REVIEWS
Lekachman, Robert & Marrus, Michael R. & Menand, Louis & Fleisher, Henry C. & Woll, Josephine & Coser, Rose Laub
CRITICISM AND SOCIAL CHANGE, by Frank Lentriechia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 173 pp. $15.00. THE ARTS WITHOUT MYSTERY, by Denis Donoghue. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown. 195 pp....
...Kershaw's keen glimpse of Nazi Germany is therefore not a look at a strange planet, inhabited by historical oddities or deviants...
...302 pp...
...The second part focuses on individual writers: Pasternak, Akhmatova, Sinyaysky, Solzhenitsyn...
...Marx created a picture which Marxists and many nonMarxist intellectuals today in the West respond to as if it were true, as if in fact this is where we live, what our history at bottom is all about...
...This is pragmatism in the mode developed by Nietzsche: interpretation as the will to power...
...Still, I should be wrong to underestimate Ms...
...q when he was a third secretary at the British Embassy in Moscow—and then from a distance...
...The subtitle, "England in the Early Industrial Age," accurately describes a volume that begins with Adam Smith and ends for the most part by 1860...
...Max Hayward is something of a legendary figure in the field of Russian letters...
...The materials are endless...
...Although very few...
...For the time being," Sturmthal concludes, "John Maynard Keynes, or some variation of his theory, has won out over Karl Marx in most Western labor movements...
...Not every essay in this volume is golden but none is dross, and most are very good indeed...
...Historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan is a meticulous researcher, a gifted writer, and a sophisticated interpreter...
...not to mention the physical disappearance of the Jews from many localities...
...Repression could not be everywhere at once, and at times was not thought worth the trouble...
...Party activists were isolated, and Hitler apparently intervened, having recognized that the further alienation of opinion was too high a price to pay for a few thousand crosses...
...Literature is inherently nothing," he writes near the end of his book...
...Art, it is clear, is the name for those cultural products that reinforce Donoghue's sense of himself as someone who is both inside and, when he desires to be, outside the walls that confine everyone else...
...A mixed, predominantly capitalistic society is likely to persist for a long time to come...
...In "The Russian Empire," for instance, Hayward discusses the 17th-century schism in the Russian Orthodox church—a matter that seems, to most students, simultaneously arcane and trivial, the mixture symbolized in such apparent irrelevancies as whether one made the sign of the Cross with two fingers or three...
...Lentricchia's preferred version of the pragmatist conversation can be read, for instance, in this argument: It is precisely the radical instability (and appropriability) of terms like "rights" or "the people" that makes for transformation in philosophical or social history...
...on Andrei Sinyaysky (three of whose books he discusses) he is incisive and penetrating...
...by Michael Rustin ler's rhetoric—comes from its having offered "as an alternative to the many-voiced confusion of [the German] parliament (a 'vocal diaspora'), [Hitler's] single, mastering voice and presence, a unifying center interchangeable with Munich...
...Thousands paid for their grumbling in concentration camps or even worse...
...The function whose usefulness we have frittered away—through the commercialization of the art world, the dissemination of pop culture, the politicizing of the art experience, interpretive relativism, and all the other things that are supposed to have made things so hard for high culture (when were they ever easy...
...Rudolf Hess shouted at a Nazi party rally about this time...
...or it is inherently a body of rhetorical strategies waiting to be seized...
...501 Between 15,000 and 20,000 Bavarians were interned in 1933 alone, mainly Socialist and Communist workers, and the danger of being sent to Dachau increased after Goebbels's declaration of Total War in 1943...
...For there is one theoretical point at which these writers meet...
...For much of the first half of the 19th century, the mean Malthusian vision was more influential than Smith's optimism about expanding economies...
...What we can say is that for all its criminality, terror, and demonic energy, nazism failed to dragoon the public into complete conformity...
...The integrity of the whole seems to have been of paramount importance to Max Hayward, and his writings are convincing testimony that he was right...
...Although the 18th-century vocabulary of "orders," "ranks," "degrees," and "estates," and the sense of mutual dependency and obligation conjured up by the sense of connection among differently situated groups persisted into the 19th century and has not entirely vanished in the 20th, Ms...
...Germans remained divided by nazism, and never gave themselves entirely to the regime...
...They do the errands, transport family members as well as necessities that, earlier, mail-order or peddlers' deliveries had brought to the house...
...As an egalitarian socialist, R. H. Tawney was moved to insist in 1926 that "There is no touchstone, except the treatment of childhood, which reveals the true character of a social philosophy more clearly than the spirit in which it regards the misfortunes of those of its members who fall by the way...
...For one thing, the intellectual bourgeosie rarely agreed on anything of importance...
...The Reich drew for its support upon a hard core of believers, but also on a huge pool of the indifferent, the shallow-minded, the otherwise preoccupied masses who only occasionally thought about "politics...
...595 pp...
...The proliferation of images from every known society can be felt as plenitude, but not as order...
...I]s Marxism "true...
...Socialism, he concludes, is obviously not dead...
...It will be objected that though this is a good story—don't we know that work multiplies to fill the time that is available?—some labor must have been saved in the changeover from local gristmill to factory-produced flour...
...Such is the force of deconstruction that all efforts to transcend its negations invariably end up looking like a tugging at the bootstraps...
...No one was to blame except the poor themselves...
...And his defense of Dr...
...Kershaw limits his description to the largely Catholic province of Bavaria, the cradle of nazism, because most of the government material there survived the war...
...but others were either ignored, intimidated into silence, or bought off by Nazi functionaries...
...it requires an act of critical authority to distinguish itself from the fake...
...There is a second reason why Ms...
...The reason: the unlimited working hours and total dependency on the employer...
...betray signs of Nazi ideological penetration and yet show the clear limits of propaganda manipulation...
...In our modern, industrial society people object to "greedy institutions" because labor now is a segmented activity that leaves people free from subordination to the source of authority after a set number of hours and days...
...It is in the pieces on individual authors that Hayward writes best...
