It is an honor to be a member of the freshman class of Harvard College, and not less a distinction to be asked to present one of the first of the many lectures that now await you. This is a venerable form of instruction and not, perhaps, the most efficient; but it is the way we do things here.
To be sure, other forms of instruction await you also: seminars, laboratories, above all, libraries; but lectures remain our preeminent mode of presenting ideas. They will matter most to you if you come with some information of your own on the subject to be presented so that the occasion becomes in effect an exchange: you not only listen, but respond.
Let me, then, present my first thought for the evening, which is that this rarely happens. As you know, I asked that in preparation for this lecture you each read Joseph A. Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, and Lionel Trilling’s The Middle of the Journey. I will estimate that one in ten of you has done this and that another tenth, wishing it had, imagines it has.
A show of hands indicates that the hypothesis is confirmed.
Now to the main work of the evening. Yom Kippur was over at sundown. It is in this spirit that I address you. The sins of the past are shrived, and we begin anew. And yet the past remains with us as knowledge of the future. There will be sins enough to atone for when the cycle comes round once more. There is not much in human experience that any longer appears to us as uniquely human. Those of you going into science will spend a good share of your time extrapolating the behavior of rats into that of people. Still, a sense of what will come, especially that death will come, would seem to be singular in our species.
A sense of what is coming is the central experience to be had from both Schumpeter’s and Trilling’s books. There is a temptation to describe this as an intellectual experience in the case of the economics text, and an aesthetic one in the case of the novel; but these are uncertain categories. Your education at Harvard, as at any such institution, will divide up intellectual life and lead you to assume that there are profoundly different ways of knowing, and perhaps there are; and yet I would not settle too quickly into that convention. It is enough to see that here are two modes of anticipation, each analytic, each rigorous, each having a claim to being considered a possible instance of social theory with true predictive qualities. Schumpeter, the economist, is absorbed with the complex impact of technology on thought; Trilling’s concerns move in rather the opposite direction, as might be expected of a literary critic. But in the end each evolves a singular vision that partakes of many disciplines.
I have asked you to read Schumpeter and Trilling because you are living in the future about which they wrote. No two men, to my thinking, have done this so well as they; but you need not share this view in order to agree that they did what they set out to do well enough for the two books to be taken as benchmarks respecting a past which has flowed into the present.
Each book is set in the late 1930’s in America. (If we are to discuss them together, we will find ourselves alternating between the vocabularies of science and literature, doing some injustice to both. But this we can claim to be a cost others have imposed on us; alternatively, a dilemma others have devised for us.) The 1930’s is a period that matters to you, for it was the time when most of your senior professors were taught. (I think of the “period” as lasting into the mid-1950’s.) It was the time in which your parents were taught, and so it has already pressed itself heavily upon you. But now you will encounter it as the climate in which the formative intellectual experiences of your college teachers took place, unavoidably influencing your own formation.
The fascination of that time goes beyond the inter-generational tie, for it was a period that was formative to the American political culture generally and reverberates down to this moment in much the relationship the 1920’s has attained to the affective culture. Each era seems to go on repeating itself in however so attenuated a manner. And why ought they not? Those are the two decades in which the present world took shape.
The world into which Joseph Schumpeter was born ended just as those decades began. There is a sense of the douceur de vivre of the Austro-Hungarian empire that lent its own dimension to his detachment as a social scientist from the events and tendencies about which he later wrote. He made his way by many stages to Harvard and made a large impression when he finally arrived. I never knew him, but for someone hanging about Cambridge on the GI Bill during the 1940’s it was impossible not to know of him. It was said he would tell his class that as a young man he had resolved to become three things: the world’s greatest economist, the world’s greatest lover, and the world’s greatest horseman; but that as advancing age constricted the horizons of possibility, he was learning to accept the fact that he would not achieve his third ambition.
