PARTISAN REVIEW
The Social Mind has been Hazlitt's most commented-upon doctrine.
This theory is not new, but it has not been adequately emphasized in
literary criticism. In his use of the theory that individual idt':ls have their
roots in a complete
Weltallschnuu71g
and must be checked against that
outlook, Hazlitt has made a contribution to traditional criticism. He
points out, furthcr, that though this social mind is not independent ot
individual minds but rather a composite of them, it alone provides the
tissue from which esthetic val lies emcrge. In other words, though value
judgments of art are made by individuals, their validity is a function of
the dominant standards of value, and their use for the future depends on
their successful adaptation to later standards of vallie.
But here, too, the question is not s:mply one of balance, as Hazlitt
seems to believe. The limits of the doctrine of the Social l\lind may be
seen in the faulty economics which Hazlitt uses to illustrate his point.
He shows that the price of a commodity is independent of its valuation by
any individual. In doing this he falls back on a supply-demand economics.
By failing to observe the determining character of the amount of socially
necessary labor power upon the value of a commodity, Hazlitt is left with
a philosophy of chance. Similarly, in questions of art, unless one points
to objectivc social forces, one cannot explain the changes in art values, nor
the significance of those that exist at any time. Standards of art become
least common denominators, to be changed by individual genius. Hazlitt
can tell us that the
~ocial
mind changed from the poetry of Dryden to that
of Byron, or that some people are molding a proletarian literature and
others believe in a relative autonomy for art, but his method gives no
insight into the mcaning or validity or
miso71
d'
etre
of these group judg–
ments.
This last hits the main inadequacy of the theory and shows that an
inadequate theory may become in practice a false one. A complete social
mind is a fiction, at least for those forms of society which have been
composed of economic classes. At most there was a dominant social mind
at any time in history. What social mind exists today that includes both
a complete acceptance of the value of MacLeish, Proust, Joyce, on the
one hand, and of the grow:ng proletarian literature on the other? The
former are merely in a precarious predominance over the latter.
The notion of "pure" art has been steadily undermined during thc
last decade. Aside from its sociological and psychological fallacies, a mere
insistence on definition would make of this slogan a plea for meaning–
lessness in art, or as Hazlitt aptly says: "for pure poetry ... would be at
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