...The answer is a strange one in this nonessentialist argument, and strangely familiar: the intellectual who fails to heal himself "will bring against [his] efforts the reactions of contempt which history always keeps waiting in the wings in readiness to expose false humanists...
...Had Cowan, who in other respects is familiar with sociological interpretations, known about the concept of "greedy institutions," she could have used it to explain another phenomenon to which she devotes many pages—the fact that collective solutions to the problem of housekeeping have failed...
...VI DONOGHUE AND LENTRICCHIA both want the conversation of criticism to continue—Donoghue on the old New Critical, neo-Kantian terms, Lentricchia in terms derived in explicit opposition to those of the New Criticism—but they want the vocabulary to be uniform and coherent, to be, in fact, their own...
...He translated Pasternak, Sinyaysky, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Isaac Babel, and many others...
...Himmelfarb suggests that the language of class became "common" in the 1830s and afterward...
...The Austrian Socialist party, which, after World War I, was widely regarded as "the shining model of a modern interpretation of Marxism," acknowledged that its constituency included not only "workers" but "intellectuals, scientists, and technicians, as well as...
...We shall never be able to test this hypothesis precisely, but we can correct the easy impressions of unanimity concocted by Goebbels and his propaganda impresarios...
...Poor people had simply entered into disadvantageous contracts...
...And what is the force that compels self-criticism, since it is the intellectual himself who is expected to exercise it...
...The cast-iron stove, an early invention, saved the men half of the work of hauling, cutting, and splitting wood—whereas the labor involved in cooking, which was women's work, was vastly increased, since the stove meant the end of one-pot and onedish meals that had traditionally been prepared on the open hearth, not to speak of the cleaning and washing that the stove needed—also women's work...
...Human motivation is complex...
...Reports include a litany of complaints against the Nazis, some of them no different from those made about any government...
...Long-term full employment did make obsolete the earlier notion that collective bargaining was a private matter for the participants...
...In Derridean criticism, Donoghue complained, "you must deprive the poem of its sacredness, its mystery...
...From Cioran: "The indigence of language renders the universe intelligible...
...Urbana: University of Illinois Press...
...It is not just that people find it hard to get along with one another, but that communes of any kind, especially the ones she describes, are also "greedy institutions" that demand the total allegiance of their members, and expect more time and engagement than the participants feel is legitimate...
...Though he is, understandably, somewhat kinder to his own views, some readers may still find the poststructuralist counterarguments in Criticism and Social Change more compelling than the proposed critical program itself...
...the production of flour did...
...Protestants were outraged when, in 1934, Nazi thugs forcibly deposed and arrested an orthodox archconservative Lutheran, Hans Meiser, head of the Bavarian Protestant church...
...This raises methodological problems, since the book plainly purports to do more than merely relay a portion of popular attitudes...
...As both the rising divorce rate and the women's movement now show, they are beginning to resent it...
...To SUM up: In today's household women do jobs that men and boys used to do—such as handling the garbage disposal, dealing with repair people...
...ONE RESULT of these past years of full employment that had significant impact on the leadership of the entire left, Sturmthal observes, "was a greater opening of educational opportunities and consequent mobility of talented people...
...These essays display Hayward's gift for lucid concision, which comes only from an impressive breadth and depth of knowledge...
...They must be typed, double-spaced, and carry the full address and name of the sender...
...The literary intellectual can best undertake the socially transformative work of textual appropriation, Lentricchia argues, by conceiving of his or her scholarly practice as a social activity: "genuine political work for the Henry James scholar, as Henry James scholar, becomes possible when contact is made with the activity of James's writing, with all possible emphasis on act...
...For another, most of the men and women who live by the word deserve to be read as though they mean what they have written...
...One must keep in mind the undoubted popularity of Nazi successes, possibly slighted in this book...
...I find it hard to believe in the English version of the welfare state as entirely a reiteration of historically familiar themes...
...Indeed...
...on Solzhenitsyn and the like-minded men whose essays formed From Under the Rubble he is dispassionate...
...How can any social theory justify its program without appealing to some essentialist view of history or human nature—without claiming to know what human beings "really are...
...Adolf Sturmthal, a veteran and close student of the European socialist movement since his youth, is perhaps in a better position than the Wall Street Journal to decide whether European socialism is ready for last rites...
...As intellectual history, the separate parts of the book can be read with pleasure and profit by anyone at all interested in the 19th century...
...One served as an introduction to Alexander Gladkov's memoirs, Meetings with Pasternak, and the second introduced Ivinskaya's memoirs in Hayward's translation...
...Her book deals implicitly with more than American society and explains why processes similar to those she describes have been at work throughout the industrial world...
...The simultaneous order which Eliot invoked is a dream of order, and nothing more [Donoghue sadly acknowledges...
...Support for these gifts of the Fiihrer coexisted with antagonisms caused by other aspects of nazism, and people could be ambivalent about politics in the Third Reich just as they are everywhere else...
...One such glint is an almost 505 off-hand comment he makes while discussing the importance of Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, when he rightly distinguishes it from most post-Stalin prose: Even the best [of it] tends to rely in considerable degree for its literary effect on the reader's awareness of the peculiar social and political context in which it is written...
...The consequences of this view become apparent in Donoghue's discussion of cultural pluralism— the proliferation of cultural objects in the modern world and the critical relativism that is understood to have accompanied it...
...At the same time, they seldom concerned themselves with public affairs or the deeper issues posed by a criminal society...
...It is a more familiar vision than we might comfortably wish it to be...
...In this process of broadening from reasonably unified labor-socialist parties to "people's parties," the "pressure for revolutionary or even simply radical changes" became minimal...
...The consequence of this pragmatist turn is that Marxism becomes for Lentricchia's argument simply the name for "that which we all desire in the way of social relations," a thing that never requires substantiation since it derives its authority not from any verifiable correspondence to social actuality but from its rhetorical persuasiveness...
