5
The New York Group and the New Left

By the early 1960s the New York group considered the threat of mass culture much less dangerous than the radical impulses of the young. It had now been ten or fifteen years since the group had sublimated its interest in political issues beneath the rhetoric of cultural analysis—in order to take a rest from fatiguing Cold War political battles. In the early 1960s politics did not seem as futile and desperate as it had in the gray dawn of the nuclear age and the bitter postwar peace. Rejuvenated, the group became more enthusiastic about political and ideological conflict with other parts of the intellectual community.

The contention between the Old Left and the New Left was partly generational. It was also an extension of the New York group's continuing struggle over what constituted responsible intellectual culture in the postwar period. Further, it was a disagreement about what it meant to be a leftist and what was required of a radical intellectual. It was a dispute within the family of the left, although even the dissenters were now closer to liberalism than to the socialist left. Yet many of them still felt themselves at least nominally tied to radicalism, even if only in the sense, as Sidney Hook had once said, that modern biologists are still Darwinian. As in all family arguments there was a mixture of intense likes and dislikes, admiration and disgust, rivalry, parental condescension and youthful bravado, some common outlooks and goals, some common backgrounds, frequent disagreements about means and ends, and debates about what constituted a desirable future.

The Beats

The New York intellectuals' antagonism toward the New Left in the 1960s was foreshadowed in their response to the Beats in the 1950s. A literary

and cultural movement, the Beats jumped from the campuses of Columbia and Reed College and surfaced in San Francisco and New York with the novels, poetry, and antics of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Lew Welch, Gregory Corso, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, among others. The early formation of the group was fostered by San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth, who, according to Gary Snyder, was "a catalytic figure for all of us," and whose house, "literally, was the place that we met."^[1]

The Beats represented a romantic literary tendency, similar in some respects to the transcendentalist vision of nineteenth-century American writers such as Thoreau and Whitman—the latter of whom they self-consciously claimed as a forefather The Beats carried on many of the earlier romantic commitments to nature, intuition, transcendental consciousness, and anti-industrialism. There was a diversity among the Beat visions, from the focus of Kerouac and Ginsberg on the street life of drugs, poverty, and the lower orders of the disenfranchised "beat" (beaten) people, to the focus of Gary Snyder on nature, simplicity, and Oriental thought. Snyder later affirmed that, despite their diversity in the 1950s the Beats "did embody a criticism and a vision which we shared in various ways," but he admitted that they were not very political. In the 1960s they drew closer to one another through a fascination with Eastern religion, and in the 1970s their common bond included a "powerful environmental concern, critique of the industrial state, and an essentially shared poetics."^[2]

As an artistic perspective, Beat writings and pronouncements were bound to draw the attention of the New York intellectuals, as many in the Partisan Review crowd were literary critics. Norman Mailer was the only member of the group who was sympathetic to the Beats; the others varied in the level of their hostility. It was not an accident that the novelist in the circle was the most sympathetic to the nonrationalist bohemians. Nor was it surprising that Mailer, who always showed enthusiasm for the outrageous, the new, and the spectacular, was the New York intellectual whose imagination the Beats most easily engaged.

In 1957 Dissent published Mailer's "The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster." His article addressed the street manifestation rather than the literature of the Beat and hip—although the two were closely connected. As one of the three original founders of the Village Voice in New York in 1955, Mailer had become acquainted with the hip movement on the street in Greenwich Village. He contributed $15,000 to the Voice during its first year and wrote a column called "The Hip and the Square." When he gave up his column and his close association

with the paper he complained that the other two founders wanted it to be "more Square—I wish it to be more Hip."^[3]

The Beats stressed spontaneity in their written language, reflecting the importance they placed on chance occurrence in life, on intuition and action rather than critical thought and orderly design, and on the primacy of the event. Mailer approved. In his opinion "the language of Hip which evolved was an artful language," one that was "a pictorial language, but pictorial like non-objective art." It was a style that worked abstractly rather than a written approach that conveyed meaning precisely and directly. "Hip is the language of energy," Mailer said of the new tendency, and "Movement is always to be preferred to inaction."^[4]

The year after Mailer's essay appeared, Norman Podhoretz took to the pages of Partisan Review to ridicule and dismiss the new bohemian writers. As artists, he wrote, the Beats were failures. Their "bop language" showed "contempt for coherent, rational discourse which, being a product of the mind, is in their view a form of death." A Beat author showed his "true intellectuality" by speaking "with his tongue tied" and making "noises that come out of his soul." This inarticulateness, Podhoretz complained, was paraded as spontaneity. Kerouac and the Beats thought spontaneity was writing whatever first invaded the writer's head. The Beats wanted the "first words" instead of the "right words"; they wanted words reflecting "emotion" rather than thinking. Podhoretz concluded that the bohemians' worship of spontaneity was "a cover for hostility to intelligence."^[5]

The New York group was eager to resist any new challenge to their own rational critical approach to literature, and they left no question that the Beats represented a danger. Podhoretz warned of the degeneration of standards and explained that "the Beat boys make their own rules for literature, defining carelessness as spontaneity, incoherence as clarity, drunkenness as vitality, and inarticulateness as eloquence. Control is 'chicken' and subtlety is 'crap,' both in the street-gang and among the Beats." Paul Goodman, hardly the most committed rationalist of the New York intellectuals, concluded that "the paucity of its vocabulary and syntax is for the Beats essentially expressive of withdrawal from the standard civilization and its learning."^[6]

An even greater threat was that the worship of spontaneity apparently had led the Beats and hipsters to a fascination with violence. That prospect did not bother Mailer, although it alarmed others in the group. The hipster, Mailer counseled, felt "the desire to murder and the desire to create," and was "a philosophical psychopath." He calmly assured his readers that the hipster-psychopath commits "murders—if he has the

courage—out of a necessity to purge his violence, for if he cannot empty his hatred then he cannot love." Murder was not a cowardly act, Mailer reasoned: a "courage of a sort is necessary, for one murders not only a weak fifty-year old man but an institution as well." The hipster was thus "daring the unknown." And hipsters were not without feeling. "At bottom," Mailer reassured his audience, "the drama of the psychopath is that he seeks love."^[7]

Mailer's fellow New York intellectuals were not so enthusiastic about the benefits of violence. In the summer of 1957 Alfred Kazin noted in his journal that Kerouac's On the Road was disturbing in its "romantic incoherence, the longing for violence, the gravitation towards the underworld." Kazin found "depressing" the novel's "wilful hardness" reminiscent of Hemingway, and "the masturbatory intoxication on violence!"^[8]

Podhoretz went a step further and wondered whether romanticism naturally led to violence. He explained that "whenever I hear anyone talking about instinct and being and the secrets of human energy, I get nervous; next thing you know he'll be saying that violence is just fine." He then accused the Beat authors of harboring a wish to kill intellectuals. He heard "a suppressed cry" in the books of Ginsberg and Kerouac: "Kill the intellectuals who can talk coherently, kill the people who can sit still for five minutes at a time, kill those incomprehensible characters who are capable of getting seriously involved with a woman, a job, a cause."^[9] For those who were puzzled by Podhoretz's interpretive zeal, he did not bother to document the evidence of violence and death he found in Beat literature.

The Beats were mystified and alarmed by such intemperate characterizations of them and their work. Ginsberg thought that a "Frankenstein image" of the Beats was being produced "by everything from [the] Congress for Cultural Freedom, [to] Encounter magazine, through Partisan Review ." He considered it "a sort of yellow press image of what was originally a sort of ethereal and angelic perception of America, and the world, and the nature of the mind." How could Podhoretz, in his paranoia of anyone who did not subscribe precisely to his ordered bourgeois outlook, mistake an angelic vision for a violent mob that wanted to kill intellectuals? "I realized early," Ginsberg reflected, "that if they were going to do that to us who were relatively innocent—just a bunch of poets—if they were going to make us out to be monsters, then they must have been making the whole universe out to be a monster all along, like from the Communists to the radicals to the anarchists to the Human Being in America."^[10]

The New York group also faulted the Beats for an irrationalist anti-

intellectualism. Mailer sympathetically described a revolution that confirmed many of Podhoretz's darkest misgivings about the Beats. The hipster, according to Mailer, may represent "the first wind of a second revolution in this century . . . backward toward being and the secrets of human energy . . . backward to the nihilism of creative adventurers." If the century's first revolution was "an expression of the scientific narcissism we inherited from the nineteenth century a revolution motivated by the rational mania that consciousness could stifle instinct and marshall it into productive formations, the second revolution . . . would have consciousness subjugated to instinct."^[11]

Podhoretz, however, did not share Mailer's sympathy for instinct, and he suspected that the Beats' hostility to intellectual culture was not of a mild, restrained sort. "The plain truth," he explained to his readers, "is that the primitivism of the Beat Generation serves first of all as a cover for an anti-intellectualism so bitter that it makes the ordinary American's hatred of the egghead seem positively benign." The Beats, in his view, were not simply members of the intellectual community with whom the New York group had disagreements. They were so far out of the intellectual community and so threateningly antagonistic to it that the normal provincial American stood between the Beats and the intellectuals. The intellectuals therefore had to repel the hipsters' attack.

Podhoretz was not alone in his criticism of Beat anti-intellectualism. "The new Bohemia's inferiority shows up clearly in its lack of intellectual content," Ned Polsky complained to Mailer in Dissent . "Most hipsters scarcely read at all," and the "pseudo-profundities" of jazz were all they would discuss seriously. Even Paul Goodman accused the Beats of committing themselves to "voluntary ignorance" to match their vows of "voluntary poverty." He was discouraged that "they don't know anything, neither literature nor politics."^[12]

The group's antagonism to Beat anti-intellectualism struck many of the same chords as their criticism of mass culture and kitsch. Although the Beats also criticized mass culture, their analysis was not intellectual enough for the New York group. Further, the group feared that the Beats, like mass culture, would lower overall cultural standards. Both tendencies represented an intellectual degeneration. The Beats were a form of romantic kitsch for those who were too young or too unsophisticated for intellectual culture.

The worst that could happen, of course, would be for the relatively isolated and ignored Beat culture to penetrate mass culture and combine in a monstrous hybrid—and then be disseminated into widespread prominence through the media of mass culture. Then the New York group would have the greatest dangers of their two adversaries—mass culture

and the Beats—combined in one. That was precisely what they would later believe happened in the 1960s. Mass culture and the Beat outlook combined to produce a mongrel countercultural kitsch that represented the dangers of irrationality. The task for rational intellectuals became that much more desperate.

