awr-1avu. 21:. ~31;

does not shrink from invoking the pro-
phetic tradition in opposition to the
idolatry of the nation-State. But he
makes it clear that such criticism must
never be applied to Israel alone. And
he understands that criticism will reg-
ister only if it is presented as part of
an af?rmation of the Jewish right to
self-determination. The Ruethers have

BOOK REVIEW

failed on these counts, and they have
consequently forfeited the audience
they claim to seek.

Progressive Jews are engaged today
in a fateful struggle over the future of
Israel and, indeed, the future of the
Jewish people. We desperately need
all the allies we can get. But the lasr
thing we need is modern versions of the

Thinking With the People

 

medieval sermons thatJews were forced
to listen to in Christian churches, or
?well-meaning? attempts to ?liberate
the Jewish community." \We wish to be
neither oppressors nor victims, neither
heroes nor puppets in someone else?s
theology. We wish, in short, to be a
normal people. 

 

Casey Blake 

The Compaiz of riticr: 50cm! riticzsm
and Politicei Commitment in the liver:-
tietia Century by MichaelWalzer. Basic
Books, 1988, 288 pp.

a famous battle cry against the

America that had executed Sacco
and Vanzetti, John Dos Passos wrote
?All right we are two nations? (The Big
Money). Such a declaration of inde~
pendence is a familiar refrain in the
history of modern American radicalism.
In subsequent decades, Dos Passos?s
sentiments were echoed by celebrants
of American pluralism and their critics
within the New Left. The historian
Richard Hofstadter, describing ?the
heartland of America" as ?filled with
people who are often fundamentalist
in religion, nativist in prejudice, isola-
tionist in foreign policy, and conserva-
tive in economics," betrayed the not-
so?secret contempt for mainstream
values that informed much of Kennedy
liberalism in the early sixties (flitti?
litteliectzmiism in American Life). So
did those bitter radicals of the late
sixties (including many err-liberals) who
raged against and sepa-
rated the country neatly into ?pigs?
and ?freaks.? A cold, cruel disdain for
anything smacking of convention and
common sense has too often served as
a badge of honor for borh liberal and

 

Casey Blake teaches history at imiimm
University. He is currently writing a book
on tine culture! criticism of Randolph
Boonie, Vim Wka Brooks, ?Waldo Frank.
and Lewis Axiom/ford.

102 TIKKUN VOL. 4, NO. 3

leftist critics of American society. To
be capable of critical insight, to rise
above the platitudes of one's fellows,
has meant being distanced from the
dominant culture. In this view, social
criticism requires a truly dispassionate
elite?a vanguard party, perhaps; or a
professional corps of experts, an avant-
garde, or a school of critical theorists
possessed of superior insights and a
vocabulary unavailable to ordinary citi-
zens. Or it requires the heroism of a
lone rebel, armed only with the wea-
pons of criticism, who risks everything
in a desperate private shoot-out with
the authorities.

Michael \Valzer?s new book, The
Company of Critics, is aimed direcrly
at challenging these assumptions. For
Walzer, both elitisr condemnation and
romantic rebellion obscure the way
effective social criticism actually works
in the twentieth century. Social critics
succeed, he argues, only when they
speak with their fellow citizens in a
commonly understood moral language.
The best criticism articulates the shared
aspirations and grievances of people
even as it painfully notes their short-
comings. ?We criticize our society just
as we criticize our friends,? \?Ualzer
writes, ?on the assumption that the
terms of the critique, the moral refer-
ences, are common."

Thus, reading in a \V?alzerian vein,
one would say that the crucial passage
in Dos Passos?s novel is not the Oft-
repeated line about America's ?two
nations," but a preceding section that
laments: ?America our nation has been

