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Younger (and Older) Than the New Left
A scholar looks for the roots of '60s radicalism in the liberal tradition
By SCOTT McLEMEE
The expression "generation gap" entered the cultural lexicon in the 1960s. And, fittingly enough, veterans of that decade's activism who became professors soon faced students too young to remember its politics and culture. Working on the intellectual roots of the New Left, Kevin Mattson, an associate professor of history at Ohio University at Athens, has had to navigate that gap from a different angle. After all, when Students for a Democratic Society disintegrated in 1969, he was 3 years old.
"The culturally symbolic decade of the sixties has become the domain -- indeed, the first-person, singular possession -- of baby boomers and thus off-limits to those who happened to be born too late to witness it," Mr. Mattson writes in his book Intellectuals in Action: The Origins of the New Left and Radical Liberalism, 1945-1970 (Pennsylvania State University Press). He recalls presenting his research at academic gatherings. "There was a lot of 'I was there, kid, let me tell you what it was like,'" he says. "I'd roll my eyes a little and think, What does that have to do with what C. Wright Mills said?"
More is at stake, however, than the right of tenured radicals to bore the young with their antiwar stories. Examining the work of several thinkers who served as the founding fathers of '60s radicalism, Mr. Mattson argues that they were engaged not in overthrowing the liberal tradition in American politics, but in deepening it. His interpretation may trouble both sides of the culture wars. During the Vietnam era, "liberal" became a dirty word for radicals (often joined with "Establishment" and "warmonger"). And the notion that the New Left emerged from a serious tradition in Western political thought goes against the neoconservative tendency to see the '60s as an essentially anti-intellectual surge of libido, or violent irrationality, or possibly both.
Mr. Mattson notes that figures such as Paul Goodman, the social and cultural critic, and William Appleman Williams, the influential historian of American foreign policy, are often mentioned in the early pages of writings about the New Left. "Then they disappear," he says. "The assumption is that they came up with some important ideas that the activists then pursued." Countercultural experimentation and militant pro-tests tend to dominate accounts (whether sympathetic or horrified) of the '60s. Mr. Mattson himself was an activist in movements against nuclear weapons and U.S. interventions in Central America during the 1980s, but he thinks historians should do more than write about mass demonstrations, or even go to them.
"I think the ideas themselves were crucial and need to be studied," he says. "The early New Left consisted primarily of people who thought of themselves as intellectuals. Their activism came from a sense of the political responsibility that went with their role as thinkers."
Wary Liberals
To reconstruct the intellectual history of the early New Left, Mr. Mattson takes a detour through a set of discussions about "mass society" during the 1940s and 1950s. The rise of totalitarianism in Europe and the Soviet Union had left many intellectuals worried about the direction modernity was taking. Technological advances certainly led to an improved quality of life for wider segments of the population in industrialized society. But they also seemed to turn people into little more than cogs in the machinery of large-scale industrial enterprises. Emancipated from old hierarchies and narrow patterns of life, people found little in mass culture to replace traditions that once helped make sense of existence. They were therefore susceptible in periods of economic dislocation and political turmoil, some argued, to the scapegoating rhetoric of demagogues -- which could now be broadcast with unprecedented efficiency by mass media.
Anxieties over mass society reinforced American liberals' postwar skepticism about radical politics. Confident that the future promised a steady expansion of the New Deal, they thought the government would intervene to correct injustices such as segregation while continuing to play a role in administering the economy, thereby mitigating disagreeable effects of the market. The dangers of mass society could be avoided, so long as power stayed in the hands of qualified experts, rather than with irrational mass movements. (For many liberals, the problem with Joseph McCarthy was not that he was wrong, but that he was a far more pernicious rabble-rouser than any street-corner Communist.)
The early New Left intellectuals portrayed by Mr. Mattson criticized the strangely nervous optimism of the cold-war liberals during the late 1950s and early 1960s. But within a few years, anger over the Vietnam War (among other things) drove many young radicals to denounce all of American liberalism -- which they saw as technocratic and profoundly alienating, culminating in a "soft totalitarianism" combining the welfare state with a warfare economy. Even after visions of revolution faded, radicals distrusted "representative democracy" as illusory; they saw it as the alibi for a system in which race, class, and gender formed the interlocking bars of a vast prison.
