Yale Man as Revolutionist

...At any particular moment, he is completely cocksure of his position and unmerciful to an opponent...

...For when we come to look more closely at the Forties, as our curiosities are now turned to the earlier decades, we may see that Politics was the only magazine that was aware, and insistently kept calling attention to, changes that were taking place in moral temper, the depths of which we still incompletely realize...

...It is the merit of Dwight Macdonald's Memoirs that he forces us once again to confront such desperate questions...

...There is a second reason: Macdonald, temperamentally, is not really interested in ideas but in moral postures, and his is a constant search for inconstant verities...

...following Hannah Arendt...

...These "memoirs," subtitled "Essays in Political Criticism," are not, apart from the introductory essay, autobiographical or reflective...

...And it followed for him that all political activity was degrading, especially for the intellectual, whose vocation, the desire for truth, brought him into opposition to the politician, with his need for expediency, compromise and myths...

...Macdonald is a journalist-cum-intellectual, not a social scientist or a philosopher...

...Macdonald was more sensitive to these concerns because, as a pacifist, he was more alive to and horrified by these changes than those who justified the war...

...The changing nature of experience, thus, always seduces the intellectual...

...More seriously, it would seem to have been micro-politics...

...When he is doing a literary demolition job, of which he is a master, woe to the writer who uses clumsy metaphors or commits stylistic gaucheries...

...And, since the indictment of innocence could be leveled against radicalism as well, politics—and Politics—had to come to an end...

...These impulses, plus a remarkable devotion to his craft, did lead him for a moment to a unique place in American intellectual history...

...This, then, is the career which unfolds in the lead essay of The Memoirs of a Revolutionist...

...the scientist accepts an existing field of knowledge, and seeks to map out the unexplored terrain...

...The sense of fear which it evoked arose not from the descriptions of sadism in the concentration camps, but the horrifying awareness that a victim, out of the deep, infantile, regressive aspects in one's own nature, would willingly take on the hideous mask, stance and code of the brutes...

...The intellectual takes his self as a starting point, and relates the world to his own sensibilities...

...Is the fabric of American life strong enough to resist such rents as occurred in Europe...

...Macdonald now concentrated his attention on Partisan Review, but resigned in 1943 when his pacifism led to growing disagreement with his co-editors...

...Macdonald is what may be called "an inconstant dogmatist...

...When the committee collectively and bureaucratically refused, he resigned...

...Apart from the apathy of the fat Fifties, one reason, perhaps, why Politics could not last is that it drew essentially from alien experiences...

...The singular theme of Politics was the event of depersonalization: the denigration of the individual through the impersonality of killing...

...But this has been the British experience, and, McCarthy apart, that of America, too...

...But then, like Heis-enberg's particle, he is off in the next historical moment on a new, erratic tack, and often as dogmatic in the new stance as in the old...

...One of the forgotten accusations that Ortega y Gasset brought against liberalism, as Mrs...

...how things happen to people and people became "things," the turning of society into a mechanism...

...And yet, these causettes reveal Macdonald at his best—lively, witty, versatile—and at his worst—sardonic, superior, irritating...

...the role of terror and extreme situations...

...Did the war really leave us unmarked...

...after considerable haggling, the New Republic printed one-third of the letter...

...The best essays in the book, unfortunately only a fifth of the total, are those written during the war when Macdonald, with his remarkable eye for telling detail, illuminated the psychology of killing, the pathetic attempts to expiate guilt, the mock bravado of war, etc...

...Judith Shklar reminds us in her interesting book After Utopia, is that it forgot the violence inherent in politics...

...In 1949, exhausted by these efforts, Macdonald surrendered Politics and politics, and turned to the genteel pastures of the New Yorker...

...editor, "The New American Right" Dwight Macdonald made his political debut in 1937 by writing a five-page letter to the New Republic protesting Malcolm Cowley's pusillanimous review of the official transcripts of the Moscow trials...

...Writing an 8,000-word letter to the Political Committee, Macdonald made as a "minimum demand" for his continued collaboration the publication of an additional 4,000 words of his article...

...Earlier, he had formed an exclusive club at Phillips Exeter Academy under the revolutionary motto of Pour Epater les Bourgeois...

...Reflecting on the incident, he declared that the party was not seriously "engaged in politics, but in meta-politics...

...We do not live "at extremes" (and when we do, as in popular culture, this represents vicarious violence, not real experience, and perhaps a useful displacement...

...But in Politics it was there, palpable, in concrete detail, and illustrated in the ways in which individuals lost their human-ness...

...he was also influenced by Nicola Chiaramonte, "European" and other refugees who had firsthand contact with these sickening events...

...Yet, more fundamentally, this awareness derived from a singular innocence about politics...

...Following uneventful, non-revolutionary years at Yale, he worked briefly, during the opening of the Depression, at Macy's as a member of its Executive Training Squad—in reaction to which, I suppose, he acquired the habit of wearing the loud pink-and-black striped shirts he now sports—and subsequently, like Jacob for Laban, he worked seven years on Fortune...

...The impulse of the journalist is to be novel, yet relate his curiosities to the urgencies of the moment...

...Macdonald's horrifying realization, his fall from innocence, was that violence—and the drive for domination —was a craving in man, and...

...the philosopher seeks what he conceives to be true, regardless of the moment...

...Ortega's indictment derived from the liberal's inability to understand the "fierce nature of the State," which, owing to the Hobbesian need to maintain order, must rule by threat against all...

...There are several—saving—reasons why one is not annoyed at these inconstancies (apart from the grace of Macdonald's own good humor and his willingness to laugh at his own faults...

...These are conceptions which derive from "heroic" and ultimately romantic images of life and man's place in it...

...that modern society had become a bureaucratized apparatus for periodically, and necessarily, evoking and suppressing such violence...

...Perhaps the most extraordinary article that Politics ever published was the abridgement of Bruno Bettelheim's account, from the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, on "Behavior in Extreme Situations...

...The book does not contain Macdon-ald's most celebrated essay, on Popular Culture, or his most ambitious, "The Root Is Man," or (except for the profile of the latter-day Franciscan, Dorothy Day) any of the longer pieces from the New Yorker—e.g., the demolition of Mortimer Adler's Syntopicon, the do-it-yourself craze, etc...

...Whatever we have heard subsequently about confessions, brainwashing and the like hardly matched the awesome revelation of those first disclosures...

...The theme of depersonalization has now been made abstract and objectified, almost a literary commodity, by existentialism, Tillich's theology, and the popular sociology of the mass society...

...For two years, Macdonald was a Trotskyite, making his exit from organized politics in 1940 when the Shachtmanites printed only 4,000 words of a 30,000-word study characterizing Nazi society as a new social form, that of bureaucratic collectivism...

...To see politics on the more mundane—and civil—level of reconciling diverse interests may be naive...

...In 1944, Macdonald founded his monthly, later quarterly, periodical, Politics, an extraordinary achievement in personal journalism...

...They are, fifty selections in all, apergus, editorials, reviews, the majority of them from Politics, the shorter and often insubstantial chips from the writer's block...

...There remains the difficult question—far beyond the scope of this review—of how true such a theory is...