Finally, perhaps most discouraging to the New York intellectuals was that the Beats did not appear to represent real radicalism at all, and what little radicalism—as opposed to style—they displayed looked as though it drew from the political right rather than the left. Kazin worried that the Beats' antiestablishment stance was merely a criminal posture. "The criminal is the protester ," Kazin wrote with discouragement in his journal. "The real question here is: are they doing anything more than 'protesting'? Is there anything more than a striking of attitudes?"^[13]

Irving Howe believed the Beats' radicalism was thoroughly part of the middle-class society they tried to oppose. They had "no clear sense" of problems, no agenda, no defined "principle" of opposition, and their incoherence reflected the confused society that troubled them. They had fallen into the trap of rebellion in a mass society. "In their contempt for mind," he reported, "they are at one with the middle class suburbia they think they scorn." They had no program, only dreams, but they were unable to "dream themselves out of the shapeless nightmare of California"—a particularly gruesome condition for a New York intellectual to ponder. Dreams had been substituted for radical intelligence, and in consequence they had been unable to shake the middle-class vision; instead "they sing out an eternal fantasy of the shopkeeper." That is why it was so difficult to be anti-intellectual and a radical at the same time, "for if you shun consciousness as if it were a plague, then a predicament may ravage you but you cannot cope with it."^[14]

Yet when the bohemian writers did venture a political statement it was likely to arouse the anger of the New York intellectuals. Comments by the 1950s Beats foreshadowed the later New Left disagreement with the New York group over communism. "Poets," Kenneth Rexroth announced, "are coming to San Francisco for the same reasons that Hungarians have been going to Austria recently." Even Delmore Schwartz, who was not particularly possessed by Cold War animosities, could not let that comment pass. In a lecture at the Library of Congress in 1958 entitled "The Present State of Poetry," Schwartz lamented that the San Francisco poets (whom he called the San Francisco Howlers) failed to "recognize the difference between the Red Army and the Kenyon Review critics, between Nikita Khrushchev and John Crowe Ransom, or between the political commissars of a police state and the tyrants who write advertising copy on Madison Avenue."^[15]

The New York group was ever vigilant about those who made unacceptable statements about Stalinism, even if that treason issued from the mouths of young, apolitical poets who knew no better. The utterances of irresponsible leftism, even if spoken softly in confusion, could damage a country if left unopposed. Gary Snyder admitted that the Beats were unschooled in politics and wandered into unfamiliar territory, but, unlike Podhoretz or Schwartz, at least Kenneth Rexroth gave them some friendly counsel.

According to Snyder, Rexroth "provided for some of us a very valuable bridge between floundering in Stalinism/anti-Stalinism at a time when the Partisan Review was talking about the failure of intellectual America." During the 1950s, Snyder remembered, Rexroth "was a very valuable aid and bridge and teacher in helping me, and I think some others, retain our radical vision and radical perspective without falling into the either/or of American capitalism or Stalinism." To escape the forced choice of capitalism or Stalinism, the Beats followed Rexroth into anarchism, and Snyder felt that "anarchism as a credible and viable position was one of Rexroth's greatest contributions for us, intellectually."^[16]

Podhoretz, however, worried about the "populism" of their work, and feared that "the Beat rebellion comes, if it can be interpreted politically at all, from the right, not the left." The Beats expressed "a kind of knownothing populist sentiment" that was fascinated with the lower orders of society. Allen Ginsberg did not agree. Again, Ginsberg saw the Beat populist vision as angelic and spiritual, rather than destructive and violent. Ginsberg connected "our own struggle back to the tradition that was immediately contactible in the Populist good heart of William Carlos Williams" and Walt Whitman. How could that be destructive? How could that be considered right or left?

Yet Podhoretz interpreted the Beat tradition differently. Whereas the earlier bohemianism of the 1930s had been against American provincialism and for European modernism, the Beats of the 1950s were "hostile to civilization" altogether.^[17] Like others in the Commentary circle, Podhoretz believed that there had to be some affirmation in a radical outlook. That the Beats affirmed many spiritual and communal values was not enough for Podhoretz. Further, he never made clear why the Beat populism was tied to the right rather than the left. As with others in the New York group, his antiruralism and fear of the masses prompted him to interpret all populism as a dangerous impulse from the right.

One of the factors that compounded their hostility to the Beats' radicalism was that the group accepted middle-class values while the young bohemians rejected them.^[18] The New York intellectuals, for all their talk of socialism, believed strongly in the values of the bourgeoisie: respect-

ability, order, civility, process, rationality, system, coherence, virtue. They found problems with the political, social, and economic order of midtwentieth-century America—some problems large enough to require democratic socialist solutions. Yet, except for some redistribution of economic and political power, most of the system was workable. They wanted to leave the system intact, or at least its underlying values, and merely tinker with its gears.

The New York intellectuals were children of immigrants whose socialism, as much as anything else, was to serve as a lever with which to boost themselves into middle-class life. Those of them who were radical at all supported a bourgeois socialism. For many of them, their adolescence and college years came during the Depression. They were bound to clash with those who graduated from college after World War II and who discarded middle-class values in favor of bohemian culture.

One has only to read the work of Norman Podhoretz to catch a sense of some of the group's middle-class yearnings. In 1957 he upbraided his generation for being so conservative, timid, and responsible, but despite his bravado he subscribed firmly to their outlook. Like his contemporaries, he celebrated early maturity, early marriage, family, a steady job—all of the values the Beats ridiculed. "In that period of my life," Podhoretz later remembered, "there was nothing that appealed to me less than the idea of refusing to grow up and settle down—which . . . was what Kerouac and Ginsberg and their friends stood for—and nothing that I wanted more than to take my rightful place as an adult among other adults."^[19] One could hardly find another statement so completely at odds with the young bohemian outlook.

It is not surprising that the two different visions of radicalism clashed. The Beats were romantic, intuitive, nonpolitical, irrational, antibourgeois, and anti-intellectual. Members of the New York group were rationalist intellectuals, pragmatic and programmatic liberals or liberal leftists who took seriously politics and radicalism—or at least other people's statements about radicalism. They had never liked visionaries, and so they refused to consider the Beats true intellectuals or radicals—any more than they had granted that status to the Communists in their earlier battles. For Norman Podhoretz, as for many of his colleagues, the Beats represented the same mix of dangerous tendencies they would later find in the counterculture and the New Left.

Norman Podhoretz

Although it is doubtful that Norman Podhoretz ever subscribed strongly to the values of the left even in his youth, his rhetoric and public stance

moved from a moderate position in the 1950s to an aggressively conservative position in the 1970s. That is, during the student unrest he crossed the political paths of most of the New York intellectuals and afterward stood to their right.

Born in Brooklyn on January 16, 1930, the son of a milkman, Podhoretz was twenty-seven years younger than first-generation Sidney Hook and ten years younger than second-generation Irving Howe. His thirdgeneration cohort of New York intellectuals included Michael Walzer, Susan Sontag, Steven Marcus, and others who were in college in the late 1940s and early 1950s.^[20]

A bright youth in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, Podhoretz "had literary ambitions even as a small boy." Partly because of the tutelage of a high school teacher who convinced him that he did not want to continue being "a filthy little slum child," he went on to study at the Seminary College of the Jewish Theological Seminary and at Columbia College, to which he had won a scholarship.^[21] He took with him into adulthood the cultural ambitions encouraged by that teacher.

Fellow undergraduates in the Columbia English department included Allen Ginsberg and future New York intellectuals Jason Epstein and Steyen Marcus. Kerouac, formerly a Columbia student, visited Ginsberg at the college while Podhoretz was there. Indeed, if Podhoretz had not altered his earlier dream of being a poet he might have run with the same crowd as Ginsberg and Kerouac and might have grown much closer to the Beat outlook he later hated so much.

While in college the young Podhoretz found more than literary influence. In his senior year, as a twenty-year-old, he read the newly published The God That Failed , which left him "dazzled and exhilarated." That book ushered him into the anti-Communist outlook of the New York group. Books that further cemented his antitotalitarianism were Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism and Whittaker Chambers's Witness .^[22] His mentor at Columbia, Lionel Trilling, years earlier had published The Middle of the Journey , and the young protege[protégé] surely had little trouble understanding what political orientation was expected of ambitious boys who sought to join Trilling's group of critics.

F. W. Dupee, one of the original six editors of the revived Partisan Review in 1937, was, like Trilling, on the Columbia English faculty. Podhoretz took courses from both of them, but came under the special care of Trilling. With the example of Trilling and Dupee immediately before him, he decided that becoming a literary critic was a much better career than being a poet.^[23] As ambitious as he was talented, he saw that prestige could be gained as a man of letters.

Indeed, ambition was at the core of Podhoretz's life, and his open thirst to achieve success shaped his career more plainly than most. He was receptive to his high school teacher's advice to use his ambition to vault out of the Brownsville slum, and he undertook the long "journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan," the goal that glittered before him like a jewel.^[24] He rejected Beat bohemianism to marry young, have a family and join society. Throughout his life his urge to "make it" stamped its influence on his ideas and career.

Following Columbia, graduate study on a fellowship to Cambridge University, and two years in the army, Podhoretz began to write book reviews and position himself as a literary critic. He remarked later that "among our most talented literary intellectuals (including just about everyone I know) reviewing is regarded as a job for young men on the make; you serve an apprenticeship as a reviewer and then you move on to bigger and more ambitious things."^[25]

Reviewing, editing, and writing nonfiction essays were the avenues taken by the young Podhoretz, and he was not modest about the worth of those particular undertakings. Critic Robert Brustein accused him of claiming an intellectual impact for those callings superior to that of a novelist. "Behind it," Brustein wrote of Podhoretz's declaration, "one can detect an effort to capture for the journalist some of the novelist's prestige." Brustein saw a young man on the make, one who wanted to assure the world of the height he was achieving. "There is something poignant about this writer's effort to elevate whatever profession he happens to be pursuing at the moment, but there is something solipsistic about it too," Brustein noted critically. "I am certain that if Mr. Podhoretz ever went into the plumbing business, we would soon have an essay on how the toilet bowl is replacing the book."^[26]

Much of Podhoretz's literary criticism was intelligent, brave, and provocative. He was particularly good at judging and commenting on generational trends, although the explicitly literary element of his work did not rank with that of the best of the New York group. Some of his earliest pieces seemed derivative; his essay on Faulkner, for example, largely restates Kazin's insights in On Native Grounds .^[27] Podhoretz's essays were collected in Doings and Undoings (1964), after which he went on to ventures other than literary criticism. The few argumentative literary pieces he wrote in the following twenty years were issued as The Bloody Crossroads: Where Literature and Politics Meet (1986).

After an apprenticeship of reviewing books for Partisan Review , the New Yorker , and Commentary , Podhoretz served as an editor at Commentary from 1955 to 1958. With Jason Epstein he was involved in book

publishing for two years, and then in 1960 he became editor-in-chief of Commentary . When Podhoretz took control of the magazine he was generally perceived as moving it politically to the left. Often cited as evidence was his publication of chapters of Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd and Podhoretz's early opposition to American involvement in Vietnam. But at least since the late 1950s when he wrote his attack on the Beats, he had harbored a strong animus against the values of the counterculture. When the New Left appeared in the early 1960s, some thought Podhoretz was initially sympathetic to it, as he printed Staughton Lynd, a young American historian at Yale associated with the New Left. But his admiration of Lynd was brief.

He initially liked Lynd, who had written an "evenhanded, almost neutralist" article for Commentary titled "How the Cold War Began." But some of Podhoretz's friends began to whisper that Lynd was soft on the Soviets, and the Commentary editor found himself having to defend his decision to publish the article. To gauge Lynd's real outlook, he invited Lynd to his apartment one evening and they talked until nearly dawn. Podhoretz concluded that Lynd was more sympathetic to China than to the Soviet Union, and was "more benevolent" toward Communism and "more hostile" toward America than he had suspected.^[28] Lynd stopped appearing in Commentary . It was not in Podhoretz to appreciate the New Left; his values clashed too clearly with theirs. Any nudging of Commentary to the left (if that took place at all) was brief and evanescent.

Three years after he began as editor of Commentary , Podhoretz printed "My Negro Problem—and Ours," one of his most celebrated articles. Although it drew mixed and some bitter reaction, most who read it agreed that it was a brave attempt to be honest about how white liberal intellectuals felt about blacks. It was partly a response to articles that James Baldwin had printed in which he talked about the black hatred of whites. Podhoretz countered by remembering his youth in Brooklyn. There, he wrote, Jews thought blacks were better off than they because blacks were better athletes, stronger, could be more lawless and erotic, and had little family supervision. Blacks also had punished him physically, so he had hated them—and still disliked them in 1963. As Nat Hentoff pointed out in the Nation at the time, there seemed to be a consistency of hatred in Podhoretz that was turned against unlikely victims—the Beats or blacks—who were not particularly threatening.^[29]

Race relations were a two-way street, Podhoretz felt. Yes, blacks were invisible to whites, but whites were also faceless to blacks. Some of his critics thought this unfairly made blacks bear the burden of the hatred they received, and many thought him blind for not understanding how

blacks could see in any white a potential oppressor. Interestingly, Podhoretz also suggested that ethnicity and race should be eliminated—that there should be no more Jews nor blacks, and that through intermarriage a solution would be found to racism.^[30] It was a brave proposal from the editor of a Jewish magazine, and one that he soon stifled.

