INTELLECTUALS, DISSENT & BUREAUCRATS

...More than mistaken: morally at fault...

...This once-admired vision of the proudly independent intellectual—I still admire it— drew in America at least as much upon native Emersonian sensibility as upon social radicalism...

...Bourgeois society in Europe was overripe for social change, and the writers who were repelled by its hypocrisy and corruption were by no means mistaken...

...We might be disturbed by the process of bureaucratic erosion...

...And this power had been possible only, in fact, when they were "powerless people...

...he ennobles it with claims to historical value...

...And sometimes it disables the sophisticated...

...Influenced by figures as diverse as Valery and Trotsky, Eliot and Edmund Wilson, the New York intellectuals of 35 years ago proposed to link a defense of modernist culture with a politics of anti-Stalinist radicalism...

...Western liberals and socialists, moved by outbreaks of dissent in those countries, were inclined to focus their attention on the intellectuals who dared to speak out against totalitarian or authoritarian power...

...In his Treason of the Intellectuals Julien Benda put forth some decades ago a classical argument for intellectuals as "a priestly-secular" order: They are all those whose activity essentially is not the pursuit of practical aims, all those who seek their joy in the practice of an art or a science or a metaphysical speculation...

...But the writers of those decades failed to estimate the limits of what was historically possible, just as they failed to consider the consequences of their contempt of liberalism...

...determinants and components of this unattached social body, but never the essential quality of the whole...

...Criticism, however, has its own exhaustions, sterilities, and self-delusions...

...SOVIET DISSIDENTS often feel something like this: • Western intellectuals are hopelessly innocent about the deadly purposiveness of the Russian party-state dictatorship...

...Indeed, the encompassing myth—by which I mean more than fact and other than lie—of the 19th- and early 20th-century intelligentsia, in Europe and to a lesser extent the United States, has been that 304 of a proudly independent critical group submitting all doctrines and values to critical inspection, asserting the legitimacy of the free mind...

...I think of two recent examples, both brilliant writers, the late Harold Rosenberg and the late Paul Goodman...

...A turning point in intellectual history occurred when we recognized that there is more than one enemy of progress and that this enemy can be located by looking in almost any direction...

...In that meeting, nevertheless, a few of us were conceived...

...The Historic Myth of the Avant-Garde THERE CAN BE NO DOUBT that for at least the early period of capitalism Schumpeter's portrait of the intellectual as a nibbler at accepted values has its large truth...

...Sometimes he alone, this poor forlorn "fool," cares about or speaks for freedom...

...Rosenberg had spent years as a oneman guerrilla band within the intellectual world, and then, almost to his own surprise, became the spokesman for a major art movement, "abstract expressionism...

...To deny that this sometimes inhibited or damaged our dissent would be foolish...

...If he is clever, and his party liberal enough to give him some living space, he can try to perform a dual function, as Crossman did: that of being at once an agent of politics, and an intellectual who keeps a distance between his movement and himself...

...306 Dissent At Home, the Total State Abroad ALL I HAVE BEEN SAYING thus far has for its tacit premise that Western society could be regarded as more or less self-contained...

...On the other hand, the intellectual group cannot help nibbling, since it lives on criticism and its whole position depends on criticism that stings...

...The West is slack in its responses...

...From all this we may conclude that there is never likely to be easy accord on how to define intellectuals, though in practice we have little 303 difficulty in recognizing them (nor do the various secret police...

...It is just when the Fabian's movement starts winning that it needs the free-lance to criticize, and just when the anarchist's ideas take on cogency that he needs the pragmatic skills of the Fabian...

...The reactionaries, as we may conveniently call them, hoped that an authoritarian state would restore an earlier cultural grandeur, real or imaginary...

...Rosenberg was some sort of Luxemburgist Marxist, Goodman some sort of Kropotkinish anarchist...

...He wrote sermons for lazy and incompetent priests and earned his living tutoring on subjects with which he was not acquainted...

...The kind of society now emerging in the West turned out to need intellectuals—far more so than earlier capitalism ever had...

...If, nevertheless, we often feel that we cannot accept the way that Benda urges, we do so or so we tell ourselves—because there are imperatives of conscience not to be denied...

