision of just what the public interest requires in a given situation, by what institutional means common solutions can be achieved, and how they would affect each group and individual...

...It is the appalling freedom from self-contradiction in Gandhi that robs us of our power to praise...

...The difference, I believe, lies in what possibly could be done about it all...

...A third strand, finally, is directly linked to changes in the economic and social structure—to the effects of urbanization and the rise of a massconsumption society...

...for I think that Bell would agree that there is no such thing as a "capitalist culture...

...For Brecht, it is finally the theater of stagecraft, the theater-as-spectacle, that asserts itself, finding in the aim of political edification support for the aestheticism that characterizes it...

...But Chiaromonte recognizes that "Brecht's dice are loaded...

...while excoriating the meat-eaters he went to the kitchen at night to eat meat secretly...

...Traditional, unchanging moral norms were replaced in a changing, but not too rapidly changing world by the conscience of the growing individual, incorporating an adult model of moral attitudes and thus forming the "innerdirected character...

...For all that, I should of course agree with Bell that the secularization—or, as he would prefer to say, the "profanization"—of the modern consciousness has been one of the major factors in the loss of cultural balance we are experiencing...

...The reader may well ask, what difference does that make...

...Moreover, he contends that in the "modern" era, which he dates roughly from the middle of the 19th century, "culture has become the most dynamic component of our civilization, outreaching the dynamism of technology itself"—an independent factor of change for its own sake, unhampered by economic constraints or political resistance...

...Capitalism and the Balance of Values IF WE LOOK at the processes of cultural change described by Bell in relation to this framework of values, the breakthrough of hedonism might at first sight appear as another aspect of the reinterpretation of the affirmation of the individual—a shift from the Puritan emphasis on the primacy of his immortal soul to an exclusive emphasis on his earthly life as a goal in itself...

...Nor is it fruitful to mark off "the arena of expressive symbolism" by itself as the cultural realm...

...As secularization itself is the outcome of the crises of traditional societies on one side and of the growth 440 of a scientific world view on the other, it thus takes its place among the elements of ever accelerating social, technological, and intellectual change that has made it more and more difficult to preserve the fundamental values of our civilization by renewing interpretation and by adjustment of the moral norms and the institutions derived from them to changing conditions...

...They are nothing but relics mutely surviving time's erosion and history's disasters, like monuments of stone...

...see how it works," but something like: "These are some arguments and facts I have just been thinking about...

...This means that the techniques of education—of "socialization"—both in the family and in specialized institutions, and the psychology of character formation are as vital parts of any culture, and as vital subjects for any study of cultural change, as are religion and art...

...But Bell believes that there has been a single direction of change within Western culture during the capitalist era—along the "axial principle" of selffulfillment by limitless experience...

...Alongside his essays on theater, Chiaromonte's passing allusions to film make strange reading...

...First expressed in the arts, this urge now has led to a generalized hedonistic breakthrough of uncontrolled appetites and irrational impulses...

...In this context Bell's third strand of cultural change—that dealing with the rise and the consequences of a society of mass consumption— takes its full weight...

...We should, in short, consider only the phenomena, the facts and the individuals as they `appear' in the present and never as products of a `process' that prevents us from knowing what they are or what we should think of them...

...Above all, I have put less emphasis on the autonomy of the "cultural realm"—though I do not, of course, deny the importance of the fact that religious and cultural changes follow a logic of their own—and I have put more emphasis on the impact of the process of general social change on the value system of a society...

...But we must not lose sight of the other side of the argument: accelerating change only produces a sense of meaninglessness, a loss of belief in an intelligible order, and a disintegration of moral ties, when the creative response to these accelerating changes fails to solve the problems of a meaningful social and international order under contemporary conditions and to transmit an effective moral sense without insistence on rigidly unchanging particular norms...

...he is blessed with our own self-indulgence and merciful duality...

...When we reason as if the indistinct communication with others, imposed on us by our daily life, in no way injures our individuality or the quality of our `values," our reasoning implies an assumption that is not so simple: that those moments have no importance, are moments effectively indifferent...

...the anonymity of the large, sinful city and the mobility of modern life multiply all kinds of temptation...

...To start with, the illusions men have about their `real' situation have no less `reality' (practical consequences) than their `final explanations,' for in society we are faced with men's real errors no less than with their true opinions...