Podhoretz was an early, though not radical, critic of the Vietnam War, and as late as 1969 he was still involved enough to give a Moratorium Day speech in which he urged "an immediate withdrawal" by the United States. Two years later he found himself ambivalent about Nixon's plan of disengagement in stages, and said it was "not the policy I would have wanted him to follow." Although the president's policy had the benefit of discouraging a Communist takeover of South Vietnam, Podhoretz said there were reasons for thinking it would not occur in any case. He supported Nixon's withdrawal "provided that policy did not entail continued American military participation in the war, whether on the ground or in the air." The bombing of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, he felt, was "so disproportionate in its destructiveness to any conceivable objective" that it should be stopped.

Actually Podhoretz went even further Although he did not want to see an "unambiguous American defeat," he confided that "I now find myself—and here is the main source of my own embarrassment in writing about Vietnam—unhappily moving to the side of those who would prefer just such an American defeat to a 'Vietnamization' of the war which calls for the indefinite and unlimited bombardment by American pilots in American planes of every country in that already devastated region." (Less than a decade after this article, his foreign policy views were so strident that these earlier words were surely an even greater "embarrassment.") During the antiwar protests of the first Nixon administration, Podhoretz recommended "a complete American withdrawal—from the air as well as the ground," for U.S. forces.^[31]

If in the 1960s his views on Vietnam were opposed to administration policy, he shared Nixon's hostility toward the counterculture. Podhoretz's outlook was not unusual for the New York group, but the strength of his animosity toward the young was unique. Rather than idealistic, he found the counterculture selfish and smug. He thought those critics sympathetic to the cultural radicals, such as Susan Sontag and Leslie Fiedler, were guilty of supporting "junky and trashy fashions in the service of the revolution in sensibility which goes hand in hand with the revolution against the American political system and the American social order."^[32]

William Phillips, who continued to edit Partisan Review , recalled an argument with Podhoretz over the counterculture. "Norman was putting

down the younger writers as a group, insisting, among other things, that they were lazy and spoiled," Phillips remembered. The Partisan editor had disagreed: the young were almost too busy and energetic. To smooth over their disagreement, Phillips then tried to create a common generational bond with Podhoretz, telling him that together they faced a new generation, "a new world, which will sweep away those of us who belong to the old world." Podhoretz, alarmed and intransigent, retorted hotly that he would never allow himself to be pushed aside by young radicals.

Phillips was surprised at the outburst. "It struck me at the time as a very vivid and disturbing example of the conservative impulse to preserve the old order against the new barbarians, to preserve moral values, aesthetic standards, and social order." With Podhoretz taking such an extreme position against the counterculture, Phillips pointed out, the young responded to him in kind, and "It became a holy war on both sides."^[33]

A person with Podhoretz's unremitting drive for bourgeois success could never be sympathetic to bohemianism. In 1967, at the first full flush of the counterculture, Podhoretz published Making It , the autobiography of a brash thirty-five-year-old who celebrated his ascendance to a position of cultural power. The book's subtheme was the American ambivalence toward success, which, like sex, it both craved and hid. Trilling advised him not to publish it. He did, and it was reviewed mercilessly. Actually it was the best early book on the genesis of the New York intellectuals, and, had he been more modest about his own ambition and success, Making It would have achieved a justified acclaim.

Yet a celebration of himself and his lifestyle was too large a part of the book to be ignored. Like Mailer's Advertisements for Myself , the very title Making It announced the sense of notoriety both writers sought. It was no surprise that Mailer was one of his favorite writers. As one of Podhoretz's own critics charged, "inevitably, Mailer's depressing development—his theatrical strutting and fretting—is described by Podhoretz as an 'exemplary career,'" because "the pursuit of success" was central to both of them. "Actually, Mr. Podhoretz's concern with the 'pursuit of success' has nothing whatever to do with the writing of fiction; it is simply a self-conscious idea about the writer's role ."^[34]

Podhoretz did not write much in the year or two following Making It , but during that time he apparently decided that the world was threatening his plans for success. How could he succeed as a champion of middle-class values if the bohemian counterculture prevailed instead? How could he rise to the top of world power with his nation if America was defeated in Vietnam? How could he hold up his head as an international intellectual if American power was second to the Soviets', or if America could not

exercise its will in the Third World? How could he feel as though he had made it if the Jewish intellectual community had not made it, and how could Jewish intellectuals be said to have succeeded if they demonstrated self-hatred in their criticism of Israel and America? How could he feel good about making it in America if his fellow citizens criticized American domestic policies and attitudes? Podhoretz realized that to really make it, to achieve genuinely meaningful success, he would have to mount a campaign against the detractors of his way of life.

In June 1970, Podhoretz initiated a monthly column in Commentary in which he undertook the first struggles in this campaign. In his first column he criticized the Jewish intellectuals associated with the New York Review of Books for their radicalism and questioning of America, which amounted to American self-hatred and Jewish self-hatred. In later columns he denounced such opponents as the counterculture, the adversary culture, the American Civil Liberties Union, and George McGovern and the New Politics.^[35]

In his column Podhoretz also reflected about the reason for his new conservatism. He reminded his readers that he had been "one of the people who participated rather actively in the movement of those days [the early 1960s] to revive the dormant spirit of radical social criticism within the American intellectual community." Podhoretz admitted that by the end of the 1960s, however, he had lost his sympathy for the left because of "the barbaric hostility to freedom of thought which by the late 60's had become one of the hallmarks of this ethos."

Moreover, the left thought that the world's problems could be resolved by political means. Podhoretz reported that he once agreed, but lost that hope in the course of the 1960s. He and the other affirmers in the New York group (who in this campaign constituted the first ranks of what by the mid-1970s became known as neoconservatism) thought that it had "become more important to insist once again on the freedom of large areas of human experience from the power of politics, whether benevolent or malign, than to acquiesce in the surly tyranny of the activist temper in its presently dominant forms. It is in this sense that we consider ourselves deradicalized."^[36]

This particular movement away from politics was conservative, as Podhoretz himself admitted. It warned against the unintended consequences of reform, and suggested not only that liberals should stop their activist programs but that since politics was not the correct arena in which to solve social problems, each person should be left to solve problems individually. The conservative implications of that outlook were obvious, since it was skeptical of organized social change.

In the following years his foreign policy views became the strident outlook of one who wanted to be assured that his country was making it successfully. He worried that American intellectuals cared only about making the world safe for communism. He fretted about a "final collapse of an American resolve to resist the forward surge of Soviet imperialism" which would produce "the Finlandization of America."^[37] Podhoretz, by the 1970s, had become the Sidney Hook of the third generation, a Johnny-one-note who lacked Hook's intellectual power.

Increasingly Commentary and Podhoretz reversed their earlier opposition to the Vietnam War, and reinterpreted it as a brave and necessary defense against international Communism, a war that was undermined by the weak and self-hating critics of America. Podhoretz worked himself into an anti-Communist passion. Even The God That Failed —the book that had initiated the young Podhoretz into the New York group's anti-Communism—now seemed weak and tepid broth. Though it might have been sufficient for its period, Podhoretz now advised that "the kind of anti-Communism legitimized in The God That Failed was shot through with too many reservations and qualifications to stand firm against the pressures of the years ahead."^[38] Sterner stuff would be needed, and Podhoretz would provide it.

If Podhoretz had merely promoted his neoconservative opinions he would not have been so provocative to the rest of the intellectual community. As it was, he infuriated those who disagreed with him by rewriting history through a strongly neoconservative filter. He not only recast the Vietnam War as a noble and necessary affair, and admonished The God That Failed for its weak anti-Communism, but also tried to resuscitate George Orwell as an eighties neoconservative. "Normally to speculate on what a dead man might have said about events he never lived to see is a frivolous enterprise," Podhoretz admitted. Nonetheless he pressed to his conclusion that had Orwell survived into the 1980s he would have opposed the nuclear freeze and the no-first-use pledge, would have rejected the possibility of a verifiable disarmament agreement with the Soviets, and would have turned his back on democratic socialism. Podhoretz was convinced that "if Orwell were alive today, he would be taking his stand with the neoconservatives and against the Left." A subsequent storm of protest and ridicule from the left did not faze him.^[39]

Part of Podhoretz's move to the right was brought about by his position of leadership in the American Jewish community. Although he had always been antagonistic to cultural radicalism, his shift to political conservatism coincided with the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. Podhoretz had always been concerned with making it himself, but after the Six-Day War he tied his own success more closely to that of Jews in America and Israel.

By the early 1970s he had already decided that "publications of the ideological Right" were less anti-Semitic than "publications of the Left like the Village Voice ," which apologized for anti-Semitism. Although he denied suggesting that Jews "join the ideological Right," he did propose that "Jews should recognize the ideology of the radical Left for what it is: an enemy of liberal values and a threat to the Jewish position." And although he was fighting the left "in the name of liberal values, not in the name of Judaism," he was "fighting the fight for Jewish security in America as well."^[40]

Even his distaste for McGovern and the New Politics was interwoven with his concern for his own success and for the Jewish position in society. McGovern and the New Politics, in Podhoretz's opinion, were an extension of that countercultural hostility to middle-class values, and Podhoretz discovered that, like him, the Jewish community saw "in that antagonism not only a denigration of them, of their achievements and their aspirations, but a threat to their future position."^[41] One insult he would not accept against himself or Jews was a threat to their achievement, aspiration, or future position. In America the right to make it, however one defined that, was a right he valued dearly.

Robert Brustein had not been the only observer to remark on Podhoretz's will to succeed; reviews of Making It had made sure of that. Yet, well into the 1980s those observations were still being posted. Christopher Hitchens of The Nation referred to him as the "sort of well-heeled power worshiper who passes for an intellectual these days."^[42] Conor Cruise O'Brien also discovered that impulse in him. Podhoretz only admired those who had succeeded in throwing their weight around, O'Brien suggested, and if Henry Kissinger had not made it among the powerful then his memoirs of those years would not have achieved literary greatness in Podhoretz's estimation.

Neoconservatives like Podhoretz wanted to get close to power, according to O'Brien, but as zealots and ideologues they would never be employed by those in power, because they were not flexible enough. Neither would Podhoretz be an important American writer who would be long remembered, O'Brien predicted, because he wrote too quickly, urgently, and politically, as though he had a bus to catch—the bus of political power. Since his essays would be forgotten, Podhoretz would make it neither as a writer nor as a politician. Therefore, referring to Podhoretz's book The Bloody Crossroads: Where Literature and Politics Meet , O'Brien declared that the Commentary editor "is not so much an authority on 'the bloody crossroads' as another of the romantic and power-infatuated victims with whom that crossroads is bestrewn."^[43]

Three of Podhoretz's characteristics are particularly prominent. First,

he was ambitious, so he wanted everything he was associated with to be dominant: American power, middle-class values, the American Jewish community Israel, and neoconservatism. Second, after Israel's 1967 war he came to feel a justifiable concern for the welfare of Israel and for American Jews. After all, he was editor of the most prominent American Jewish publication. Those concerns increased his desire to see American power not only be strong enough to protect its interests but be dominant.

