THIS AGE OF CONFORMITY
9
being rationalized according to the long-run needs,
if
not the imme–
diate tastes, of corporate economy-had all this appeared in isolation,
the intellectuals would have reacted critically, they would have recog–
nized the trend toward "state capitalism" as the danger
it
was. But
their desire for the genuine social reforms that came with this trend
made them blind or indifferent to the danger. Still, one may suppose
that their enthusiasm would have mellowed had not the New Deal
been gradually transformed into a permanent war economy; for
whatever the theoretical attractions of the Keynesian formula for
salvaging capitalism, it has thus far "worked" only in times of war
or preparation for war. And it was in the war economy, itself closely
related to the trend toward statification, that the intellectuals came
into their own.
Statification, war economy, the growth of a mass society and
mass culture-all these are aspects of the same historical process. The
kind of society that has been emerging in the West, a society in
which bureaucratic controls are imposed upon (but not fundamen–
tally against) an interplay of private interests, has need for intellec–
tuals in a way the earlier, "traditional" capitalism never did.
It
is
a society in which ideology plays an unprecedented part: as social
relations become more abstract and elusive, the human object is
bound to the state with ideological slogans and abstractions-and for
this chore intellectuals are indispensable, no one else can do the job
as well. Because industrialism grants large quantities of leisure time
without any creative sense of how to employ it, there springs up a
vast new industry that must be staffed by intellectuals and quasi-in–
tellectuals: the industry of mass culture. And because the state sub–
sidizes mass education and our uneasy prosperity allows additional
millions to gain a "higher" education, many new jobs suddenly be–
come available in the academy: some fall to intellectuals. Bohemia
gradually disappears as a setting for our intellectual life, and what
remains of it seems willed or fake. Looking upon the prosperous ruins
of Greenwich Village, one sometimes feels that a full-time bohemian
career has become as arduous, if not as expensive, as acquiring a Ph.D.
Bohemia, said Flaubert, was "the fatherland of my breed."
If
so, his breed, at least in America, is becoming extinct. The most excit–
ing periods of American intellectual life tend to coincide with the rise
of bohemia, with the tragic yet liberating rhythm of the break from
