LETTERS
Editors Robert Lekachman's review of my The Bard of Savagert: Thorstein Veblen and Modern Social Theory (Fall 1978) manages to combine intellectual distortion with moral complacency. Perhaps it...
...This, probably, is too unstructured for a profound thinker to grasp...
...Incidentally, why is it inaccurate to call Veblen a philanderer simply because he did not pursue women aggressively...
...There is always the danger that the response will support the reviewer's complaints...
...He is correct about one point...
...Diggins's uncertainty as a biographer is exemplified by a paragraph in which he both terms Veblen a philanderer and concedes that he was the passive party in the many affairs with women that scandalizes contemporaries in colleges where smoking was grounds for expulsion and professors of mathematics opened classes with prayer...
...I only wish that Lekachman had addressed himself to the important issues instead of lamenting the absence of humor, a complaint that reflects his own limitation as a reviewer with a weakness for popular journalism...
...They must write in a manner readable by the public: otherwise they have no position...
...He is to be regarded as eccentric and as Bromwich himself admits, "isolated" and "astonishingly without curiosity" about America...
...I am convinced that Marxist socialism rests on profoundly questionable theoretical premises, not the least of which is Marx's tautological explanation of the phenomenon of alienation...
...Such problems as Marx's labor theory of value, his concentrating on production to the exclusion of consumption, his seeming indifference to the socialpsychological compulsions of "emulation," his Hegelian synthesis of matter and spirit, his unconvincing explanation of the commodity fetish as simply an aspect of exchange value, and his (and Engels's) failure to explain the origins of property, slavery, and the "barbarian status" of women are issues that Veblen studied from different and perhaps more telling perspectives because he had access to later anthropological data unavailable to Marx...
...He seldom made the first pass, and indeed he didn't even become interested in other women until his forties...
...No wonder he was critical of the marginalist principle of "diminishing return...
...Western journalists, of course, are not legally appointed or elected...
...I rub my eyes...
...But the issues I raised in the course of evaluating Veblen's ideas in relation to those of other social philosophers are too serious to be treated as "entertainment...
...How else does one explain his clinching, if cryptic, put-down...
...He was, as I pointed out, "more seduced than seducing" even in his relations with faculty wives...
...There is a possibility, is there not, that Solzhenitsyn may, in due time, change his opinion...
...It is for this reason that Veblen, whom Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer esteemed as "America's greatest sociological critic of capitalist culture," must be taken seriously as a theorist and even as a moralist, and not treated merely as a satirist whose main function is to "entertain" us...
...Readers of Dissent may be interested to know that Marx's ideas are critically examined, as indeed they were by Veblen, and found gravely deficient...
...Perhaps it is wise not to reply to reviews, bad or good, but when one finds a reviewer advising an author to do the very thing he tried to do— "excise speculation about the connections between Veblen's personality and his opinion," as I did in my critcisms of David Riesman's psychoanalytic interpretation—one can only conclude that Lekachman chose to give his own discourse on Veblen rather than read the book carefully and critically...
...The curious will need to consult Diggins's book in order to decide the merits of my comments on these matters...
...Authors are seldom good authorities upon the merits of their own style and literary strategies...
...If I do make comments about Veblen's personality it is only because his eccentricities continue to baffle us and not because I want to interpret adult behavior from childhood experiences...
...xi, 37, 233-34, passim...
...It really is inadvisable to reply to critical reviews...
...Actually I thought there were some funny moments in the book, which Riesman has praised for its "wit...
...When John Dos Passos etched his marvelous portrait of Veblen in The Big Monet he titled it "The Bitter Drinkm ' Perhaps only those skeptical of socialism are in a position to realize what escapes the complacent academic: capitalism is no laughing matter...
...Their position is based on the talent to write...
...Bromwich's article is excellent in every other way, but do not think we should find Solzhenitsyn's attack "most disturbing...
...q Editors: David Bromwich writes about Solzhenitsyn's Harvard attack on the freedom of the Western press, in Dissent, Fall 1978, "His attack on another highly visible beneficiary of that principle should be most disturbing to those who have been the greatest admirers of his courage" I do not think so: Solzhenitsyn, who is somewhat like Tolstoy, should not be regarded seriously for his blast at Western journalists...
...Even in hands more adroit than Diggins's, psychohistory is a tricky genre...
...I am also convinced that we must clear the air of much of the cant of the '60s before social theory can once again address itself to social problems...
...Although my review as a whole obviously took Veblen seriously, I may have been less clear about my judgment that Diggins contributed nothing novel in his analysis of Veblen, Marx, Engels, or Weber...
...Not only did I emphasize in the preface that the book is an exercise in comparative social theory but I stressed again and again that I am not writing "biography" and am critical of the use of"psychohistory" in the field of intellectual history (pp...
...Lekachman concludes by complaining "that Diggins is too humorless a chap to derive entertainment from his subject...
Vol. 26 • April 1979 • No. 2
