Christopher Lasch The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type (1965)

Christopher Lasch
The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963:
The Intellectual as a Social Type (1965)

[ix] The intellectual may be defined, broadly, as a person for whom thinking fulfills at once the function of work and play; more specifically, as a person whose relationship to society is defined, both in his eyes and in the eyes of the society, principally by his presumed capacity to comment upon it with greater detachment than those more directly caught up in the practical business of production and power. Because his vocation is to be a critic of society, in the most general sense, and because the value of his criticism is presumed to rest on a measure of detachment from the current scene, the intellectual's relation to the rest of society is never entirely comfortable; but it has not always been as uncomfortable as it is today in the United States. "Anti-intellectualism" offers only a partial explanation of the present tension between intellectuals and American society.
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The rest of the explanation lies in the increased sensitivity of intellectuals to attacks on themselves as a group. It lies in the intellectuals' own sense of themselves, not simply as individuals involved in a common undertaking, the somewhat hazardous business of criticism, but as members of a beleaguered minority. The tension is a function, in other words, of the class-consciousness of intellectuals themselves.

...

The growth of a class (or more accurately, a "status group") of intellectuals is part of a much more general development: the decline of the sense of community, the tendency of the mass society to break down into its component parts, each having its own autonomous culture and maintaining only the most tenuous connections with the general life of the society—which as a consequence has almost ceased to exist.

[xiii] Everyone who has studied the history of American reform agrees that the reform tradition underwent a fundamental change around 1900. Some people identify the change with a changing attitude toward government, a new readiness to use government (particularly the federal government) as an instrument of popular control. Others associate it with an abandonment of the old populistic distrust of large-scale institutions, like corporations, and an acceptance of the inevitability of the concentration of wealth and power. Still others define the
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change as a movement away from the dogma of natural rights toward a relativistic, environmentalist, and pragmatic view of the world. All of these developments, in truth, were going on at the same time, and all of them contributed to the emergence of the new radicalism. Equally important was a tendency to see cultural issues as inseparable from political ones; so that "education," conceived very broadly, came to be seen not merely as a means of raising up an enlightened electorate but as an instrument of social change in its own right. Conversely, the new radicals understood the end of social and political reform to be the improvement of the quality of American culture as a whole, rather than simply a way of equalizing the opportunities for economic self-advancement. It is precisely this confusion of politics and culture, so essential to the new radicalism, that seems to me to betray its origins in the rise of the intellectual class; for such a program, with its suggestion that men of learning occupy or ought to occupy the strategic loci of social control, has an obvious appeal to intellectuals newly conscious of their own common ties and common interests.

...

[xv] The intellectual in his estrangement from the middle class identified himself with other outcasts and tried to look at the world from their point of view. This radical reversal of perspective was still another distinguishing feature of the new radicalism, socialist or progressive. ...

That point of view—the effort to see society from the bottom up, or at least from the outside in—seems to me to account for much of what was valuable and creative in the new radicalism. On the other hand, the very circumstance which made this feat possible—the estrangement of intellectuals, as a class, from the dominant values of American culture—also accounted for what seems to me the chief weakness of the new radicalism, its distrust not only of middle-class culture but of intellect itself. Detachment carried with it a certian defensiveness about the position of intellect (and intellectuals) in American life; and it was this defensiveness, I think, which sometimes prompted intellectuals to forsake the role of criticism and to identify themselves with what they imagined to be the laws of historical necessity and the working out of the popular will.

