Remembering Irving Howe
Fehèr, Ferenc & Heller, Agnes
Rarely, if ever, are the words "socialism" and "nobility" associated with one another. Early socialists, following in the tradition of the French revolution, sought to destroy the old regime and...
...And yet we must do so, in Irving Howe's spirit...
...Much could be said about him as eloquent militant of a deserving cause, but that would never reveal his unforgettable personal quality...
...The key was Irving Howe's nobility—a word he rarely used...
...Social democrats became a part of mass society, emphasizing their "plebeian" mettle...
...For a moment he believed that the Hitler-Stalin pact would hold and the world would plunge into a long nightmare of tyrannies...
...It was a way of life...
...He once told us that 1940 had been the darkest year of his life...
...There is an element of inhumanity in drawing "sociological lessons" before a fresh grave...
...Irving Howe was an heir of America's democratic socialist tradition...
...Irving Howe disliked Georg Lukacs, who was, in his view, too patrician, too abstract, and too compromised...
...Howe remained an egalitarian opposed to all despotisms...
...Communists, while they erected concentration camps and fashioned ruinous economies, boasted that their new civilization had nothing to do with the "ridiculous ceremonies" of historically defunct classes and estates...
...This New York social and cultural celebrity criticized those with whom he disagreed, but accepted disagreement as a fact of healthy culture...
...Irving Howe, democrat, democratic socialist, egalitarian, would never have used these words, but he personified them...
...He was a principled democrat in political vision as much as in life-style...
...But standing alone, sticking to his guns, was never an "emergency situation" for Irving Howe...
...The title he gave to his journal of democratic socialism, Dissent, shows what animated him, what deeply moved him...
...The recent memorial for him was heartwarming, for the huge gathering demonstrated that in the end he was not isolated...
...Early socialists, following in the tradition of the French revolution, sought to destroy the old regime and its inequality...
...He was uncompromising in his criticism of Moscow's "socialism of the Gulag," even when many left-wing intellectuals made contemptible concessions to Stalin and his successors...
...he drew lines, but was able to make friends across them...
...His gestures of friendship were filled with a unique refinement...
...In the twentieth century, neither of socialism's main branches had much time for "nobility...
...He stood for a democratic mass society guided by socialist dynamics, but Irving Howe was not himself made of the stuff of mass society...
...He was alien to any form of mob socialism...
...But as Irving Howe, utopian and incorrigible realist, would say: This is in the nature of things...
...Three years ago we spent a week with him in Mexico City, on the occasion of a series of televised debates on the liberation of Eastern Europe, and witnessed, not without amusement, his utter shock at the lavishness of the hospitality bestowed on the participants...
...In his criticism he always considered the 528 • DISSENT vulnerability of the criticized...
...His life's lesson is that in our age of "mass democracy," nobility of life, of stature, of gestures and of words—all so badly needed though rarely attained—is a personal accomplishment, not that of a caste of notables and celebrities...
...he lacked all the false grandeur of European mandarins...
...Few, perhaps, will recognize this message...
...Lukacs sometimes said of those around him: unus eademque nobilitas—one and the same nobility...
...Yet he embodied a Lukacsian maxim: real courage is not displayed in standing up to the schoolmaster but in saying "no" to classmates who have transgressed one's deepest moral and political convictions...
...He dissented against McCarthyism, which enthralled so many in the 1950s, just as the neototalitarianism of "political correctness" does now, and, in the 1960s, he dissented against pathologies—particularly intolerance —in both the old and new lefts...
Vol. 40 • September 1993 • No. 4