...As the dynamics of capitalism has been the prime mover of this process of accelerating change in the West, it is true that all the strands of cultural change may ultimately be derived from these dynamics...

...Yet it is the inevitable limitation of a review article that it cannot attempt to reproduce the rich texture of its subject but must M concentrate on criticizing the underlying skeleton of arguments...

...Traditional belief in a divine order was effectively replaced in the Western world by belief in meaningful historical evolution toward "progress" in the direction of common values—toward improved rational understanding, expanding individual rights, and increasingly universal loyalties...

...and by the increasing emancipation of the artist from social norms and forms and the exaltation of his subjective "genius...

...This is the aspect of Genet not very concisely analyzed by Sartre—the use of the stage, and of public life in general, to construct a game of roles or "screens" endlessly elaborated...

...At the same time, I am not as convinced as Bell that the triumph of hedonism in mass consumption is incompatible with a (non-Puritan) work ethic, or that it is responsible for the decline of the work ethic we observe in the advanced Western countries...

...Yet the integrating function of a culture clearly depends on a measure of balance between its constituent values, even though the precise weighting of that balance may vary in differing periods of the culture's development and in different ideological movements in the course of its history—and disorientation becomes inevitable once that balance becomes radically disturbed...

...our experience of the crowd is not limited to the feeling of anonymity...

...That is not, of course, Bell's own conclusion—he is far too responsible to be consistent on this point...

...But how, asks Chiaromonte, can we pretend to hold ourselves above the very situation we claim as the cause of our suffering...

...other European names are possible but unsatisfying...

...But Chiaromonte is receptive to the quite different logic of a political theater, which, in every age, must encourage citizens to reflect on the fate of the polis by depicting its troubles either openly or in disguise, in the heroic, the satiric, or the ironic mode...

...But the value of the work as a major contribution to social understanding does not depend on the reader's sharing that mood or accepting Bell's thesis...

...The standard Romantic definition of art as energy shaped by intelligence—a definition that plainly informs much of Chiaromonte's writing—can in no way be read to exclude film a priori from the list of the arts...

...In the case of the modern West, the weakening of the family's educational role, both by the general separation of home and work in industrial society and by the growth of public education, would belong to that context, as would David Riesman's famous observation of the change from an "innerdirected" to an "other-directed" character or Erik Erikson's studies of the role of "identity crisis" in historical change...

...For only by dealing with society as a means can we regard man as an end...

...It is only the continuous acceleration of change in the growing individual's experience of daily life as well as in techniques of production, social structure, and political order, that has, by making older-generation models less and less relevant, led to the increasing replacement of the "inner-directed" by the "other-directed" character and the consequent weakening of moral certainties...

...I would suggest that a culture indeed is characterized by a particular vision of the meaning of human existence that distinguishes it from other cultures—but that vision is not only symbolically expressed in art and religion: it underlies the common values that are embodied in norms of conduct and assure the cohesion of a society...

...For here the effect of capitalist dynamics on the value system is not mediated by the effect of the general change in society on people's image of the world, but it is direct and tangible: with the increase of leisure time and of the range of available goods, the mentality of competition has been transferred from the work sphere to the sphere of consumption for ever wider strata...

...In short, a temperate skeptic...

...Bell's approach is based on the idea that complex and dynamic societies cannot be understood as unified "systems" in which each part develops as a function of the whole, but that they are composed of three major, interconnected yet autonomous "realms"—the economy, the polity, and the culture—each of which develops according to its own inherent logic...

...This is complexity...

...What I called, for want of a better phrase, the sense of limit, ought to have emerged as a theme in many of these quotations, from their common modesty of tone...

...Of this art of unmasking, Pirandello and Genet are the acknowledged masters...

...In particular, it shapes his passion for theater as the place where people who are forever inhabiting a single role, their "everyday mask," can step out of it for a moment to gain a distant prospect on themselves, more intelligent and perhaps more modest than what they knew before...

...In the end, the release of the sex instinct from all moral inhibitions, the release of material greed from communal social sanctions, and the release of demonic irrational urges from rational control converge to create a cultural climate that is increasingly hostile to the bureaucratic rationalization of life underlying the economic growth and administrative organization of modern industrial societies...

...the Greeks were first of all geometricians in their apprenticeship to virtue...

