Profiles in "Tsoores"

...To Lasch an intellectual is one "for whom thinking fulfills at once the function of work and play"—this has all the definitional utility of Ortega's description of an aristocrat as one who "demands much of himself...

...Second, Lasch indicates that Hook considered Soviet Communism to be a "system of absolute depravity" incapable of an internal transformation towards freedom...

...That is to say, if I read him correctly, the "new radicalism" was essentially an absurd reaction to an absurd environment: Mabel Dodge Luhan's break with the sexual mores of her era was at root as irrational as the code she fought...

...Lasch's last chapter, "The Anti- Intellectualism of the Intellectuals," in which he works over Reinhold Niebuhr, Mailer, Schlesinger, Macdonald, and—with unexpected fury enhanced by egregious misquotation (to be examined subsequently)— Sidney Hook, is a weird performance...

...But, he continues, "a representative man is a contradiction in terms...

...In fact, Lasch suggests, the system today is even more sinister than it was in World War I: Even opposition has been domesticated, •and Norman Mailer has trouble getting in his denunciations between trips to the bank...

...thus finds himself in the same category as George Creel or Colonel Edward House...

...But there is still another dimension to Mr...

...Buttressed with this convenient misquotation, Lasch turns Hook into a simple-minded Manichean...

...This is, of course, a familiar indictment, one given its ultimate caricature by the Grandma Moses of American social critics, the late C. Wright Mills, in The Power Elite...

...Arthur Schlesinger Jr...

...Indeed, I was reminded of Arthur Koestler's story of his interview with Freud in London shortly before World War II...

...With a blandness worthy of Alan Taylor, Lasch notes in his Introduction that the characters he has discussed may seem to have little in common, may seem to have little coherence as the foundation for a category...

...Lasch's ironic nihilism: Quite consistently (in terms of his closed system) he indicates that rejection of American society by the "new radicals" was largely founded on individualized, neurotic motives...

...In this context, the "new radical" is characterized by his rejection of the choice between Communist and democratic value systems...

...With this majestic assault on the laws of historical logic, Professor Lasch is off and running, and—I think it is fair to say—he never looks back...

...No true radical would therefore "Choose the West" (as Dwight Macdonald did in 1952)—he would, I presume, choose not to choose and settle down as a university professor in a society which permitted him to opt out and even write about it...

...Lasch begins his assault on Hook by quoting an article the latter wrote in Partisan Review in 1952: "I cannot understand why American intellectuals should be apologetic about the fact that they are limited in their effective historical choice between endorsing a system of total error and critically supporting our own imperfect democratic culture with all its promises and dangers.' On its face, at least to anyone who understands the philosophical traditions in which Hook is an outstanding figure, this citation is improbable...

...It is not my mission to defend Sidney Hook—he can take care of himself in pretty effective fashion— but two other distortions deserve brief notation: First, while I thought the Hook attack on Fail-Safe was an exercise in polemical over-kill, Lasch interprets it as a "fervent defense of American military policy...

...But to anyone who has read the symposium, this was not a vicious attack—it was a fair statement of Hughes' position...

...The first is that technology and capitalism created in the United States an atomized society of "one dimensional" men (to use Herbert Marcuse's phrase), a "lonely crowd" composed of standardless men and women, eager to conform to the ways of the powerful...

...Mabel Luhan made the orgasm a symbol of revolt, but poor Mailer could suddenly find himself Chairman of the National Council on Sexual Goals for Americans...

...Radicalism thus ends up in a profoundly anti-political solipsistic cul-de-sac...

...I shall not tarry here to argue the validity of this proposition...

...Consequently, since it is assumed that American society has not fundamentally altered, there is no more justification for working "within the system" now than there was at the height of the World War I frenzy or the Red Scare...

...I am prepared to take on all comers on the subject, though not here, where the significant fact is Lasch's attachment to this dogma...

...Reviewed by JOHN P. ROCHE Morris Hillquit Professor of Politics, Brandeis University Since the "yowl of Minerva is heard only at dusk," it is quite appropriate that—now that we have lived through the anti-poem, the anti-novel, Camp, Pop, and Rump —Christopher Lasch should present us with a volume of anti-history...

...In the view of my critics this judgment is ipso facto proof that I have either been "brainwashed" (if they are polite and addicted to the sociology of knowledge) or have "sold out to the power structure" (if they are young and apocalyptic...

...Perhaps it can best be understood as an apocalyptic rendition of Richard Hofstadter's Anti- Intellectualism in American Life, one in which Hofstadter's impassive forebodings about mass society have been converted into a gospel of rejection and despair...

...Lasch, inter alios, disposes of Jane Addams, the feminists, Randolph Bourne, John Dewey, Mable Dodge Luhan, Walter Lippmann, Colonel House, Lincoln Steffens, Dwight Macdonald, and Sidney Hook...

...In my judgment the last chapter gives the game away...

...It is a series of vivid "happenings" off on the littoral of American intellectual history, a set of profiles in tsoores etched to point up the moral that in 20th century United States only the alienated are sane...

...This is Dada historicism with a vengeance and a lot of it is good clean fun...