...Who on that account would choose to surrender it...

...The two wanted to express disdain for bourgeois liberalism, but for opposite reasons and, as soon became clear, in opposite directions...

...It is a myth I inherited when I began writing some 35 years ago, and for a time it was accepted as a "given" among those writers we have come to call the New York intellectuals...

...I have, in my own fashion, remained faithful to both parents, though by now they no longer speak to each other, have for some time not been feeling well, and are reported to take no pride in their offspring...

...Influence concentrated and focused soon becomes a kind of power...

...On the one hand, freedom of public discussion involving freedom to nibble at the foundations of capitalism is inevitable...

...But the assumption that change required a trampling of liberal values in the name of "hierarchical order" and/or "proletarian dictatorship" proved a disaster beyond reckoning...

...Both despised the constraints of ideological systems and the shabbiness of pragmatic politics...

...H. distant offspring of priestly orders, still caught up with visions of the sacred, though now in secular guise...

...that for intellectuals the struggle for definition takes on, at times, an aggressive and compensatory function...

...I couldn't work up a full-scale coherent presentation, so I had to content myself with a series of notes...

...Still, as Harold Rosenberg once memorably put it, "The weapon of criticism is undoubtedly inadequate...

...it was a meeting between parties hurrying past one another, brief, hectic, messy...

...And the paradox of it all is that the very intellectual who eschews power hungers for influence—he is, after all, human...

...and criticism of persons and of current events will, in a situation in which nothing is sacrosanct, fatally issue in criticism of classes and institutions...

...Normative definitions may be more useful...

...Some of us were fighting Stalinism at a time when he was still a faithful admirer of the Beloved Leader...

...they are certainly more solacing...

...Since then, the text has been printed in the Proceedings (along with Andrei Sinyaysky's essay, "Dissent as a Personal Experience," reprinted in the Spring 1984 Dissent, and others), in the Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, no...

...Your Fabian runs the risk of accommodation, slyness, a curling deceit of voice...

...but it lacked durability and it has long since come to an end...

...A parallel—though far more harsh—version of this process could be observed in the Communist countries...

...We who wanted to oppose Stalinism at a time when that was extremely unpopular in the American intellectual world also wanted not to become apologists for the status quo...

...A two-sided politics may be clear enough in principle, but it is often confusing in practice...

...They felt free to sneer at it because they remained within its psychological orbit...

...The Fabian attaches himself to a movement of social reform, though he is likely to feel he serves it best as historical mentor...

...Taking for granted its shelter, they could not really imagine its destruction...

...Where did this leave them...

...If his movement achieves office he may become its leader, like Leon Blum in France, or its spokesman, like Richard Crossman in England...

...What followed was the absorption of large numbers of intellectuals into the academy, government bureaucracies, and the industries of pseudoculture—a few decades later also into the corporations, as ideologues, speech-writers, and sloganeers...

...307 Half-In, Half-Out, and All the Way Out FOR INTELLECTUALS who want to combine serious criticism of their society with defense of its democratic structure, there are two major courses of action...

...A central difficulty with Schumpeter's analysis is that it is not sufficiently historical, that is, it fails to account for the ways in which the roles of intellectuals may change, as of course they have, within capitalist society...

...We had to recognize that, together with the wrongs within the gates, there were evils without...

...but the truth had also to be recognized that many of the apparatchiks were intellectuals, or at least semi-intellectuals, people skillful at manipulating ideas and using words...

...How are we to develop a politics that might simultaneously enable resistance to Communist power and minimize the danger of a nuclear war...

...The free-lance or anarchist intellectual will have none of this...

...With the persuasion that no government is likely to be very good, or good for very long...

...In 1954 I noted, "As social relations become more abstract and elusive, the human object is bound to the state with ideological slogans and abstractions—and for this chore intellectuals are indispensable...

...Ralf Dahrendorf sees the intellectual as the modern "fool" whispering unwelcome truths to the king, barking his unwanted dissent at state, party, class...

...That bourgeois society required scathing criticism I do not doubt...

...Western intellectuals may respond something like this: For people like Solzhenitsyn to write as if all or most Western intellectuals had been fellow-travelers in past decades is a piece of ignorance or impudence...