[xvi] I am much less interested, in short, in praising or condemning the new radicalism than in understanding where it came from. Even the effort to understand where it came from, unfortunately, will strike some readers as an insidious attempt to discredit the ideas of radicals and reformers by "psychologizing" them away. For some people, it is enough to say the reformers were moved by the spectacle of human injustice; to say anything more is to deny the fact of injustice. I am unable to understand this argument, nor do I know quite how to meet it (since I cannot understand it), except to say that the reformers themselves did not share this reluctance of their admirers to examine their own motives. They wrote about their motives with all the enthusiasm, and all the honesty, with which they wrote about social injustice, and I have relied very heavily on what they wrote. Of course it would be possible to ignore what they wrote about themselves, and to write instead
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about the evils of capitalism. But that is not the book I have chosen to write. I have written instead about some of the critics of capitalism, in the hope that their history would tell something, if not specifically about capitalism, about the peculiarly fragmented character of modern society, and beyond that, about what it means to pursue the life of reason in a world in which the irrational has come to appear not the exception but the rule.

Not only the scope and design of this study but its method needs a word of explanation. I have chosen to approach the new radicalism chiefly by means of a series of biographical essays, although I know that for a social historian to proceed in this way is almost to invite misunderstanding. The connection between biography and history is never altogether clear, and it is especially obscure in the case of social history. The political historian can justify the study of notable men by reference to their influence on events, the literary historian by reference to the intrinsic value of their works. For the social historian such considerations are ruled out from the start.

His subject is the social structure, the people he writes about are often anonymous, and if he ventures on biography at all, it must be—so it would seem—with the excuse that his subjects are "representative men." By taking this position, however, he lays himself open to the objection that a representative man is a contradiction in terms; for is not a human being, by reason of all that makes him human, something unique?

The subjects of this book were chosen in deliberate violation of the notion that a social historian ought to write about people "typical of their times." One of them was a hunchbacked dwarf, another an extremely neurotic woman with an irregular emotional history, another a counselor to Presidents. All of them were extremely articulate people—a fact which further sets
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them off from the run of humankind. But it is this very fact, though it further distinguishes them, which makes up their value to the study of the history of American society. They 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. Some experiences are archetypal: men undergo them simply because they are human, the experiences are inherent in the human condition. But others are closely rooted in a social context, and by listening carefully to what people say about them, one can sometimes learn more about a given society than by more formal sociological analysis.

[11] It is a commonplace to say that progressivism represented another outcropping of the old New England moralism. Such observations are quite misleading, however, unless coupled with the observation that the old moralism now existed in a theological void. It was the waning of theology rather than the persistence of piety that created the cultural climate out of which the social settlement in particular and progressivism in general emerged.

[62] For women such as these, conscious of their intellectual gifts but unable, it seemed, to make use of them within the sphere of women's traditional duties, life, experience, "growth" were always out there, they belonged to the great world beyond the household and the family. But the sense of "alienage" was by no means confined to women. When one sees the feminist impulse as an aspect of a more general development—the revolt of intellectuals against the middle class—one begins to understand the feminists' acute fear that life had passed them by. For this conviction that life lay always outside the narrow confines of one's own experience was common to all those, of whatever sex, who felt themselves imprisoned in the stale room of a borrowed culture.

The envy with which women looked on men had its counterpart in the envy of intellectuals in general of what they conceived to be the richer life of the proletariat (an envy which in our own time has been transferred to Negros). ...
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To live fully, directly, spontaneously; to live to the outer limits of one's capacities; to immerse oneself in the stream of experience—all this was no longer something one took for granted as the essence of the human condition, but had become rather an objective to be strived after with all one's powers, an objective one was yet fated always to fall pitiably short of. It was precisely this mystical sense of the sanctity of experience, life, growth, and development that rendered the men and women of the period incapable of setting up an alternative to the cult of "self-fulfillment" the destructive possibilities of which they were so quick to discern. ...

The cultural and even the political history of the period, looked at in such a light, seems always to shine back some reflected facet of this religion of experience. One sees it in the vogue of literary naturalism; in muckraking journalism, with its celebration (under the guise of censure) of the teeming life of the cities...
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Above all, one sees it in the discontent of intellectuals not only with the old conception of culture but with intellectual life itself; in their eagerness to escape from the isolation to which intellectuality seemed to condemn them; in the self-effacement and self-contempt which made them yearn to put their abilities at the service of the community. Nothing could have been more revealing than the pervasiveness of the ideal of "service" among the very people one might have expected to have been its most outspoken critics. Disinterested inquiry and speculation could no longer suffice. Intellectuals, like everybody else—even the poor, not withstanding the full-blooded sensuality with which the intellectuals in their own minds endowed them—could find comfort and meaning, it appeared, only in large, encompassing movements of masses of people, of which they could imagine themselves a part.