...MORE WORK FOR MOTHER: THE IRONIES OF HOUSEHOLD TECHNOLOGY FROM THE OPEN HEARTH TO THE MICROWAVE, by Ruth Schwartz Cowan...
...France, "the advanced country that took socialism most at its word, has seen the 'future' and even its intellectuals have acknowledged it doesn't work...
...The deportation and the murder of German Jews occurred in darker times, beginning in the autumn of 1941, when the war began to go badly for Germany...
...While many of the "guest" laborers have returned to their native countries, significant numbers still remain...
...It was this "selfcenteredness," as much as his natural integrity, which made him impervious—though not indifferent— to the terrors and temptations of the age...
...V SINCE LENTRICCHIA is concerned to correct the notion that intellectuals can assume a position outside the social formation they presume to explain, but since he needs to make an argument that does not issue in despair, his management of this problem is somewhat more intricate...
...Deutschland ist Hitler...
...22.95...
...but it has changed greatly...
...Bavarians knew details of the Final Solution, and information about extermination camps was virtually nonexistent, there were certainly rumors about mass shootings and other atrocities...
...And this is why, after all, the Equal Rights Amendment was defeated, while its implications were misunderstood by the voting population...
...A crisis arose in 1941, when the regime launched a series of attacks upon the churches in the province...
...NOWHERE IS THIS JARRING NORMALITY more evident than in the extensive discussion of popular opinion on the persecution and murder of the Jews...
...496 THE IDEA OF POVERTY, by Gertrude Himmelfarb...
...By mid-1936 most unemployed Germans were back at work and material conditions improved despite growing shortages and rising food prices...
...It is impossible to evaluate its success until the next volume appears...
...q 506...
...Rorty's conversation sounds like no conversation at all...
...The example of Hitler is adduced as a caution, of course, a reminder to the intellectual to remain alertly self-critical of his own interpretive will to power...
...It does turn the struggle into a scene of "pragmatic strife in which the issues are less exciting for the histo504 rian of ideas but no less consequential in terms of human lives...
...With similar compression he cuts to the very heart of Peter the Great's paradoxical Westernization of Russia: Forcing his subjects to ape the ways of Europe, he violated Europe's very spirit...
...IT IS RARE that a scholarly book is so much fun to read...
...New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich...
...It is worthwhile reproducing the caption below one of the book's delightful sets of pictures: In times gone by, all kinds of goods and services came right to your door...
...Marxist interpretations of bourgeois analysis and proposals in terms of class interest do not convince her...
...How can we ever know what such people thought...
...But I would venture to guess that they would more likely have seemed to him degrading to literature...
...Cultural pluralism seems to me the best chance we have to insure, not that we get the society we want, but that we don't get the society someone else wants...
...Catholics succeeded in 1941, as Protestants did in 1934, because the issues at stake were not fundamental to the Hitlerian order...
...Generally, in the social sciences, household items are seen at best as objects of profit and at worst as objects of consumerism—for which women get blamed...
...Intellectuals might play a more positive role in the cultural life if, instead of exercising so much humility toward the objects of their cultural preference or the awesomeness of their historical task, they begin to exercise a little toward the preferences and tasks of their fellow women and men...
...Everyone else's theory becomes either a corroborating statement of the master theory or a symptom of the condition that it proposes to explain...
...Her technique is one of immersion in her materials as part of a generally successful endeavor to see problems and proposals through 18th- or 19th-century rather than 20thcentury eyes...
...True art does not simply announce itself (this is, of course, one of the odd habits of transcendental phenomena...
...An extraordinary linguist, he mastered—or, in the more literally accurate Russian word, usvoil ("made his own")—upward of a dozen languages, including Romany, Welsh, and Hungarian...
...In this criticism the critic tries to come into contact, as in conversation, with the voice of the writer—as opposed to engaging in the free play of interpretation advocated by Derrida and Roland Barthes, for whom the notion of a coherent authorial voice in or behind the text constitutes a kind of metaphysical fraud...
...is unabashedly Kantian: "With the arts, people can make a space for themselves, and fill it with intimations of freedom and presence...
...Like his much earlier volume, The Tragedy of European Labor, which analyzed the failures of the European left to avert fascism, nazism, and war, Sturmthal's Left of Center is written with sympathy and understanding for the aspirations of the labor and socialist movements of Europe...
...Letters will not be returned to senders unless they are accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes...
...The critic must be a secularist...
...Lentricchia's advice to leftist intellectuals is to seize the means of representation...
...The first part of the book includes a survey of prerevolutionary Russian cultural history, two overviews of Soviet literature since the Revolution, an examination of the history and posthistory of "socialist realism...
...he is quite right that it "remains to be seen" whether codetermination actually gives rank-and-file workers a "sense of participation in managerial decision-making...
...450 pp...
...Others in the cast of characters include Thomas Carlyle, a radical Tory, William Cobbett, a radical populist, Friedrich Engels who turned the poor into 498 proletarians, Henry Mayhew who in four volumes categorized the street people of London, Charles Dickens, and such lurid popular novelists as William Harrison Ainsworth and G. W. M. Reynolds who made their readers' flesh creep with tales of horrible crimes and sordid practices in the London slums...
...On Anna Akhmatova he offers wise, judicious comment...
...Once again, the police state backed down...
...According to Kershaw "the extent of civil disobedience during these months was greater than at any previous time during the Third Reich in Bavaria...
...Marx's picture, in other words, is true not in the reflectionist terms in which it is often posed...
...And on Pasternak, for whom he had a special love, he is positively brilliant...
...Generally, discontent did not produce active opposition...
...A new element in both the economic and political sectors, Sturmthal argues, is a "steady blurring of the boundaries between the classes," while simultaneously "a subproletariat of foreign workers has become the main victim of discrimination," whose interests the labor movements have, by and large, shown only a limited willingness or ability to serve...
...If the present era of heavy unemployment continues, if issues involving the environment and the assorted dangers of nuclear power and nuclear weapons are not soon resolved, then we are apt to see "more active and fundamental opposition to the existing social order, which would then better reflect the mood of large numbers of people threatened by the economic decline...