...The world's agony cries out, and there are times when Benda's vision must seem morally pinched...

...They prevent him from expressing himself...

...Schumpeter had failed to take into account— he who had kept insisting that capitalism "not only never is but never can be stationary"— that in its new bureaucratic stage capitalism would find honored roles and high status for intellectuals...

...Whether the sociological approach can ever describe "the essential quality" of anything is an interesting question...

...I am not saying that the writers of Europe were responsible for the rise of modern totalitarianism...

...In practice, most of us combine the two, but there's a value in isolating the "pure types...

...but by the '50s it was being pronounced outmoded, naive, irresponsible...

...Few intellectuals still thought of themselves as a "permanent opposition" to the world of power...

...Goodman may have been against all states, but in 1960 he wrote an influential book, Growing Up Absurd, which not only describes how a frivolous commercial society wastes the resources of its youth but also offers some concrete suggestions for social amelioration...

...and I say this as one who, a good part of the time, has chosen another path...

...The free-lance offers one product: criticism, and he offers it unceasingly, for it is always needed, though by no means always wanted...

...q 308...

...Intellectuals, he says, should speak up for innocent victims like Dreyfus, since in doing so they serve as "the officiants of abstract justice and [are] sullied with no passion for a wordly object...

...Neither rest nor retreat...

...Philip Rahv called this a process of embourgeoisement, but I suspect it would be more accurate to speak, in an equally inelegant phrase, of the bureaucratic institutionalization of intellectuals...

...It may settle into its own familiar, even comfortable rut...

...Still more, this dissenter must now take into account not only how his behavior will affect the life of the country in which he functions, but also how it may affect the fate of that country in relation to its external adversaries...

...And Western intellectuals still play games, holding to an outmoded stance of opposition within societies that suffer mostly from an excess of tolerance, softness, and ease...

...without these, they would be of no use whatever...

...In providing this mordant description Schumpeter hardly meant to praise intellectuals, though at least until a few decades ago many of them would have accepted his description as both truth and tribute, perhaps mumbling to themselves: Nibblers of the world, unite...

...It is a deeply American tradition, this crying of "No, in Thunder...

...Intellectuals, says Edward Shils, "employ symbols of general scope and abstract reference, concerning man, society, nature and the cosmos...

...All through the last several decades it was no longer enough, even while it remained necessary, to declare oneself a critic of American society...

...He cares not for power but for influence, and less for influence within the larger society than among the community of fellow intellectuals...

...And are we not morally obliged to speak out against injustices at home even though these do not add up to anything so dreadful as the totalitarian state...

...Does not the frequent support by the United States of right-wing authoritarianism in underdeveloped countries rebound to the advantage of the Communists...

...they counter appeals to factuality by invoking the 'impractical ought.' They consider themselves special custodians of abstract ideas like reason and justice...

...and hence in a certain manner say, "My kingdom is not of this world...

...The single most important task in the world today is to resist Communist power...

...A certain degree of historical scruple is necessary if there is to be any serious exchange between US...

...Dreaming of natural aristocrats and high aristocratic cultures, or a "temporary" dictatorship of a historically ordained "van305 guard," they helped, in a small way, to ready the path for manic lumpen and brutal apparatchiks...

...It needs them for their skills, knowledge, inclinations, even passions...

...They knew little about fascism and its costs, any more than the left-wing writers knew about Stalinism and its costs...

...Dissent, Power, and Public Life WHAT SHOULD BE THE ROLE of the intellectual in the public life of a democratic society...

...but it does not look kindly upon, indeed it does all that it can to curb, their traditional role of free-wheeling critics...

...He provides it with intellectual rationale...

...C. Wright Mills's oncefamous description of them as "powerless people" now had to be severely qualified...

...But with a crucial proviso: that while the institutional world of government, corporation, and mass culture needs intellectuals because they are intellectuals, it does not want them as intellectuals...

...Let us call them Fabian and free-lance, or social democratic and anarchist...

...you have nothing to lose but your bite...

...How hard it has been, during my lifetime, to adjust between competing enemies, to maneuver among bloody opponents...

