OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
575
IRVING HOWE
The "alienation"l of American intellectuals has at least
three major sources: a sense of inferiority felt by earlier genera–
tions toward European tradition; a decision, often the result of a
radical commitment, to break from official society; and the inherit–
ance of the central experience of modern European writers, which
begins with Stendhal's and Flaubert's hatred for bourgeois values,
leads to the appearance of a precarious caste of literary intelligentsia,
and ends with the cult of aesthetic difficulty and the unappreciated
artist working in estrangement from the public.
Clearly, the first of these is now close to anachronism. Amer–
ican culture, by comparison with the European product, should
evoke neither apology nor what is worse, genteel chauvinism. The
notion that America is uniquely a land of barbarism now seems silly.
The notion that America is uniquely a land of social vitality is
equally silly, an illusion shared by Parisian literary men overcome
by the splendors of Dashiell Hammett and American liberals over–
come by the benefits of a war economy. For all its distinctive traits,
America is more than ever part of an .international society; the
fate of world capitalism, whatever that may be, will be its fate.
The other two sources of "alienation,"
in
no way dependent on
a completed phase of American history, are more important; they
can best be discussed in terms of a political premise.
A once vigorous society is reaching its end, but there is no
clear sight of what will replace it. No matter how many years it
may linger, capitalism as a world system is exhausted, economically
and spiritually; only
in
America does it still claim substantial ad-
1,
This word has a curious history. As used by Marx, it suggests the psychic
price of living in a society which resolves "personal worth into exchange value"
and in which the worker's "deed becomes an alien power." The subdivision
of labor makes the worker "a cripple .. . forcing him to develop some highly
specialized dexterity at the cost of a world of productive impulses. . . ."
Certain writers therefore have a point when they attack the notion that
intellectuals are alienated and insist, rather, that intellectuals are among the
few who can achieve an organic relation to their work-but
it
is a scholastic
point. For it must by now be clear that the word "alienation" has at least two
distinct uses. When the worker, because of his place in production, is alienated
from his capacities, that is a social evil; when the intellectual, because of his
spiritual independence, becomes alienated from bourgeois society and its values,
that is something else again.
