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PARTISAN REVIEW
the most important clue to a true understanding of their problems
and new insights. In Marx, as in the case of other great authors of
the last century, a seemingly playful, challenging, and paradoxical
mood conceals the perplexity of having to deal with new phenomena
in terms of an old tradition of thought outside of whose conceptual
framework no thinking seemed possible at all. It is as though Marx,
not unlike Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, tried desperately to think
against the tradition using its own conceptual tools. Our tradition of
political thought began when Plato discovered that it is somehow in–
herent in the philosophical experience to turn away from the com–
mon world of human affairs; it ended when nothing was left of
this experience but the opposition of thinking and acting, which, de–
priving thought of reality and action of sense, makes both meaningless.
II
The strength of this tradition, its hold on Western man's
thought, has never depended on his consciousness of it. Indeed, only
twice in our history do we encounter periods in which men are con–
scious and over-conscious of the fact of tradition, identifying age as
such with authority. This happened, first, when the Romans adopted
classical Greek thought and culture as their own spiritual tradition
and thereby decided historically that tradition was to have a perma–
nent formative influence on European civilization. Before the Romans
such a thing as tradition was unknown; with them it became and
after them it remained the guiding thread through the past and the
chain to which each new generation knowingly or unknowingly was
bound in its understanding of the world and its own experience. Not
until the Romantic period do we again encounter an exalted con–
sciousness and glorification of tradition. (The discovery of antiquity
in the Renaissance was a first attempt to break the fetters of tradition,
and by going to the sources themselves to establish a past over which
tradition would have no hold.) Today tradition is sometimes con–
sidered an essentially romantic concept, but romanticism did no more
than place the discussion of tradition on the agenda of the nineteenth
century; its glorification of the past only served to mark the moment
when the modern age was about to change our world and general
circumstances to such an extent that a matter-of-course reliance on
tradition was no longer possible.
