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tention and their pivotal values." As usual, the act fails to live up to its
advance billing.
But even as propaganda or special pleading, the book is no good
for the simple reason that the author fails to make clear what he is
propagandizing for, who his client is. I think this is because he doesn't
himself know, because he is himself drifting, confused, and, above all,
indifferent. The only pages which seemed at all alive to me were 324-
332, on the general political indifference that has become so widesp read
in this country since 1940. I think, or at least suspect, they are alive be–
cause here Mills for once is talking about himself and his own
problems. "Manipulation feeds upon and is fed by mass indifference,"
he observes later on. Since manipulation, exploitation of data and
ideas rather than a creative respect for them seems to me precisely to
characterize his own book, I find the sentence interesting. The masses
today are indifferent for the same reason so many of us intellectuals are:
you can't work up much interest-politically, at least-in a process which
you feel you can't affect. Almost everybody, masses and intellectuals
alike, feel ineffectual in politics (which is why half the eligible voters
don't vote even in presidential elections), but we intellectuals suffer a
further frustration: can we understand politics and history any more,
can we fit them into any conceptual frame, can we still believe that we
can find the theoretical key that will lay bare the real forces that shape
history-indeed, can we believe there
is
such a key at all? The liberals
and the Marxists, as Mills well points out, had their keys, but they
didn't fit the lock. Mills recognizes this, but he has no alternative theory
or explanation of why things are as they are. I suspect he feels modern
society is just not understandable, that he feels helpless and confused,
as, for that matter, I do myself. Only Mills won't admit it. So he writes
a book in which he tries to disguise his indifference, and therefore his
lack of ideas or even of interest, by energetic manipulation of impressive
abstract words, by interrupting both his interviewees and his quotees
before they can say anything, and indeed by constantly interrupting
himself
before he can say anything either, or rather before he can give
away the fact he hasn't anything to say. I wish he hadn't done it.
Dwight Macdonald
the hans hofmann school of fine art
52
west
8th street
new york city
phone gramercy 7-3491
morning • afternoon • evening
