Socialism as a Regulative Idea: Irving Howe's Utopianism

...It was a profoundly tragic corruption for as Howe remarked in a somewhat (though not entirely) different context—a reflection on the collapse of the Soviet Union—there was, for many of its adherents, an "idealism— twisted, distorted, corrupted, yet idealism nonetheless—that went into the communist movement...

...At the advanced age of fourteen," was Howe's reply...

...the great disaster was if this grew within as they grew in years...

...As we're not an academic journal, we prefer that they, wherever possible, be dropped altogether or worked into the text...

...This, commented Howe, was why he cheered twice for utopianism: it was "a necessity of moral imagination...

...This realization, and his assimilation of it, sustained Howe's own transition from a version of Trotskyist sectarianism to American democratic radicalism...

...Another way of putting this might be as follows...

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...Going beyond was indeed essential, for "a life without some glimmer of a redeeming future" is "a life cut off from the distinctively human...

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...Tragedy and danger were entwined in Naphtas, whether in Eastern Europe or in City College alcoves...

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...But for Irving Howe, what was moral was not yet realized...

...these were the democratic socialists who hoped for "a world more attractive," but who were consumed by regimes that legitimized terrifying brutality with the language of the left...

...The short term must be linked to an image of the long term, even if you assume that the long term will not be attained, even if you assume that a great deal changes as you engage the world with it in mind, even if you are cognizant of the danger that the image may become a "fantasy of static perfection," as Howe and Lewis Coser put it in "Images of Socialism," the article they wrote together for the second issue of Dissent and that was, in many ways, the intellectual charter of the magazine...

...On one hand, he insisted on the legitimacy of utopianism, on the validity of social imagination, in opposition to "curdled realism...

...it is "nowhere...

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...The word "regulate" is essential for without it, politics, good or bad, is ever lost in the given, in the here and now...

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...twentieth century Americans" in the CP also defended the Moscow trials and, soon enough, were rationalizing the Stalin-Hitler pact...

...Every so often I heard him describe socialism as the "regulative idea" of his politics...

...Immersion was the utopianism of totalitarianism, of Stalinists hankering to incarnate a "fantasy of static perfection" and calling it God...

...This may seem surprising...

...Socialism was not "a controlling day-dream" but rather a vision that "gives urgency to . . . criticism of the human condition in our time...

...and that by immersing yourself in the river of History, you are on the way there...

...Howe felt a special kinship for and rage about the fate of socialists who were victimized by communism...

...The approach was "Browderism," named after the American communist who, in the mid-1930s, at Moscow's behest, led the Communist party (CP) into popular front tactics within the framework of the New Deal and a burgeoning labor movement...

...While a brief, and greatly simplified, glance at a dimension of these debates may, at first, appear to be quite a detour from Howe's world, it will, I think, permit some insights into the lessons that might be drawn from the 1930s and demonstrate, despite his preferences, that there was indeed a philosophical architecture in Howe's thinking...

...He spent considerable energy in the 1980s examining the work of people like Alec Nove, searching for a "feasible" socialism—a market socialism—that could be the basis of a left program for new times...

...But if there is such a thing as nuanced desire, such was Howe's...

...Socialism is the name of our desire," they averred, echoing Tolstoy's "God is the name of my desire...

...Howe was, after all, suspicious of too much philosophizing and was known for insisting that the left had to address directly what it would do in power and not simply divine a rosy but very hazy future...

...For American intellectuals who traveled from left-wing anti-Stalinism to uncritical, often smug celebrations of the status quo, what was real was moral and what was moral was real in the United States (at least until the rise of the New Class, feminism, and similar perils...

...In his writings, this was generally articulated as a desire to sustain utopian thinking...

...And there was no greater violation than Stalinism, an unmitigated calamity for the left—not to mention for the inhabitants of the Soviet Union...

...finally I suppose he was resigned to it...

...His last article in Dissent (Spring 1993) proposed "Two Cheers for Utopia"— two, not three, yet genuine cheers nonetheless...