beaten by strangers who have turned
our language inside out who have taken
the clean words our fathers spoke and
made them slimy and foul.? Our nation,
our language, oar fathers?without this
assumption of some shared moral de-
cency and democratic heritage uniting
Americans, Dos Passos?s grim acknowl?
edgment that ?we are two nations"
would hold no force. Dos Passos moves
us because he speaks as Socrates or
the Old Testament prophets did, as a
voice of civic conscience that appeals
to values that continue to shape many
of our private pracrices and that may
yet serve to renew our public life.
\?Ualzer examines the careers of eleven
\Vestern critics, from Julian Benda and
Randolph Bourne to Michel Foucault
and Breyten Breytenbach, in order to
defend a prophetic role for critical
intellectuals on the left. His book is
not a work in intellectual history or in
the sociology Of knowledge. It is rather
a personal manifesto, a contribution
to the long debate about the social
position and function of the critic that
assesses how ?general intellectuals"
have situated themselves in relation to
the moral and political discourses of
their contemporaries. From the start,
Walzer makes clear his belief that com-
mitment tO some kind of local political
or moral community is necessary for
the practice of social criticism. ?The
mOSt attractive picture of the true in-
tellectual," Walzer writes, is not ?as
the inhabitant of a separate world, the
knower of esoteric truths, but as a
fellow member of this world who de-

 

 

votes himself, but with a passion, to
the truths we all know." His book is
an argument for thinking about moral
and political truths as embedded in
?the strucrures and practices of every-
day existence."

Consequently, The Company ofCr'lr-
t'cs deserves to be read alongside Habits
of the Heart by Robert Bellah and his
aSSOCiates, Jacoby?s The Last
lnfe/lectuals, Carol Gilligan?s In a Dif?
ferent Voice, Norman Birnbaurn?s The
Radical Renewal, and many of the con-
tributions to this magazine. It is an
example of a growing concern among
liberals and leftists about grounding
contemporary criticism in a public
culture that would promote collecrive
moral reasoning. Walzer?s book shares
with such writings a broader interest
in renewing citizenship as a practice
linking individual aspirations and civic
obligation, a goal that nor only chal-
lenges conventional understandings of
the critic?s sodal role but also under-
mines many assumptions about what
constitutes progressive politics. If one
agrees with \Y?alzer that the best criti-
cism grows out of what Clifford Geertz
calls ?local knowledge" ?or what Wal-
zer?s hero, Ignazio Silone, considered
?the ordinary sense of the relations be-
tween [oneself] and others, the ordinary
sense of rights and duties, the ordinary
standards of moral judgement" ?then
one has to challenge not only the
Enlightenment model of the critic as
?teacher? of the ignorant but also a
good deal of conventional progressiv-
ism, from Hofstadter?s assumption of
the masses! superstitious stupefaction
to the left?s condescending complaints
about ?false consciousness? and a static
?one-dimensional society."

 alzer?s antagonists on the left

are those who refuse to acknowl-
edge their participation in the very
communal practices they criticize. They
are advocates of an abstract univer-
salism who ?miss the texture of moral
life? in their blanket condemnation
of a social group or an entire society.
He is scornful of Jean-Paul Sartre,
Simone De Beauvoir, and Herbert
Marcuse, whose misanthropic portraits
of the French bourgeoisie and the pied
noz'r community of French Algeria,
?unliberated? women, and the ?moron-
ized" working class of mid-twentieth-
century America respectively allow
those being described no legitimate

response other than silent assent. Ac-
cording to these thinkers, the French
bourgeoisie and the pied noz'r may
undergo a conversion experience and
remake themselves as dedicated revolu-
tionaries engaged in a war to the death
with their own friends and family;
women may ?nally free themselves once
they accept that ?culture, civilization,
and universal values have all been
created by men. because men represent
universality," as De Beauvoir claimed;
and American workers might hold out
for salvation from a technical elite cap-
able of satisfying the ?real needs" of
the population through better tech-
nology. But such people may not draw
on their own historical experiences,
their own conventions, and their own
ways of understanding the world in a
collective project of which criticism is
only a part. They certainly may not
speak in their own voices.

 

Soczal crz?tz'cs succeed,
W/alzer argues, only when
they speak with their
fellow citizens in a
commonly understood
moral language.

