14
PARTISAN REVIEW
major tendency among his colleagues as a drift from "science" to
"policy" in which "loyalty, not truth, provides the social condition
by which the intellectual discovers his new environment."
It
is a
drift "from the New School to the Rand Corporation."
There is, to be sure, a qualitative difference between the academy
and the government bureau or the editorial staff. The university is
still committed to the ideology of freedom, and many professors try
hard and honestly to live by it.
If
the intellectual cannot subsist in–
dependently, off his work or his relatives, the academy is usually his
best bet. But no one who has a live sense of what the literary life
has been .and might still be, either in Europe or this country, can
accept the notion that the academy is the natural home of intellect.
What seems so unfortunate is that the whole
idea
of independence
is losing its traditional power. Scientists are bound with chains of
official secrecy; sociologists compete for government research chores;
foundations become indifferent to solitary writers and delight in
"teams"; the possibility of living in decent poverty from moderately
serious literary journalism becomes more and more remote. Com–
promises are no doubt necessary, but they had better be recognized
for what they are.
Perhaps something should be said here about "alienation," a
subject on which intellectuals have written f9.ore self-humiliating non–
sense than any other, except several. Involved, primarily, is a matter
of historical fact. During most of the bourgeois epoch, the European
intellectuals grew increasingly alienated from the social community
because the very ideals that had animated the bourgeois revolution
were now being violated by bourgeois society; their "alienation" was
prompted not by bohemian willfulness or socialist dogmatism but by
a loyalty to Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, or to a vision of a pre–
industrial society that, by a trick of history, came pretty much to re–
semble Liberty, Fraternity, Equality. Just as it was the triumph of
capitalism which largely caused this sense of estrangement, so it was
the expansion of capitalism that allowed the intellectuals enough free–
dom to express it.
As
Philip Rahv has put it: "During the greater
part of the bourgeois epoch ... [writers] preferred alienation from
the community to alienation from themselves." Precisely this choice
made possible their strength and boldness, precisely this "lack of
roots" gave them their speculative power. Almost always, the talk
