The Anarchy of History

...It is to Harrington's credit that 10 years ago he was asking these questions...

...Michael Harrington's The Accidental Century (Macmillan, 322 pp., $5.95) seems to have been intended as a work of the first type, but turns out to be far closer to the second...

...Out of them came The Other America, which brilliantly exposed and documented the existence of an immense social phenomenon-the American poor-which the cant of the '50s had effectively obscured...

...Short of that, it certainly calls for a criticism no less concrete and informative than that embodied in The Other America...

...I think the most interesting chapter of The Accidental Century is the one devoted to "The Masses," and I wish Harrington had undertaken a comprehensive study of that subject instead of spreading himself thin on so many others...

...Yet I wonder for whom they are intended...

...He understands the complexities that enter into that crisis: the conflicting and often anarchic pressures of social need, money interests, bureaucratic inertia, and esthetic insensitivity (which, on the modern urban scale, is another form of social corruption...

...This is the meaning of Harrington's title: that the combined forces of capitalism and technology have loosed an "accidental revolution" on modem society which is already swamping the very values in the name of which it makes claim on the future...

...It calls for the elaboration of a political program in which the criticism of American institutions-a criticism now more robust and politically relevant than at any time in the past quarter-century-can be enlisted for concrete goals...

...Here, as on so many similar political issues, The Accidental Century is virtually silent...

...Here it only obtrudes on a more imperative task: to effect a viable political equation between what we know, and know well, from these writers, and the far more aggravated social crisis which has come into existence since these writers passed from the scene...

...Indeed, The Accidental Century may be the first ambitious work to come from a native Socialist writing from a sense not of the predictability and rationalization of history but of its anarchy...

...For over a hundred years, the Western poor have been the most dynamic, creative, and moral force for social justice in their culture," he writes, and then asks the most painful question any Socialist visionary has had to face: " what will be the [future] political equivalent of poverty, what will replace the idealism that misery forced upon millions...

...If little here is new, the familiar is at least restated with clarity and force...

...What are the implications of this permissive attitude on the part of the public-an attitude which often amounts to a vote of confidence in the void...

...The Accidental Century does not really answer to either of these needs...

...New perspectives are thus opened on common dilemmas...

...Above all, what can be done about it...

...In periods of indifference or complacency, such books may perform a service as intellectual holding actions...

...The former may exhibit familiar ideas, but present them in new and unexpected relationships...

...Harrington often writes well about these and other figures in the modernist pantheon, but the task he sets himself in the pages devoted to these writers-that of elucidating the morphology of social and spiritual decay as our greatest modem literary artists have recorded it-has already been better performed elsewhere...

...Why have urban politicians remained-and been allowed to remain- so unresponsive to the needs of what is still, despite far-reaching changes in its social makeup, the majority of their constituents...

...The "decadence" of our ill-planned and overbureaucratized society-Harrington's principle subject-is now a commonplace of the daily headlines...

...Only a writer of passionate conviction would have undertaken a task of that sort at a time when intellectuals generally were accentuating the positive, but it was neither its author's passion nor his (Socialist) conviction which gave The Other America its special force: It was its detailed and unanswerable description...

...Where it needs to be specific and politically inventive, say, in particular legislative proposals for bringing mammoth corporate enterprise under democratic control, it is too general-usually, in fact, silent...

...He does not give us a very satisfactory answer to this question-but then, the question itself is historically unprecedented...

...What he advocates is less a revolution than a counter-revolution against the massive and capricious private collectivization which business now carries out on a scale mocking the utopian dreams of former times...

...And if Harrington writes without the intellectual comforts of those teleological doctrines which were once the principal ballast of the Socialist vision, he writes, too, without any illusion that the social leverage of the counter-revolution he seeks can now be found-or found easily, anyway-among the dispossessed...

...The result was a book which the intellectual public could not ignore...

...Others-no less urgent, impassioned, or historically engage only argue the necessity of new thought while remaining incapable of supplying it...

...Today this is no longer true...

