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PARTISAN REVIEW
scious of itself, articulate, and capable of resisting the temptation and
the insidiousness of the most powerful social and psychological
pressures.
Critical non-conformism is an unfortunate but unavoidable tenn.
It suggests the village atheist, the urban crackpot, and the parlor
socialist. It is less likely to suggest Socrates, who whatever else he may
have been, was certainly a critical non-conformist, and in a systematic,
committed, quintessential way. So, to use the rhetoric of citation,
among other critical non-conformists are Montaigne, Pascal, Voltaire,
Kant, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, and Freud; and in America, whether we
think of Emerson and Thoreau, or Veblen and Mencken, there
is
hardly a name to invoke in whom critical non-conformism is not
central and essential. Apart from names, if we think of the human
situation in any time, how can we conceive of the functioning of the
intelligence apart from the possibility of criticism and dissent? The
intelligence is in its very nature critical; to be an intellectual is to be
committed to the intelligence and to be a critic and to raise endlessly
the question of acceptance and rejection. It is true that there is always
the danger of dissent as automatic, and criticism for its own sake, but
surely this is far less of a danger to civilized existence than the
barbarism which prevails whenever the intelligence is absent and
often enough when it is present.
Whether this description of the intelligence as critical and
non-conformist seems just for all human situations, it certainly
cannot be overemphasized or overestimated in our own situation: we
live in a mass society and in an industrial economy.
As
things are and
as they are likely to be in any near future, the highest values of
art,
thought and the spirit are not only not supported by the majority of
human beings nor by the dominant ways of modern society, but
they are attacked, denied or ignored by society as a mass.
Hence each of the questions of the symposium must be answered
by reference to the existence and the functioning of a critical, non–
conformist minority.
It is true that American intellectuals have changed their attitude
toward America and its institutions. But the change has occurred
because only America can any longer guarantee the survival of that
critical non-conformism without which the very term intellectual–
and the reality of the intelligence-is meaningless. However, to be-