 

In the most benign version of the
position \Walzer rejects, the one pre-
sented in Antonio Gramsci?s Prison
Notebooks, Subordinate groups trapped
in hegemonic ?common sense? may
aspire one day to live without teachers,
but, in the meantime, they must take
their lessons from those dissident ?tra-
ditional intellectuals? who have cast
their lot with the Communist party.
What unites all such views of the social
role of the radical critic is the assump?
tion that, at this moment, there can
be no productive dialogue with ?the
masses,? whose historical situation pro-
hibits them from speaking as political
0r moral agents. Even Michel Foucault's
calls for local insurrections againsr the
disciplinary systems of modern civili-
zation founder on this point, insofar
as his social theory addresses no com-
prehensible antagonist? of a society
organized on the basis of total sur-
veillance. In Walzer?s analysis, success-
ful social criticism cannot take place
outside of a public conversation?-that
is to say, outside of a polity. It is telling
that the very worst thing Walzer can

  
 

say about Marcuse is that he ?has no
faith in the linguistic creativity of the
common people.?

contrast. the critics Walzer ad-
mires?Randolph Bourne, Martin
Buber, Ignazio Silone, Albert Camus,
George Orwell, and Breyten Breyten-
bach generally practice what Gramsci
called the ?national-popular? version
of criticism, closely connected to the
linguistic, moral, and political idioms
used by their fellow men and women.
They speak to a potential democratic
culture immanent in the practices of
their society, as in Bourne?s ?trans-
national? ideal of a ?Beloved Commu-
nity," or they draw on the practical
wisdom of their neighbors, as in Silone's
evocation of the common decency of
the Abruzzi peasants. When they attack
their culture, they do so from within,
as Buber did when he launched an
internalist critique of Zionism and
Breytenbach does when he Challenges
his fellow Afrikaaners to accept their
identity as Africans.

\?Ualzer?s endorsement of such so-
cially connected criticism leads him to
defend Camus and Orwell from their

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REVIEWS 103

supposed acquiescence to nationalistic
imperatives during wartime. For Wal-
zer, Camus's famous refusal to support
the FLN during the Algerian \War sig-
nifies not capitulation to the colonialist
privileges he enjoyed as a member of
the pied noir community, but his belief
that justice absrracted from bonds of
family and friendship is no justice at
all. Similarly, Orwell?s I941 expression
of his English patriotism, The Lion
and (be Uizz'rom, is for Walzer an appeal
to a concrete democratic culture em-
bodied in the minutiae of English
working-class life. Like Bourne in the
United States during World War I,
Orwell spoke in the early forties for a
patriotism of the left that gave the
radical critic the opportunity to argue
with other Englishmen on the basis of
a shared love of land and values that
was the very antithesis of a coercive
state nationalism. family with the
wrong members in control? was how
Orwell described England in 1941, in
a sentence that captures the spirit of
?antagonistic connection? that \Xlalzer
believes essential to Successful social
criticism.

Clearly, Walzer has more on his
mind than the social role of the intel-
lectual. The Company ofCrz'tz'c: makes
a powerful argument for seeing radical
criticism as part of a broader project
of deepening and enriching democratic
discourse. A defense of what might
broadly be called ?populism? emerges
time and again in the book, in opposi-
tion to the various Strains of Leninism,
technocratic elitism, and social dis-
tancing Walzer decries. But such a
political argument is never made ex-
plicit. Aside from urging critics to talk
with their contemporaries in the ver-
nacular and to appeal to their capa-
cities for moral and political reflection
on a democratic basis, \Valzer is not
clear about how committed intellec-
tuals should proceed in the last years
of the twentieth century. This omission
is especially troubling because, as J.
Peter Euben has observed in ?Fanfare
for the Common Complaint? (New
l?br?e Times Boole Review, Jan. 8, 1989),
\Walzer never identifies where he him-
self stands or how he locates his own
project. At various times, \Valzer di-
rectly draws his readers into the project,
addressing us as ?you and But whom
exacrly is he speaking to? Are ?we? the
twentieth-century, social-democratic
successors to the ?gentle readers" of

104 TthtUN VOL. 4, N0. 3

 

the genteel Victorian literary tradition?
if so, who is being excluded here, and
why? Are ?we? among the ?friends in
Jerusalem to whom Walzer dedicates
the book and to whom Walzer presum-
ably Speaks as an internalist critic of
contemporary Zionism? If so, then
wouldn?t \?(lalzer?s Israeli friends benefit
more from a book that used Buber?s
career as a starting point for a con
sideration ofthe current state oflsraeli
politics?