...In loosening the powerful engine of the limitless hunt for profit upon our world, these driving forces were bound to upset the balance between individual self-affirmation and social ties: to that extent, the whole capitalist era has been a lopsided development within the history of Western culture...

...All these values have been reinterpreted again and again in Western history, precapitalist as well as capitalist...

...It is not the cry of Dostoevsky's children...

...Again, the loss of religious faith, and of belief in personal immortality in particular, did not generally, and for several generations not typically, destroy the sense of a meaningful task in a finite life nor the effective sanctions of the moral conscience representing the individual's ties with the community...

...the breakdown of the form presupposes a weakening of communal ties before it becomes a factor accelerating that process...

...Yet the intellectual's concern for the weightlessness or lack of imposed meaning in social life is real enough...

...Finally, the idea of the positive merit of work, first developed in the medieval monastic orders, has received a new and intensified interpretation in the Protestant ethic, making it the mainspring for the "rationalization" of conduct, amounting to an instrumentalization of other spheres of life under the primacy of the economic imperative...

...He finds the only chance of a solution in the elaboration and acceptance of a new "public philosophy" to guide a democratic government in arbitrating between the diverse group interests according to the requirements of the public interest, and to help it in winning broad consensus for the resulting policies...

...If the genius is there, the metal will not be base...

...As Bell points out, the unleashing of the Hobbesian appetites was a driving force in the rise of capitalism from the start, along with the Puritan temper and in conflict with it...

...And he can show this consciousness in only one way—by speaking the truth without presuming that it has been given to him alone...

...Who would doubt that film has, of all the arts, the largest ability to distort facts...

...Because this exploration is not historically cumulative as in science but must return again and again to the same basic problems, there can be no single direction of change in culture as in economic or technological development...

...With the increasing importance of common tasks that have to be satisfied outside the market, the "public household" has become, first, an expanding sector and, finally, a more and more controlling organ of the economy...

...The Strands of Cultural Change BELL DEFINES the cultural realm as "the arena of expressive symbolism in art or religious forms that seek to explore and express the meaning of human existence...

...Or we can smile at both...

...But on closer inspection, it becomes clear that we are dealing with something more fundamental—a simultaneous tendency toward a crisis of belief in the other values of reason, community ties, and work, and a hypertrophy of individual self-affirmation ending in emptiness...

...FROM a constant and powerful emphasis one must surmise that Chiaromonte ranks theater highest among the arts...

...How many of these remain...

...And I think the prejudice that rules him is a deep and simple and Platonic one...

...the impulsive individualism of the artist has come to dominate the life-style at the expense of the rational and disciplined individualism of the bourgeois...

...Chiaromonte, a clearer and less self-dramatizing thinker, may be slow to gain the attention he deserves...

...Perhaps Chiaromonte too would have said that a vigilance on behalf of this ordeal, lest it lose all severity, was the great task of his life...

...that he is an artist in spite of his theory...

...But important as these specific points are, they do not touch the central issue...

...And one cannot discover the man through the writer, or the writer through the man...

...There is no need to mark instances because they are all in the same vein...

...in a number of chapters he follows various strands of this development in more or less detail...

...It is hard to think of a writer one might compare Chiaromonte to...

...A Broader View of Western Culture AS BELL UNROLLS this canvas, the reader cannot fail to recognize that he illuminates many important features in the evolution of Western capitalist societies...

...but it is closer to Toynbee than to Marx in that it is not deterministic, but accepts the truth that in given situations, cultural creativity may or may not succeed...

...But both are destined to survive...

...As a political thinker he is a contingent, high-spirited, remarkably unpolemical socialist...

...And it is only the increasing failure of Western history to make good the promise of matching technical and scientific progress with value-oriented progress, the grave world crises and world wars of the 20th century, and the threat of total destruction, that have given rise to a widespread sense of meaninglessness, to nihilistic outbreaks and horrors reinforcing it, and to the anarchic forms of a pseudohedonist rage of selffulfillment by self-destruction...

...However, it is my conviction that the inflation rate, which is really inseparable from steady growth in a controlled market economy, is rather lower than he assumes-2 to 3 percent rather than 4 to 5 percent was the rule in most of the Western world until the middle 1960s...

...The further weakening of the sense of intelligible order and of communal ties by recent critical developments has come on top of this original lopsidedness, and conversely that lopsidedness all along has made the creative solution of new problems more difficult...