And yet he had: for our purposes. His book, which he described as “an effort to weld into a readable form the bulk of almost forty years’ thought, observation, and research on the subject of socialism,” is a work of analysis and passion on a level few can sustain; but it is more than that. It is the work of a man who has been around horses. I do not know this actually to have been true, but his stepfather is described in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences as “a high-ranking officer in the Austro-Hungarian Empire,” and so it ought to have been true. Schumpeter was not of the view that horses or riders are all alike. Dams counted and sires counted, training and daring counted, resolution counted, and a tenth of a second could make all the difference in life. How to explain the beginnings of capitalism? A simple matter for Schumpeter: the “supernormal intelligence and energy” of the early entrepreneurs brought success in nine cases out of ten. How to account for the appeal of socialism? Again, simple. Socialism, in scientistic guise, formulated “with unsurpassed force that feeling of being thwarted and ill-treated which is the auto-therapeutic attitude of the unsuccessful many. . . .”
(I would assume that many of you take exception to such views, and you have every right to do so. But if you think Schumpeter wholly wrong in such matters, let me offer you at the outset what could prove the best advice you will ever get at Harvard College. Stay away from race tracks.)
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Schumpeter wrote both to praise Marx and to bury him. His purpose was to test the scientific validity of the great Marxist thesis which has been so central to 20th-century politics and thought. He praised Marx the sociologist and Marx the teacher, and was scarcely disrespectful of Marx the economist. Even so, he thought the Marxian scenario altogether wrong. Capitalism as the organizing principle of the economy and the underlying structure of the culture would not go through the stages Marx had predicted. There would be no immiserization of the masses, no wars of colonial expansion. And yet—and here we see the daring of the man, the exuberant intellectual elegance—he concluded that Marx was right about what in the end would happen, was indeed right “that a socialist society will inevitably emerge from an equally inevitable decomposition of capitalist society.” This was his “paradoxical conclusion”—that “capitalism is being killed by its achievements.”
He saw this as resulting from the interaction of two phenomena. First, the very success of capitalism would lessen the importance of the entrepreneur and lessen the perceived value of the one thing capitalism indubitably creates, which is material wealth. Those men of “supernormal intelligence and energy” would gradually be replaced by managers of only marginally greater competence than the managed. One recalls Herman Wouk’s description of the navy in World War II: a system devised by geniuses to be run by morons. Further, as any good economist ought to have been able to foresee, there would come a period of diminishing utility of increased consumption or increased production. An economist would know this: a Schumpeter would know also that the phenomenon would first appear in the most affluent classes, thereby acquiring social prestige. Nowhere does he say so, but I choose to be confident that he quite foresaw the day when the children of the rich would go about in ragged dungarees and that on ceremonial occasions college students would bury automobiles, combining in a sense the aristocratical ways of the court of Marie Antoinette and the Kwakiutl Indians.
(Allow me, parenthetically, to note that Schumpeter was thinking in a very long time perspective. At the time he wrote it had been roughly two centuries from the period capitalism had got going; it could well be, he judged, two centuries more before it had quite disappeared. My own estimate would be a half-century from now, in part because the rate of increase in wealth has quite surpassed even Schumpeter’s forecast; and he was most bullish for his time.)
The second of Schumpeter’s master propositions is more subtle, and for me more difficult to follow. In essence he states that capitalism is rationalism. It began by challenging the right of kings and barons and popes and bishops to exist: it would end by challenging its own right to exist. I follow this, and I can see how the defense would be difficult. But Schumpeter goes further. He suggests that the capitalist assault on itself will come not just from a habit of mind, a tradition of contentiousness and innovation, but also from far more ominous impulses. He seems to argue that there is an innate contrariness in human nature—an irrational destructiveness—which, far from being quelled by rationalist conditioning, merely uses it as the most effective possible device by which to attain irrational ends. Here is the key passage:
It is an error to believe that political attack arises primarily from grievance and that it can be turned by justification. Political criticism cannot be met effectively by rational argument. From the fact that the criticism of the capitalist order proceeds from a critical attitude of mind, i.e., from an attitude which spurns allegiance to extra-rational values, it does not follow that rational refutation will be accepted. Such refutation may tear the rational garb of attack but can never reach the extra-rational driving power that always lurks behind it. Capitalist rationality does not do away with sub- or super-rational impulses. It merely makes them get out of hand by removing the restraint of sacred or semi-sacred tradition. In a civilization that lacks the means and even the will to discipline and to guide them, they will revolt. And once they revolt, it matters little that, in a rationalist culture, their manifestations will in general be rationalized somehow. Just as the call for utilitarian credentials has never been addressed to kings, lords, and popes in a judicial frame of mind that would accept the possibility of a satisfactory answer, so capitalism stands its trial before judges who have the sentence of death in their pockets. They are going to pass it, whatever the defense they may hear; the only success victorious defense can possibly produce is a change in the indictment. Utilitarian reason is in any case weak as a prime mover of group action. In no case is it a match for the extra-rational determinants of conduct.