Third, Commentary has been the central publication of the affirmers in the New York group, and like many other affirmers Podhoretz did not make precise distinctions between justifiable and unjustifiable criticisms of America. He did not distinguish between criticism of American culture and anti-Americanism, between Jewish criticism of Zionism and Jewish self-hatred, between criticism of American domestic inequalities and an abhorrence of all American institutions.

The antagonisms fostered by the New York group's polemical style and outlook sometimes created a kind of holy warrior mentality. Podhoretz and Hook are the clearest examples of writers so intent on their struggle against absolutism, holism, and extremism in the world that they tended to overlook those tendencies in their own work.

The Proper Order of the Intellectual Community

The rise of the New Left and the campus disorders in the 1960s compelled members of the New York group once again to argue their definition of what constituted acceptable limits of speech and action within the intellectual community. The student uprisings struck at the heart of the group's value system, since the university was nearly a sacred institution to them. Even more than their small magazines, the university was an institution that protected open inquiry and the free dissemination of ideas. It was a microcosm of the group's ideal state: open, free, stable, independent, inquiring, diverse, and a repository for high culture. As the group looked to America to defend the world against the Soviet Union, so they looked to the university to defend America against the more dangerously irrational elements in domestic culture and politics.

As in their former campaigns, the conflict with the students created disagreement among the New York intellectuals about how strongly to fight their opponents, and by what means. Members of the group needed to decide whether the police should be called, or if intellectuals should control their own house instead. They had to determine where authority should reside in the university community. If democracy and majority rule were good enough for Sidney Hook in all other aspects of American

society and culture, for example, was it acceptable in the university? If so, how would a professor run a class or a department? The group had to decide whether there should be a hierarchy of authority in the university, which suggested that some groups had different interests, or if instead there existed a common interest among all groups. Further, what rights did the forces of free scholarly inquiry and a neutralist disengagement have—as opposed to student demands for political advocacy from the faculty and administration? Was advocacy dangerous to the intellectual community as a whole, or just to teachers?

Most of the New York intellectuals were interested in the first stirrings of the political New Left, particularly since American campuses had not seen any significant student radicalism in several decades.^[44] The dissenters followed the new developments most closely—as Howe, Coser, and others around Dissent had hopefully monitored the failing pulse of the American left throughout the 1950s. Yet even many affirmers in the group became engaged with the young radicals at the beginning.

In 1962 Commentary was sent a copy of the Port Huron Statement, the opening manifesto of the New Left, but Podhoretz declined to publish it. The manifesto asked that "the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life" and that "society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation." But the document, drafted by Tom Hayden, went beyond issues of individual participation in political and economic processes and crossed into a transcendental rhetoric about human possibility that was reminiscent of the Beats—thereby tying the young political movement to the cultural radicalism that had preceded it. The charter announced the young radicals' belief that "men have unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity," and urged individuals to find "a meaning in life that is personally authentic." Work, the young radicals thought, "should involve incentives worthier than money or survival."^[45]

Podhoretz later regretted his decision not to publish the document. He reflected that since it "almost immediately achieved the status of a historic document, the decision I made against running it, at least in a shortened version, might easily be considered the worst judgment of my entire editorial career. . . . Nevertheless, historic or not, the Port Huron Statement simply was not on its intellectual merits worth publishing." Although he rejected the manifesto because he considered it cliched and derivative, he and others in the Commentary circle were not hostile to its message. Fellow affirmer Nathan Glazer later even called the declaration "a model of humanistic radicalism."^[46]

Dissent took a more active interest in the early New Left. In the spring issue of 1962 the editors published a long symposium, "The Young Radicals," consisting of statements by young leftists. Later that same year the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) paid a visit to the Dissent offices. Both undertakings produced signs of the disagreements and antagonisms that would hinder relations between the two groups throughout the next decade.

Michael Walzer, a former student of Howe's at Brandeis and a young writer already associated with Dissent , led "The Young Radicals" symposium. He asked his fellow contributors what made them radicals and how they were different from the older generation of leftists. They produced no unified answer, although most of them were softer on the Cold War than the Old Left and some were more "existential." Staughton Lynd, for example, rejected the term socialism as meaningless to young radicals, and wanted "a new atmosphere in human relationships, a new creativity in daily life." Although he thought long-term goals and strategies were "fatal defects," he also wanted to avoid an "intellectual shallowness." He felt some kinship with Third World revolutions, a position for which the New York group had little sympathy.^[47]

As Dissent 's designated representative of the Old Left, Lewis Coser responded with some apprehension. He worried that there was no longer a sense of continuity on the left among the young, that there was too little concern for democracy and for analytical criticism and too much interest in romantic Third World revolutions. The new radicalism was too "visceral," the same complaint the New York group had lodged against the Beats.^[48]

When later that year SDS visited the Dissent offices for a talk, it did not go well. In attendance for the magazine were Irving Howe, Michael Harrington, Murray Hausknecht, Bernard Rosenberg, Stanley Plastrik, and Emanuel Geltman. Among the visitors were Tom Hayden, Todd Gitlin, and Carl Oglesby. During the discussion Howe objected to SDS's use of the term participatory democracy because it seemed to undermine the value of representative democracy and was reminiscent of the Stalinists' rejection of "mere" bourgeois democracy.

There was also an unmistakable generational conflict at the meeting, and Howe later admitted that the Dissent editors "mishandled the meeting badly. Unable to contain our impatience with SDS susceptibility to chauvinistic dictators like Castro, several Dissent people, I among them, went off on long windy speeches." But the fault was not all Howe's; he found Hayden "rigid" and "fanatical," a nascent "commissar."^[49] Hausknecht got the impression that the young radicals regarded the magazine's

editors as people who had nothing to say to them, as old fogies from the archives of the Old Left. That, according to him, was traumatic for the dissenters. Hausknecht found their talk of participatory democracy and the other ideas in the Port Huron Statement partly appealing, partly empty rhetoric.^[50]

Two years later a series of campus disorders across the nation directly set the young radicals against the New York group, most of whom were defending their cherished institution, the university as faculty members. The first clash was at Berkeley in 1964. Among the prominent New York intellectuals on the faculty at the time were Nathan Glazer, Seymour Martin Lipset, Philip Selznick, and Lewis Feuer. Sides were drawn, with Glazer, Lipset, and Feuer critical of the New Left, and Selznick more sympathetic to the young radicals.^[51] What Glazer wrote soon after a tense Academic Senate meeting could have been said about the Berkeley experience as a whole for the New York group: "Afterward men who had been friends for years but had taken opposite sides approached each other with hesitation, and felt it necessary to reaffirm their friendship, so deeply had their emotions become involved."^[52]

Four years later, in April 1968, the protests struck closer to home when students occupied Columbia University. Daniel Bell, Richard Hofstadter, Lionel Trilling, and F. W. Dupee were faculty members, and many others in the group resided in Manhattan or within commuting distance. The original issue was student opposition to the presence of the Institute of Defense Analysis (IDA) on campus. Columbia was affiliated with the IDA, as were such leading universities as Berkeley Chicago, Stanford, and Princeton. Under student pressure Columbia cut its ties with the IDA, although Grayson Kirk, Columbia's president, remained a member of the IDA board of directors.

Although the students demanded that Kirk resign, the IDA issue did not sufficiently provoke the student ranks, so SDS leaders added to the fire the issue of the controversial new gym that was to be built in Morningside Park. Despite a neighborhood poll of Harlem to the contrary, the student leaders claimed that the gym was an infringement on Harlem and excluded its residents.^[53]

On Tuesday, April 23, demonstrators gathered at the sundial at the center of campus at noon. They pushed their way up the stairs to Low Library, the main administration building, where they hoped to confront President Kirk. The crowd was turned back by counter-demonstrators. Led by SDS president Mark Rudd, a Columbia student, the demonstrators then marched to the gym site, tore down a fence, held a brief rally, and finally returned to campus. They then decided to occupy Hamilton Hall,

the building where the undergraduate college administration and some faculty offices were housed.

Richard Hofstadter was leaving campus when he saw the demonstrators returning from the gym to the sundial. He followed the marchers into Hamilton Hall, as "it seemed to me to have the makings of another sit-in." Hofstadter went to his office in Hamilton as the students gathered on the main floor When he left around three-thirty in the afternoon he did not think the students would take over the building.^[54] They did.

That first night of occupation, Lionel Trilling, a member of the Executive Committee of the Faculty, attended emergency meetings on campus. Diana Trilling stayed at home waiting for him, "playing Canfield, an unopened book on my lap, the unceasing campus radio at my side, straining for the unfamiliar sound on the street beneath my shaded windows, the tramp or rush or scuffle of invasion."^[55]

The next morning, Wednesday, a few of the faculty met in Philosophy Hall and formed an ad hoc committee to mediate between the students and the administration. Daniel Bell had been out of town when the seizure of Hamilton Hall occurred, but when he returned on Saturday he joined the steering committee of the faculty ad hoc committee.^[56]

Hofstadter occasionally attended the faculty committee's meetings, although he never spoke. He considered himself "one of the more conservative members" of the committee. "I generally tended to go there only when one of my friends called up and felt an important issue was coming to the floor, and when it was suggested people of my tendency, so to speak, were needed, because senior faculty were drifting out of the committee and it tended to become . . . relatively heavily weighted towards marginal and junior faculty. A lot of us were concerned about its non-representative character."

As the week wore on, Hofstadter thought the committee felt within itself "an increasing spirit of animosity, an increasing factionalism between right and left."^[57] One of the main points of contention was whether or not to call in the police to remove the students from Hamilton Hall. Bell and many others on the committee thought that if police were called in, the student body would be "radicalized" and the SDS would have gained a victory. Some of the students, Bell thought, might be persuaded through negotiation to leave Hamilton Hall.^[58] Bell was never sympathetic to the New Left's program or tactics, and the difference between him and others like Hook, Hofstadter, and Diana Trilling was not in softness toward the aims of the young radicals. Instead, while opposing the student movement, Bell thought that the young should not be clubbed by police called by the faculty. The university should run itself, maintain a model

of cool rationality for the young to observe and follow, and attempt peace through discourse and negotiation. Proper tactics, he thought, were equally important for both faculty and students to observe.

Hofstadter reported that, unlike Bell, he "did not sign a faculty pledge which was circulated at that time . . . not to teach if police were brought to evacuate students from buildings." He was discouraged that the faculty, "toward the end of the week, were beginning to forget that force had been introduced on the campus by the seizure of the buildings by the students, and were thinking only of the force that might come if the police came."^[59]

Bell and others on the ad hoc committee, Hofstadter remembered, "even at the end felt that not all the possibilities of negotiation had been exhausted at the time the police were called, and I suppose that a lot of people in the faculty would have strung the situation out further." But Hofstadter had lost his patience. Nor did Diana Trilling have Bell's patience for negotiation with the students. She applauded the administration when it "bypassed the faculty in calling the police because it believed—rightly, I think—that the faculty was making matters worse by delaying the police confrontation."^[60]

Sidney Hook also disagreed with Bell's stance, and even years later maintained that his friend lacked a fighting spirit. Hook argued that Bell's "dissident faculty group" had "encouraged student intransigence by seeking to mediate between the rampaging students and their victims." That Bell believed "under no circumstances should the police be called to keep the peace on the campus" was for Hook "the acme of foolishness, an invitation to student storm troopers of any ideology to run riot." At times, Hook advised, "even a pacific-minded right-wing Social Democrat should call the police."^[61]

Hook posed the issue as one of intellectual appeasement: whether or not intellectuals would protect the territory of free thought. If a university official, Hook concluded, "is willing to permit himself to be manhandled by students and publicly humiliated when he capitulates to their lawlessness . . . he has been guilty of intellectual treason."^[62] Bell saw it differently. One could not simply assert authority in a community and thereby regain it; one had to earn it by "going in and arguing" with the adversary in a "full debate," and then changing what needed to be changed. He felt that "repressive force is self-defeating. The Columbia administrators may have known about Berkeley and Wisconsin, but they did not show it."^[63]

Dwight Macdonald, however, was exhilarated by the Columbia uprising—for which he earned the disdain of the rest of the group. Friday, two days after Hamilton Hall had been seized, a giddy Macdonald headed to

Morningside Heights from his Upper East Side apartment, "egged on" by his wife and F. W. Dupee, the latter of whom had told Macdonald on the phone: "You must come up right away, Dwight. It's a revolution! You may never get another chance to see one."

