The Importance of Being Radical

...He should know...

...The lack of "issues" apart (and this is an argument which is less valid than it appears...

...And only in this way—by realizing his function—can he achieve and maintain his independence in a bourgeois civilization...

...We may not have a crisis today but we have something less tangible and more dangerous...

...For ideologies are for those who want to change the status quo, not to preserve it...

...It may be asked: Why does the intellectual choose the radicalism of the left which is implied in this article...

...It is tempting not to be radical today as a simple means by which the intellectual firebrand of the 1930s can rid himself of a past which seemingly clutters up the present...

...The hard edges of reality have become softened and soggy so that it now yields to the slightest material desire...

...If he has any complaints, he too can become a pressure group, as Daniel Bell suggests...

...Some of the other writers in The New American Right indicate that this simple-minded viewpoint is characteristic of certain ex-radicals...

...As C. Wright Mills has said: the liberal fought a fight for free speech during McCarthy's wild ride, but then found he had nothing to say...

...The unreal maze-life of Kafka has come into existence and politics is now nothing more than a part of the maze—shoptalk with no end but itself...

...And if there are many reasons to justify radicalism, for an intellectual who carries the imprint of the 1930s there is one necessity which now seems especially relevant —the necessity of asserting the values of an intellectual way of life...

...One ultimately comes to admire the 'practical politics" of a Theodore Roosevelt and his scorn for the intransigents...

...It is the role of the intellectual to make such a point, and radicalism is one precise way of saying that America in 1956 is in a very exact way both absurd and fantastic...

...The intellectuals, he says, are out of touch with the new discontented classes which are composed of the new middle classes...

...The intellectual is now an individual the government, or big business, or the Ford Foundation can turn to if it wants to find out something about Southeast Asia, nuclear physics, African unrest, or strategic bombing...

...The question, why be radical?, is more urgent today than in those more stringent times when radicalism tended to be instinctive...

...not ideas...

...there are plenty of things to complain about if that is all one wishes to do) , it is difficult to be critical and even sarcastic about a political and economic system whose main weapon is to cloy the senses with a succulent, velvety, gummy unreality...

...Sartre defines an absurd world as one without ends, and a fantastic world as one in which ends and means are reversed...

...And indeed, why not...

...It is one aspect —and only one aspect—of the intellectual's fight to be an intellectual, to deal with ideas as he alone sees fit...

...That is why Riesman tells the intellectual to visit the women's club...

...threat but by the more permanent malaise McCarthy represents...

...It is not impossible: it is being done...

...In conforming to bourgeois standards he has got his reward: a job, the occasional illusion of power, a garden and a Ford grant...

...But unfortunately for the new view ideas are the one characteristic which identifies the intellectul...

...It is not a rational skepticism...

...But it will not be done for long if the intellectual follows Daniel Bell's advice and avoids ideology and controversy...

...it envelops and surrounds the citizen in a sticky, perfumed embrace in which the urge to struggle ceases to exist...

...There is no lack of problems, but how can they be described, let alone solved, when the ad-man grins and pulls you into the cocoon...

...Therefore, to avoid ideas or even their dangerous but necessary structuring as ideology is to cease to be an intellectual and to become an expert, a technician, a member of the clerisy...

...Radicalism is rather a point of view with which to fight the miasma of today on any plane you choose...

...Madison is now elevated for his political wisdom...

...There are no permanent victories in this field...

...Radicalism is not something to be kept in the suburban deepfreeze for a future crisis: we can do without the future crises, thank you, and it will be a sad day when the liberal/ radical hopes for catastrophe as a means of giving him something to say...

...Most of the writers in The New American Right have a judicious and grave concern with the effects of the status struggle, but it is rendered impotent simply because they accept the standards and values of the bour geois society which produces this struggle...

...so is Calhoun for his ideas on how to check a majority...

...A tough-minded creed of radicalism is one way to make such an assertion...

...But more significant than the idea of the status struggle as a determinant of political behavior is the obvious concern of the writers before this fact of American life...

...This independence is always precarious and threatened by many things...

...his only recourse is to go to a psychiatrist— if he can afford it—and get his bad temper removed...

...Free gifts instead of freedom will solve any problem which happens to be lying around: e.g., the Ford grant to colleges will allow us to burke the whole problem of higher education...

...Let us just say—not that he is "tired": this old excuse doesn't hold water in view of the long hours he spends for his boss—but rather that he functions comfortably and neatly within the cocoon...

...This, as I see it, is the importance of being radical...

...And choice demands values...