But if all these things were true, why, it must be asked, did so many women ignore them? Why did they see only the "sexual question"? If, in fact, women shared with men of the same class this yearning for a larger life and for more direct encounters with experience, why did they not perceive the existence of this common ground? Why did they persist in attributing their sufferings not to class but to sex, not the their being middle-class intellectuals in rebellion against what had come to seem a sterile and meaningless existence, but to the simple fact of their being women? It is true, of course, that women such as Jane Addams saw the class issue as well as the sexual issue and in fact gave precedence to the first, but it is also true that the discussion of the new woman, considered as a whole, had a way always of coming back to the fact of "sex discontent"...

[65] The resentment and the suspicion were inescapable because of the peculiar conditions of American life—or perhaps more accurately the peculiar conditions of life in English-speaking countries.
[[post to reports]]
In America the idea of culture was predominantly feminine to begin with. The care and preservation of culture had early been entrusted to women. Not only art but religion was considered to belong to woman's sphere, the more practical pursuits to man's, and in no other country in the world was the distinction between the two, in the popular mind, as uncompromisingly rigid. ... In a society that felt itself on the verge of chaos...they [women] came to represent cohesion, decency, and self-restraint; and the cult of the home, over which they presided, became the national religion. Under those circumstances the rebellion against culture necessarily became a rebellion also against the definition of woman's "place" with which the nineteenth-century concept of culture was so closely bound up. ...

[66] The feminists suspected, and with good reason, that not only the genteel ideal of culture but the whole system of genteel social intercourse had as its essential function the auctioning off of young girls to the most eligible bidders. ... Fashion, "society," "culture" were all aspects of the same process. Their purpose, it seemed, was to cultivate a girl's attractions and then to provide a setting for their display. Even the business life of the middle class, if novelists like Robert Herrick were to be believed, came eventually to be pervaded by the social ambitions of American women; and the complaints one so often encounters around the turn of the century, that all life had been "womanized," would seem to reflect the degree to which social intercourse of every kind, at a certain level of society, had come to revolve inexorably around the demands of competitive matchmaking.

[69] The rebellion against the middle class presents an ever-changing face. From one point of view, it was a rebellion of women against the "family claim." From another point of view, it was a rebellion of intellectuals against middle-class culture. But it was also a revolt of youth, and as such it set a pattern which had been followed with variations only of detail by each subsequent generation of youthful rebels... The mass society, lacking the cohesive influences that make a society into a community, tends to break up into smaller communities, autonomous, self-contained, and having not viable connection with the whole. The existence of a "youth problem," a phenomenon mistakenly regarded as a problem of inadequate law enforcement or of a decline of public morality or of society's failure to provide adequate incentives for young people, in reality signifies the emergence of an autonomous youth culture.

[80] Europe quickened [Randolph] Bourne's political sympathies. A progressive, he became something of a socialist as well. After Europe, his writing acquired a certain sharpness and bite which it had lacked before; in his later work he was less the genteel
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essayist and more the critic of politics—and his critique, as time went on, became increasingly astringent and increasingly effective. Yet in the conventional sense Bourne had no politics at all. His politics remained largely an extrapolation from his own emancipation from the cultural stagnation of Bloomfield. Though he spoke glowingly of social and political advance, he conceived of it as cultural progress. On the continent, he had noted, "life was enriched by a certain natural sensitiveness to art," the absence of which in England and America had a "brutalizing" effect. He advised a friend in New York, an architect, that if he could do anything "towards spreading that sensitiveness at home," he would have accomplished a work "as important as that of the best social reformer." "Until people begin to really hate ugliness and poverty and disease, instead of merely pitying the poor and the sick, we shall not have, I fear, any great social advance."