Macdonald concluded that his friend Dupee was right. "I've never been in or even near a revolution before," Macdonald admitted breathlessly. "I guess I like them. There was an atmosphere of exhilaration, excitement—pleasant, friendly, almost joyous excitement. . . . Everybody was talking to everybody else those days, one sign of a revolution." While he was there he visited two of the student "communes" in occupied buildings and had a grand time.^[64]

The spectacle of an effervescent Dwight Macdonald enjoying himself on her campus in the midst of the insulting students was too much for Diana Trilling to take. "The militant Harlem leaders," she wrote with disgust, "had at least a demonstrable political motive based in the genuine grievances of their race and class: could one say as much for the white tourists, for—say—Robert Lowell, Dwight Macdonald, Paul Goodman?" Bell was sympathetic to her revulsion, and wrote with disapproval of the many "members of the New York literary 'establishment,' who were ecstatic at having a real revolution on their doorstep. Norman Mailer threw a large fund-raising party. Dwight Macdonald wrote a 'begging' letter to his friends for money in support of SDS."^[65]

Even those New York intellectuals whose campuses did not burst into revolt were antagonistic to the young radicals. Irving Howe, because he was so combative, polemical, and concerned about the condition of the left, found relations especially difficult to maintain. Howe acknowledged that in the 1960s "the 'kids', as the phrase goes, 'got to me.'" He wished later that he had not been "so emotionally entangled in disputes with the New Left," and that he had not "overreacted, becoming at times harsh and strident." Even his fellow dissenters mentioned his demeanor. "Friends began to hint in the kindliest way that I was becoming a little punch-drunk. . . . Couldn't I make my criticisms more temperate?"^[66]

David Riesman spent the year at the Center for Behavioral Studies at Stanford in 1968–69, and both Irving Howe and Lewis Coser were there. Riesman recalled that some people at the Center would go to the campus to watch the students confront the police. Howe was one of them. "Irving Howe never went out to lunch with us once, because he was always going down to argue with the bad students," Riesman reported. "He loved that forensic. Coser was much more reserved."^[67]

Howe offered a similar story. Each day while he was at the Center he drove to the Stanford campus to lunch with his wife. "One day a group

of SDS students led by a fellow named Cohen forms a semi-circle behind us, chanting hostile slogans. They mean to carry the battle against decadent liberalism to the heart of the enemy. This continues day after day. Go elsewhere for lunch? My pride won't allow it." One noon an angry Howe spins to the group following him and shouts at Cohen, "You're going to end up as a dentist !" Howe was relieved. "Cohen blanches—the insult is simply too dreadful—and I march off in miniature triumph."^[68]

It was not only what Howe said but also what he wrote that disturbed some of his associates. "When 'New Styles in "Leftism"' first appeared," he remembered painfully, "I was the happy recipient of a considerable amount of advice about the inappropriateness of my tone." But, he wondered, "what is the use in telling people who feel strongly about an intellectual matter that they should keep their voices low and sweet?" His defense was that he had come from a polemical tradition that cared more about the pursuit of truth than the pursuit of manners and gentility. The best of the New Left, he assumed, would respond well to serious criticism and prefer "an exchange of ideas" to flattery.^[69]

Several of the New York intellectuals believed that the university community as a whole—both students and faculty—had a common interest, and that the university would be gravely threatened if that common interest became divided. Hook thought that a university constituted a "family," albeit with differences of status, function, and authority, "where mother, father, older and younger children accept different tasks and responsibilities." This authority was not based on anything so primitive as "the rule of the majority, but on knowledge," and intellectuals who had earned the right to authority therefore exercised that power. Intellectuals could not rule the university by a show of hands, since democracy did not mean that all minds were equally qualified. "Of course the faculty is not infallible," he concluded, "but because no one is infallible, it does not mean that all are equally qualified to decide."^[70] Hook's commitment to democracy did not extend into the area which intellectuals inhabited. It could work outside their camp, in issues of the political and cultural self-determination of the general population, but not inside the university. Within, standards had to prevail or any meaningful sense of intellectualism would be lost.

Bell also worried about the New Left dividing the university. The students were wrong to portray the university as the enemy, he wrote, since in the 1960s the universities had been the source of antiwar pressures on society and had staged teach-ins. Similarly, the university should not treat students as antagonists, and it should deal with disruptions "not by invoking civil force but by rallying an entire community to establish com-

mon rules of common procedure." The university ruled by moral rather than civil authority, Bell thought, which was why he disagreed with Hook on proper tactics. "If the university is a community, asking for special loyalty from its members, how," Bell inquired, "can it sanction the clubbing of its students?" He agreed with Hook, though, that the university community must respect a proper hierarchy based on a "definition of areas of rights and powers and responsibilities appropriate to the division of function and place in the university itself."^[71]

Glazer wondered whether there was to be no commonly agreed-upon set of rules. "What of the faculty? What of the students?" he asked. "Are all incapable of determining what is proper on a university campus?" Would various sections of the campus be self-ruled? Would each individual be autonomous? Was there no common ground for the organized intellectual community? "Constitutions can be changed," he acknowledged. "But should the constitution of a university include a grant of immunity to any and all forms of action that go by the name of politics?"^[72] If not, who would decide what was permissible?

Further, the group felt that one of the most dangerous problems with the New Left's activism on campus was that free scholarship would be threatened by the requirements of political commitment. Even for the New York intellectuals, who mixed political commitments with their scholarship, the New Left transgressed the boundaries of what was acceptable in this regard.

The New York group was not proposing that intellectuals withdraw from society, only that they not be required to perform their analyses for a specific political purpose. They recognized that the difference between an intellectual and a scholar was that an intellectual had a wide curiosity and engagement with the contemporary world and with other disciplines, and that a scholar withdrew to neutral detachment and archival studies. They were among the most enthusiastic supporters of the general intellectual ideal, and were by no means suggesting to their New Left antagonists that those in the university community should withdraw from contemporary concerns. Still, the group did not want the scholarly role sacrificed entirely to intellectual activism.

Far from counseling withdrawal from the political and social world, Irving Howe pointed out that although universities were stocked with "scholars who live in the past and know far more about it than most intellectuals," the real "struggle for the idea of the past can be conducted with some hope of success only by those intimately related to the crises of the present: which by definition, so to say, the intellectual is and the scholar, insofar as he remains simply a scholar, is not." Paradoxically, "it

is the intellectual who is particularly obligated and in the best position to teach the young the beauty of scholarship."^[73] The ideal, as the group saw it, was to have both an engagement with the contemporary world and the freedom from having that engagement place any political or social requirements on their analysis.

Seymour Martin Lipset summarized their case. The political activist, he observed, is expected to be an advocate, "a lawyer, whose obligation is to make the best case possible for his client." Like a lawyer, an activist could be selective with evidence, not presenting contradictory or damaging facts, not addressing all points of view. But scholarship, he reminded the intellectual community, "emphasizes the opposite characteristics."^[74] Therefore the roles of scholar and activist undercut each other and could not be pursued simultaneously. The political guidelines imposed by New Left activism reminded the group of requirements demanded of intellectuals by the Communists in previous decades.

The New York group's emphasis on intellectualism against the New Left's ideological activism illustrated aspects of continuity and change in the group's concerns. The members' anti-ideological stand echoed their earlier rejection of party-line requirements in the 1930s and 1940s. But the group also had evolved in thirty years—from political intellectuals and ideological activists at small magazines, to respected scholars at major universities who were increasingly concerned about preserving the proper function and prerogatives of the university and the scholarly role. That proper function, in their opinion, demanded an open and free university without specific political commitments, and an independent and secure scholarly role. Bell was a good example of one who had evolved in this period from a journalistic intellectual to a recognized major scholar.

Daniel Bell

Daniel Bell frequently has been portrayed as a principal contributor in the 1950s and 1960s to the conservatism that manifested itself in the end-of-ideology movement and related impulses, and throughout the 1970s and 1980s he was thought of as a neoconservative. Yet his complex style of thought cannot be so easily categorized, and his independence set him apart from his neoconservative friends. While Norman Podhoretz began as a political moderate and then wobbled to the left and right during the course of the 1960s, Bell's social democratic politics changed very little.

Bell was born Daniel Bolotsky on May 10, 1919, in New York, and he grew up on the Lower East Side. His father died when he was six months old, and his mother worked in a factory. The young Bell spent a large

portion of his time in a "day orphanage" because his mother worked into the evenings. "So I had what is today called a deprived, disadvantaged, broken-home background," he explained. "I have an impeccable social origin, as they say, when the revolution comes."^[75]

He "came to political awareness in the Depression," Bell remembered, "and joined the Young People's Socialist League in 1932, at the precocious age of thirteen." Within a year he began to be more sympathetic to the Communists because they seemed to be the only alternative to the rising fascism in Europe. But several of his mother's cousins were anarchists who, alarmed at the youngster's tilt toward Communism, gave him pamphlets on the Bolsheviks and the Kronstadt rebellion. Every generation has its Kronstadt, Bell later remarked. "My Kronstadt was Kronstadt." The pamphlets convinced him, and from that point forward he was aggressively anti-Communist. "I moved to the right wing of the socialist party."^[76]

The right wing of the socialist party was where his friends found him in the lunchroom debates at City College in the mid-1930s. He had been a member of the Socialist party in 1936, but when the Social Democratic Federation split off from it that year, he went with them. So Bell, beginning in the 1930s, was a social democrat, a more conservative socialist than many of the other young New York intellectuals.