...The Tawney quotation is one of a very small number of references to the 20th century in 595 large pages...
...Controversies over the treatment of the poor have a cyclical character...
...Welfare as a technique of social control, in our day the thrust of the work of Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, among others, can be neither proved nor disproved, since it can account for anything and everything: the restriction of poor relief or its expansion, the provision of education for the poor or the failure to provide such education, the passage of a Ten Hours Bill or the defeat of that bill, a religious movement that catered to the poor or one that ignored the poor...
...In this she joins her colleague, the historian Carl Degler, who has shown that equality of women in American society 500 has foundered on the hard rock of demands for their full commitment to the family...
...IN GENERAL, however, Cowan shows sophistication in dealing with sociological issues...
...Although you might have used your first automobile just for fun, before many years had passed you would have been using it every day for domestic chores...
...The last category was one that Karl Marx in his years in the reading room of the British Museum found especially valuable...
...These theories are threatening to traditional Marxism, as they are to any humanist philosophy...
...Sturmthal is willing to accept a thesis that the leaders of many of these parties would prefer to escape the embarrassment of dependence on the Kremlin...
...If language, as Jacques Derrida would have it, is simply a deferral of meaning, signs referring us only to other signs, how can the text the leftist intellectual would appropriate be made to yield anything but evidence of its undecidability...
...As for the radicals, If class relations were contractual rather than conventional, if the legitimizing principle of social behavior was interest rather than obligation, the constraints of the old order were no longer binding, and the most radical ideas about power and authority, property and equality could be advanced with impunity...
...257 pp., $17.95 It is hard to believe: American women spend about as much time on housework today as they did one or two centuries ago...
...There were some centers of anti-Semitism, notably Protestant Middle Franconia, under the influence of the rabble-rousing Julius Streicher...
...15.95...
...Indeterminacy is an answer to proliferation...
...His ambition is to devise a Marxism responsive to the challenges posed for its theoretical foundations by the poststructuralist or deconstructionist critical theories that have been invading literary studies in the past decade and have more recently established footholds in philosophy and law...
...I n the process she also shows the intimate connection between various stages of industrialization and household techniques...
...second, on Nazi evaluations prepared by officials who kept close watch on civilian attitudes...
...progressive managers and entrepreneurs in trade, artisans, and [people in] agriculture who earn their living by their own work...
...But Cowan's analysis of modern times is also exciting...
...Reading Hayward on Pasternak or Akhmatova, one understands not merely the text of their work, but the texture that is the product of a man or a woman living in a certain society in a particular epoch, growing up with certain values, speaking certain languages, reading certain books...
...I should have devoted rather more space also to Jeremy Bentham, about whom she has also written extensively...
...Rorty is right, Lentricchia allows, in wanting to change the course of Western intellectual conversation by getting rid of the fiction of a natural standpoint, some ahistorical a priori on which the conversation can be grounded...
...This is why in Criticism and Social Change everyone who is not a Marxist dialectician is an aesthetic trivializer or a "cultural dupe...
...Lentricchia has shown himself to be a sharp critic of other people's theories in his well-known survey of contemporary theory, After the New Criticism (1980), and in a long essay on Foucault published two years ago in Raritan...
...Peddlers visited farmhouses, horsedrawn wagons delivered groceries or trundled vegetables or pots and pans up and down city streets, pushcarts brought all kinds of goods right to the curb, laundry could be picked up and delivered, and even doctors made house calls...
...HAYWARD'S ESSAYS ON SOVIET LITERATURE are informed by the same qualities, the writing perhaps a shade drier but shot through here and there with glints of individuality...
...Give them the opportunities available in a free economy and, out of ordinary self-interest, they will eagerly grasp them...
...One should not draw the wrong conclusions from such incidents...
...Cowan implies that the family as an institution is what Lewis Coser has called a "greedy institution," demanding total commitment on the part of at least one person, the housekeeper...
...in some respects I coincide with its official [?] interest, in other respects I am an alien within it...
...underlining the apparent conformity, two small children ape their elders, ranged beside a scowling storm trooper...
...It emerges when we put Donoghue's description of the art object—"the most available sign of an alternative life, an adversary image if the official life is understood as enforced social practice"— together with his description of himself: "I am a member of the middle class...
...He thus undertakes to weigh the force of the questions contemporary critical theory has taught us to ask...
...And they see language not as referring to the world, as a social theory that makes its claim on us by virtue of its truth-to-life must, but as referring simply to other language...
...Two essays in this book deal with Pasternak...
...The Marxist theory of history is valuable, he argues, not because it is the true description of how social change occurs, but for the pragmatist reason that it is good in the way of belief...
...The crucifixes remained on the walls...
...Continuities are stronger than impatient radicals prefer to contemplate...
...The jacket of this book presents an image that its text carefully challenges: a 1937 photograph of a Munich street shows a crowd ecstatically saluting Nazi leaders on parade...
...History, it turns out, has a dustbin...
...As CAN BE EXPECTED, Gertrude Himmelfarb is skeptical of attempts like that of E. P Thompson to construct a "radical consensus," a "radical intellectual culture," and indeed a working class distinguished by sensibility and ideology from other classes...
...If the New Poor Law reformers and their successors did their best to separate those whom they were willing to define as poor from the working classes and subject them to a harsh workhouse regimen, British Liberals, Laborites, and socialists did their considerable best in this century to universalize benefits, among them medical care, housing, and income maintenance...
...She is disposed to defend history from above against the claims of those who would write it from below...
...People expressed grievances in various ways, ranging from demoralization at the workplace to open demonstrations...
...Nevertheless, the strands of protest are hardly rarities, and they help us to elucidate other dimensions of popular opinion...
...Malthus worried about overpopulation, food shortages, and the profligate tendencies of the lower orders...
...The process, Sturmthal acknowledges, has been interpreted, in the words of Daniel Bell, as "the end of ideology...
...And how is the genuinely radical act, one that is not ironized by the determining pressures of 493 an inescapable past, possible...