...At this point something in him rebels, and he will hear no more talk on the subject...

...Why aestheticism...

...Beneath all of his essays, where the signature would go, one might easily engrave Emerson's comment on Montaigne: "Cut these words, and they would bleed...

...Edited by Miriam Chiaromonte...

...and nothing can replace it...

...The entire book would be justified if only by that quiet challenge to Ortega...

...By contrast, I feel that Bell, writing in the United States, has not given sufficient weight to the increasing irrelevance of decisions made by most individual states to the central economic problems of our time, and to the paramount need for international and even supranational mechanisms of decision on such vital issues as world currency management, raw material prices, and resource conservation, basic food supplies, etc...

...q David Bromwich A Free Mind THE WORM OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND OTHER ESSAYS, by Nicola Chiaromonte...

...The most recent and fully articulated program for such a theater was supplied by Brecht, and Chiaromonte's objection to "epic theater" is that it is not really political at all...

...He sees this development as conditioned by the new experiences of rapid motion, height, and noise, by the gradual loss of intelligible images of a rational order of nature (and society...

...I am speaking of Western society and Western culture...

...Everything is fragmentary, everything is incomplete, everything is the prey of mortality even when destiny seems to have granted both man and writer the gift of living to the limit of his forces, and of giving everything humanly possible, as in the case of Tolstoy...

...Where an abstract faith in the dignity of life is all we have, we are obliged nevertheless to let our faith draw strength from something as immediate as a cry in the night...

...But there is still a more substantive sense in which the loss of cultural balance is linked to the dynamics of capitalism...

...Moreover, the cathartic effect of classical art was linked to the taming of the impulse by the form that made its representation acceptable to the community...

...The strand he describes most fully is an aesthetic one: the replacement of the spatial and temporal order, sequence, and harmony that are characteristic of "classical" post-Renaissance art, and of the "objectifying" distance that went with it, by an increasing effort to represent the subjective chaos of impressions and to assault the spectator or audience until finally, in the 1960s, the borderline between art and "life" supposedly had disappeared...

...that "Mother Courage is in reality a pessimistic fable, indeed, nihilistic and misanthropic, much more than pacifist or anticapitalist...

...To this breakthrough of impulses Bell largely attributes the growing distributive conflicts in the polity of the Western democracies—notably the "revolution of rising entitlements" and the trend toward growing inflation resulting from the "fiscal crisis of the state...

...If the increasingly widespread perception of the world as chaotic and of individual life as meaningless, and the consequent turn of masses of people to a hectic and often self-destructive search for any kind of experience to fill the void, are the consequences of a largely autonomous development in the cultural realm, the only remaining hope is a new cultural creation ex nihilo—a "Great Instauration...

...Because of his evident concern about the phenomena of cultural crisis and decay in the West, Bell has in recent discussions frequently been described as a conservative...

...Yet it is the conclusion that seems to follow from his analysis...

...But Chiaromonte is writing as an Italian, a contemporary of the postwar realists, a man to whom the films of De Sica and Rossellini could not have been entirely unknown...

...But while art may generalize this breakthrough by expressing it in its vision of the world, the underlying loss of belief in an intelligible, rational order must be rooted in the experience of society before it can be proclaimed and spread by art...

...A second strand, treated in less detail but presumably no less important, is of a religious nature and comprises the consequences of secularization and more particularly of the loss of faith in individual immortality...

...He seems most personal, however, in his recollection of Camus...

...But if that is true, we must go back to a time before that capitalist stage, before the age of the Puritan entrepreneur, for an understanding of the fundamental Western values...

...The modern tyranny of ideology and science is pervasive, subtler than mere politics, and altogether more dangerous than its ancient precursor...

...Having penetrated this far most critics would stop...

...Human and humane are words, shockingly discrete from each other, which we try to bring together...

...The truth was the living presence...

...Within certain limits, the willingness to work, and to work well, seems to be most effectively stimulated by material incentives, and these are strongest where there is a great deal of leisure and a wide choice of objects for filling it...

...Bell does not suggest that the victory of the principle of self-fulfillment, or of hedonism, over the older Puritan attitudes has come about by a single chain of causation...

...It is, of course, true that these values are symbolically expressed, and impressed on the members of the society, in religion or myth before they are rationally formulated as part of a system of thought...

