8
PARTISAN REVIEW
to consider those new developments in our society which have changed
the whole position and status of the intellectuals. Far from creating
and subsidizing unrest, capitalism in its most recent stage has found
an honored place for the intellectuals; and the intellectuals, far from
thinking of themselves as a desperate "opposition," have been enjoy–
ing a return to the bosom of the nation. Were Archibald M.acLeish
again tempted to play Cato and chastize the Irresponsibles, he could
hardly find a victim. We have all, even the handful who still try
to retain a glower of criticism, become responsible and moderate.
And tame.
II
In 1932 not many American intellectuals saw any hope
for the revival of capitalism. Few of them could support this feeling
with any well-grounded theory of society; many held to a highly
simplified idea of what capitalism was; and almost all were com–
mitted to a vision of the
crisis
of capitalism which was merely a vul–
garized model of the class struggle in Europe. Suddenly, with the
appearance of the New Deal, the intellectuals saw fresh hope: capi–
talism was not to be exhausted by the naive specifications they had
assigned it, and consequently the "European" policies of the Roose–
velt administration might help dissolve their "Europeanized" sense
of crisis. So that the more American society became Europeanized,
adopting measures that had been common practice on the Continent
for decades, the more the American intellectuals began to believe
in ... American uniqueness. Somehow, the major capitalist power
in the world would evade the troubles afflicting capitalism as a world
economy.
The two central policies of the New Deal, social legislation and
state intervention in economic life, were not unrelated, but they were
separable as to time; in Europe they had not always appeared to–
gether. Here, in America, it was the simultaneous introduction of
these two policies that aroused the enthusiasm, as it dulled the criti–
cism, of the intellectuals. Had the drive toward bureaucratic state
regulation of a capitalist economy appeared by itself, so that one
could see the state becoming a major buyer and hence indirect con–
troller of industry, and industries on the verge of collapse being sys–
tematically subsidized by the state, and the whole of economic life