...Lentricchia calls this "Marx without science...
...Once the production of market goods became more centralized in the next phase (the 20th century), the productive household-work process remained individualized, with the women keeping up, or trying to obtain, middle-class living standards all by themselves, while the men were freed for work outside the home and the children freed for school...
...That book's greatness as literature—here Lentricchia is summarizing Burke's essay on HitCOMING — IN OUR NEXT ISSUE: Northern Ireland: Ending the Troubles...
...Pasternak, expected by the authorities to read verses excoriating Western warmongering, did not merely confound such expectations but nearly provoked a public demonstration when he read his earlier, well-known and well-loved poetry...
...It would be helpful, of course, to listen to the authentic voices of the poor...
...Even Ruth Cowan herself slips into the trap of blaming consumerism on the housewives' unwillingness to leave home and hearth for outside work so that they might help the family reach the high-status standards symbolized by new household technology...
...Few have said it as well, none better...
...What these two seemingly disparate books have in common, and the reason they could both spring from the same theorysaturated intellectual milieu, is the extraordinary intolerance they exhibit toward the theories and tastes of other people...
...These cases of opposition, in short, could not be models for wider protest...
...but their situation has allowed them, long before the era of oral history, to create few written records...
...Soon afterward the Journal called M. Mitterrand ”the best thing to happen to Italy in years," because his record in office had led "his socialist colleague, Bettino Craxi" to steer clear of a socialist program that in any way resembled that of the French Socialists...
...Our interpretations "of the world," deconstructionism has it, are really interpretations of other interpretations, with no originating, preverbal ground in sight...
...Zhivago, Hayward, in the mid-1940s, happened to rent a room in a house in Oxford belonging to Pasternak's sister, Lydia Slater...
...Having moved away from the evangelical piety of the Protestant minority and the unusually vital Catholic church in Bavaria, the regime had to clash with the established Christian churches...
...Hayward's understanding of Pasternak's conceptions of time and eternity, of the former as the stuff of history and the latter the stuff of poetry, and of the irreconcilable antagonism between politicians, the men who "make history," and poets, "the temporal representative[s] of eternity," is profoundly true...
...Small farmers, a mainstay of support for Hitler before 1933, blamed the state for labor shortages and rising agricultural wages by the end of the decade...
...Patricia Blake, in her introductory essay, describes the first fortuitous intersection of Hayward's life with Pasternak's: in a coincidence that could come straight off the pages of Dr...
...But, for Lentricchia, Rorty's brand of pragmatism seems to be a promise of "cacophony, a Babel-like chorus of unconstrained and incommensurable interpretation...
...And the British Labour party's drive for socialization of basic industries rapidly lost momentum...
...Local Nazi leaders, energized by the racial-nationalist and "spiritual" side of the movement, resented the influence of clergymen, their recalcitrance on some aspects of racist dogma, and attempted to substitute the ideology of the regime for traditional religion...
...There were relatively few Jews in Bavaria, about 42,000 in 1933 or 0.55 percent of the population...
...More 502 than anything else, this aggressive Nazi proselytizing raised the ire of local populations...
...340 pp...
...It was a famous evening in 1948...
...Lower-middleclass groups, important in supporting nazism before Hitler became chancellor, bemoaned high taxes, large-scale enterprises, and bureaucratic meddling, as they had always done...
...At the very beginning of this meticulous essay in intellectual history, Gertrude Himmelfarb employs Samuel Johnson and R. H. Tawney to make a point of importance, that attitudes toward the poor in England have changed less in the last two centuries than the remaining adherents to the Whig conception of history as a record of spreading enlightenment and social progress might be willing to concede...
...Nevertheless, the Eurocommunist parties offer little basis for trust in their new approaches "since major policy decisions are not anchored in an expression of rank-and-file sentiment," and thus "are easily reversible...
...In achieving greater equality of opportunity, a higher degree of social mobility, and further extensions of democratic rights, the socialist movements brought desirable victories to their constituencies—"but not socialism...
...Although the Nazis succeeded in murdering the Jews largely without German resistance, they failed to mobilize the entire population on behalf of anti-Semitism...
...but in the pragmatist sense that it has put many intellectuals into active and rich commerce with their society...
...Following the Blitzkrieg victories in the spring and summer of 1940, public confidence in the Nazis experienced a powerful boost, however short-lived...
...And it is why Lentricchia and Donoghue both, with opposite ends in view, refer to the cultural history of the past 200 years as though its dominant figure were Walter Pater...
...In her promised sequel, Ms...
...It is therefore not surprising that the single literary example in Criticism and Social Change is Mein Kampf...
...The wholesale importation of the material and cultural benefits of the Renaissance—in which Russia had not partaken— was carried out in such a way as to make a mockery of the humanism at the basis of them...
...Himmelfarb has eloquently written elsewhere, deserved a chapter or at least a substantial section to himself...
...Not much is new under the sun...
...by reinterpreting their interpretations, we can change it...
...Zhivago, while it can be challenged, is reasoned and proceeds from an infinitely well-informed sympathy for Pasternak as poet, novelist, and man...
...but Sturmthal argues that "does not mean the end of social conflict...
...Conveying vividly how people of different social classes actually lived in different periods of our recent history, she helps the reader experience the misery of the poor and the drudgery of the better-off...
...Bavarian Catholics were even more strenuous and more persistent in their confrontation with the Nazi order...
...The pieces comprising the first part are uniformly competent, if not particularly original: they read like what they were, introductions to anthologies, intended for readers with relatively little knowledge of the subjects and providing those readers with thorough, intelligent, accurate priwis...
...In both cases demonstrators were prepared to live with nazism once their particular grievance had been settled...
...Servants no longer assist in the heavy work, are no longer available mornings and nights for some peace of mind at crucial hours...
...Ungrounded conversation is restricted by the same social actualities that restricted all the essentialist conversations in the past—the social actualities Lentricchia so often appeals to...
...Himmelfarb's hopes of telling her story in a single volume proved implausible...