...we might sadly observe the extent to which younger academics and writers preferred their comfortable specializations and institutional comforts, as against the free intellectual's role of the critic...

...Schumpeter's portrait of the intellectual as the agent of ceaseless unrest, the obsessive "nibbler," turned out to be comically outmoded...

...that the greatest service an intellectual can do a democratic government is to irritate and needle it, keep crying that the king has no clothes, the president only a few...

...For example: how is it that the mere accumulation of Western military power seems to be of so little help...

...writers never have that degree of power...

...The relation between intellectuals and state power...

...Clearly then, we have passed the moment when a vital dissent might be expected in our culture from the encounter between literary modernism and political radicalism...

...And even there, one ought to stress the "perhaps...

...But if not resolved it has been dissolved in the brilliant pages of Joseph Schumpeter, who sees intellectuals as inescapably caught up in the struggles and confusions of modern society: Unlike any other type of society, capitalism .. . inevitably creates, educates, and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest...

...In the joyful brutality of their verbal violence, some of our greatest writers simply failed to realize how large a stake they had in preserving the norms of liberalism...

...They were guilty of fecklessness, dilettantism, arrogance...

...this has at least the value of reducing our tendency to excessive pride, for it analyzes us in terms no different from those employed for the bourgeoisie, the lumpen proletariat, and other questionable types...

...Perhaps to his own surprise, he became a guru of the youth rebellion of the '60s in its earlier, fraternal phase...

...This clash between detachment and commitment has been an obsessive concern, sometimes a source of torment, for generations of intellectuals, and by its very nature it cannot ever be fully resolved...

...He now had power, limited but real...

...All political entanglements he sees as inherently debasing...

...Ideology began to play an unprecedented part...

...Lewis Coser sees intellectuals as "the men who never seem satisfied with things as they are...

...The Buried Scandal of Cultural Modernism IN THE DECADES between the Paris Commune and World War II—the decades when bourgeois liberalism in Europe suffered its most severe tests—both right- and left-wing intellectuals (also writers, artists, composers) were gravely mistaken in their easy dismissal of liberalism...

...some Western intellectuals still share the illusions of earlier decades...

...31 (1982), copyright 1983 by the Comparative Literature Program, Indiana University, with whose kind permission we reprint a few portions of it...

...This position is clear: do all you can to help a Sakharov, but do not become an adviser to government or propagandist for a party...

...What Benda deplored was entering the political arena for "the triumphs of a realist passion, whether of class, race, or nation...

...In Europe this union of the advanced—of critical consciousness and political conscience— had flourished only briefly, perhaps in Paris during the late 19th century, perhaps in Berlin during the '20s...

...The bureaucratization of mind was a process apparently inseparable from modernization, and for that reason, among others, the right to dissent, even when confined to small powerless groups, remained especially precious for those of us living in democratic countries...

...Inheriting the roles of priest, jester, and prophet, we stand—presumably (some of us)— as critics of the given, devotees of speculation, irritants, gadflies who find our models in Tolstoy's "I Cannot Remain Silent," Zola's "J'accuse," Melville's "No, in Thunder...

...Once he takes on these roles, he ceases, in some strict sense, to be an intellectual, for now he cannot act out of a dispassionate search for truth but must write propaganda, which sooner or later means telling lies...

...Albert Salomon ties the modern intelligentsia to the bohemians of the 18thcentury coffeehouse, proposing as our archetypal ancestor Denis Diderot: "He lived for a time on the margins of bohemia, in debt to his grocer, engaged in a fantastic charade with monks from whom he received money on the strength of spurious promises to join their orders...

...In one sense, the intellectuals did gain power: they were now advisers and spokesmen for major institutions...

...The very nature of this alliance, insofar as it existed, made probable its rapid collapse, for in its cultural style the European left, usually middlebrow, was often hostile to the avant-garde, while the avant-garde was often apolitical when not reactionary...

...Suppose we must defend not only a great figure like Sakharov but an entire martyred nation like Poland...

...No, the union between cultural modernism and independent radicalism was neither proper marriage nor secure liaison...

...they force him into a role for which he is ill-equipped, indeed, into a self-violation that easily becomes a pitiable dependence on power...

