Connecting with Everyday Life

...Reviewed by Yehudah Mirsky Writer, political consultant Michael Walzer is a singular presence in today's intellectual landscape...

...There is no realm of absolute intellectuality," Walzer declares, "at least not one inhabited by human beings...

...The crucial link uniting the critic to his community is language...

...taken together, they show up the unreality of his One-Dimensional Man...

...Or it may be Silone, returning from the Communist Party to the practical, enduring truths of the peasant Christianity from which his political commitment to justice had originally sprung—to the Abruzzi region, where people "spend most of their time telling one another the story of their lives...

...This stricture does indeed make sense when applied to the romantic intellectual...

...But mine are minor complaints...

...Walzer's latest book, The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century, is in some respects a companion volume to two of his recent works, Spheres of Justice and Exodus and Revolution...

...Walzer's preference here for the relaxed, conversational essay over a more structured expository form is calculated...

...They are places where there is politics, where change and conflict are mediated as much as possible by discussion, where critics and criticized alike speak to, and not at, or above, each other...

...He will not necessarily be a good politician, but he need not be worse than any other...

...he gives expression to his people's deepest sense of how they ought to live...

...These are not only the tensions that will make or (as in the case of Randolph Bourne) destroy a critic...

...By joining in the vernacular, the connected critic places himself in his community's web of communication...

...It may be Buber, the Zionist critic of Zionism, working to simultaneously foster a Jewish awareness of peoplehood and yet keep that awareness from hardening into a rigid nationalism...

...While Marxist criticism, Walzer's major target, best exemplifies the approach, it does not exhaust the range of romantic possibilities...

...It may be Breytenbach, moving beyond the obvious cruelty of apartheid to point up how the sickness is strangling the emergence of a genuine, color-blind South African culture...

...For example, Walzer finds the chinks in Herbert Marcuse's heavy philosophic armor through one of his literary tics, his habitual qualifiers...

...the force of his criticism derives from the force of society's contradictions...

...Thus abstraction, detachment and their claims to universality and objectivity are also fraught with moral peril...

...As a matter of epistemology, critics working within romantic traditions that exalt cerebral constructs over the sentiments of "mere" people are operating under an illusion...

...every practical embodiment of [truth] inphilosophical doctrine or poetic vision is partial and ideological, a parochial mix of insight and myopia...

...Though one may differ with Popper's historiography as well as with Walzer's wholly social notion of knowledge, surely both are correct in asserting the fatal consequences —for ideas and for people—of basing political action on high-flown abstractions...

...The authentic critic is not, as Walzer puts it, the lone sheriff riding in and out of town between heroic gunfights...

...Defining the contrasting role of the connected critic, who neither separates himself from society nor pretends to have the answer, Walzer says: "These then are the three tasks of criticism: the critic exposes the false appearances of his own society...

...it is a tool, which he deploys along with compassion and sound common sense...

...In the present volume, Walzer re-examines the work of nearly a dozen of this century's social critics—Julien Benda, Randolph Bourne, Martin Buber, Antonio Gramsci, Ignazio Silone, George Orwell, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Herbert Marcuse, Michel Foucault and Breyten Breytenbach—to develop a stance that can dissolve another antithesis: between criticism's necessary detachment and the everyday life of society that is the wellspring of principle...

...He has brought criticism closer to the moralquestions and complexities it is meant to serve...

...The Nazi is Caliban...

...The distanced intellectual cannot truly help society, he can only conquer and rule it...

...Moreover, to think some sort of truth exists "out there" that the intellectual alone can grasp and wield is a basic error with possibly devastating consequences...

...they are the tensions that will create or destroy a democracy...

...He is the native son who experiences and gives voice to society's contradictions...

...In his view, this is an essentially romantic posture, as old as Plato's parable of the cave...

...I regret, too, that in training his fire on academia and the Left, Walzer barely mentions any conservative critics of the 20th century, save for a passing reference to José Ortega y Gasset...

...Professor of Social Science at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study and coeditor of Dissent, his work dissolves the disciplinary metes of the academy, fusing the historian's breadth and the theorist's acumen with the journalist's eye...

...Walzer makes the case on three levels —the epistemological, the existential and the moral...

...it is conceptually incoherent, morally dangerous and an existential fraud...

...Like Hamlet, he is a reluctant moralist, Walzer says, holding the glass up close to his mother's face and interpreting for her what she sees...