...and so is the habit of voiding claims 495 upon our attention by declaring them all equally arbitrary...
...New York: Basic Books...
...This program will sound familiar: it belongs to the line of Marxist social criticism that includes Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse, and Louis Althusser...
...It is all the more surprising that at the end of the book the author suggests as a solution to the enormous problems she has depicted so dramatically that we throw fewer T-shirts into the washing machine...
...In this book, Ian Kershaw of Manchester University looks at Germans behind the scenes—"the muddled majority, neither fullhearted Nazis nor outright opponents, whose attitudes...
...Smith believed in ordinary people...
...In a separate chapter Cowan discusses the "servant problem" in this country—the fact that, because of demographic factors and the persistent process of industrialization, women over the years have increasingly refused to go into household service, even though the wages might be better than in low-skill-level industry...
...Cowan destroys the myth that the most important things are going on in the "outside" world, and in the "hard" world of steel and coal at that...
...And his Russian was so good that anecdotes—like the one in which a Soviet visitor to England took Hayward, a Yorkshireman, for a colleague, while Hayward took the Soviet for an emigre, with predictably hilarious results—are commonplace...
...While women give to the household as much time as their mothers and grandmothers did, 499 she notes the decrease in spent energy, the increase in comfort, hygiene, and health in all social classes —that is, in the general standard of living, including that of the poor...
...It finds a popularized echo in the motto of a kind of leftism current here and in France since the 1960s: if we remake ourselves, we will remake society...
...Sturmthal examines efforts to provide a greater influence for unions and their members: codetermination, collective bargaining, a governmental incomes policy...
...This is not to say that Ms...
...Discontent with particular policies was often counterbalanced by satisfaction with other aspects of the Third Reich...
...Once it emerged, the regime usually cracked down...
...Since this meant that yolks and whites had to be beaten separately, the work was doubled...
...POPULAR OPINION AND POLITICAL DISSENT IN THE THIRD REICH: BAVARIA 1933-1945, by Ian Kershaw...
...They have a long road to travel before they are accepted as resident members of the work force in their host countries...
...and the concomitant rebellion of minorities against systems of discrimination that interfere with the advancement of talented men and women from minority ranks...
...The answer is that...
...There followed a storm of unrest...
...One way of putting the issue is to say that Lentricchia wants to rewrite Marx's 11th thesis on Feuerbach to read, "The philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways...
...Cowan concludes that "Merchant flour, castiron stoves, municipal water, and manufactured boots did not free women from their labors...
...Wisely, Sturmthal offers the cautionary advice of the late Sam Goldwyn: it is difficult to make forecasts, especially about the future...
...Readers who recall the cautionary example in the preface to The German Ideology of the man who thought to eliminate the problem of drowning by convincing people that the idea of gravity was a superstition, will perhaps wonder where the Marx is...
...Yet Cowan shows the immense improvement in living conditions, and she notes that much time was saved with the introduction of plumbing and electricity...
...Lentricchia's designated spokesman for most of his discussion is Kenneth Burke, recommended here as a critic who since the 1930s has managed to sustain a socially astute criticism in full awareness of the complications that would be proposed, many years after the bulk of his criticism had been written, by such writers as Derrida and Foucault...
...THE ONE AREA where discontent flared into open opposition was the Nazis' assault upon various forms of Christian religious practice...
...AntiSemitism, as we know, can easily exist without Jews...
...Lentricchia's defense of Marxism against the critique implied by deconstructionist theories of language and by what he has called the "supermaterialism" of Foucault rests finally on a single theoretical move: a crossing of Marxism with pragmatism...
...LEFT OF CENTER: EUROPEAN LABOR SINCE WORLD WAR II, by Adolf Sturmthal...
...His position is most readily observed in the argument he makes to distinguish his kind of pragmatism from the Jamesian and Deweyan kind recently revised and promoted in two influential books by Richard Rorty...
...THUS FAR, I have emphasized the general strategy of inquiry...
...Edited and with an Introduction by Patricia Blake...
...The flood of ersatz art experiences—art in galleries, photography, rock music, television, postmodernist art of "whatever happens"—is attributed to a failure of the critical will, the will to assert discriminations and make value judgments...
...Within a few weeks, facing a storm of protest, Hitler himself had to back down and reinstate this champion of provincial religious independence from Berlin...
...Only the crushing of communism remained their great consolation, and this inevitably wore thin in the face of war, shortages, and aerial bombardments...
...This essay is distinguished throughout by such lapidary explanations of highly complex social developments—and they give the distinct impression of stemming from a mind crammed full of erudition but self-confident enough to dispense with the footnotes...
...I finished this book envious of those people who had the luck to know him personally—but glad, at least, that the rest of us have this opportunity to make his acquaintance...
...Himmelfarb will deal with the emergence of the welfare state in England and the changes and continuities registered in political decisions to add illness, disability, and old age to poverty as misfortunes that merit public concern and public expenditure...
...We reserve the right to edit letters down to fit our space and to choose which shall be printed...
...The kind of transcendental status Donoghue would have us attribute to the art object is indicated succinctly by a passage in his introduction: 494 While I was working on the Reith Lectures, two passages, one from St...
...With the help of machines, women now process the laundry from hamper to washer to dryer to folding...
...Simple explanations displease this guide to the idea of poverty...
...25.00...
...Symbolic of the confrontation that year was the effort of an ardent Nazi official to remove crucifixes from the schools and otherwise to extend the Nazification of the educational system...
...And a few pages later he speaks of contemporary criticism's "undisguised revulsion against the sacred object, the original work of art...
...As the years passed and suburbia spread, delivery services disappeared, and you would have hardly been able to run a household without a car, performing services that retailers had once offered, and chores— such as picking children up at school—that had never existed before...
...And he is anxious to avoid the rewriting he thinks poststructuralism, in its current academic incarnation, would perform: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways...