...The cardinal conclusion he reached was that any divorce of socialism from democracy violated socialism's animating spirit, the belief that ordinary men and women should and could have authority over their lives...

...our Reason regulates the Understanding's interaction with the empirical world, pressing it beyond what is given empirically, though what is beyond always remains beyond and we must always remember this...

...Socialism is the name of our 256 • DISSENT Irving Howe's Politics desire but we shall not be as gods...

...SPRING • 1995 • 255 Irving Howe's Politics The notion of a "regulative idea" has a history in epistemological debates in German idealist philosophy...

...Our "Understanding," in his scheme, is composed of categories (for example, quality, quantity, modality, temporality) that impose order on what our senses take in...

...Social imagination remained precious to Howe, and this brings me back to socialism as a regulative idea...

...What succeeded as a brilliant masquerade," he wrote four decades later, "might look rather different if undertaken out of democratic good will...

...A great deal of his mature intellectual energy was devoted to understanding the fate of the left in those years...

...they're the author's responsibility...

...it is forever in the making...

...Yet Browderism provided, in Howe's mind, a model, albeit an "ambiguous" one, for what a real democratic left-wing politics might look like...

...And please remember that we can't return articles unless they're accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope...

...A "feasible" politics, however, had also to project human possibilities...

...Hegel, on the other hand, believed that history, writ large, is rational, and our own reason engages it...

...The problem with the second position lies in certain suppositions: that the currents must, finally, flow in one direction...

...One doesn't assume utopia to be inscribed in reality, in Being, or in History...

...The other assumes that Reason is inscribed not just in the intellect, but in History itself, that utopia is implicit in the here and now...

...There was, of course, a certain consistency, for either way Howe's politics was an enemy...

...But it is not something in which you are immersed...

...It is commonly accepted that Naphta was modeled, at least in part, on Georg Lukacs, Marxism's most formidable philosopher (and literary critic) in this century—a thinker whose aspiration to what he called "totality" led to his immersion in and debasement by Leninism and Stalinism...

...Yet once swimming, you change, you learn your own powers and are thereby transformed...

...My purpose here is not to pursue or evaluate the formidable arguments marshaled by Kant and Hegel...

...Howe rejected this Utopia of the Drowned, not on behalf of resignation but on behalf of a regulative idea of hope, a means by which to judge and thereby challenge the given...

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...Instead, I want to expropriate them and to translate them into the bases of two political orientations toward the world and utopianism...

...This was no matter of historical necessity but of humane imperative...

...Howe, I think, came to suspect there was at least something of Naphta in a good many militants...

...You will, perhaps, recall from Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain the figure of Naphta, the half-Jewish, Jesuit-trained fanatic who declares that "the proletariat has taken up the task of Gregory the Great, his religious zeal burns within it...

...There was no need to look beyond...

...It was in a world of depression, fascism, Stalinism, and global conflagration that Howe's politics first took shape...

...It forgets that as you swim, you don't generally reflect on your body and its motions—that is, unless you somehow get caught, perhaps in undercurrents, and start drowning...

...He had, after all, spent years engaging intellectual gymnasts who, without skipping a beat, had dispensed "left-wing" justifications of dictatorships, only to turn neoconservative "on principle" later, usually as the country's mood shaded right...

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...The language, mentality, and tenets of Russian revolutionism would never address adequately American conditions or articulate successfully the needs of American working people...

...Another lesson was that the politics of the American left had to be American and to speak American...

...Kant argued that knowledge of the world is due to the organization of experience by the structure of our minds...

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...Howe came to characterize those politics as "liberal socialist...

...Sometimes he would muse grimly about it, but This essay was originally presented in April 1994 to a conference on "Irving Howe and His World" at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York...

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...In contrast, utopia as a regulative idea demands reflective distance along with principled engagement...