...The saving glory of the United States is that politics has always been a pragmatic give-and-take rather than a series of wars-to-the-death...

...And it is not necessary to be an intellectual to be a radical.* But in a bourgeois society, and especially one so monolithic as ours, it is very useful to be both...

...on the other hand, one doesn't like to say that he hasn't been bought off...

...The New American Right is a brilliantly unconscious revelation of this weakness...

...Democratic politics is bargaining and consensus because the historic contribution of liberalism was to separate law from morality...

...it is the intellectual's misreading of his own past which has led him to think that radicalism is a means to "power" or "influence" in a purely political sense...

...Especially for the intellectual who finds easy employment in a time of know-how-to-no-purpose, the question is pressing and doubly pressing if he was of the generation of the 1930s...

...They are in fact deeply bothered not only by the McCarthy • See also winter issue of DISSENT for a discussion by Bernard Rosenberg of The New American Right.—Ed...

...This can certainly never be said if a bourgeois scale of values is the only one which exists, for the bourgeois is, by definition, unconcerned with the problem...

...in giving up an independent system of values to pander to the mighty, he loses the foundation of his intellectual life...

...Radicalism is one way in which the intellectual asserts himself against alien values...

...it is a fear which haunts the book...

...Thus the importance of the intellectual's political ideas to his whole role as an intellectual...

...This romantic theory of capitulation for the sake of ease fits well the prevalent atmosphere of America today...

...This is what marks him out as a distinct member of any society—even in America where ideas are at a discount...

...Supposedly it is an attempt to explain the new approach to politics called "status politics"—an analysis which, we are told by the editor, Daniel Bell, is to replace Marxism...

...But it is not so...

...Riesman is pulling our leg...

...Yet they also point implicitly to a dangerous situation...

...If today one's values are those of the bourgeoisie, then choice is easy, automatic and painless...

...All this isn't to say that the intellectual lacks courage...

...But its basic function for the intellectual has been the more significant one of maintaining the integrity of the intellectual qua intellectual...

...Richard Hofstadter in an essay, "The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt," tells us that the Liberal is now Conservative...

...Yet the question remains...

...It [representative government] is the only way of providing the "concurrent majorities" which, as Calhoun knew so well, were the solid basis for pro viding a check on the tyrannical "popular" majority...

...When the chips are down, Bell, Hofstadter, Riesman, et al will stand up and be counted...

...The purpose of radicalism in this sense becomes not criticism of the bourgeois for the sake of criticism, or epater le bourgeois...

...Thus the importance of being radical...

...Surely it is time to question the slops that are being fed us...

...The irascible man has no place in the America of 1956...

...OF COURSE IDEAS are dangerous: of course ideologies are particularly open to misuse...

...Unless some assertion is made, the intellectual becomes a pen-pusher to the great...

...As scribbler to the great, he has become the technician of thq Age of General Motors and United States Steel...

...that it is not the suffocating atmosphere of America alone which is responsible for a near debacle of the intellectual and radical, but rather the intellectuals' inadequate understanding of the meaning of radicalism...

...It is the political aspect of the intellectual's need to roam as he will—even in a bourgeois civilization...

...The solution is simple: avayd ideology...

...If the professors can't win a prize on the $64,000 program, then it will be made up to them by some other corporation...

...Then, too, refusal to accept the status quo is quite obviously bad taste...

...Stickily entangled in the cocoon of Republican prosperity and Democratic mediocrity, one may feel it difficult to credit the relevance of radicalism to the 1930s, let alone to the 1950s...

...The insipidity of this approach to their subject is most apparent in the case of the editor's introduction where Daniel Bell draws what he considers to be the logical implications of the book's analysis: The essays in this book are primarily analytical...

...Part of this reluctance to see bourgeois society for what it is results from the fact that the American-intellectual-who-was-radical is now a part of the American clerisy, as Marcus Cunliffe has pointed out in EnCounter (May, 1955) . One doesn't like to say that this type of intellectual has been bought off...

...This process of degradation has gathered speed in a prosperous bourgeois civilization since brains are as useful a commodity as any other—provided, of course, like any other commodity, they are kept under control...

...They are different strains but the effect—of a society at odds with itself—is much the same...

...and these writers try to give it serious consideration...

...And the consequent threat to democracy is much the same...

...In the first case the threat comes from letting loose a struggle for power and position which shatters the nation and in the second case it comes from incapacity to produce...

...But the new view, as one comes across it in The New American Right and similar writings, is evidently that not only do the ideas of the radicals of the past have no relevance today but they didn't have any relevance in the past...

