178
PARTISAN REVIEW
cafe adventurers, as well as poets and left-wingers. Even in
this
broader application, however, the "bohemian" is still, to use an ugly
journalistic word, a "mic.;fit."
It would indeed be a good thing, then,
if
these bohemians, this
gang of outlaws, pseudo-aristocrats, cracker-box philosophers, free
lovers, unemployed and poets, whom everyone has long suspected
anyway, were convicted of the crime of fascism and humanity itself
were absolved.
But just to pin things on this human flea market will not do,
apparently. For Heiden's definition is deep as well as broad. The
bohemian, he says, is an "intellectual" who has not found his place
in society. And an "intellectual"? He is the "type of the pragmatical
and mechanistically minded modern man, product of mass education
[and who isn't], whose sole criterion is: Will it work?"
According to this, the "intellectual" is practically everybody who
has gone to school-the exceptions would be certain rare individuals
who were educated privately and who shun the test of utility, or
measure it
in
turn by some system of higher values.
Heiden's intellectual
is
Modern Man, and he is a bohemian or
potential bohemian, while only the exceptions are not
bo~emians
for Man does.not have a private tutor. So the bohemian won't do as
a scapegoat after all, and humanity itself is once more un(ler suspicion.
Heiden's image of the bohemian villain who springs out of cul–
tural conditions bears certain resemblances to that of the sociological
Freudian, Erich Fromm, whose alienated and divided modern per–
sonality inevitably contains the dangerous "outsider'' within the depths
of his self. But Fromm does not make Heiden's mistake of dividing
society into more than one basic psychological type....
A:
It is Modern Man, then, that has tendencies towards fascism?
B: Well, only under certain conditions-unemployment, social up–
heavals. The monster is there, of course, but-we keep to the
Freudian parallel-he comes out only in black weather.
A:
But the positive source of evil is still the nature of Man himself,
who,
if
his order breaks down even momentarily, reaches for
the ax?
t':
Through all psychological theories of Man, the fascist, runs the
thread of Original Sin and the belief that society is charged with
the function of restraining the evil nature of Man. Once we
grant this, the whole democratic movement, the entire spirit of
the French and the American revolutions, the educational cru–
sade begun by Rousseau, the socialist and anarchist ideals of a
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