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Now I do not fully understand this. Why is it that “Capitalist rationality does not do away with sub- or super-rational impulses”? Rather, what is the nature of these impulses, and what is the evidence for them? Hearsay, mostly, albeit impressive hearsay. One thinks of Robert Warshow’s comment on the nihilism of the Marx Brothers, men who “spit on culture.” They are popular among middle-class intellectuals, he writes, “because they express a blind and destructive disgust with society that the responsible man is compelled to suppress in himself.”1 This was written more than a quarter-century ago, but is surely as true of the present. Hardly a day goes by when one or another Marx Brothers movie is not being shown somewhere within a quarter-mile of Harvard Square. And this curious mixture was part also of the Greek experience. So there it is: something we see happening, even if such as I do not fully comprehend it.
I have suggested that any good man might have made these points. Schumpeter’s glory lies in having identified the peculiar agent which capitalism would create for its own destruction, which is to say the intellectuals. (Of which, one could add, Marx himself was an exemplar; indeed, in his patronage of the manufacturer Engels, a prototype.) And why would capitalism do this? Here, there is just the least touch of melancholy in a not especially sentimental man. Capitalism would create a vast intellectual class because it believed in such a class, because it derived its own vitality from intellectual processes. And so capitalism would protect intellectuals, even as they shrieked of oppression and hurled anathemas at their protectors: “any attack on the intellectuals must run up against the private fortresses of bourgeois business which . . . will shelter the quarry.” Capitalism, alone of social systems, would subsidize and reward its mortal enemies: bound by its own rationale to do so. Its morale would begin to be affected:
Perhaps the most striking feature of the picture is the extent to which the bourgeoisie, besides educating its own enemies, allows itself to be educated by them. It absorbs the slogans of current radicalism and seems quite willing to undergo a process of conversion to a creed hostile to its very existence.
Schumpeter asked no quarter of life, and yet one is glad somehow that he died in 1950 and was not on hand two decades later when one of Harvard’s most distinguished officers, an avowed and courageous opponent of the Vietnam war, collapsed in the midst of a particularly brutal political demonstration just as some scion of the upper-middle class was describing him on the bullhorn as a “running dog of imperialism.”
I speak of melancholy because Schumpeter had a sense of what was being lost: first language, then something akin to liberty, for the collectivist society would ineluctably narrow the limits of what is permitted and what is encouraged:
Radicals may insist that the masses are crying for salvation from intolerable sufferings and rattling their chains in darkness and despair, but of course there never was so much personal freedom of mind and body for all, never so much active sympathy with real and faked sufferings, never so much readiness to accept burdens, as there is in modern capitalist society; and whatever democracy there was, outside of peasant communities, developed historically in the wake of both modern and ancient capitalism.
To this assertion he adds an equally apt footnote:
Even Marx, in whose time indictments of this kind were not anything like as absurd as they are today, evidently thought it desirable to strengthen his case by dwelling on conditions that even then were either past or visibly passing.
Schumpeter defined socialism as “conquest of private industry and trade by the state.” He did not consider that this would have to be a precipitous sequence, nor yet that there need be a totalitarian outcome. He had no illusions about capitalism: “the civilization of inequality and of the family fortune.” And yet this new state: how different a regime it would be from that of Die Fledermaus where Eisenstein, having insulted a government official, must go to jail for eight days, but can put it off just long enough to attend Prince Orlofsky’s ball.