...At one point, talking of the crisis of belief and the loss of a civic sense in the capitalist world, Bell remarks that the socialist idea, which had seemed the alternative, had "died" in the Soviet Union, in China, and in the Third World owing to the total denial of individual rights and freedoms practiced there...

...Contradictions" may and do arise from those autonomous developments...

...Or, to mingle two proverbs, it is wisest not to see the omelet for the eggs...

...443 Not only Camus is celebrated here, but an entire mode of survival, indeed of comprehension, by which men and their works, inextricably bound in the living fact, are allowed to maintain each their separate integrity...

...It is this tendency that Chiaromonte exposes in his brilliant political essays: "Modern Tyranny," "The Mass Situation and Noble Values," and the "Letter to Andrea Caffi," from which I have been quoting...

...The whole bias of his nature is opposed to the conceit of writing as performance, which is a uniquely modern debasement and exaltation of rhetoric...

...One feels that he is writing always to make a test or trial of his own meaning...

...But what consorts well with Chiaromonte's own bias is the distinction Strauss makes between ancient tyranny and the objectifying modern tyranny that has its source in Machiavelli...

...The first volume of Daniel Bell's sociological diagnosis of our time—The Coming of PostIndustrial Society—was described as "a venture in social forecasting": it concentrated on tendencies toward social transformation originating primarily in the economic-technological sphere, and saw the political system as facing corresponding tasks of adjustment...

...To begin with the aesthetic component, I confess—at the risk of being regarded as a philistine—that I have difficulty in accepting hisaccount of "modernism" in art as an independent factor of change...

...Culture, in short, has increasingly taken the lead in transforming modern Western society...

...I have been trying to give some impression of a book that is not appropriately described as a collection of essays...

...There can be no doubt, however, that this has greatly strengthened the lopsidedness of the capitalist version of Western culture...

...Here as elsewhere Chiaromonte's concern is for the idea of limit...

...As Bell's analysis in this economic-political part of his book is rather more sketchy than in its cultural main part, I do not propose here to discuss it in detail...

...This second volume —The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism—is imbued with a sense of crisis that was absent from the first...

...Yet, at the same time his concept of Western culture appears to me both one-sided and not sufficiently integrated with the analysis of other social processes...

...For success at any stage depends on the outcome of struggles—social, political, or "cultural," e.g., religious—that is not predetermined, while the price of prolonged failure may be cultural disintegration...

...it is, rather, considered a legitimate defense of the individual against the violence of arms or the implacable force of institutions...

...The creation of that broad consensus indeed is what democratic leadership in modern conditions is largely about...

...We can sympathize both with the ethical effort and with his failure...

...The trouble is that a sufficient number of unimportant moments and indifferent acts gives us the precise image of the perfect mass man—the man whose existence has minimal importance and who passively submits to this fact without even recognizing it...

...Bell is clearly right: there is an inherent "contradiction" between the untrammeled pursuit of material group interests in a modern, pluralistic democracy and the functional needs of effective management in an increasingly communal economy...

...what can we make of them...

...it is, overwhelmingly, of this world...

...What can we learn from Bell's analysis about the nature and causes of that shift...

...He finds the virtue of any utopian idea in its unrealizability, and would prefer to treat every political ideal as utopian...

...The spectators are free to receive the most upsetting revelations, aware that their purpose is not to wound but to arouse the part of themselves that is alive...

...But the picture of the man is not made up of the sum of your memories...

...This approach is in one sense closer to Marx than to Bell, in that it looks at cultural change as responding to changes in the overall condition of society rather than developing from within a special cultural realm...

...continued on page 448 445 BOOKS continued from page 445 Even on occasions of little weight...

...In another essay he quotes Simone Weil approvingly: "We are only geometricians of matter...

...To show this, I propose to start from his 438 definition of the cultural realm as "the arena of expressive symbolism in art or religious forms that seek to explore and express the meaning of hum;'n existence...

...While preaching chastity he was harassing his wife with a most demanding lust...

...Because, by its nature, this theater transforms into a more or less phantasmagorical scenic image the incitement to action it intends to produce, so that the formal element naturally gains the upper hand...

...nor the figure of the writer of the sum of his works...

...In his saving inconsistency Brecht merely resembles the majority of artists big with theory...