Politics, in short, was important to Bourne as "a means to life." Even his opposition to the war, on which his reputation as a public figure came to rest, was a politically negative act (however appropriate or correct) signifying his continuing preoccupation with the personal as opposed to the public. He opposed the war precisely because he saw that it represented a monstrous intrusion of the public on the private. It showed him the danger, if he had not know it before, of making politics a cult; and it was the reaction to this "cult of politics," he told Van Wyck Brooks, that had finally "driven so many of the younger generation back from the liberal camp." ...

[84] These observations, drawn presumably from private rather than from public life, nevertheless had a way of slipping over into politics. Youth and Life was a political manifesto and a call to revolution. But in Bourne's politics, the source of injustice was seen not as the monopoly of the means of production or as the unequal access to privilege and power, but as the simple fact of age. The older generation ruled the world; "hence grievous friction, maladjustment, social war." More precisely:

Youth rules the world, but only when it is no longer young. It is a tarnished, travestied youth that is in the saddle in the person of middle age. Old age lives in the delusion that it has improved and rationalized its youthful ideas by experience and stored-up wisdom, when all it has done is to damage them more or less—usually more. And the tragedy of life is that the world is run by these damaged ideals.

Bourne was like other rebels before him in wishing to throw off the dead hand of the past; to that extent he belonged to a long line of radical thinkers. What was new in all this was his conceiving of the struggle quite literally as a struggle of youth against age, in spite of his awareness that youth is often more conservative than age itself. That only confirmed his opinion of the evil effects of the social domination of the middle-aged. If young people were conservative, when their natural tendency was to be radical, that was surely because they found the world in which they were expected to make their way "rather narrow and shallow."

What was also new in Bourne's radicalism was the way in which the political problem, once it was formulated in this way, dictated nonpolitical solutions. To say that "friction, maladjustment, social war" had their origin in the ascend-
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ancy of age over youth was to rule out politics altogether as a means of social advance. Specifically, it was to rule out the conventional radical solution of social revolution. Bourne could not urge the young to seize power as Marx had urged the proletariat to expropriate the expropriators. In the first place, the struggle for power was itself a form of "friction and social war." In the second place, Bourne saw clearly enough that revolutions are seldom led by men in their teens or even their twenties. ... A revolution of youth is a contradiction in terms. But in the third place, it did not require a revolution, after all, to bring the young to power. The young would come to power as a matter of course, but in their middle age—there was the rub; and what would be the gain if by that time the rebels of today had become the reactionaries of tomorrow? The young must somehow discover how to take their youth with them into middle age.

This is why it behooves youth to be not less radical, but even more radical, than it would naturally be. It must be not simply contemporaneous, but a generation ahead of the times, so that when it comes to control of the world, it will be precisely right and coincident with the conditions of the world as it finds them. If the youth of to-day could really achieve this miracle, they would have found the secret of "perpetual youth."

Not Marx but the spirit of Ponce de León presided over Bourne's vision of the better world.

His statement of the problem took the problem out of politics and out it squarely into the realm of psychology. The key to politics was the process of aging. The root of social disorder was seen not as oppression but repression: the destruction of freedom and spontaneity which was necessary to make children into adults. It was at this point that Bourne's analysis
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coincided with John Dewey's, Jane Addams's, and the progressive educators in general. It also ran parallel, for a while, to Sigmund Freud's, although how closely Bourne knew Freud's work, if he knew it at all first hand, is not clear. The very fact that the point should be in doubt suggests what is indeed amply confirmed by other evidence, that the concept of the child as a different order of being from the adult—and in some respects a superior order of being—did not owe its existence to Freud. It was rather the general intellectual property of the age. ...
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The nineteenth century, someone said, was the century of the child. The coincidence, toward the end of the century, of so many independent discoveries of the mystery and sanctity of childhood leads one to think that childhood must have owed its discovery not so much to a set of intellectual influences—romanticism, naturalism—as to the social conditions of the period; to some common experience through which an entire generation had passed. To look critically at the patriarchal family was to see it, first and foremost, through the eyes of a child. Psychoanalysis—which has been credited with opening up the study of the child—appears to have acted more as confirmation than as revelation. It gave the weight of science to the intuition which had already impressed itself on so many sons and daughters of the middle class: that culture was founded on repression.