...In this new study Sturmthal analyzes the process through which the European Socialist parties have moved from a platform of socializing the means of production to one absorbed with more immediate goals: wages, health care, pensions, adequate education, and greater democracy in the workplace...
...Perhaps, then, the games of literary dissection that go by such names as semiotics and deconstructivism might have amused him...
...Kershaw draws mainly upon two sources: first, on confidential reports from the Social Democratic party underground and leftwing opponents of the regime who until the outbreak of war regularly sent assessments to the West...
...No wonder that Ms...
...and that is all that philosophers—or anyone else—can hope to do...
...Frank Lentricchia has chosen a difficult problem for his new book, Criticism and Social Change...
...Her work is original in the way she takes us into the households as she interprets the link between family life and the stage of the economy...
...The historical materials that impart specificity and emotion to the abstractions of absolute and relative surplus value were usually derived from official documents...
...Hayward saw Pasternak only once, Re: Letters • Dissent welcomes letters, but we must ask that they be kept within bounds, about 225 words...
...HAYWARD WAS AN OUTSTANDING LINGUIST...
...Himmelfarb's intellectual virtuosity and scholarly resourcefulness...
...Himmelfarb has successfully resisted any temptation to draw tempting parallels between the debates that led to the New Poor Law Act of 1834, that monument to Malthus, and contemporary disputes in both England and the United States over definitions of poverty and appropriate policies to alleviate the condition...
...For the economists, class was connected with interest and contract, the comforting universe of maximization and markets, where they masterfully maneuvered the sacred categories of rent, capital, and labor...
...Writers in Russia, 1917-1978, by Max Hayward...
...His conclusions are qualified, but they suggest nevertheless that what Goebbels attempted was never fully realized...
...Kershaw's Germans indeed may appear disturbingly normal—which the author himself may have noted when he reflected in his preface: "I should like to think that had I been around at the time I would have been a convinced anti-Nazi engaged in the underground resistance fight...
...Oxford and New York: Clarendon/Oxford University Press...
...Without the knowledge that it is written in defiance of certain previously imposed standards, and that a challenge to them still involves difficulties or hazards for the author, one would lose the odd sense of tension which Soviet literature derives from its nonliterary context...
...n October 1983 the Wall Street Journal commented, with obvious pleasure, that "the idea called socialism is dead...
...Indeed, will the socialist parties survive, with or without a "socialist" ideology...
...But from the beginning, activity against Jews—arson, violence, boycotts, discrimination— was mainly the work of zealous party men rather than of the general population...
...Industrial workers lamented the sharpened distinctions among social classes, worsening labor conditions, and harsh repression of workers' organizations...
...Instead, "economic policy-making became the result of arrangements among corporate powers . . . unions, farmers, consumers' groups, and the government...
...While recognizing the nature of the capitalist-patriarchal system, she also knows that other social dynamics are at work—that American men and women will not agree to any alternatives that seem to threaten family life as they understand it, with the full-time devotion of the wife-mother...
...It is too bad that she ends her bang-up exposition with a whimper...
...And, he cautions, if the era of full employment is over for the foreseeable future, the programs of the labor and socialist parties may very well become more radical than they have been in most of the postwar era...
...But nothing distinguishes Hitler's appropriation of the conversation from the sort Lentricchia would like leftist intellectuals to undertake except the consequences...
...Only wives and mothers, as Talcott Parsons noted years ago, still accept such an imposition on their time...
...In Donoghue's survey of the contemporary critical scene, Ferocious Alphabets (1981), which has recently been reissued by Columbia University Press, the bias clearly favors a kind of criticism that Derridean theory has declared obsolete...
...III ON THE FACE OF IT, nothing could be more antipathetic to the theoretical orientation of Lentricchia's book than Denis Donoghue's Reith Lectures, delivered on BBC radio in 1982 and reprinted with lengthy commentaries as The Arts Without Mystery...
...From Augustine: "Whatever is understood by knowledge is limited by the understanding of the knowledge: even what can be called ineffable is not ineffable...
...True, a new gadget, the eggbeater, relieved some of the burden, but at the same time angel-food cakes became popular...
...Churchmen were generally silent, reflecting the widespread lack of concern about the issue...
...The bulk of the text consists of a series of frequently brilliant separate essays...
...Those who may have wondered whether Donoghue meant what he seemed to be implying in this sentence will, after The Arts Without Mystery, wonder no more: The reason why modern critics are embarrassed by the mysteriousness of art is that it threatens the purity of their secular status [Donoghue writes in this new book...
...The work of men and children had already been separated from the home during the first phase of industrialization (in the 19th century...
...Part One contrasts the generous vision of Adam Smith with the harsh rhetoric of Thomas Robert Malthus...
...Sturmthal takes note of the impact of all these economic and political phenomena on the West European Communist parties...
...49.50...
...Kershaw's quest for Bavarian public opinion concentrated upon a search for "critical, nonconformist, dissenting strands...
...Therefore, discontent surfaced...
...The 1955 Bad Godesberg declaration of the German Social Democrats recognized the lack of interest in the old program of socialization of industry...
...Remarkable as it may seem, Bavarian opinion seems not to have occupied itself with the Jews...
...when ruling discourse is seized and, in the name of ruling discourse, turned against the rulers...
...The only conclusion I can draw from this is that if art is neither a language nor a form of knowledge, and if it is inaccessible to my language and my ways of knowing, then either the arts are inhuman or there is something less than human about the rest of my life...
...WILL ANY OF THIS lead toward what was traditionally regarded as socialism...
...If society, as Michel Foucault would have it, is a totalization of power relations, how can intellectuals, socially accredited and institutionally integrated, stand apart from or outside these relations in order to criticize them...
...In a few lines Hayward delineates what was really at stake, and why people were prepared to die for a finger...
...Take transportation as an example...
...Yet the indifference of the population to the "Jewish question" is nevertheless striking, considering the Nazis' emphasis...
...Far more important were the worsening conditions of life at home, the gloomy news from the front, and the fear of Allied retribution should the Reich be defeated...