Bell entered City College in 1935, and after three years entered Columbia Law School. Following his first semester he switched from law to sociology. Then after studying sociology for a year and a half full-time, he began work at the New Leader in the summer of 1940. As Nathan Glazer pointed out, Bell fit in well at this journalistic forum for social democrats. It was there Bell met Sidney Hook, the social democrat who would be so close to him. After a little more than a year, at the age of twenty-two, Bell became managing editor. During this period he wrote many of the paper's articles "using four or five different names"—including John Donne (before Hemingway used the name) and Andrew Marvell.^[77] His early journalism addressed political parties and strategies, Marxist or leftist factional arguments, and economic conditions, but, as a generalist, he also wrote reviews of dance, fiction, and international affairs.^[78]

During the early 1940s, as he tried to find new writers for the paper, Bell read a piece by C. Wright Mills in the American Sociological Review . He wrote and asked Mills to contribute to the New Leader , and the two became good friends. In turn Mills introduced him to Richard Hofstadter in 1942 or 1943.^[79]

In 1945 Bell was brought to teach at the University of Chicago by

Maynard Krueger, an economist. "Chicago was to me a great revelation because I got an education there for the first time," he remembered. "I really didn't have an education before that. I had a patchy education, in the sense that I knew a lot from study groups, but it was a floating, undigested mass." Edward Shils had assembled the social science staff, and Bell worked with Shils, Milton Singer, David Riesman, and Barrington Moore, among others. Philip Rieff was a graduate student and a member of a small group to which Bell served as faculty advisor. All of those he worked with seemed to be bright and in their late twenties. "During the war Shils had been active in the area of psychological warfare, and a lot of these people had worked for him. Shils brought some of them back to Chicago, and he was very eager to find the best young people around."^[80]

Like fellow sociologists Coser, Mills, Riesman, and Glazer, Bell closely followed Macdonald's Politics . While he was in Chicago, however, he went through a period of strained relations with Macdonald. In November 1946, Macdonald sent Bell a harsh letter explaining why he had been unfriendly to Bell on the phone: Bell had not been writing for Politics , had failed to answer letters, and his correspondence had none of the friendly intellectual give-and-take Macdonald expected. Instead, as Macdonald explained to him, his letters were "nothing but a lengthy and detailed account of your own little academic busynesses . . . full of complacency and self-satisfaction. . . . Just a smug retailing of your doubtless highpowered activities, in few of which I could take much interest." Because Bell found the academic atmosphere at Chicago so cozy, Macdonald felt "there's not much in common between us any longer." Bell's "greatest weakness" was "careerism," according to Macdonald, and he wrote Bell that "a streak of careerism which has always bothered me about you has widened a lot."^[81]

Part of the reason for the hurt feelings was that Bell and Macdonald were traveling different roads. Under the academic influence of teaching, Bell was beginning to approach ideas more as a scholar. Bell was becoming less like Macdonald, who could be giddy and flamboyant about his intellectual journalism, a person who, as Bell once pointed out, had a "habit of wearing the loud pink-and-black striped shirts" of the less restrained.^[82] Later, Bell felt that "when I went to Chicago and began contributing to Commentary , Dwight became cross with me. After all, Commentary was paying for articles—careerism?"^[83]

Although he continued as a columnist into the 1950s, by the late 1940s Bell began to drift away from the New Leader , because he remained more interested in socialist politics than the paper was. Macdonald, however, felt sure that Bell broke with the magazine over the stridency of its Cold

War rhetoric. "Good for you to break with the New Leader ," he wrote Bell, "(especially as it was such a personal wrench) over their war-drums beating." He told Bell that "the neurotic intensity with which those circles pursue a hate-Russia policy is making it easier for the black-rightists to push this country still faster toward something damned unpleasant—as in the red purge now projected in govt offices."^[84]

After leaving Chicago, Bell returned to New York. For ten years, beginning in 1948, he was labor editor at Fortune magazine. He also began teaching in 1952 "as an adjunct lecturer" in General Studies at Columbia. An interdisciplinary faculty seminar on McCarthyism that he taught there with Hofstadter and Seymour Martin Lipset in 1954 yielded The New American Right (1955)—a collection of essays on McCarthyism, populism, and the New Right, edited by Bell. The seminar also inspired Hofstadter's interest in the use of sociological perspectives in writing history, which was a perspective prominent in much of his work after that point.^[85]

Bell worked for the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Paris in 1956–57, and when he left he decided not to return to Fortune . He was asked whether he wanted to edit Commentary but said no. A year later he took "a 50% salary cut to go back to Columbia." C. Wright Mills was not happy about Bell returning to the Columbia sociology department, and went to the Dean of the College about it. "At that point," according to Bell, "Dick [Hofstadter] turned against Mills and told him that he would support me, against Mills, and Dick's support, along with that of Lionel Trilling, was decisive." Bell was awarded his doctorate in sociology from Columbia in 1960, and he taught at Columbia for ten years before moving to Harvard.^[86]

It is evident that Bell's interests and outlook changed from the 1940s and early 1950s, when he was at the New Leader and Fortune , to the late 1950s and beyond, when he taught full-time at Columbia and Harvard. In the 1940s he had labored on a "tired" Marxist book called The Monopoly State , which he later jettisoned. At that early point in his career he wrote shorter, more political articles, and was more politically engaged. After the late 1950s, while teaching, he found his interests naturally became "more scholarly, reflective, and academic," and the length of his essays increased tenfold.^[87]

Like Sidney Hook, Bell could be sharply contentious with those he thought wrongheaded, but, more than Hook, Bell was also a reconciler. Hook, for example, thought that Bell had been too easy on his adversaries in the 1950s (over the issue of how the American Committee for Cultural Freedom would respond to McCarthyism) and 1960s (the students at Co-

lumbia). In an otherwise laudatory and affectionate account of Bell and others printed later, Hook told his readers that Bell had "no fighting heart." Hook thought that was demonstrated by Bell's willingness to compromise and mediate with radical students who used improper tactics. Asked about this later, Bell laughed and said that Hook was too much of a fighter, and did not always judiciously choose his battles or his timing—as Bell had warned him on occasion. Bell retorted that contrary to Hook's characterization, he thought of himself as a fighter, but a fighter for moderate positions. He was a "passionate centrist." He had been the one in the ACCF, he maintained, who had told people that if they wanted to be effective they had to discard their sectarian vices.^[88]

Elliot Cohen and Hook had been the battlers in the ACCF, according to Bell, and he and Diana Trilling had been the menders, the centrists. The old joke around the group, Hook remembered mirthfully, was that if you were hungry and you had no place to eat you would attack Bell; to settle the argument and make up he would invite you to dinner. "Fighting, real fighting," Hook proclaimed proudly, "is when someone insults you and you kick them in the balls."^[89]

Neither Bell nor Hook was among the easiest people to get along with, but in Hook, who was another contentious social democrat, Bell found a friend and teacher. He acknowledged the debt. "In a personal and intellectual sense, I owe most . . . to Sidney Hook, who taught me the appreciation of ideas," Bell wrote in his dedication to The End of Ideology . "While never, formally his student, I learned from him in the more valuable ways of working together in common enterprises and in the informal, albeit argumentative, exchange of ideas."

Rather than relating as editor to contributor, or professor to student, Hook and Bell harmonized as older and younger colleagues in such undertakings as the ACCF, and in their writing they defended similar critical values. "I share most of his intellectual concerns while disagreeing with some of his passions," Bell noted, "but above all I admire his courage, personal and intellectual, which is expressed in his refusal to shirk a fight, however unpopular the cause, or to abandon a friend. He is, as all who have heard him know, one of the great teachers of the generation."^[90]

Further, Bell noted that "Sidney was quite realistically a father to me. I had grown up without a father and for a period of time, Sol Levitas and Sidney were, quite openly fathers to me. But as in Jewish families, one argued a lot with them." He was closest to Hook in the 1950s. In the early 1960s they began to drift apart for more than a decade. "In part, Sidney was dismayed by my turn back to religion and Judaism and the evident sense that I had rejected his and Dewey's naturalism in favor of a Nie-

buhrian neo-Augustinianism and an Old Testament view of human nature. In part, because I thought Sidney had become, paradoxically for the labels, too conservative."^[91]

One of the more intellectually curious of the New York group, Bell's interests have been diverse. In college he was influenced by John Dewey and by Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia , and when he taught at Columbia he was affected by the members of the Frankfurt School who were in residence at the Institute for Social Research at Columbia—especially Franz Neumann and Leo Lowenthal (and less so Max Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno, the latter of whom Bell thought "pretentious and somewhat of a fraud"). But over the course of his career the greatest written influence was Max Weber, from whom he understood the relationship of politics to society.^[92]

Bell and other sociologists in the group were often accused by members of the New Left of being Parsonian structural functionalists who emphasized a consensus view of society in their sociology. But the Parsonian scheme was too formalized around a system of shared values for those in the Partisan circle to accept it. Rather, most of them subscribed to some form of conflict theory or to a view that sociology is attached to history and institutions and evolves with them. A set holistic theory like structural functionalism was as inadequate as a set ideology; neither allowed the dynamic flexibility essential to intellectual analysis.^[93]

Of course, members of the New York group were not opposed to interrelatedness, but to "total" systems. After all, one of their signal contributions was to keep alive, in the age of specialization, an intellectual generalism from their Marxist pasts that promoted an interdisciplinary mixing of culture, politics, social science, journalism, and activism. But total and absolute systems—whether ideological utopianism, final solutions, or rigid sociological structures—were unacceptable to them.

Still, Bell and some of his fellow sociologists were criticized by the more radical members of the younger generation for emphasizing consensus instead of division in society. Basing their assumptions on European neo-Marxists such as Antonio Gramsci and Raymond Williams, many of these younger social critics described a society as a field for asymmetrical power relations in which hegemonic groups subtly oppressed subordinate groups; these inequalities were compounded and unconsciously reinforced by language itself.^[94]

The consensus label was used primarily for a group of historians in the 1950s such as Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, Louis Hartz, and Allan Nevins, who emphasized the American population's agreement rather than disagreement over political and cultural goals. The label at least partly applied to Hofstadter's American Political Tradition (1948), as he later ad-

mitted, and his Age of Reform (1955). But both Hotstadter and Bell were descriptive rather than prescriptive consensus writers, in Hofstadter's terms. That is, rather than prescribing and celebrating an American pragmatic consensus, as Daniel Boorstin did in his Genius of American Politics (1953), Hofstadter and Bell described a condition of apparent middle-class dominance and stability but were still somewhat critical or skeptical of it.^[95]

Neither Bell nor Hofstadter included a radical vision in their "consensus" books, but those works were less conservative than some of their critics alleged. Indeed, Hofstadter argued that "the idea of consensus is not intrinsically linked to ideological conservatism," but shared as much with Marx as with Tocqueville. Marxist historians, after all, also noticed the middle-class liberal dominance of American society and therefore "a 'left' consensus interpretation" was also possible. "My own assertion of consensus history in 1948," Hofstadter reported, "had its sources in the Marxism of the 1930's."^[96] The same might be said of Bell's End of Ideology , which appeared in 1960.

The consensus view, whether prescriptive or descriptive, was part of the larger anti-ideological impulse of the period. Bell's provocatively titled End of Ideology , however, made him the target of critics of the anti-ideological outlook. The book was more complex than his critics acknowledged, and his title less celebratory or prescriptive than they assumed.

In publishing The End of Ideology , Bell had two agendas. First, in these essays, written over the course of the 1950s, he outlined the anti-absolutism that all the New York intellectuals shared—both affirmers and dissenters. The book argued against a crusading moral absolutism that promoted an all-or-nothing intemperate set of political demands. Instead, Bell made a case for tentative and empirical thinking that allowed for modest compromise instead of total conflict.

Bell's second agenda was to show that between the 1930s and the 1950s America had become a more pluralistic, diverse, and open society, with less economic oppression, class immobility, and civil rights abuses. In order for the affirmers to justify no longer dissenting as strongly from American culture and society as they had in the 1930s, America had to be recast as an example worthy of affirmation in the postwar period. Bell, who associated more with the affirmers than with the dissenters, described this change in American conditions in his book. The documentation of this change continued into the 1980s in the work of most of the neoconservatives—Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Norman Podhoretz, Hilton Kramer, Kenneth Lynn, and contributors to Commentary and the New Criterion .

Still, Bell's End of Ideology was not an uncritical celebration of Amer-

ica. It is true that he argued that America in the 1950s was no longer stratified by immovable classes, that there was no real ruling class, that mass society was still varied and diverse, that there was social mobility, that crime had actually declined, and that the socialist ideas and the socialist example were exhausted in America. Yet he also argued for greater social justice, criticized capitalism for its irresponsible worship of efficiency that resulted in worker alienation and dissatisfaction, and proposed responsible liberal reform on a nonideological basis.

A nonideological reformism, Bell thought, should strive toward social justice through a pragmatic economic and governmental social policy aimed at achieving specific solutions to specific problems. It should reject the more ideologically sweeping proposals that assume a tragic flaw in American society that only a large-scale reorientation could fix definitively. Keynesian countercyclical economic policy and specific adjustments to the welfare state were more attractive to the increasingly pragmatic, experimental, and tentative reform outlook of the New York group.