Heroes of a Generation
For thinkers of the early New Left, argues Mr. Mattson, things did not look quite so bleak, nor the political differences so stark. While often harsh in their complaints about actually existing liberalism, they shared much of its worldview, seeking, as Mr. Mattson writes, "ways to make key liberal ideas speak to changing historical circumstances, not simply to discard all of them."
C. Wright Mills might look like an unlikely example for Mr. Mattson's purposes. An outspoken critic of self-censorship in academic life, the sociologist became a hero to a generation of young radical intellectuals; his reputation and influence only continued to grow after his death in 1962, following weeks of strenuous preparation for a television appearance to debate American policy toward Cuba.
In books such as The Power Elite and The Causes of World War Three, he painted an unflattering picture of the United States as a society approaching complete domination by the military-industrial complex.
But as Mr. Mattson points out, Mills was never a Marxist. His philosophical reference points were such liberal thinkers as the American pragmatists (including John Dewey) and Max Weber. Mills's sociological writings tended to confirm many elements of the mass-society argument about the centralization and alienation in American life. But he held out hope that intellectuals could take an active role as critics and reformers, if they only found the courage to speak out. "Post-war liberals have been so busy celebrating civil liberties," he complained, "that they have had ... neither the time nor inclination to use them."
The Anarcho-Wonk
Another figure Mr. Mattson cites as an example of "radical liberalism" is Paul Goodman. An author of fiction and poetry as well as a literary theorist and practicing psychotherapist, Goodman won an avid readership on college campuses during the early 1960s for his numerous books of social criticism, especially Growing Up Absurd (1960). His idiosyncratic blend of pacifism, sexual liberation, and communitarianism reflected Goodman's long involvement in anarchist circles in New York.
Arguing that American life had grown rigid and wasteful of human capacities, he advocated decentralization of the economy, education, and the media. And, as Mr. Mattson writes, Goodman joined a think tank that tried to draft policy for the government -- a surprising move for an anarchist radical, perhaps, though not so unusual for an intellectual with a basic faith in the desirability of reform as well as revolt.
The Left's Decline?
A thinker influenced by Mills and Goodman, the philosopher and activist Arnold Kaufman coined the expression "radical liberalism," a label that Mr. Mattson considers useful for the political current he has identified among early New Left intellectuals. What radical liberals shared, Mr. Mattson writes, was a belief in "individual rights ... a common good, a certain amount of state intervention to protect the public interest ... and political participation as a means of educating citizens for the responsibilities of a democracy."
Centrist liberals had faith in (and, indeed, enthusiasm for) government intervention that flowed from the top down, from administrators to the public. For radical liberals, the great danger of life in mass society came from its tendency to reduce citizens to passive clients of the system. Radical-liberal academics had a role to play, not as technocrats, but in providing the public with information and critical perspectives.
As Intellectuals in Action makes clear, the radical-liberal moment was a brief one. Inspired by Mills, young scholars started journals such as New University Thought and Studies on the Left and participated in activist movements. But the demands of academic careerism soon distracted some. Others were caught up in the excitement of organizing large demonstrations -- or, in a few cases, making bombs. The thoughtful critique of cold-war liberalism turned into a habitual denunciation of liberalism of any kind.
By the 1980s, all such distinctions were moot anyway. (After that, as someone once put it, the conservatives got to run the government and the radicals got to run the English department.)
"I'm on the outs with a lot of people in the academic left," says Mr. Mattson. It turns out he doesn't just mean baby-boom militants. "I hear young activists now who talk as if 'mushy liberalism' were still prevalent, like that's the biggest obstacle they face. I'm always kind of taken aback." He calls his book a "reminder of a tradition of people with a deeper reading of their current situation" than intellectuals practice today. In his voice there is a note of frustration: the sound of someone nostalgic for a time before he was born.
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