...This propaganda view still is largely accepted: the Germans overwhelmingly backed the Hitlerian regime...
...If they sense that the work of art is indeed occult, they get away from it as quickly as possible...
...The road to Auschwitz," Kershaw writes, "was built by hate, but paved with indifference...
...However, I know really that I would have been as confused and felt as helpless as most of the people I am writing about...
...so is play...
...And anybody can seize them...
...Together with the editor of this volume, Patricia Blake, he attuned Western ears to the "dissonant" voices in the Russian chorus of post-Stalinist writing...
...Assessing Pasternak's moral role in Soviet literary history, Hayward almost inadvertently illuminates Pasternak's poetry: Pasternak stood at the center of a perpetually astonishing universe, and his poetry is the tale of how, in all its diversity, it related to himself, the only fixed and immutable point...
...There is no sign that Hitler's personal standing weakened notably over these issues...
...Thank you for your kind cooperation...
...New York: Alfred A. Knopf...
...The old-time proletariat was changing...
...If it can be made to appear that we have always submitted to a single shaping vocabulary in the past, perhaps we can be persuaded to submit to another in the future...
...I find the boolc's first three chapters the most exciting ones, perhaps because they bring us material that is not familiar, and because here a good historian makes us relive the past...
...IV EVERY THEORY POSITS a privileged position from which its operations, so to speak, can be directed...
...he asks.] Does it "correspond" to social reality...
...II BUT LENTRICCHIA COMPLICATES the argument by introducing into his discussion the skepticism poststructuralist thought has brought to bear on this optimistic view of society and the self...
...I should have thought that John Stuart Mill, about whom Ms...
...She shows systematically how the work process in the home is closely linked to the economy...
...The influential political economists, and the new radicals in particular, deployed class concepts in pursuit of contrasting objectives...
...Himmelfarb doesn't 497 stray from time to time into current controversies among historians...
...Clergymen were scandalized, for example, by the pornographic appeals of Streicher's violently anti-Jewish newspaper Der Stiirmer, which mingled denunciations of Jews with lascivious cartoons and articles illustrating sexual perversions...
...Sturmthal, however, hedges his bets...
...The tradition exemplified in this volume is that of intellectual conservatism: history is complicated...
...We shall see how successful the enterprise is as a whole when the next volume emerges...
...By 1860 "the value of its product was $249 million, more than twice [that] of the . . . cotton industry ($107 million) and three times that of iron and steel ($73 million...
...Perhaps because Sweden receives, unfortunately, only passing attention in his study, Sturmthal all but ignores the random efforts by labor and management to "humanize the workplace" through rearrangement of functions and schedules on the assembly line, or to solicit worker 503 involvement for a more humane and productive job environment, Codetermination, Sturmthal finds, works "quite effectively" in some of the countries as an instrument of conflict management...
...Angel-food cakes, strawberry preserves, clean clothes, ironed ruffles, and leavened bread may have made life easier and pleasanter for their families, but they also kept women working at home...
...They insist upon the assurance that nothing escapes their consciousness...
...Peasants grumbled about the marketing of egg and milk products— often, for them, the very essence of the new "system" imposed from Berlin...
...Augustine, the other from E. M. Cioran, kept coming into my mind...
...And in the opposite corner, Lentricchia places Paul de Man, whose deconstructionist practice as a literary critic is understood to issue from the political quietism of a comfortable academic nihilism...
...Protesters, moreover, focused their campaigns on specific, achievable objectives, and in both situations mentioned here the Fiihrer was able to chastise a subordinate while yielding at no significant cost...
...In the 19th century metals and textiles did not dominate American industry...
...She forgets that other writers today are blaming women for wanting to go to work because they want extra money to buy "gadgets"— a case of being damned if they do and damned if they don't...
...Too often the time that was saved with new inventions served only the men and children...
...The annals of the poor are composed by such journalists as Mayhew, novelists as Dickens, moral philosophers and economists as Smith, Malthus, and Mill, and the indispensable reports of Poor Law commissioners and Factory Act inspectors...
...Himmelfarb, nevertheless, observes an increasing substitution of class language...
...The best equipped "anybody" turns out to be the academic intellectual, who is institutionally situated to exert an interpretive power over society's essential texts...
...21.95...
...It began a 20-year association, intellectual and personal, extending even after Pasternak's death, when reprisals were inflicted on Pasternak's mistress Olga Ivinskaya and her daughter, and Hayward campaigned on their behalf...
...No matter which way the conversation goes, though, short of social disintegration, it will not become the Babel these critics fear...
...In the 18th century, to take an example, when fine wheat flour replaced homegrown corn and rye in most households, not only was the simple process of baking bread with cornmeal replaced by a much more complex process of baking white bread, but baking pies became fashionable— to the point where at the beginning of the 19th century French travelers, who were, after all, used to good cuisine, praised New England's "cake-inventive housewives and daughters...
...In 1770 that stalwart Tory Samuel Johnson, who after all knew something about poverty from first-hand experience, declared that "A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization...
...When he died, aged 55, in 1979, the combative, disputatious world of Russian scholars, students, and emigres joined together in mourning the loss of a greatly talented and beloved man...
...In every essay in this book, as well as in pieces of his that are not included in this volume, Hayward approaches a subject—a book, an author, an era—as a complicated combination of history, politics, language, emotions and ideas, which can be separated only arbitrarily...
...that position is always occupied by the intellectual who has created the theory...
...But the labor saved was that of men and children, for the handgrinding and hauling of grain to the local mill had traditionally been men's work...
...Confronted by the new prosperity and new thinking among European workers, and the unpleasant actions of the Soviet Big Brother, they zig-zagged through a series of "Eurocommunist" experiments and a constantly changing pattern of public positions...
...Spontaneously, villagers and townspeople marched and disturbed the peace, subverted the new regulations, and assailed Nazi authorities...
...They refuse to consider the key terms of humanist discourse—"man," "freedom," "right," and so on —as anything more than ideological constructs...
Vol. 31 • September 1984 • No. 4