...Take, for example, his definition of his analytical categories, which are obviously crucial to a study of "radicals" and "intellectuals...

...for is not a human being, by reason of all that makes him human, something unique...

...It is, of course, a secularized version of the classic Augustinian doctrine of salvation by grace—and presents the same problems when one attempts to evaluate its institutional connotations...

...And, of course, he didn't...

...The "Cold War liberals" (as I. F. Stone would say) are the intellectual villains of this existential melodrama...

...In short, this is a moral tract for our times in which the author has drawn selective data from the past to convey a message of nihilism...

...And Sidney Hook, of all people, turns up as Mephistopheles, the soul merchant who provided the timid conformist liberals with the rationale for betraying their trust...

...This is patent nonsense: In 1958 Hook wrote an extraordinary article in Partisan Review, "Socialism and the Prospects of Liberation," arguing that "the gradual transformation, within the ideological tradition of Marxism- Leninism, of the totalitarian system of Communism into a libertarian culture" was not only a possibility, but was "the only realistic perspective in the next historical period...

...Having a pedantic, Establishment- type mentality, I trailed him at a slow pace trying to fit the pieces together, and I can report that the body of the book is a series of vignettes, several of them engrossing and all finely written, emphasizing the dilemma of the "intellectual" (as non-defined) over the last 60 years...

...If this is a fair reading, the "New Left" should be recruiting in mental institutions rather than universities —though given the pessimism of his premises, Lasch might inquire how in the United States one can differentiate between the two...

...In fact, despite Lasch's unnerving notions about organization, it has all the earmarks of an afterthought, a polemical footnote to a work which essentially terminates in the 1930s...

...Lasch is clearly a very perceptive, intelligent man, and I should like to think that—at least in part—he has played a jolly practical joke on solemn historical reviewers...

...Hughes was hardly sanguine about the consequences of such a policy, but he thought the risks of nuclear annihilation were greater than the dangers involved in a Soviet take-over...

...suffice it to say that I consider it nonsense by any objective historical standards one can muster...

...Despite its title, this book is not about "radicalism," nor about intellectuals as social types...

...And it is to these premises that we must now turn our attention...

...In Lasch's view, radicalism seemingly depends upon alienation, and alienation in turn grows out of psychic maladjustment: Bourne's hunched back, Mable Dodge's galloping libido, Steffens' manipulative megalomania...

...The latter had advocated the elimination of American nuclear weapons as a defense against Communism and the substitution of "conventional weapons, guerrilla warfare, militia-type organizations, passive resistance, underground activity...

...Curiously, Lasch's approach to Hook (as well as to Niebuhr, Schlesinger, and Macdonald on a lesser scale) seems to involve precisely that "treason of the intellectuals" which he deplores, that subordination of intellectual standards to the exigencies of the moment which is the hall-mark of the "pragmatist...

...Lasch's second assumption is that the real burden of the American "intellectual" (still undefined) has remained unchanged over the past 60 odd years, i.e., that the obligation of the intellectual today is really the same as it was in 1910 or 1920...

...He referred, quite accurately in view of Stalin's behavior at the time, to a system of "total terror," which is conceptually in a different universe from "total error...

...To conclude, what can one make of this eccentric book...

...I can imagine Sidney Hook saying a lot of peculiar things, but it is utterly inconceivable that he would employ the formulation: "a system of total error...

...This is accomplished by some of the most outrageous misquotation and misconstruction that I have seen anywhere in a long time...

...Rather than escaping from the noose of the contemporary— which in the body of his book he has argued is the obligation of the "radical" intellectual— Lasch has utilized his version of the past to belabor the present...

...He did not appear disturbed by the—to me— terrifying prospect of 100-odd million armed Americans practicing guerrilla tactics...

...To maintain his proposition that "radicals" must reject American values, he shifts his emphasis from the domestic scene (where presumably he would have to deal with such knotty questions as civil rights and economic opportunity) to the cold war and the confrontation with Communism in the world arena...

...The logic of his position as best I can make it out—he is a bit elusive—is that both Communism and democracy are bureaucratized totalitarianisms...

...And the gist of his position is that the "new radicals" were those—Bourne perhaps being the prototype—who recognized that any effort to come to terms with their culture was worse than immoral, it was absurd...

...Those intellectuals who attempted to modify the system were doomed to failure and, in intellectual terms, to a betrayal of their function...

...As further proof he adduces in evidence a statement Hook made to Stuart Hughes at a Commentary symposium in 1961: "You are prepared to surrender the world to the Communists...

...Koestler asked Freud his opinion of Nazism, and the latter replied "They abreacted the way we knew they must...

...Yet this chapter may be the matrix of Lasch's book, with the early historical sections supplying scholarly "cover" for what is essentially a polemical tract...

...the subjects of his book] articulated experiences which, whether or not they were representative experiences in the sense of being widely shared by others, were nevertheless representative in another sense: they could only have happened at a particular place at a particular time...

...Personally I would prefer to take my chances with the bomb...

...To me it is interesting that precisely as massive changes in the character of American society began to develop which have, over the past quarter century, brought a new meaning to freedom, justice and equality, Lasch runs out of ideological steam...