A quarter-century later there are some things Schumpeter appears to have got wrong, but in the main events have gone precisely as he foresaw. The power of private enterprise remains formidable, but its morale and its reputation in places where it matters are quite shattered. The conquest of the private sector by the public proceeds apace, abetted by the extraordinary dynamic of inflation, a point Schumpeter made in his address, “The March into Socialism,” delivered at the end of 1949 just eight days before his death. Wage and price controls, he forecast, would return and would “play an importat part in the eventual conquest of the private-enterprise system by the bureaucracy.”
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What a very different mind is Lionel Trilling’s. The backgrounds of the two men are not all that different; their families part of that Central European stream from which have flowed the dominant intellectual forces of American life today. With the death of Edmund Wilson, Trilling will surely be deemed the first laureate of American literary critics. His study has been that of minds, not that of markets; his endeavor has been to assess the authenticity of ideas rather than their going rate. To do this, at a middle point in his own career, he turned (as did Wilson) to the novel itself and produced his only such work, The Middle of the Journey. It is a novel about the two great absolutist ideas of our time and the wan possibility of maintaining a distance from either. If the world is not made by God, it is made by man: what possible position can there be in the middle? Enough perhaps for most of us to huddle there, but not very comfortably in this time, and even less in the late 1930’s when the demand for commitment was greater. Each of these positions has its protagonists. On the one hand, Gifford Maxim, a former Stalinist, apparently some kind of spy, who has broken with that belief and is undergoing a profound and passionate Christian conversion. He believes the Communist party will try to kill him, and his efforts to make this difficult by giving a public dimension to the fact that he is alive provide the structure of the narrative. Opposed, as near convinced Stalinists, are Arthur and Nancy Crooms, he a rising young professional who will join the New Deal but is spending the summer in Connecticut. In the middle, John Laskell, who is Lionel Trilling. One almost hesitates to note that Trilling was writing about one of the most dramatic personal, ideological encounters of American history: which hadn’t happened yet. For in another sense it had happened. The ideas were there, and it was destined that men would prove their vehicles.
It is getting a bit hard to recall how dominant, then, were the ideas of the Left. In the era itself the fact was self-evident. Warshow begins his review, published originally in COMMENTARY, of the novel with this almost casual assertion:
For most American intellectuals, the Communist movement of the 1930’s was a crucial experience. In Europe, where the movement was at once more serious and more popular, it was still only one current in intellectual life; the Communists could never completely set the tone of thinking. . . . But in this country there was a time when virtually all intellectual vitality was derived in one way or another from the Communist party. If you were not somewhere within the party’s wide orbit, then you were likely to be in the opposition, which meant that much of your thought and energy had to be devoted to maintaining yourself in opposition.2
The “Stalinist liberalism” of that time, he continued, was “not a point of view but a psychological and sociological phenomenon.” It was specifically “an experience of the middle class,” centered in New York, a middle class increasingly able to summer in Connecticut.
Events lead, as they ought to in a novel of ideas, which is also in ways a roman à clef, to an event, the death of a young girl brought about by the cruelty of her squalid lower-class—they would have used some such word, lumpen, perhaps—father. The protagonists must face the meaning of it. Nancy Crooms knows that something evil has occurred, but there is no place for evil in her universe. “You surely know,” she says to Maxim, “why it isn’t his fault.” “Nancy means,” her husband tries to help, “that social causes, environment, education or lack of education, economic pressure, the character-pattern imposed by society, in this case by a disorganized society, all go to explain and account for any given individual’s actions.”
No, says Maxim, the child has died; the man is bad; he is to blame. And it may be also that he is to be forgiven. He pronounces the final Christian verdict on the Communist:
. . . You and I stand opposed. For you—no responsibility for the individual, but no forgiveness. For me—ultimate, absolute responsibility for the individual, but mercy. Absolute responsibility: it is the only way that men can keep their value, can be thought of as other than mere things. Those matters that Arthur speaks of—social causes, environment, education—do you think they really make a difference between one human soul and another? In the eyes of God are such differences of any meaning at all? Can you suppose that they condition His mercy? Does He hold a Doctor of Philosophy more responsible than a Master of Arts, or a high-school graduate more responsible than a man who has not finished the eighth grade? Or is His mercy less to one than another?