A a practitioner of ?local knowl-
edge,? Walzer must situate himself
somewhere, and this book suggeSts
that he is most at home with Silone,
Orwell, and Camus, those exemplars
of socially connected criticism who
provide the standard by which \?Ualzer
judges virtually everyone else he dis-
cusses. If \Y?alzer himself has a cultural
base, it is here, in the intellectual tradi~
tion that he shares with Irving Howe,
his coeditor at Dissent. For someone
advocating a ?national-popular" criti-
cism, as Walzer does, this is a remark-
ably selecr and cosmOpolitan heritage.
The conversation \Walzer engages in is
one involving other critics, most of
whom are Europeans. Like earlier cos?
mopolitan intellecruals described by
hisrorian David A. Hollinger in In the
American Province, Walzer seems more
comfortable viewing local cultures ?as
repositories for insights and experi-
ences that can be drawn upon in the
interesrs of a more comprehensive out-
look on the world than he is in show-
ing how his own intellectual project
intersects with a particular set of local
conventions. Despite his own inten~
tions, Walzer?s re?ections on the critic's
social role are unconnected to any
project beyond criticism and unrelated
to any speci?c vernacular idiom. One
leaves \Valzer's book, as one leaves
much of the current discussion of
?community? and ?public culture" on
the left these days, with the impression
that the public conversation resulting
from such recommendations will be
short on substance and devoid of the
inflections, accents, and of
any particular community. It is fine to
keep talking, but whom will one talk
with, by what means, and in what way?
Here, Walzer's hermetic community of
critics proves maddeningly abstract
and unhelpful. Whatever its appeals
to the moral pracrices of local, every-
day life, The Company ofCr-r'rrcs never

quite leaves the confines of the com-
pany store.

\Y?alzer?s lack of a concrete cultural
or political reference point suggests
that the problem of is
simply a matter of one?s critical in-
tentions. But more than the critic?s
own will is required for genuinely
democratic conversation to take place.

The political arrangements of mo-
dern cultural life have made it increas-
ingly dif?cult for such a discourse to
get Started. Corporate control of the
mass media may not involve direct
censorship, but it certainly marginalizes
writers, artists, musicians, and others
who lack the ?nancial means and con-
nections necessary for the production
and distribution of culture. Unusual
and dissenting works rarely reach a
large audience. Even if they do. they
may have little effect if they remain
disrant from the everyday experience
of most people.

The organization of the workplace
since the late nineteenth century has
consistently narrowed possibilities for
creativity and autonomy on the job,
even as it has increased the power of
professionals and managers (who are
themselves often constrained by cor-
porate and bureaucratic hierarchies).
Our political culture leaves little room
for optimism about the possibilities
for democratic conversation either,
since politics has taken on the charac-
teristics of the corporate advertising
campaign. It is an odd conversation,
after all, in which one participant insists
on speaking through a bullhorn.

One reason for this problem is the
ascendancy of languages of profes-
sional and administrative expertise,
which has accompanied the rise of
large-scale bureaucratic insritutions.
But another reason involves the in-
creasingly central role of the university
in modern cultural life. \?C/alzer?s book
will likely find its widest audience
among academics drawn from several
disciplines. Given the expansion of
the university since 1945, this is a sizable
readership, far larger than that of the
?little magazines" of the twenties and
thirties. Yet, as Russell Jacoby and other
critics argue, the academy?s inclination
is to discourage writing like Walzer?s
in favor of more specialized publica-
tions. This is hardly the terrain for the
kind of socially connected criticism
\Valzer envisages.