...But this changed atmosphere has in itself created a new situation for a writer of his persuasion...

...But if one is willing to be severe in one'~ criticisms of The Accidental Century, which IS clumsy, repetitious, and gauche in more ways than can be enumerated here, it is precisely because it addresses itself to the most compelling issues, and does so with fewer illusions and a tougher-minded grasp of existing social realities than any Socialist critic of the past quarter-century has been able to muster-at least in America, where the Socialist ideal has been so depressingly infertile in generating a viable ideology...

...He effectively questions some of the standard definitions of the "mass," and the moral attitudes which support such definitions, but his inquiry remains polemical rather than disinterested, and stops short of the most fateful question: In a society dominated (for good or ill) by technology, a society in which the governing decisions will therefore be primarily technical, will not the specialization required for such decision-making imply a form of class distinction incompatible with Socialist values...

...Where it need not be specific, say, in those potted analyses of Proust, Mann, and Joyce, it plunges enthusiastically into detail...

...The time has passed when one needed simply to be informed of it...

...Begun in the '50s and published in 1962, The Other America changed the way Americans understood their own country...

...But the book is very oddly planned, and is somewhat crippled by its own ambition...

...Its synoptic view of capitalist culture, social relations, and spiritual values, and of the radical transformations which technology has effected in all of these, is correct, I believe, as far as it goes...

...In the claustral atmosphere generated by Eisenhower and McCarthy, in the years of academic torpor and the "silent generation," and of intellectual celebrations of "Our Country and Our Culture," just to have asked the questions posed in The Accidental Century represented a victory of informed conscience over the comforts of intellectual conformity...

...As technology created the "masses," in the modem sense, will it not, by its very nature, perpetuate them...

...they keep alive what might otherwise be lost...

...No single writer has contributed more than Harrington to the increased realism and cogency which now characterize the critical analysis of American life...

...What is never dealt with in the press is the organic political component of the urban crisis: Why has the radically altered social complexion of our cities made so little impact on its political complexion...

...It offers no program for coping with them, but instead gives voice to that frisson we are all suffering as our daily experience: the consciousness that the means of our civilization have overtaken the ends, have increasingly become the ends, and that something radical, anarchic, and unforeseen is resulting from this apocalyptic discrepancy between our massive powers and the uses we make of them...

...But they do not advance the issues they embrace...

...If The Accidental Century leaves us politically stranded in the face of such questions, it is nonetheless aware of them...

...Unlike the problem of poverty in the '50s, our cities are not "invisible," and in any case, the popular press now dwells on their plight as a regular feature-not always intelligently, to be sure, and rarely as critically as the nature of the plight demands, but the attention is there nonetheless...

...It can be glimpsed in the city streets, observed in classrooms from Harlem to Berkeley, breathed in the very air...

...Consider the treatment of "Megalopolis" in The Accidental Century...

...The latter, however, only rehearse these familiar materials while appealing for new perspectives...

...As an exercise in exhortation-which it essentially is-it comes, I would judge, about 10 years late...

...Harrington is well-informed on the crisis of our cities, not only from observation-as he made abundantly clear in The Other America-but from the sizable literature now available on the subject...

...As had often been the case in the earlier history of American radicalism, inspired and empathetic reportage succeeded where the exposition of theory had failed...

...His method in that book was more empirical than hortatory...

...His paragraphs on this issue are unexceptionable...

...In an effort to synthesize a comprehensive vision of contemporary "decadence"-a word which Harrington recognizes is imprecise and to which he attributes a greater variety of meanings than it can fruitfully sustain- The Accidental Century encompasses too many subjects in too short a space...

...It also helped change the intellectual atmosphere in which the most acute social problems could be discussed...

...While explicitly identifying his vision with that of the Debs tradition, in which Socialism "stood for equality, solidarity, the elimination of class distinction, co-operation, and the fulfil1ment of democracy at least as much as for the nationalization of the means of production," Harrington writes as a Socialist historically disabused...