...It is because of this (given the very ordinary necessity that has brought us together) that we can speak of ourselves as all equal, as units that are undifferentiated and interchangeable...

...N icola Chiaromonte was an essayist in the original sense of that curious and difficult word...

...and in this book he has illustrated his thesis of the hedonistic breakthrough with an impressive wealth of material—gleaned from the history of both art and religion, and also from the new life-styles that have evolved with the growth of the mass consumption society, particularly in the United States...

...On one side, the "spontaneous" changes characteristic of a dynamic society—say, of an economic or demographic nature—will require adjustive changes in its institutions and norms of behavior...

...Film is the corrupter, the leveller: it speaks in the voice of ideology and advertising and barbarism...

...We may wish to think of Genet as another dramatist whose conclusions are happily at odds with his premises: his theater starts from what is viewed as an intimate connection of dramatic action with play-acting, of play-acting with risk, and of risk with criminality...

...The failure being contemplated may be amusing enough and no more, but the act of sympathy by which it is understood, without forgiveness, and set in relation to other efforts, not all of them failures, seems to me a key to what the sense of limit meant to Chiaromonte...

...I also believe that the sensitivity to random shocks provoking a sudden acceleration is not inherent in the economic system as such, but in the institutional weaknesses of the international currency system that collapsed in 1971 (the privileged position of the dollar and the abuses made possible by it...

...and you seek to form a judgment that takes account of the secret source from which they sprang and which is now stilled...

...The opening paragraph of Chiaromonte's essay on Albert Camus may give a local sense of his generosity and distinctive care for a given subject...

...and that may be where to begin...

...Anyone who has felt the true queerness of the situation, which is not such as to induce conceits either of aloofness or revulsion, must applaud Chiaromonte's final note of warning: "the intellectual can distinguish himself from the mass only by the greater consciousness he may have of their common situation...

...On one hand, growth is the best condition for satisfying the plurality of group demands, but the increase of social services and of communal consumption tends to slow down economic growth...

...At a moving-picture, seeing those images against the screen, he recalls Plato's myth of the cave, with the lantern-projections on the wall rooting the cave-dwellers to their darkness...

...I shall confine my remarks on the political part of the book to a brief conclusion...

...Though both Bell's books are composed of reworked versions of a number of essays written over a span of several years and partly overlapping in date, the elements determining the mood of the new volume reflect the experiences of a more recent and more critical period...

...The Fall was about the ordeal of coming to know the relation between one's own humanity and humanity...

...The idea of a rationally intelligible order has changed from a static, God-given order to that of a dynamic world analyzed by science...

...on the other hand, Bell says that a growth rate geared to full employment, combined with the low productivity advance in the expanding service sector, produces a "normal" inflation of 4 to 5 percent per year, which any random shock may cause to accelerate, and that inflation brings about a new distributive "class war" between the working class and the middle classes, which endangers the functioning of the democratic system...

...In Chiaromonte one takes these things in stride: his political sanity is owing after all to the same spirit of recalcitrance...

...Bell, of course, does not ignore these concrete problems...

...And there is no visible end to it until intellectuals realize for themselves that the project of society-as-an-end can exist only in the mind...

...A man is dead: you think of his living face, of his gestures, his actions, and of the moments you shared, trying to recapture an image that is dissolved forever...

...I further believe that, writing in a crisis atmosphere, Bell has underestimated the powers of endurance and recovery of the Western democracies...

...But as that cannot be brought about by conscious activity, we literally can do nothing...

...Indeed, to be precise, it is not we who feel anonymous in the crowd...

...And one lesson art can teach, because it has needed to learn it so often and patiently, is an awareness of life itself as a limiting factor in every ambition...

...Some Political Consequences I HAVE LARGELY accepted Bell's description of the phenomena of cultural change in our society, but have tried to put their analysis in a somewhat different context...

...the author of The Balcony, in a lucid interval, would have seen its truth...

...Social life as we know it cannot sponsor "nobility"—a word that Chiaromonte is strong enough to use without quotation marks...

...This means that the solution of the problems of a dynamic society depends on a continuous transformation of its underlying values, an ever new interpretation in the light of new conditions—in other words, on ever new acts of cultural creativity that may or may not be accomplished successfully...

...And that value is eternal...

...Chiaromonte recurs to the example of Tolstoy in his eulogy for Gandhi...

