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PARTISAN REVIEW
are simply Utopians-scorning-the-name-of-Utopians.
At other times, the
doctrines of
<week
im
Recht
is required to understand their policies.
By this doctrine, we are advised to "discount" the face- value of their
statement by noting what "interests" it protects. The principle of the
discount advises us to note that many advocates of socialism, for in-
stance, can gain asylum for their views by interlarding their appeal
with attacks upon Russia. Thereby they can advocate an unpopular
philosophy by "sharing" with their audience the usual capitalist aver-
sions. They need not be hampered by the realistic problems involved
in the "bureaucratization of the imaginative." In explicitly condemning
Utopianism, they can conceal from both their auditors and themselves
the underlying Utopian pattern of their thought.
"We concede the close relationship between this concept and
Spengler's culture-civilization dichotomy. But we should hold that every
individual man, at any period in history, must develop his own mature
"civilization" out of his own childhood "culture." Again, Spengler's
use of the formula vows him to an overly mystical notion of historic
change. Also, it asks us to think of culture and civilization as historic
absolutes, with one reigning at one time and the other reigning at an·
other, a schematization that makes for a false philosophy of purpose.
Yet it is undeniable that the accumulated by-products leading to "alien-
ation" are greater in some periods than others. And our concept might
offer a method of conversion whereby Spengler's formula could be
sufficiently "discounted" to make it useful for a Marxist critique of
social relationships.
"In the modern laboratory, the procedure of
invention
itself (the
very essence of the imaginative) has been bureaucratized.
Since the
time of the Renaissance, the West has been accumulating and perfecting
a
methodology
of invention, so that improvements can now be coached
by routine. Science, knowledge, is the bureaucratization of wisdom."
The citation is long. But I assure you that, after many tentatives,
it is the quickest way I know of correcting the falsities of emphasis in
Hook's simplified report of the tenor and contents of my book. Hook
makes my whole book appear like a mere off-shoot of the Stalin-Trotsky
controversy, an issue to which he devotes more space in his 5 pages
than I do in my 480 pages. I freely state, in this sentence, my sympathy
with the momentous tasks confronting the U. S. S. R., and my ad-
miration for the magnitude of its attainments.
But by far my major
interest is with the analysis of cultural processes as revealed by any and
all kinds of historical and personal situations. And I believe that this
quotation, despite the fact that it contains many terms requiring dev-
elopment elsewhere in my book, is sufficiently clear in itself to make
my perspective apparent. In passing quickly by the core of my book,
its concern with the psychology of art, Hook says that it deals with
"attitudes toward life-anytime,
anywhere." But when discussing, by
garbled and misleading quotation, a single projection I make from this
material, he seeks to give the impression that it is
the
most restricted