...Because it was an American radical movement that he wanted, he found it a "bitter irony" that, as he wrote in Socialism and America, "the most promising approach of the American left, one that came closest to 254 • DISSENT Inning Howe's Politics recognizing native realities, derives from the very movement that [had] done the most to discredit and besmirch the whole idea of the left...

...There was, at the same time, a utopian philosophical architecture within Howe's politics...

...Nor was it, for those who remained in some way on the left, to forsake any sense of possibility, of going "beyond the given...

...His ire was often aimed at those—especially intellectuals—who "adjusted," who allowed themselves to become comfortable within their society...

...Communism, it was then declared, was "twentieth century Americanism...

...It follows from the nature and character of ethical thought that it can never condescend to accept the "given...

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...A broad movement that spoke directly to America, a popular front in good faith, to press toward a society more and more democratic in all dimensions of life—for such a movement Howe yearned, even if his expectations remained sober...

...This was decidedly not Irving Howe's preferred realm of discourse— such matters strained severely his famously limited patience—and I don't know that he consciously drew from it...

...In the decade in which I worked with him on Dissent, I often heard Howe comment about political cognitive dissonance and about the human capacity for moral rationalization...

...we shall live in a world in which, even if we progress toward socialism, there will be "new problems, new conflicts, new questions...

...But part of being human was recognizing that "there is no total fulfillment," no end of history...

...it was an image toward which, though never expecting its full achievement, one strived, by dint of being human...

...That would have been 1934, a year after Franklin Roosevelt became American president and Adolph Hitler became German chancellor, and two years before the Moscow trials began...

...that you will never be shattered on rocks or ensnared in weeds, pulling you on another course or beneath the waves...

...It is the name of our desire because the desire arises from a conflict with and an extension from the world that is...

...This was, of course, a politics pursued in bad faith, a matter of positioning rather than a principled embrace of democratic pluralism...

...It only assumes a basic human need to strive beyond the given, to have an image of something qualitatively better by which to regulate that striving, to regulate politics in the here and now...

...The words striving and imagination are constantly present in these formulations...

...essential was not nationalization of the means of production but, as he once put it, the "socialization of concern...

...But just such a conception of a nowhere has stood the test and proved its strength in the development of the modern world...

...On the other hand, he knew too well what utopians, possessed by a myth of revolutionary apocalypse, had brought about in this century...

...among the lessons he took from the 1930s—from the experience of Stalinism as well as from all forms of political sectarianism— was that socialism's egalitarian aspirations ought to be the fulfillment, not the negation, of liberalism, and that socialist politics needed to be imbued with a self-critical temper...

...socialism, utopia, for Howe, is an image and an image is something you keep before your eyes...

...I often find myself saying Yes and No to each of them at one and the same time...

...THE EDITORS q SPRING • 1995 • 257...

...It exists at no moment of time and at no point in space...

...He closed his last Dissent article by citing the same passage by neo-Kantian philosopher Ernest Cassirer with which "Images of Socialism" ended: A utopia is not a portrait of the real world or of the actual political or social order...

...Whereupon you recognize that your confidence in the long term needed modulating in light of the twists and turns of the short term...

...If there's a delay, it's because a few editors are reading your article...

...The alternative, however, was not to become a Naphta of anticommunism, the persona of many a leftist turned neoconservative...

...For Howe, the intellectual's task was critical—always...

...Though he criticized, sharply and freely, liberalism's weaknesses from a left perspective, the reproaches were not dismissive...

...For Stalinism, what was real (in the USSR) was moral and what was moral was real(ized in the USSR...

...you cannot learn to swim, he noted, without jumping in the water...

...He thus famously criticized Kant on the grounds that it is misleading to speak of an archetypical intellect composed of tools standing opposite the world...

...Its task is to strike terror into the world for the healing of the world, that man may finally achieve salvation and deliverance...

...The ethical world is never given...

...For instance, in scientific research, we proceed as if nature were "a unity," although we can never experience it as such and any effort to prove it to be a unity would be a delusion...

...What socialism demanded, however, was a striving to rid the world of suffering that comes from material deprivation and political domination...