...But for some decades that has of course not been true, and a crucial variable—in the judgment of some, the crucial variable—has been the presence and pressure of totalitarian states...

...They form, says Karl Mannheim, "an unanchored, relatively classless stratum" floating more or less freely within the spectrum of classes...

...Here "dissent" degenerated into a mode of fecklessness, and in our century the price of fecklessness runs high...

...It is a matter of the greatest urgency to ask ourselves: What was it that drove some of the major writers of our century to one or another form of authoritarianism...

...He wanted to be true to himself...

...A second approach places intellectuals according to their declared ideals, thereby buoying our morale by invoking a tradition of courage and independence...

...An attractive idea, this linkage helped to energize a good many writers...

...Though rigid in his commitment, Benda was not so rigid as to propose a complete withdrawal from history...

...What is the point of cheering the right of dissent in the Western democracies if we do not use it forcefully and responsibly...

...It may become quite as conventional as the celebration of conventions...

...but we knew that the margin of freedom that was ours made all the difference in the world...

...Decades of bitter struggle, exhaustion of whole generations, the spilling of quantities of blood: all were required to learn that tyranny can come from right and left, and that the dissenter who cares about freedom must become agile in facing both ways...

...Two sharply divergent traditions have been at work here, that of detachment and that of commitment, and both have their dignity, truth, and limitations...

...Crossman, while a member of a British Labour cabinet, kept a scandalously frank journal—he intrigued at least as much as his colleagues, he maligned them, he stepped back to see them and himself with some critical objectivity, and he was clearly planning to publish this journal, so as to make the passage from politics to history...

...When that happened, the enemy beyond the gates really triumphed...

...your free-lance of righteousness, isolation, sterility...

...History seems to work a little better here...

...They question the truth of the moment in terms of higher truth...

...I doubt that there has ever been a serious intellectual who has failed to respond, if only inwardly, to this vision of a life devoted to disinterested philosophical and intellectual contemplation...

...Intellectuals in a Bureaucratic Society As IF THE EFFORT TO COPE with the rise of the totalitarian movements was not difficult enough, intellectuals in the postwar era began to find that their traditional stance of independence— the proud assertion that their place was on the margin of society so as, all the better, to be its critics—was now endangered by new social developments that neither Marxist nor liberal thought had foreseen...

...What I am saying is that they contributed some a little more, some a little less—to an atmosphere in which the discrediting of bourgeois society became indistinguishable from a contempt for liberal values...

...Once he saw that the movement was turning mindless and authoritarian, he had the courage to criticize it publicly and see his influence disappear overnight...

...Nor is there much reason to suppose that such a moment will recur...

...and, given the irony that must sooner or later be recognized as an occupational trait, this struggle for definition can also become a mode of "black humor...

...Dissent East, Dissent West WE COME TO ONE of the most difficult problems in contemporary intellectual life—the necessary divergence of outlook and the frequent misunderstandings between Western intellectuals and the Soviet dissidents who have chosen or been driven into exile...

...few writers could still say with Flaubert, "bohemia is the fatherland of my breed...

...He was unhappy about this, but he accepted it...

...It seemed at the time as if the intellectual life—free-wheeling, wide-ranging, speculative— could be regarded as a "permanent revolution" in consciousness, a ceaseless dynamic of change...

...IN ANY CASE, simply to issue grand declamations of opposition to communism is not yet to answer the difficult problems we face in the West...

...All of which sounds uncomfortably familiar, except perhaps the ghosting of sermons...

...Many historians have seen the intellectuals as Some time ago I was asked to talk at a conference at Indiana University on "The Meaning of [intellectual] Dissent" in both West and East...

...he gives it ideology...

...Yet insofar as they still remained, or wished to remain, thinkers and critics, they lost power— the only kind of power they had ever really had, which was to assail the insolence of office, to criticize stale ideas, and to keep venturing into new thought...

...But Mannheim acknowledges the limitations of this sociological approach: it "might describe correctly certain...

...It is hard for all but a few in the West to realize they are facing an imperialistic, dictatorial state quite as ruthless and in some ways more formidable than that of nazism...