These institutional arrangements have

 

 

exacerbated conflicts over questions
of values?what Christopher Lasch has
called our ?cultural civil war." It has
always been difficult for Americans
living in a pluralistic society to reach
any kind of consensus about the ends of
a good polity or a good life, but the cur-
rent divisions within our culture now
make it increasingly dif?cult even to
hold such discussions, let alone resolve
them. One doesn?t have to believe in
a torally administered ?one-dimensional
society? to realize that the constraints
on our cultural citizenship require more
than plain speaking from our social
critics. Without democratic spaces for
public conversation, how can American
culture provide the right setting for
the type of criticism Walzer advocates?
During the twentieth century, discus-
sion of public issues has tended to
fragment into separate specialized dis-
ciplines inaccessible to outsiders.
Walzer?s reliance on the tradition of
Silone, Orwell, and Camus has an ad-
ditional drawback: it deprives him of
the opportunity to examine American
traditions of radical thought that are
particularly appropriate to his enter-

BOOK REVIEW

prise. Walzer?s theoretical writings are,
in many ways, firmly in the American
pragmatic tradition. Yet he makes no
effort to address that tradition direCtly
and ignores the career of John Dewey,
the twentieth-century American who
best embodies Walzer?s own ideals.
Moreover, where, in this brief for the
prophetic role of radical intellectuals,
are the prophetic voices of Jane Ad-
dams, Edmund Wilson, Lewis Mum-
ford, Dwight MacDonald, the 
(Staughton, as well as Robert and
Helen}, James Baldwin, or the authors
of the Port Huron Statement?

By sticking to Silone, Orwell, and
Camus, Walzer stays on what is fa-
miliar ground for him. European critics
of totalitarianism have provided the
ethical underpinnings for the social-
democratic perspective Dissent has at-
ticulated since its founding. Such critics
have done for American social demo-
crats what Reinhold Niebuhr did for
?realist? liberals in the forties and
?fties. They give a moral dimension to
reformism that juSti?es itself in the
adminisrrative language of the welfare
state rather than in the rhetoric of

civic republicanism or Old Testament
prophets. Perhaps the American radi?
cals I mentioned are in the end too
pietistic, too populistic, too libertarian
for Walzer?s brand of social democracy.
They have less to say about the state as
the center of reform activity than they
do about the ways in which friendships
and associations formed in the church,
the school, or the protest movement
link the quest for personal meaning to
public endeavors. In their insistence
that moral and cultural issues are at
the heart of a democratic politics, they
have embraced positions closer to the
ambiguous tradition of radical protest
that link Tom Watson to Jesse Jackson
than to the rationalist socialism of Olaf
Palme and Willy Brandt. The first tradi-
tion may be messier, more problematic,
than the second. But it cannor be
ignored by American social critics
committed to the renewal of a demo-
cratic discourse. As Dos Passos under-
stood, the ?clean words? spoken by
our fathers?and our mothers~may
sometimes become ?slimy and foul,?
but they are in the end the words we
must use and try to make our own. 

Tom Hayden: The Waning of a Politics of Vision

 

Harold Jacobs

Reunion: A Memoir by Tom Hayden.
Random House, 1988, 539 pp.

A rticulate, intelligent, courageous,
committed, energetic, and charis~
matic, Tom Hayden was the radical
intellectual who, as a result of his
leadership abilities, stood out among
all his peers in the sixties. The publica-
tion of Reunion: A Memoir; a book he
had been thinking about writing for
over a decade, has been a long-awaited
event for all those who have an interest
in him as a political ?gure or in the

 

Harold jacobr is a professor ofsociofogv
at Part: and is the editor
of the book Weatherman (Rarirpan?s
Press, 1971).

New Left itself. While his recent sepa-
ration from Jane Fonda, much like his
March 1989 introduction of legislation
to create a California Holocaust Com-
mission, guarantees that he will remain
a mass-media figure, Hayden?s future
significance transcends the hype: he
is one of the few veterans of the move-
ment against the Vietnam War who
remains capable of playing a national
leadership role in a revived left during
the coming decade. It is, therefore, all
the more important to understand his
current attempts to distance himself
from the New Left which he did so
much to shape.

Hayden was at the cutting edge of
the action during the pivotal moments

of the movement?s history. A brief
synopsis of his political career high-
lights his presence through all the twists
and turns of the New Left?s evolution.
He was active in the South during the
early civil rights struggle; he was elected
president of Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS) in 1962 and drafted the
organization?s famous manifesto, the
Port Huron Statement; he was a com-
munity organizer in the Newark ghetto
from 1964 to 1967; he was among
the first New Leftists to travel to
North Vietnam and became a nation?
ally known antiwar spokesman; he
planned and helped lead the demon-
strations at the Democratic National
Convention in Chicago in 1968 and

105