But if psychoanalysis shared with American progressivism this common ground, nothing could be more illuminating than the way in which they diverged. Freud was led by his evidence to a stupefying irony: an ever-mounting burden of guilt was the price men paid for civilization. Freud was a European, and such a conclusion was implicit, perhaps, in every detail of the European scene. Jane Addams caught a glimpse of it in Madrid. But the American, faced with Europe, found it easy to repudiate its implications. Having no past, Americans could
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look forward to an untroubled future. The American progressives drew back from the implications of psychoanalysis even as they embraced it. If culture and nature were in conflict, culture would have to go.

But in fact now such conflict was thought to exist. John Dewey's resolution of it was characteristic. In traditional societies, he explained—he was thinking of the primitive societies which anthropologists were just beginning to study—the young had to be brought up in the ways of their elders. These societies, being content merely to perpetuate themselves, were obliged to instill in new generations reverence for the customs and rituals of the old. Under such circumstances, socialization might indeed require repression; for "the natural or native impulses of the young do not agree with the life-customs of the group into which they are born." But in progressive societies the "life-customs" themselves are constantly changing. Progressive societies accordingly "endeavor to shape the experiences of the young so that instead of reproducing current habits, better habits shall be formed, and thus the future adult society be an improvement on their own." If the better society of the future was defined as a "cooperative commonwealth" (as all of the new radicals, progressives, single-taxers, and socialists alike, defined it), and if it was true, moreover, that children were more adept in the art of cooperation than adults, then children themselves became the teachers in the school of social progress. Teachers became pupils. Far from repressing the natural impulses of the young, progressive societies—progressive schools in particular—tried to encourage their emulation by adults. "For certain moral and intellectual purposes," Dewey concluded, "adults must become as little children."
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This discovery of Dewey's ran parallel to Jane Addams's discovery that it was the "neighbors" who educated the social worker by demonstrating socialized democracy in action, rather than the other way around; and the sentence in which Dewey summed up his philosophy of education reads almost exactly like a sentence of Randolph Bourne's—the one in which he spoke of adults becoming "as little children."

[163] The idea that it was possible by means of proper planning to create "a life that shall be really interesting"—an idea so characteristic of the manipulative mind—points up once more the confusion between political and cultural issues that was the essence of the new radicalism. The new radicals proposed political solutions for cultural problems and cultural solutions for political problems. On the one hand, they proposed to improve the quality of American life by means of public administration. On the other hand, they proposed to attack such public problems as the conflict between capital and labor by eliminating the psychological sources of conflict, by "educating" capitalists and laborers to a more altrustic and social point of view...

[174] As a tribute to the social planner, Social Control [Edward A. Ross, 1916] distinguishes itself from many other books in the same vein only by virtue of having been one of the first. What gives the book more than passing interest is the uneasiness that periodically breaks through the bright vision of a better world. Even Ross's enthisiasm for social reform could not quite suppress the book's sociologicl realism. Thus, although he agreed that great advances had been made in public education, Ross also foresaw the growth of an educational bureaucracy in the hands of which the new education would become a peculiarly insidious instrument of oppression. His observations on this danger, surely among the most prophetic in the vast literature on education which flooded the country in these years, need to be quoted in full.

A state educational machine with its semi-military organization of little children, its overriding of individual bent and preference, its appeals to head instead of heart, its rational morality, its colorless and jejune textbooks, its official cult of ethical and civic principles, its cold-blooded fostering of patriotism, is far from attractive. . . .