The End of Ideology reflected the complexities and contradictions that were central to Bell's thought throughout his career. Increasingly after the 1950s he placed importance on religious values in society yet in his role as a secular intellectual he might be described as an agnostic and skeptic. Profoundly influenced by Kant and the intuition of the spirit, he seemed to contradict that as a social scientist whose rationalist empiricism on many issues resembled Hook's pragmatism. Although Bell constantly affirmed the importance of a strong commitment to moral values in society, he was one of the strongest opponents of moral absolutism. Closer to the affirmers, he still wrote occasionally for Dissent . Bell was a thinker who was committed to his view of the intellectual function, an open society, and free politics, but who was skeptical and moderate enough that rarely was he hotly committed to causes. Thus his outlook split on many planes, and contained many apparent contradictions.

Paradox was so central to Bell's thought that some observers have suggested that all of his later work was formed by the contradictions he faced in the 1930s and 1940s. According to one account, the young Bell's desire for socialism in the West even as he saw that planned capitalism was more likely to prevail forced him "to pursue socialist ends through the instrumentalities of the capitalist state." By another account, Bell struggled to reconcile "certain parochial identities such as Hebraism with the universal aspirations embodied in Hellenism" and to face the "contradictions and tensions that emerge when one seeks to temper the radical idea with the conservative impulse."^[97] Precisely these sorts of tensions and uncertainties were laced through The End of Ideology .

Bell had opposed intellectual absolutism and holism at least since the disillusionment of Kronstadt. His opinions were reinforced by the stories of Communist oppression told by Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, and Manes Sperber, as well as by Max Weber's "Politics as a Vocation." Weber warned about the difficulty of combining a commitment to politics with an allegiance to intellectual freedom and ethics. One had to choose between the "ethic of responsibility" and the "ethic of ultimate ends," and Bell chose responsibility and the path of compromise over the zealous pursuit of ultimate ends. Like Weber, Bell "came to reject any ethical absolutisms."^[98]

Bell's realization that absolutisms produced Kronstadts made him "a lifelong Menshevik—the chooser, almost always, of the lesser evil." Further, the various Kronstadts produced by the mass politics of the mid-twentieth century prompted him "to fear the masses in politics and those who would whip up the passions of the mob 'in the name of the people' as was once done in the name of God." The ethic of responsibility, of compromise, the politics of civility (as with Shils), and the fear of the moral zealot were the concerns that Bell felt governed his intellectual life. Bell lived according to the advice of Max Weber: "He who seeks the salvation of the soul, of his own and of others, should not seek it along the avenue of politics."^[99]

Although he was deeply interested in issues of religion and salvation, most of Bell's writings were characterized by a search for realism. His work with Irving Kristol in 1965 to found the Public Interest was part of his search for practical solutions. Intended to combat ideological misinformation about social actions and consequences, the journal was devoted to the social scientific analysis of public policy problems. The Public Interest served as a forum for social analysis and the sociologists in the group, as Partisan Review had served as an outlet for mainly cultural ideas. Along with Commentary , the Public Interest quickly became recognized as the spiritual home for the social scientific neoconservatism increasingly associated with the New York intellectuals.

Like Trilling, Hook, Niebuhr, Glazer, and others, Bell valued complexity and ambiguity. He was against a "closed system," one governed by "totality" or "integration." His sociology, he reported, was "based on the methodological repudiation of a 'holistic' view of society, be it Marxist or Functionalist." In this respect, he joined Hook in the tradition of William James and John Dewey. Unlike Dewey however, Bell had a dark side that was skeptical of natural progress, that was more associated with the misgivings of Max Weber, and that showed itself in the occasionally pessimistic tone of the Public Interest .

His long-standing opposition to ideological rigidity began in the 1970s

to be framed in new terms. The solution to intellectual holism was to break the realms of social reality and social theory into a multiplicity of realms, as he proposed in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973) and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976). "Against these holistic views," Bell instructed his readers, "I have argued that society is better understood as being composed of diverse realms, each obedient to a different 'axial' principle."^[100] The realm of the economy is guided by efficiency, the polity is ruled by the principle of equality, and the culture is dominated by self-realization or self-gratification. Since they are "contrary" principles, society has been in a constant state of tension with its beliefs. In Bell's opinion, this accounted for much of the previous century's cultural and intellectual history.^[101] His proposal to fracture social thought into various axial principles reflected his dissatisfaction with simplicity and his hesitation to put too much trust in any one area of explanation.

Bell led the way, in the dissolution of unified ideological fields, by announcing that he was "a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture." He was a socialist, he reported, because he believed in a "social minimum," and he believed that the community rather than the individual should be the first priority of economic policy. But because he believed that the individual rather than the group should be the primary actor in society, he considered himself a liberal in politics. Bell also endorsed the liberal beliefs that consenting parties should decide their actions, and that the public and private spheres should remain independent of each other. Finally, he labeled himself a conservative in culture because he respected tradition, supported "reasoned judgments of good and bad about the qualities of a work of art," and defended "authority—in the form of scholarship, teaching, and skilled exegesis."^[102] In other words, he defended the authority of intellectuals.

It is unfortunate that Bell has been remembered primarily by the phrase "end of ideology." While there is a strong conservative component in his work, he has been a much more subtle political thinker than many of his critics concede. One of the few affirmers who also wrote for Dissent , he later quit his affiliation with the Public Interest because he thought that group was getting too conservative. In the mid-1980s he resigned from the board of Partisan Review because he disagreed with William Phillips's decision to use, as a centerpiece for a symposium, what Bell considered to be a tainted article by Michael Ledeen. On the fiftieth anniversary of Partisan Review he scolded the Committee for the Free World not only for their strident foreign policy views but for their gratuitous attacks on the writings of Michael Walzer and Irving Howe. Thus he spent the 1980s warning the neoconservatives about their excesses.^[103]

In many ways Bell served as an opposite to Norman Podhoretz within the group. While Podhoretz increasingly simplified his thought from the 1950s to the 1980s, finding a simpler and more identifiable evil, Bell went from being a partly ideological writer in the 1940s to a more scholarly and complicated thinker in the 1950s and after.^[104] Unlike Kristol, Podhoretz, or others who have moved from the left to the right of center, Bell has stayed relatively steady near the center. This situation has given rise to the illusion that he has actually moved back and forth across the middle as the intellectual community shifts around him. It has also prompted the idea in the 1970s and 1980s—when many in the group moved slightly to the right of center—that Bell may have moved slightly to the left. For example, around 1970 this illusion was created when Podhoretz crossed Bell's political path, moving from Bell's left to his right. Although less interested in socialist organizations than he once was, Bell remains in the 1980s the social democrat he has been for most of his life.

Defense Against the Counterculture

By the 1960s most of the New York intellectuals inhabited the liberal center or maintained a respectable democratic socialist dissent. They were former radicals who felt their fortress was being stormed and saw it as their duty to protect society. One reason they had abandoned their earlier radicalism was that their revolutions largely had been won. Stalinism had been discredited, anti-Semitism had declined, modernism had become mainstream, and America was becoming more internationalist in culture. Their country was a leader in protecting free thought—partly because of having followed their advice about the Cold War, or so they liked to think. By the 1960s they genuinely valued liberal politics and liberal society.

Even in its most radical days, though, the New York group had held to the paramount values of rationalism, pluralism, system, temperance, moderation, informed debate, analysis, civility pragmatism, and reason. So the group saw a threat to liberal society in the counterculture's sympathy for mysticism, irrationalism, ideology, nihilism, the adversary culture, romanticism, emotionalism, moralism, absolutism, and inflexibility. It was against these dangerous heresies that the group attempted to hold the line.

The young radicals' hostility toward authority was especially frightening. The New York intellectuals believed in authority—either from a particular class, an idea, or an institution—and they had supported respect for authority even in their most radical moments. Daniel Bell could sympathize in theory with an opposition to certain types of authority, but he considered a general opposition to authority to be a romantic vision

of a nihilistic generation. In his eyes the young radicals were "anti-institutional and even antinomian."^[105]

The student radicals dismissed these worries of the New York intellectuals as those of "a new conservatism rather than of liberalism." Singling out the Berkeley faculty members in particular, two graduate students there accused them of valuing "order" above "democratic goals." It was not a new accusation. Young scholars since the late 1950s had noticed the group's fear of the masses and their worry about the decline of authority.^[106]

Later, Bell thought his critics were right about himself and others in the group.^[107] As he put it in 1972, he realized that both Stalinism and the Holocaust had been "traumatic" experiences that had affected his generation. He and Richard Hofstadter, troubled by these events, had "long conversations" that revealed "what might be called a fear of mass action, a fear of the sort of thing that emerged to some extent in his whole interest in Populism. What happens when a mass gets out of hand and becomes a mob? And therefore there was a great suspicion and fear of mass action of a particular kind, and fear of those situations which in a sense tear down the very fragile bonds of society." He noted that Niebuhr, Arendt, Riesman, and many others in the group shared those fears.^[108] "And in this sense," Bell admitted, "we all became somewhat conservative."^[109]

Bell saw in Hofstadter and others that their "fear of mass action" was the same fear they would have "if anarchy were let loose, so to speak, in the world." At Columbia in 1968 that fear "came home, in a very direct immediate way." The student unrest, Bell felt, "in a sense fulfilled—confirmed all [Hofstadter's] worst forebodings."

Part of the origin of this fear of mass action was grounded in recent history. Jews of the New York group's generation had been victimized by mass uprisings in Europe, and the Soviet Union, and they had feared antiSemitism at home in Father Coughlin's following.^[110] Their generation, Bell noted, had "this fear in a sense of the nihilistic elements which lie deep in human nature." In addition, Bell maintained, the Jewish element in this fear went even deeper. There was "a fear of the animal" in Jewish life, he noted. "There's a great sense, you know, that man is a raging beast, and it's only a kind of tough-minded law which holds him down, which is why in Judaism you always have the symbol of the Torah, essentially of the law, as against any other precepts of this kind." Therefore, among both the affirmers and the dissenters, there was a desire for authority, reason, and law, against what they feared was an uncontrollable passion in the students.

As early as three years before the Berkeley protests, Lionel Trilling

was worried about the values professors were teaching their students. In their required courses students studied modernism, which had been imported to America with the enthusiastic help of Partisan Review and the New York intellectuals. Yet in that modern literature Trilling found "the disenchantment of our culture with culture itself," and discovered a "bitter line of hostility to civilization which runs through it." The literature itself should not be discarded, but he thought professors should hesitate before passing it along to the uninitiated. "My doubts do not refer to the value of the literature itself," he assured the intelligentsia, "only to the educational propriety of its being studied in college."^[111] Why a sympathy for modernist literature had not fatally harmed his own generation, he did not say. Four years later, in 1965, Trilling surveyed the subject again, and found that an "adversary culture" had formed among the young, as he had predicted. Again he complained about "the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterized modern writing," an intention to exalt individual autonomy at the expense of society and culture.^[112]

Bell saw an irony in his colleagues' fear of an adversary culture. Rahv, Abel, Howe, and others celebrated modernism, Bell wrote, but were afraid of modernism's natural culmination in the nihilism of the sixties. Yet unlike Trilling, who began to question modernist literature, many others in the group praised the aesthetic of modernism while denouncing the adversary culture it created.^[113] For Bell, however, an important distinction separated an adversary culture and the sixties counterculture. An adversary culture was a facet of "serious culture," and was derived "in many respects from the whole modernist temperament." Its animus was to "tear down bourgeois society" and "all restraints on civilization." It articulated "a preoccupation with the abyss and the sense of nothingness that comes from it." In contrast, the counterculture "derives from certain elements of hedonism, particularly in American bourgeois life—the search for pleasure, the search for excitement, the search for sensation—and it is abetted, in many ways by campus culture itself." Adversary culture was a troubling product of high culture, while the counterculture was a self-indulgent offspring of mass culture.^[114]

That nihilism, the New York group believed, was accompanied by irrationalism, mysticism, and reverence for the transcendentalism of drug experiences. Another way to phrase it is that they were convinced that the counterculture had a strongly religious and mystical component that could lead to irrational and destructive tendencies. The counterculture was more likely to pursue the avenues of faith, intuition, and sensation than of reason or intellectual analysis.