Laskell demurs:
Is it really a question. . .? I can’t see it as a question, not really. An absolute freedom from responsibility—that much of a child none of us can be. An absolute responsibility—that much of a divine or metaphysical essence none of us is.
Pascal, responds Maxim, said all that long ago; but there is no longer a middle way. The Renaissance idea—the day for being human in that way—is over. “Gone. Done for. Finished.” The Crooms and the Maxims had inherited the future, would jointly or separately impose order. It was Laskell’s hunch that “the intellectual power” had gone from the Stalinists, and their power of drama also. He sensed that the Whittaker Chamberses would dominate. But he would not. Not he.
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All this was long ago, and yet the process proceeds. You may not think this, and assuredly you are under no obligation to do so. And yet you had best satisfy yourself why it is you think otherwise, for surely a different view would belie appearances. The appearances are that of a steady progression in the direction Schumpeter and Trilling, each in his own mode of anticipation, saw as ineluctable.
The great transformation, to my mind, although this may merely be the preoccupation of a political scientist, has been in the language and the personnel of politics. Stalinism brought the middle-class intellectual into American politics, and American politics is vastly changed for it. Please note that I did not use the term Communism. In itself a vigorous American Communist party need have done no harm and might possibly have done some good. But in the Stalinist form it was profoundly corrupting, for its fundamental thrust from the time of the Popular Front—that is to say the mid-1930’s—was to deny that it itself existed and to make itself felt through the infiltration and manipulation of other popular movements. Deception on a massive scale became policy, while extraordinary numbers of extraordinary people submitted to this life of the mind. The language of politics has never recovered, and confidence in politics has concomitantly declined. This happened not least because the popular reaction to these events has been led, or symbolized, by men who have only dimly grasped what really was at stake and have been easily discredited in the minds of the newer cohorts of middle-class activists coming along. Contrary to John Laskell’s hunch, the point of view Gifford Maxim stood for has acquired but few advocates and less prestige, not least because so many of its ablest advocates have been, as Maxim was, converts whose conversion led them to acknowledge what all their former colleagues denied, so that they have seemed quirky at best and paranoiacal at worst. There have been times when the tiny and not very hopeful Socialist party has seemed the sole repository of both understanding and honesty in American politics. I cite you the Hebrew; hamayvin yavin, those who understand, understand.
Institutions have changed almost beyond recall in this process, and none so drastically as institutions like Harvard which was, for all its distinction, rather a sleepy and parochial place in the 1930’s. It knew little of the Croomses; nothing of the Maxims. Indeed, there is a sense in which it knew little of intellectuals as Schumpeter understood the term, a calling that extended to that of propagandist and included that of journalist. Harvard was a place for the pursuit and the transmission of knowledge. There were probably few persons on the faculty who would have even thought of themselves as “intellectuals.” They were scholars and might well have been offended by the other term. All that has changed in response to pressures certainly no individual can be held accountable for, and which few seem able to resist. That, perhaps, exaggerates. The via media that Laskell sought to follow and Maxim said was finished is not yet finished in Cambridge. It is our predominant belief, but no longer our most confident one. Professor Adam Ulam, in his compelling and necessary new book, The Fall of the American University, writes that for all the outward calm, “the politicization and bureaucratization of the American university have grown apace.” Harvard, Professor James Q. Wilson wrote last spring,3 is no longer as liberal an institution as it once was. There are ideas that are not tolerated here, knowledge that is not taught. But that was predictable, wasn’t it?
There are, of course, cycles in this long-term trend, and we may well be on a downward slope at the moment. Harvard became greatly involved with government in the early 1960’s and came out of the experience hurt and uncomprehending. Government had seemed such great fun; but it turned out not to be fun at all, but bloody and tragic. There has been a withdrawal. The university has given fifteen honorary degrees to members of the Kennedy administration,4 but only one to a Johnson man and only one other to a Nixon man, and both of these Ivy Leaguers seen as somewhat out of place in their respective administrations. Harvard has been through, to put it gently, a chastening experience of the real world and real power.