The coalescence of physical and spiritual forces in the modern state may well inspire certain misgivings. When we note the enormous resources and high centralization of a first-class educa-
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tional system; when we consider that it takes forcible possession for half the time during its best years, and submits the little creature to a curriculum devised more and more with reference to its own aims and less and less with reference to the wishes of the parent; when we consider that the democratic control of this formidable engine affords no guarantee that it will not be used for empire over minds—we may well be apprehensive of future developments.

[175] Like other radicals of his time, Ross deplored the disorder of American society. Like Jane Addams, he pointed out that modern societies were organized economically but not socially, the social order, as he put it, having parted company with the sociable impulse. Ross was practically alone, however, in calculating the costs of imposing order on such a system. He was alone in confronting the fact that what the reformers of his
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generation really proposed was not, as they thought, to create a new community, but to replace the old one, now hopelessly shattered, with an artificially devised system of controls and restraints. These controls, Ross believed, would keep order, but they would not restore the sense of community. Most of the reformers of the progressive period believed that the success of their program depended on the development of untapped social instincts in a people given over wholly to the bourgeois pursuit of self-interest. Ross maintained, on the contrary, that the effect of social control was precisely to render sociability unnecessary. He cast this observation in the form of a rather dogmatic evolutionary formula, but history, for once, seems to have borne out a Darwinian view of the social future:

In the same way that the improvement of optical instruments checks the evolution of the eye and the improvement of tools checks the evolution of the hand, the improvement of instruments of control checks the evolution of the social instincts. The goal of social development is not, as some imagine, a Perfect Love or a Perfect Conscience, but better adaptation; and the more this adaptation is artificial, the less it need be natural.

[271] whatever the limits of Steffens' self-scrutiny, the incident shows once again how closely the radical impulse was allied with the effort of introspection. It was for that reason that the new radicals wrote most freely and coinvincingly in the autobiographical vein: what they had to say about American society was inseparable from the record of their own re-education or "disillusionment." The problem of society was a problem preeminently of consciousness or, in Steffens' phrase, intelligence—a problem, at bottom, not of politics or economics but of psychology and culture.

[297] Some of the agrarians, to be sure, argued rather half-heartedly for a "program of agrarian restoration," but most of them seem to have been saying in effect that writers and artists should "take their stand" on an issue which was cultural, not political—resistance to philistinism and the barbarization of taste. The same thing is true of later critics of "mass culture such as Dwight Macdonald (of whom I shall have more to say), who turned to cultural criticism only when they had become convinced that political resistance to totalitarianism—Communist or democratic—was as futile as resistance to industrialism. Few of them would have gone so far as to say...that the artist had "no serious concern whatsoever" with questions of power and booty, but they would have shared his pessimism concerning the ability of artists to influence the struggle for power.

[306] Sidney Hook, an impassioned disciple first of Marx and then of John Dewey, wrote 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." Ostensibly a plea for political realism, that sentence revealed a utopianism or messianism as thoroughgoing as the utopianism it condemned. To describe the Soviet Union as a "system of total error" was all too obviously to make the same mistake as upholding it as a system of total truth. ...
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[[post to Lit Imp]]
In 1962, long after the rise of China and the revival of France had disrupted both the Russian and the American alliance systems, and long after most liberals, even the most orthodox, had admitted that the rhetoric and policies of the cold war were no longer relevant to world politics, Sidney Hook was still preaching a "pragmatism" that was the very antithesis of pragmatic, making a religion out of the defense of the "free world." The novel Fail-Safe, a popular fantasy of accidental nuclear war, stirred him to write a fervent defense of American military policy interlarded with elaborate and dismal forebodings about the probable effect of the book. "If the influence of Fail-Safe grows and the hysteria it germinates affects public policy and American defense efforts are curtailed, the Communists will become progressively emboldened. They will adopt more and more intransigent attitudes at the disarmament negotiation sessions in the expectation that the growth in hysterical fear about accidental war in Western countries will make their representatives 'more reasonable' in granting concessions." As for the book itself: "There is something repugnant to moral sensibility, something that transcends the limits of legitimate political criticism in impugning the patriotism and bona fides of men who have faithfully served the cause of freedom." Hook's "critical support" of American culture was hard to distinguish from unconditional acceptance.

