To the Editor:
I wish to endorse heartily the arguments of Morton White in his reply to H. Stuart Hughes in your January “Letters from Readers.” I do so as a relatively late convert to his ideal of the “free practical intellectual,” having been strongly inoculated at college with the Spenglerian virus (I wrote my A.B. thesis mostly on Spengler, on whom I believe Mr. Hughes wrote his Ph.D. thesis), and having consequently taken for granted too much of the moral quietism on which Spengler’s effects, like Toynbee’s, depend. It seems to me now that the spectacle of a Dean Acheson, a Kennan or, yes, even a Robert Cutler (about whose mental equipment I confess I know almost nothing), moving in and out of office but remaining clearly felt presences whether in or out, is the most satisfying aspect of our public life. At the risk of being banal, I would say that no benefit of government is worth more than this possibility.
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Our nostalgia for the days when intellectuals seemed to exert a more direct pressure on government seems to me to rest on a false analogy. What looks to some people like government in the 16th- or even 19th-century sense of the word is usually better described in the 20th century as administration. The government which, for convenience’s sake, used to be embodied in the person of a ruler or small group of ministers, has now become, except during emergencies, more of what Santayana used to call a “moral stress,” diffused and often seemingly quiescent. And when we look into a Machiavelli, an Erasmus, Milton, or Bentham, we see that, for the most part, they kept a respectable independence from “government” in the most tangible sense. Ideas worked more openly, swiftly, and directly. States were smaller and more mobile; things happened faster. These may be truisms but I think they are easily forgotten. To a degree, Mr. Acheson is still a power in government; for his actions, his opinions, and person are still very much in the minds both of the actual administrators and those of age to speculate competently about foreign affairs. The only answer, I should say, to the despair of our current political parties so eloquently voiced by Irving Howe and his associates of Dissent is to point to this perpetually convening congress of “free practical intellectuals” which our mid-century way of life has made possible. Perhaps we may miss the drama and panoply of more direct government, we may even regret the dynastic abruptness of a system in which intellectuals may safely devote their whole attention to chess and memoirs when out of office. The fact remains, however, that no true Milton can remain mute or inglorious very long with Washington only a five-minutes’ telephone connection away from any part of the country. And if the appearance of Hugh Gaitskell on Boston TV sets for three nights running, delivering the Harvard Godkin Lectures, at the height of a British parliamentary crisis, is not drama, then I don’t know what drama is. We have to take it where we find it.
R. W. Flint
Cambridge, Mass.
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