Of Ideologues and Intellectuals

...to watch unbelievers brood, take umbrage, then launch their attacks...

...All the problems attending on stratification that we are now aware of will rear their heads in new contexts...

...If there is to be a fundamental change in the quality of life in the Western world, it will have its origin in a change in the nature of the men who grow up in that world...

...In the view of their critics, all the values and beliefs implicit in their class position constitute an ideology that is of great power in our culture...

...But the attitudes and ambitions that are instilled in children is the crucial matter...

...to see the defense become rigid and self-righteous in the face of misinterpretation, distortion, and abuse...

...In large industrial nations matters of ownership, resource allocation and income distribution, while important, are not all-determining...

...What kind of people do we want our children to be...

...Both contend that the welfare state, the mixed economy, political pluralism, and decentralization are viable institutions that can be adjusted or reformed to cope with the major problems of the industrial and post-industrial eras...

...Surely it must be clear that if the examples we set are of intolerance, hatred, confrontation, and violence, we will remain where we are and not move one step closer to Utopia...

...The change must be made in man, through what is done within the family and in the schools...

...He was certainly right in stressing the question of means, and he looked favorably on the early confrontation efforts of European students...

...Bell insists " 'the revolt against ideology' is not to make one insensitive to injustice or to the need for a transcendent moral vision...

...no leaders harangued about the need to annihilate the people's enemies...

...It is true, I believe, that in the period 1957-60 the proponents of the notion that ideology in the West was at an end were amazingly inexact, were guilty of giving a scientific overlay to wishful thinking, and failed to realize that the body of ideas they were putting forth itself constituted an ideology...

...If the social blueprint eliminates positions of leadership, they will nevertheless be created more or less spontaneously for those who truly are superior...

...Bell and Lipset, especially, are attacked for not caring, for ignoring the poverty that continues to exist in the midst of plenty, for believing that what we have today in the West is the best of all possible worlds, that what we have here and now on New York's West End Avenue or Amsterdam Avenue, or in Selma, Alabama, is the good society...

...Let families, let educators keep those questions before them, and the system of the future will be all right...

...Faced with the horrors of industrialization, Mill placed his hopes for the improvement of mankind in education and the stationary state...

...politics seemed cleansed of true believers...

...In several essays, notably those of C. Wright Mills, Irving Louis Horowitz, and William Delany, a good deal is made of the charge that the end-of-ideology has been espoused by intellectuals who have made it, who share commuter-train congeniality with mutual fund and ad men...

...They meant well...

...By 1969 it has become plain that those who would be the new ideologists of the Left have little regard for parliamentary democracy...

...Prosperity, though, also brings with it a distinct fading in the vitality of the ideologies that gave men, the young especially, hope and purpose in harder times...

...In addition, they made the mistake of lumping socialism and other ideologies together, headily asserting that all were finished, the good ones and the bad ones...

...Otherwise, they would be planning the scenario for the biggest bloodbath since 1937...

...As Bell advises, those who speak of structural change should be cognizant of "the costs of the enterprise and [have] some realization of, and justification for, the determination of who is to pay...

...Behind a statement like that is the kind of ideology Bell has in mind, ideology that precipitates action...

...Parenthetically, one should remember, too, that in "Applications," the final chapter of On Liberty, Mill opts for a mixed economy...

...It is ironic that at the time that this book is being published Bell's thesis is proved wrong but serves as a very effective warning...

...Certainly this was a development to be thankful for...

...A new man in the old system will make life much more beautiful than will the same old man in a new system...

...Abstract philosophical inquiry has always sought to eliminate passion, and the person, to rationalize all ideas...

...to see the attackers dust themselves off and turn away, mistakenly satisfied that the endof-ideology ideology and its ideologists, Raymond Aron, Edward Shils, Daniel Bell, and Seymour Martin Lipset, have been thoroughly ravaged...

...Recently, on a news report from San Francisco State College, a young black leader said, "We ought to go on in there, and chop Hayakawa's head off...

...that is, so long as, to use Lipset's term, democratic counterpower exists...

...John Stuart Mill covered all this ground 100 years ago...

...How do we want them to treat other people...

...to see adherents come forward...

...Mill was suggesting that once a nation achieved a level of production that could provide all its people with a reasonably comfortable standard of living, it need not go on to a higher and higher Gross National Product...

...But their numerous attackers do their best to ignore the fact that the end-of-ideology theory was born of this most humane impulse...

...Far from being the alienated critics of society who in the past filled the role of intellectual, Lipset and Bell brush off such critics as ideologues incapable of sustained exercises in reason and reasonableness, then fail to acknowledge that their being built into the university establishment, enjoying high salaries, status, leisure, and the rest, gives them a vested interest in preserving the institutions beneficial to their class...

...Yet there was something special about the post-World War II period that they were responding to...

...The over generalizing and braggadocio of the members of the end-of-ideology school are sins that charity requires they be forgiven...

...talk about effecting structural change is both dangerous and obfuscating...

...Yet if ever the New Leftists were to move on from diversions and happenings and make a serious attempt to spell out the means by which the institution of private property is to be ended, they probably would find themselves back again in the company of the reformists...

...Whether it grows out of an ideology is unimportant...

...For if there were no more ideologies, there would be no more holocausts...

...It is a rare intellectual treat to be placed in attendance at the birth of an ideology...

...In 1960, Mills told the New Left that "the most important issue of political reflection" is the problem of the agency of change...

...For regardless of the changes that may be made in a society's institutions, some individuals will always try to make it to positions of superiority...

...The main impulse they were expressing was relief...

...And since nationalizing an industry here and there, as the British have done, has not changed very much, it must be assumed "structural change" means going considerably farther...

...This term seems to have become sociological code for the abolition of private property...

...At the heart of Lipset's defense of existing institutions and forms is the belief that "ruling strata under all economic and social systems will try to institutionalize their superiority...

...Structural change" is what he calls for...

...Thus, changing the system is not the answer...

...at meetings of learned societies that they have tried to capture they have shown their scorn for rules of orderly procedure...

...Their critics, however, insist on inferring that Lipset and Bell mean no further improvements in human institutions are desirable...

...He, and others, cannot abide the reformist go-slow attitude...

...Western man was preoccupied with the making and marketing of transistors and transmissions...

...Their hearts were in the right place...

...The above-named friends of socialism were, unfortunately, too eager to sound the death knell...

...There is a hard core of truth in this statement that those who abuse Lipset persist in refusing to acknowledge...

...The errors of Bell's thesis should not make us so foolish as to refuse to acknowledge such truths as these: "What gives ideology its force is its passion...

...Mills is one of the most vehement attackers...

...For the ideologue, truth arises in action, and meaning is given to experience by the 'transforming moment.' He comes alive not in contemplation, but in 'the deed.' One might say, in fact, that the most important, latent, function of ideology is to tap emotion...

...thus, while recently it has been said that the Deity himself is dead, a few years earlier socialism seemed to be lapsing into its death sleep...

...Reviewed by PAUL MARX Professor of English, New Haven College Chaim Waxman has put together a very exciting and useful book...

...Naturally, it was not long before socialism's firmer friends came forward to rectify such unkind usage...

...new forms of action," as he put it, have to be found...

...Given the barbarities and disruptions of the preceding decades, the comparative mildness of the political atmosphere in the Western countries in the '50s seemed like progress...

...Lipset, for example, says he supports "all measures which would bring the Utopian 'equality of status and of opportunity' closer to realization...

...And Lipset also implies that other aspects of our social system that we dislike intensely will have their parallels in whatever kind of system might be contrived...

...This despite the many demur-rals...