r.
~
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270
PARTISAN REVIEW
Meanwhile the once revolutionary urban bourgeoisie has become a
conservative force. No more a sensitive membrane, but an inert sticky
glue which holds the social body together. Their frustrations are re–
pressed, their aspirations are not towards new hierarchies of values,
but towards climbing to the top of the existing hierarchy. Thus the
intelligentsia, once the vanguard of the ascending bourgeoisie, be–
comes the Lumpen-Bourgeoisie in the age of its decay.
IV
THE INTELLIGENTSIA AND THE FouRTH EsTATE
As
the Third Estate gradually loses its progressive character to
become first stagnant then regressive, the intelligentsia becomes more
and more detached from it and driven to the quest for more vigorous
allies, capable of fulfilling its task of demolition and construction.
The most fascinating example for this quest is nineteenth-century
Russia. '... Whether they (the revolutionary intelligentsia) spoke of
the necessity of political liberty, of the plight of the peasant or of the
socialist future of society, it was always their own plight which really
moved them. And their plight was not primarily due to material need:
it was spiritual.' (Borkenau, 'The Communist International').
This spiritual plight of the Russian intelligentsia was yet another
form of the duality I mentioned: the contradiction between the inert,
stagnant, habit-conditioned form of everyday life on the one hand,
and the accumulated data of objective knowledge lying fallow as
'theory' and 'ideology' on the other. For the nineteenth-century Rus–
sians this latter principle was embodied in Western European civiliza–
tion: in British Parliamentarism, French literature, German philoso–
phy. For them, the Western was the incarnation of homo sapiens as
opposed to the Barbarians of the steppes; just as, by an ironical tum
of history, the Western intelligentsia of the two post-war decades be–
came spell-bound by Russian Communism which seemed to incor–
porate the truly human Utopia, as opposed to the decay of Capitalism.
There is, however, a fundamental difference between the early
Russian revolutionary intelligentsia- the Shelyabows, Sonja Petrov–
skajas, Bakunins, Nechaews, Kropotkins, and the Bloomsbury of
the Pink Decade. It is easy to sneer at the comparison and to con–
trast the futility of the latter with the heroism of the assassins of
Alexander II, the martyrdom of the Siberian exiles and the prisoners
of Schluesselburg. Racial comparisons between the undeniably greater
endurance and fatalism of the semi-asiatic Russians and the highly
strung Westerners provide one differential factor, but not the basic