...Plato, the philosopher whose name he most often invokes, taught the proper use of dialectic against the seduction of rhetoric, and Chiaromonte has the purity of an inquiring spirit...

...With the respect due to any commanding myth one may still opt for common sense...

...He is certainly convincing in describing the loss of a sense of order, harmony, and sequence, the consequent renunciation of the effort to reconstruct that objective order in the aesthetic form imposed on the artist's subjective impulses, and the increasingly chaotic breakthrough of these impulses as a central trend of "modernism...

...In the shorter second part of his book, he deals—after a descriptive account of recent American developments—with the manner in which changes in the social and economic structure of Western capitalist society are tending to lead to an "overloading" of the polity and to consequent instability of democratic institutions...

...To remain conscious of this lack at all times will lead one to the usual complaints about mass society and mass man...

...on the other, these institutional and normative changes will have to be achieved in the framework of a continuity of fundamental values, if the latter are to retain their binding force and the society's cultural integration is to be preserved...

...In what follows, I shall first try to present this skeleton of Bell's cultural analysis and then confront it with some possible alternative interpretations...

...It has enlisted the intellectuals...

...But Tolstoy, messianic and helpless, is a creature we can understand...

...As advanced capitalism becomes dependent on the creation of ever new wants, as advertisements and movies suggest a growing range of luxuries and installment-selling puts them within reach, and as rising productivity leads to expanding leisure that has to be filled with "fun," the paradox develops that the economic system requires its members to act according to a Protestant ethic of duty in the sphere of work yet according to a hedonist ethic of enjoyment in the sphere of consumption...

...We can wonder and admire...

...They had the sense of limit...

...But it is in this very fragility—which equates the humblest existence with the one that we falsely call "great" and is simply one that had the luck to express itself—that there lies the meaning and value of human life...

...To want to be the convict," he observes, citing Rimbaud's vision of himself among the unregenerate, "also means that we feel we are in the right...

...It is perhaps safest to call him a libertarian who never found it possible to place a low value on the individual or the community...

...it means that we want to be criminals and right at the same time, or, rather, that we do not want to be criminals but good men condemned to crime—in other words, men...

...Rather oddly he discovers a congenial fellow-spirit in Leo Strauss...

...Conversely, only the achievement of concrete solutions for the crucial problems of our communal economy can also, by demonstrating the 442 interdependence and compatibility of individual and group interests over a sufficiently wide range, revive and strengthen the awareness of communal ties and reduce the lopsidedness in the balance of Western cultural values...

...But the direction in which he seeks a solution is by no means conservative—it is, now as before, the direction in which all democratic socialists are looking...

...What all this amounts to is that it seems to me more fruitful for the study of social change to use the term "culture" in the sense it has in "cultural anthropology," or in the way that Toynbee uses his concept of a "civilization"—that is, as describing a society's system of integrating beliefs and values rather than a separate sector of "cultural" activities...

...They give readers what philosophy must give: fortitude, the belief that some ideas are worth fighting for or against, and a recognition that belief is itself a preliminary form of action...

...The author of Saint Genet was long past knowing the force of so clear a formulation...

...Yet it seems to me that what Bell describes as the strengthening of communal control over the market economy by the "public household," and as the restoration of the primacy of common interest in a society founded on individual freedom, is what most non-Communist Westerners mean by the socialist idea...

...In such wonder and admiration is the explanation that does not explain away...

...This not only deprives the traditional morality of self-restraint of its transcendental sanctions and rewards, but creates a deep, though often unconscious sense of the futility of a finite life, and a reactive passion to fill it with infinite experience...

...Bell is putting forward the thesis that in Western capitalist societies a major, dysfunctional contradiction has arisen between the capitalist economy with its requirements for rationality and discipline, and the cultural sphere, in which the Puritan temper and the Protestant work ethic, largely corresponding to the above requirements, have increasingly succumbed to an urge for limitless self-fulfillment...

...Puritan discipline was most effective under the ever watchful eyes of the smalltown community...

...A dynamic society, like that of the West, is from that viewpoint a society that must live dangerously: it keeps creating problems for itself whose creative solution is never assured in advance...

...It is a sustained glimpse of the mind of one scholar—but the furthest thing imaginable from Nietzsche's "squint-eyed soul"—lucid, tactful, uncapricious, and operating at its depths...