Then, in the late 1960’s, Harvard became greatly involved with the rhetoric and tactics of opposing government, in this case from a posture of the Left. (In both instances, of course, only a small element of the community has been involved; but that element nonetheless defined the period.) This movement, too, is somewhat recessive at the moment; but it persists, even as the involvement with government persists.
A CCNY man may perhaps be forgiven the impression that Harvard has not been equal to the strains that have been imposed on it by these movements, which Trilling described and Schumpeter anticipated, of the political culture into the scholarly community. Attack from within is wholly new to its experience and brings forth few of the brave and honorable qualities that so characterized the university’s response to attack from without in the 1950’s. One has the sense of a somewhat overbred community that had the instinct to bring in new blood, but did not understand that in doing so it would bring in also new conditions of argument, and resentment of its very existence. In the face of ideas that intend nothing less than the destruction of what Harvard has stood for, Harvard seems to have almost no defense save good manners. Now I do not underestimate the power of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant being well-behaved. Scenes from Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape come quickly to mind. Yet this is a form of passive defense more appropriate to the bondholder than to the guardians of a great university tradition. The fact, as I see it, is that the ideological initiative at Harvard has been conceded to the extremists. Many ignore their views, but few contest them. An occasional Social Democrat, wandered in from CCNY, rejoins the battle of his youth; but on balance the Brahmin intellectual tradition stands uncomprehending, and not a little fearful before a still resolute politics of organized deception and violence which is a legacy of the Stalinist era in American intellectual life. There has been of late a diminution of energy which Professor Ulam notes, but none of purpose. Mass assault has given way to “salami tactics”: one professor at a time rather than one building at a time. But the institution remains trapped in its own decency, its moral authority gradually eroding, such that in the end all that will be left will be the good manners, and then it will not any longer matter.
But then there is an altogether new and quite uncertain development which takes place this week. A new class has arrived. You. It is now your university, also. It will impart some of its qualities to you, and partake of some of yours. I have dealt tonight with the foreknowledge of other men, and it would be inappropriate to enter the field myself. And yet, I would wish you to know that you are well spoken of and genuinely welcome.
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Postscript
Most of the many students who attended the freshman lecture this year were handed literature as they entered Sanders Theater by representatives of three groups, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Radcliffe-Harvard New American Movement (NAM), and the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). The material was familiar enough, stressing especially that aching need for alliance with the working class which upper-middle-class radicals continue to exhibit. (One learns in the SDS pamphlet that “Harvard students under President Lowell were given course credit for breaking unions in Massachusetts by scabbing on workers’ strikes. But if we really want to change things, workers must be our strongest allies.”) Dean Bundy, Professors Kissinger and Huntington come in for the usual epithets. Somewhat new, however, is the identification of a “Cambridge Circle” made up of a number of professors, myself included, who are alleged to be leading an “attack on equality.” It is surely “no accident” that almost without exception the specific charges leveled against the “Cambridge Circle” are lies. That is to say they are not distortions, or misreadings, but true and genuine lies. In most instances they represent the individual as holding an opinion exactly opposite of that which he does hold. This has nothing to do with the correctness or incorrectness, or attractiveness, or whatever, of the views the individuals do hold or those they are alleged to hold. It is merely that there has been a complete inversion of reality. I believe this to be a distinguishing quality of the Stalinoid mindset.
In fairness to the Revolutionary Communist Youth, it should be said that, unlike their forebears of the Popular Front period, they sail under their own colors. They state:
The Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY) is the youth section of the Spartacist League, which uniquely represents the nucleus of the vanguard party in the U.S. The RCY originated in 1969 as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus, a Left oppositional grouping in SDS which fought for Marxist clarity against both the anarcho-Maoism of the Rudd-Weatherman wing and the crude social-workerism of Progressive Labor. . . . The RCY seeks to develop young radicals into lifetime communist militants, and to build a socialist youth organization which can intervene in all social struggles with a revolutionary program based on the politics of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky.
It is doubtless perverse to do so, but I happen to find that an honorable statement of purpose.
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1 Robert Warshow, The Immediate Experience, Double-day, p. 50.
2 Ibid., p. 33.
3 “Liberalism versus Liberal Education,” COMMENTARY, June 1972.
4 Some of the fifteen served in earlier administrations.
