The Man in the Middle

...No doubt they have been oversold and their cultural influence has often been baneful, but they have at the very least broadened our sense of the density of society and history...

...He has been the target of much acrid criticism and to some has come to symbolize a certain swampiness of mind which has too often characterized American liberalism...

...But take, for instance, Lerner's discussion of the fundamental question of whether America can justifiably be regarded as a distinctive civilization at all...

...Criticism of his long credit list might better be directed against the vanities and status obsessions of American academic life which compel him to mention everyone who assisted him in any way from Big Names to typists...

...A certain presumption in favor of the slim, pregnant volume seems to have become established if it is profundity and originality one seeks...

...It is not that he ignores alternatives to his own position: One of the best features of the book is its able and lucid summaries of the clashing views of a host of thinkers and writers selected from a far wider variety of fields than are customarily considered by intellectual historians...

...Yet one is compelled to admire the industry and devotion which have produced this huge book, the frequent sharp paragraphs summarizing whole vistas of thought and experience, and, not least of all, the valuable annotated bibliography...

...Although I have been dipping into America as a Civilization at intervals over the last four months and have with no sense of strain read the entire book, very little of it has stuck in my mind and, except for the celebrations of diversity itself, I find it hard to isolate a central theme or leading argument...

...Yet, I find that I am able to recall clearly the structure and thesis of Wyndham Lewis's America and Cosmic Man, Geoffrey Gorer's The American People, and Reinhold Niebuhr's The Irony of American History—to mention three quite different books, none of which have acquired the stature of classics in discussions of contemporary America, and all of which I read when they appeared from seven to ten years ago...

...Tocqueville said that there was not a single sentence in Democracy in America which he had not written with France in mind, and the most permanently valuable summations of American life have been those which were comparative to the core...

...Today interpretative and theoretical works tend to be much shorter...

...The whole book is presumably intended to document this initial claim, but Lerner's approach is insufficiently comparative to be entirely convincing...

...Henry Steele Commager has compared it favorably with Tocqueville...

...Most of his shortcomings stem from this posture...

...America as a Civilization will not reverse this tendency...

...The social sciences, whether some historians and literary men like it or not, are here to stay...

...America possesses a technological dynamism that is unequaled by these or any other previous societies, but how much weight should we give to technology ? According to Lerner himself, technology and economics can no longer be regarded as major keys to the understanding of American society, although at times he writes as if America's power and wealth alone were sufficient to entitle her to recognition as a great civilization...

...Some of these objections seem to me to be frivolous...

...The trouble is that Lerner simply fails to persuade the reader that he has arrived at the various positions he adopts as a result of closely reasoned analysis and reflection...

...10.00...

...As for the 150 authorities, they do not appear to have prevented Lerner from writing his book in a style and from a perspective that remains consistently and recognizably his throughout...

...Or perhaps it is just that Max Lerner is so enamored of the pluralism and diversity of American life— which, I agree with Richard Chase in Commentary, he certainly overestimates—that he surrenders to it and wallows in it...

...Its greatest use and value will be as a textbook and as a reference work for anyone who wants a quick run-down of current thought on some aspect of American life...

...Economy and polity, crime and conformity, culture and popular culture, trend and counter-trend are balanced against one another to convey the picture of a profoundly resourceful, richly variegated, and flexible society...

...One picks up this fat book, hefts it in one's hands, and in the mind's eye it assumes a position at the end of a row of equally massive volumes about America: Tocqueville, Bryce, the Beards, Parrington, Laski's The American...

...Simon & Schuster...

...Because Tocqueville wrote before Freud, should contemporary analysts of America consider it infra dig to discuss character formation, mental disease and sexuality in American life...

...the biggest books are usually anthologies, textbooks, reports by bureaucratic research teams or mediocre, sex-laced best-sellers...

...Perhaps the very effort to cover everything unavoidably gives the impression that nothing is covered thoroughly...

...This "fallacy of enumeration'1 indicates a slackness of intellect for which there is even less justification in interpretative prose than in poetry, where it has become the hallmark of the Whitman tradition...

...Paragraphs which simply list things recur throughout the book...

...Democracy...

...Max Lerner has for twenty years been a Man in the Middle, between journalism and scholarship, ideological and pragmatic liberalism, and for a time, disastrously, between pro-Communist and anti-Communist on the Left...

...Others have made the opposite judgment, deprecating Lerner's reliance on the newer social sciences, his consultation of no less than 150 authorities, and the origin of the book in a college course in American civilization...

...1,036 pp...

...He summarizes the views of Nietzsche, Spengler, Toynbee and various cultural anthropologists on the nature of civilization, notes that nearly all of these writers regard America as "only an offshoot, perhaps an excrescence, of the West," and counters with the ringing declaration that "for good or ill, America is what it is—a culture in its own right, with many characteristic lines of power and meaning of its own, ranking with Greece and Rome as one of the great distinctive civilizations of history...

...After all, Assyria, Carthage and Byzantium had distinctive features, too...

...Lerner's failure really to argue his case and his readiness to substitute description and enumeration for analysis, for any effort to weigh the relative importance of the criss-crossing strands of American experience, gives the book an eclectic looseness, a bland "now-on-the-one-hand-and-then-on-the-other" tone, with which it is difficult to come to grips...

...Maybe this is so, but one hardly feels that the opposing view has been seriously examined...

...Most of the reviewers have evaluated it with their eye on this imaginary shelf...

...Richard Chase has called Lerner a middlebrow...

...Time, mindful of Lerner's political affiliations, has been thoroughly nasty, and the National Review has complained that too little attention is given to organized religion...

...If, in this age of specialized scholarship, he had made gross blunders of fact (there are remarkably few), the critics would have howled...

...Yet America as a Civilization deserves a prominent place on our imaginary bookshelf...

...Lerner appears so committed to this view at the outset that the possibility that the American equilibrium is brittle and unstable and highly vulnerable to the gales of historical change escapes close scrutiny...

...We shall be taking the book down from the shelf on frequent occasions in the years to come...

...When Malthus added 40 chapters of documentation to his original brief Essay on Population, he continued to call it an "essay" and his 19th-century critics often answered him in works running to several volumes...

...Big books are not as common as they once were...