Even Paul Goodman, who had a less rationalist orientation than many of his fellow critics, found youth in the 1960s to be surprisingly spiritual. "I had imagined that the worldwide student protest had to do with changing political and moral institutions, to which I was sympathetic," he wrote with surprise, "but I now saw that we had to do with a religious crisis of the magnitude of the Reformation in the fifteen-hundreds." To replace their previous dependence upon science and progress, the young had turned to "religious innovation, new sacraments to give life meaning." Although he was sympathetic to these mystical yearnings, Goodman complained that the young brought their religious concerns to the political field. "But [religion] is a poor basis for politics," he told them, "including revolutionary politics."^[115]

The need for this religious experience or transcendence, these critics thought, also produced in the counterculture an inflexible moralism, a rigid, visionary self-righteousness. Some of the young, it seemed, could have written a book with a title like Witness . Hook, as might be expected, was a leading critic of the counterculture's inflexible true-believers. Complaining that "the student population has become 'moralistic,'" Hook told the young that, instead of being tentative and making careful distinctions, they saw "only right or wrong, good or bad, and no degrees of evil." Forgetting history, they saw a current good as a perennial good, a current evil as a perennial evil. Therefore in any conflict they could see only one way to progress: "the ideal solution." The counterculture's ideological moralism was ill-informed, too simplistic, and predicated on faith rather than experimental analysis. Hook had said nearly the same to Whittaker Chambers fifteen years earlier.^[116]

To the charge that they were too simplistic, some in the New Left retorted that complexity was only a veil for conservatism. A devotion to complexity and ambiguity, it is true, often allowed some members of the New York group to argue that attempts at social reform were too simplistic and produced unintended results. It allowed some of them therefore either to shy away from reform or denounce reform as utopian. Disciples of complexity and ambiguity often were identified, with justification, as the inheritors of the end-of-ideology outlook. Those liberals or conservatives who liked the more complicated approach, however, credited the New York intellectuals with providing a successful challenge to simple ideologists and bringing a higher and more intelligent level of debate to political, cultural, and social problems.^[117]

To those who admired the New York group for their impatience with simplistic notions, Glazer's advice to the young radicals was welcome. Glazer, who was moving from Berkeley to Harvard at the time, cautioned

the counterculture that their insistence "that something fundamental is wrong leads easily to the conclusion that something grand and apocalyptic is required to set it straight." The inverse was also true. If the young wanted a total transformation, some overwhelming evil had to be discovered to justify it.

In an "advanced" society like America, Glazer believed, only a small and diminishing number of problems could be solved "by direct clashes between competing interests," the sort of large and total conflicts that ideologists waged. Currently, "clear evils to fight against are rapidly succeeded by increasingly ambiguous evils, whose causes and solutions are equally unclear." Because "no solution is ever complete or final," Glazer counseled, "there is no alternative to bureaucracies, administrators, and experts." His difference with the young, he reported, was that he saw "no Gordian knot to be cut at a single stroke."^[118] His advice? Leave moralism, ideology, and inflexibility behind.

In sum, the New York intellectuals considered the values, methods, and ends of the counterculture to be subversive of a liberal pluralist society. Liberal pluralism was based on humane tolerance, civil freedoms, free and independent critical inquiry, and respect for diversity. Liberal pluralism, in turn, supported and protected the values important to the New York group—not least of which was the freedom to be intellectuals. Although they themselves had criticized that society in the 1930s, in the postwar years they gradually came to be among its most vocal defenders. In the 1960s they were not prepared to stand aside and let it be trampled by an enemy from within.

Part of the problem, as Dissent editor Howe saw it, was that the young had not studied liberalism enough to understand the tradition they were rejecting. To the young radicals "liberalism means Clark Kerr, not John Dewey; Max Lerner, not John Stuart Mill; Pat Brown, not George Norris." They did not realize that liberalism provided radicals with "a heritage of civil freedoms, disinterested speculation, humane tolerance."^[119] Ignoring the liberal tradition, the young escalated their tactics into a policy of extremism, Howe complained. They brought physical violence to campus, but then objected to police force. They burned government papers and records, but protested when their own offices were invaded.^[120] The New Left attacked the liberal society, but cried foul when not protected by it.

There was, of course, a range of liberal opinion within the New York group—from a neoconservative and grudging liberalism on one side (represented by affirmers like Norman Podhoretz) to a liberal socialism on the other side (characterized by dissenters like Irving Howe). But despite these differences, all of the New York intellectuals agreed that the liberal

pluralist society was what made America unique, and they felt that when the counterculture rejected liberal pluralism it rejected America. For the young, though, it seemed that they had to reject part of America in order to regain America's genuine promise and potential.

Proper Radicals and Critics

Central to each of the battles the members of the New York group waged against their various antagonists was their attempt to promote a responsible political and intellectual point of view. In these conflicts they constructed their vision of a beneficial politics of dissension. In doing so, they were repeatedly forced to define the proper limits of radicalism, the extent to which leftism had to be mixed with liberalism, and the amount of openness and independence required to sustain a healthy radicalism or intellectualism. Increasingly, as former leftists, they decided that liberal values constituted the heart of proper "radicalism."

At the Waldorf Conference they decided that useful intellectual radicals had to be open, honest, and nonpartisan. Leftists could not misrepresent their ideas or their allegiances. In their response to the literature of repentance, the group found that respectable radicals had to set their own records straight, but avoid patriotic partisanship that could enforce conformity and undermine further dissent in the political community. In their debate over mass culture, the group reaffirmed the intellectual axiom that standards must not be compromised by either radicals or conservatives.

In their conflict with the New Left, they found that a correct and useful leftism was liberal, democratic, moderate, practical, and even technical. The radical impulse had to be tempered by some of the modesty, sobriety, and pragmatism of the Public Interest . By the time of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, if not before, liberalism was the true left for the New York group. That outlook was modest rather than dramatic. It avoided excessive anti-Americanism as thoroughly as it refrained from a celebration of America. Proper radicalism was neither authoritarian, irrational, mystical, nihilistic, nor romantic. It was antitotalitarian but not absolutist or extremist in its means. A successful leftism had to have a program. It had to be able to work in a coalition with other enlightened and responsible political forces, and had to avoid factionalism. A worthwhile radicalism had to have virtue, which meant it had to reject violence, minority rule, and excessive civil disobedience in favor of civility, intelligence, rational argument, and reason.

What the group asked of leftists was perfection, because if radicalism

could not be perfect it was hardly worth preserving. Yet what they asked of radicals was no more than they asked of intellectuals, which meant it was no more than they expected of themselves.

Harold Rosenberg had said that intellectuals turn answers into questions. Yet in their conflict with the young, the group was antagonistic about the New Left questioning traditional American liberal "answers"—and in that way the New York group defended a form of orthodoxy. By contradicting Rosenberg's definition, did the members of the group disqualify themselves as intellectuals? The paradox can be resolved by noting the group's motives: they defended a liberal orthodoxy out of fear that the romantic, irrationalist, and ideological outlook of the New Left would contradict and undermine liberal society's tolerance for the very practice of questioning. Not all questioning was equally beneficial, in the group's view. Especially bad was a style of questioning that appeared to lead to its own closed system of orthodoxy and that would stifle questioning in the future.

They supported liberalism because they were convinced it would permit intellectuals to continue to oppose orthodoxy—to turn answers into questions—in a way that more passionate ideological visions would not. In their view, they contradicted Rosenberg's dictum in the case of the New Left in order to preserve the right to continue questioning in the future. This, of course, was the same position they had taken against the Communists decades earlier.

Another continuity in the group's outlook was the belief that an intellectual's responsibility was to evaluate and interpret society and culture openly and honestly. As Dennis Wrong phrased it, one had to show a "scrupulous concern for intellectual rigor," and maintain one's "duty as a political intellectual to criticize 'incorrect analysis' by writers" with whom one honestly disagreed.^[121] But, as we have seen, dissenters and affirmers disagreed about whether intellectual rigor required a vigorous criticism of one's own culture. The dissenters thought that a large part of the intellectual's function was to maintain intelligent criticism, loyal opposition. In contrast, the affirmers agreed with Irving Kristol, who complained that many intellectuals not only were "critical of the failure of this civilization to realize perfectly the ideals it claims as inspiration" but also extended that to "an adversary posture toward the ideals themselves." Cultural intellectuals, he believed, had "always been assigned the task of, and invariably accepted responsibility for, sustaining and celebrating those values" of the culture.^[122] For the affirmers, an intellectual was a sustainer.

Among the values necessary for intellectuals and their magazines was

a "commitment to dispassionate inquiry as the ground of understanding," Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol reported. "But also there is the commitment to the idea of rational authority; to the view that opinion is not knowledge, that intellectual qualifications are a condition for judgment, and that some judgments are more worthwhile than others. It is thus a commitment to reason and to its mode of discourse, the mode of civility." Reason—and the process of reason, which included civil discourse—was absolutely central. "We believe," they continued, "that without rational authority and civil discourse, a civilized society—and that is the ultimate model of the university—is impossible."^[123] It was this strong attachment to rationality and reason that bound affirmers and dissenters together from the beginning. Despite their serious differences, both sides of the group shared a basic consensus on means (reason, rationality, due process, standards) as well as ends (diversity, openness, freedom, antitotalitarianism).

Repeatedly throughout their careers, members of the New York group decided that their political and cultural beliefs should be predicated on their intellectual role. That is, in progressive stages in the decades after the 1930s, they slowly abandoned any commitment to political leftism that contradicted their vision of what it meant to be free, independent, unbeholden intellectuals. In their conflict with the New Left, as with virtually all of their other decisions at significant crossroads, they chose to support their intellectual identities over their political identities. Although they had long thought of themselves as leftists or radicals, even if moderate liberal leftists, they chose to denounce the first indigenous radical movement that had appeared in decades. Rather than considering it most important to support their heritage of political values at all costs, they found it more essential to endorse their intellectual beliefs. In the end that left the great majority of them neither radicals nor conservatives—but liberal intellectuals. They increasingly saw liberalism and pragmatic intellectualism as symbiotic values, each of those values a vehicle to insure the health of the other.

In the end, the group's struggle with the student left was reminiscent of its campaign against the Waldorf Conference. Sidney Hook, for one, had not altered his rhetoric or his logic since his denunciation of Harlow Shapley and his colleagues twenty years earlier. He was still concerned with intellectual honesty and the freedom of ideas.

The greatest weapon against all adversaries, Hook still thought, was reason. He advised his fellow intellectuals to "assume that most students can respond to ideas and that they are responsible in large measure for their actions. Although it is possible that they may continue to turn a

deaf ear to criticisms of their position and a blind eye to ideals continuous with the liberal and humanist tradition from Socrates to John Dewey, the effort must be made until they see reason." Hook might have written exactly the same sentiments about the Waldorf participants two decades earlier. "Whether they see reason or not," he concluded, "what their teachers say and do must exemplify it."^[124]