...The process of meaningful social change adumbrated in Walzer's understanding of criticism does not descend on society like a thunderbolt on a prison, galvanizing the prisoners and electrocuting the guards...

...Enshrining The Critic as a lonely, alienated messenger bringing unwelcome Truth to sullen and stiff-necked people with whom he shares nothing is not simply unworkable...

...This points, in turn, to a basic truth about democratic societies...

...Connected criticism can take many guises...

...In the former, he attempted a reconciliation of two seemingly antithetical concepts, pluralism and equality, and argued that moral principles are to be discovered within, not outside or above, everyday life...

...He can have an impact because he has the ability to actually move people...

...Here Walzer is reminiscent of Karl Popper, who in The Open Society and Its Enemies tried to defang German philosophy by smashing its Truths into humble, parochial bits...

...The fearful thing about having him in power is that, being blind to his own limitations, he will probably behave like an intellectual instead of a politician, confusing a mastery of concepts with a mastery of people...

...And one need not dwell on the quiet absurdity of academics dissecting institutions they have never participated in to suggest that criticism stands to be enriched by direct contact with the realities of power...

...But the inflicted will of an intellectual stings no less than the inflicted will of a colonel...

...Turning Keynes on his head, we may say that intellectuals who believe they are free from mundane influences are themselves in the grip of pre-existing social and political arrangements...

...It may be Orwell, building a bulwark against both class hierarchy and vanguard pretension out of the simple democracy of private life and private things...

...By the act of distancing, the would-be critic insulates himself from criticism and sometimes, as with proponents of Leninism, puts himself in a vanguard that answers to none except itself...

...The risk is much less for the connected critic, who bases himself on a recognition of his own limitations and on a deep understanding of his society...

...In his hands theory is not a straitjacket...

...And like Silone, whom the author greatly admires, he is "steady, patient, stubborn, faithful...

...Walzer has written a moving, penetrating work and all students of politics and society ought to be grateful for his achievement...

...His quarrel is with those who seek to impose on society their own theoretical and personal disengagement...

...Beneath the infatuation with the Federal judiciary exhibited by many legal scholars of both the Right and Left, for example, one senses a quiet contempt for democracy...

...In the latter, he revisited the biblical book of Exodus in order to recreate the meaning of liberation...

...One of this century's sad lessons is that once a man thinks he has the Truth, it is merely a matter of time before he takes it upon himself to discipline the unenlightened...

...A disconnected critic's alienation from even his own ideas will be evident in his language...

...No mere bit of revisionist interpretation, the book is an active engagement with the texts, lives and politics of these critics, who are taken up one by one in what amounts to a string of mini-essays...

...Precisely because he has renounced the politics of discussion in favor of the nonpolitics of force, there is no talking to him...

...Walzer asks the critic to live the tension between alienation and belonging, between implacable realities and imperfectly understood ideals, between a breathless desire for universality and a sober love for the local truths that constitute the moral life...

...and he insists that there are other forms of falseness and other, equally legitimate, hopes and aspirations...

...Rather, it enables society to come to terms with itself, to track itself to its own healing roots...

...It is also a record of the author's intellectual self-understanding...

...Genuine concern—say, caring about the poor without mistaking poverty for a virtue—is replaced by hollow sermonics...

...In addition to making criticism and critical dialogue possible, language sets limits...

...This critic feels himself to be a part of those he takes to task...

...Perhaps he feels conservative critics have taken their connectedness too far, wholeheartedly assenting to the darker claims of community...

...I disagree with Walzer's assertion that the intellectual's duty to illuminate the disparity between the ideal and the real requires him to renounce the pursuit and exercise of power...

...Losing sight of the gap between himself and those he would save, the wouldbe tribune of the masses is often left, in Breytenbach's haunting phrase, "like a dog longing for the moon...

...Similarly, Walzer notes that in Foucault's subjectless sentences power relations simply come into being without the aid of a single active verb, leaving no room for any discernible act or will, including that of the critic himself...

...His voice—earnest, graceful, halting— is above all a thinker's, trying to make sense of the often apparently contradictory ways of morality...

...There is little use in talking to a Nazi, Walzer says, fighting him is better...

...In romanticism's place, Walzer proposes the "connected critic," whois not " the inhabitant of a separate world, the knower of esoteric truths, but a fellow member of this world who devotes himself, with a passion, to the truths we all know...