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masses according to their needs in future historical epochs, the prerequisite
for this social self-expression of the masses being their liberation by the
dictatorship of the proletariat. The dilemma of the utopianists-if the
society of the future already exists as a concept, how will the people of
the future accomodate themselves to it without being mechanized;
if
it
does not exist as a concept, how can one judge that it will be superior to
present society ?-a dilemma which Mr. Krutch, because be cannot com–
prehend the historical reality of class struggle, vainly strives to pin upon
communism, is dissolved by the Ma rxist dialectic and its conception of
the creative historical rOle of the masses.
Marxism makes it possible to gauge the potentialities of the
fut~r.:
because it provides the means for analyzing the formations of the past.
But owing to his inability to think in terms of . historical actuality, Mr.
Krutch's notion of Europe's past, its ''heritage," is as vacant and misguided
as his notion of communism. "Individuality," "freedom," and "disinter–
ested speculation" (the "disinterested" is, of course, dubious), the heritage
which- he claims to defend, have been different things in different historical
epochs. They seem to have no place in communist society because for
Mr. Krutch's intellectual epoch the word individuality actu::lly means the
self-fascination of personality and the nurturing of the unreal ego of the
sentimental pragmatists; freedom means the liberty to inherit, travel,
and "live dangerously" a career of sensation; and disinterested speculation
means, not scientific accuracy and necessity, or even speculation apart from
propagandist aims, but detachment for its own sake, the privilege of being
a voluptuous taster of spiritual commodities secure from the partisanships
of life and without responsibility. So that the individuality, freedom and
speculation of Mr. Krutch's epoch can have no place in communism.
Communism exposes the degeneracy
qf.
bourgeois conceptions of in–
dividuality, freedom and knowledge.
It
displays the actual content of
these terms in the present epoch. It proposes to mak:e a realistic redefinition.
of these values in accord with social fact and scientific possibility.
But why, in view of the particular forms of individuality, freedom
and knowledge which he has in mind, does Mr. Krutch elect to call
them "European" values? They would be "European" only if they had
always existed in and been characteristic of European life; but he himself,
though he tries to see them floating over the whole history of Europe, is
forced to state that they were "at times obscured by opposite tendencies,
and certain of them-notably those which relate to individ ual freedom
and the high valuation put upon what is called personality-hardly man–
ifested themselves very strongly before the Renaissance." And the fact is
that these values of the bourgeois individualist, to whom "differentiation
and variety" are "desidable in themselves," scarcely
ant~cede
the anti-social
and animistic ideals of the 19th century; in the middle ages, when freedom
was considered as synonymous with reason, individuality had to with a
discipline of the metaphysical soul; in antiquity, the individuality of a man
seems to have consisted largely of N arne and Reputation, an eidolon re–
sulting from the social quality of his deeds. Apparently then, it is not
of free, speculative individuality in its European context that Mr. Krutch
is thinking, but of 19th century personality which arises from and depends
upon the bourgeois social structure; he is not analyzing the history of