...For here and now the liberal/radical man-of-goodwill has forfeited—willingly and not under duress—his right and obligation to criticize and negate...

...But the necessity to choose is something more than an existentialist cliche...

...It is not necessary to be a radical in order to be an intellectual...

...Surely today these values are of greater importance than ever before and also in greater danger than ever before...

...America has always been "different...

...But today, the threat in America comes from the specific bourgeois values which is the atmosphere of America, 1956, and which are of necessity different from the values of the intellectual...

...If, however, one's values are those of the intellectual for whom ideas are the greatest value, then it will be necessary to make some more difficult choices and to bend the mind to some more difficult problems...

...Such fears of the popular majority are enlightening, to say the least...

...It is this atmosphere of futility and dream which creates the basic difficulty of being radical, not the lack of "issues" or "crises...

...presumably the intellectual will go on his soapbox again, but this time instead of standing on a cold and windy street corner, he will be snug and warm in the living room of a women's club patiently explaining a "way of life" to them...

...Particularly for the intellectual...

...But this he does not say: as a Conservative, the Liberal is dedicated to the conservation of a bourgeois civilization with its whole ad-man scale of values and to the conservation of all the values in which we are caught today...

...THE INTELLECTUAL HAS BECOME the expert...

...that is too easy...

...It is rather a protective device and one which has been used ever since the modern intellectual came into being...

...But since he perforce has values, surely it is better to hold them with some sophistication...

...In the cocoon in which we are suspended today, an attempt to assert these values grows more and more difficult...

...One would like to think that Mr...

...The tendency to convert issues into ideologies, to invest them with moral color and high emotional charge, invites conflict which can only damage a society...

...If, of course, he strays beyond the confines of his subject he is ejecteu: e.g., Oppenheimer...

...Only by using ideology and/or a philosophy as a critical analysis of man and society can the intellectual fulfill his function as the man concerned with ideas as such...

...David Riesman has postulated some high-flown reasons in "The Intellectuals and the Discontented Classes" (reprinted in The New American Right...

...It will be a choice in which political radicalism subserves the purpose of an intellectual's life, not a choice in which an intellectual subserves political radicalism...

...Since they do accept these values, they must perforce accept the status struggle and all that it entails...

...the more bourgeois the civilization the more vital it is...

...the intellectual does not lead the discontented classes as he did in the 1930s (a somewhat questionable assumption) . Ergo: the intellectual should once again take over leadership, but this time of the discontented middle classes...

...Such acceptance does not give the intellectual any ground from which to criticize the values of his civilization: his role is that of the passive spectator explaining to other passive spectators what is happening...

...But when the chips are down it will he too late...

...Ideas are old hat, anyway: avoid ideology...

...There are other ways—such as writing a novel or painting a picture...

...The answer is that (a) the radicalism of the left has traditionally been the most convenient tool with which to assert intellectual values, and, much more important, (b) it has certain libertarian qualities which are fundamental to the intellectual's values and needs...

...This curious book does in fact prove one thing at least...

...Radicalism has served the intellectual well, but not as a dogma giving him leadership of the masses, or as the means of bringing bread to the poor, as Riesman naively assumes...

...And yet as writers who are writing a political tract (in the best sense of the word) instead of, or as well as, a work of analysis they are incapable of facing up to the political implications of their own study—that in times of prosperity bourgeois capitalism threatens democracy just as it does in time of economic crisis...

...And the more bourgeois the civilization the more difficult it is...

...IT IS TRUE that there are more rarefied theories as to the political impotence of the intellectual-who-was-once-radical...

...It can certainly never be said if the intellectual does not assert his own supreme value of rationality...

...So be it...

...The struggle to attain status would seem to set up social strains in somewhat the same way the Marxist class struggle does...

...Today radicalism has the appearance of quaintness...

...There are, perhaps, times when it can give him political power...

...Techniques are what he spends his time on...

...The American intellectual is notoriously skittish in front of values...

...Insofar as these writers are correct (and too much of their material rests on vacuous generalizations) the status struggle in particular forms is worth consideration for its political effect...

...They may wring their hands in despair but more than that they cannot do...

...As a method of analysis it has much to recommend it...

...It is rather a way of asserting a different set of values...

...It is simply to say that he has not made the intellectual analysis which would tell him how to use his courage...

...And who is there to raise the questions except for the intellectual...

...But if political radicalism is only one aspect of the intellectual's life, it is a vital part of the intellectual's life in a bourgeois civilization...

...One reason given is that this would be the safe thing to do since these are the classes which will seek to attack the intellectual...