It was possible, of course, to attack Fail-Safe, and other such popular fantasies, on their artistic merits. It was possible to argue that by raising false issues instead of real ones they had a bad effect on the public. ... But Hook's argument, that such novels undermined the national will to resist and thereby "emboldened" the Communists, went far beyond these considerations.

[312] Most intellectuals, however, wanted to believe that Kennedy cared deeply and thought profoundly about the cultural life of the nation. Rovere's eulogy of the dead President, a fine specimen of the jargon of the New Frontier, came back again and again to the same point: Kennedy had "brought to the Presidency a genuinely distinctive style." He surrounded himself with people of "large, bold aims and a large expansive view of life.

There was not a reformer among them, as far as anyone could tell. Pragmatism—often of the grubbiest kind—was rampant. "Facts" were often valued beyond their worth. "Ideology" was held in contempt—too much so, perhaps—and was described as a prime source of mischief in the world. But if there were no do-gooders around, and no planners, and not even, really, very much in the way of plans, there were large thoughts and large intentions and very long looks into the future.

Kennedy himself was "interested in and amused by and critical of everything in American life." He was "the first modern President who gave one a sense of caring—and of believing that a President ought to care—about the whole quality and tone of American life." He cared about the aesthetics of motels, he cared about the "ugliness and vulgarity and intellectual impoverishment" of urban life, he cared about the quality of American education. "He proposed to have, in time, an impact on American taste. He proposed to impress upon the country—to make it, if he could, share—his own respect for excellence of various kinds." Rovere admitted that Kennedy himself "did not respond much to painting or music, or even to literature"; rather he dutifully "looked at paintings he didn't enjoy, and listened to music he didn't much care for, because people who he thought were excellent people had told him they were excellent things." (Kempton's Kennedy, with his "proper proportion of indifference," was quite unrecognizable here.) Ro-
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vere was not sure but what "this sort of thing," in anybody but a President, might have been "the opposite of admirable," and he conceded that there was something a little fatuous in Kennedy's idea "that he might do something to advance American civilization." What was important, however, was Kennedy's "style." What was important was that Kennedy admired "excellence" and surrounded himself with excellent people. "He made thinking respectable in Washington."

[319] The convergence of the world of culture with the world of advertising and entertainment was only incidentally a function of the rise of mass communications. It was primarily a function of the concentration of cultural life in the city of New York, a development, in fact, which was indispensable to the creation of an intellectual class in the first place. In the nineteenth century the United States was a country without a cultural capital, the best example of such a country in the world. The years between the Civil War nd the First World War, however, saw the steady dissolution of provincial culture and the concentration of intellectual life in Chicago and New York, and by the time of the Second World War the isolated preeminence of New York had long been assured. Neither the newspaper business nor the publishing of books and periodicals nor, indeed, any form of cultural activity escaped the centralizing pull that governed the economy as a whole.

[333] The fact is that politics without ideology, whatever else it may be, tends to become somewhat boring; and it was necessary for most people to put the ideology back into politics, whether it belonged there or not. Without ideology, politics lost its intellectual excitement. So too had religion, in Jane Addams's generation, lost its appeal as a field of argument and speculation when piety parted company with theology. For Dwight Macdonald's generation, political argument had once had the excitement of theology. Marxism, like a Jesuit school, repre-
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sented among other things an exacting form of intellectual discipline. For people raised in the school of Marxist polemics, the politics of the 1950's were singularly lacking in interest, because they had ceased to be a form of intellectual play. And it was not only the Marxists who suffered in this way, although they may have suffered more acutely. All intellectuals, simply by virtue of being intellectuals, approached politics with something of the same expectations; which, under the circumstances of the cold war, were bound to be disappointed unless the old fervor, the old blend of culture and politics, could somehow be recaptured.