Irving Howe
THIS AGE OF CONFORMITY
(Notes on an endless theme, or,
A
catalogue of complaints)
Intellectuals have always been partial to grandiose ideas
about themselves, whether of an heroic or masochistic kind, but
surely no one has ever had a more grandiose idea about the destiny
of modern intellectuals than the brilliant economist Joseph Schum–
peter. Though he desired nothing so much as to be realistic and
hard-boiled, Schumpeter had somehow absorbed all those romantic
notions about the revolutionary potential and critical independence
of the intellectuals which have now and again swept through the
radical and bohemian worlds. Marx, said Schumpeter, was wrong
in supposing that capitalism would break down from inherent eco–
nomic contradictions; it broke down, instead, from an inability to
claim people through ties of loyalty and value. "Unlike any other
type of society, capitalism inevitably . . . creates, educates and sub–
sidizes a vested interest in social unrest." The intellectuals, bristling
with neurotic aspirations and deranged by fantasies of utopia made
possible by the very society they would destroy, become agents of
discontent who infect rich and poor, high and low.
In
drawing this
picture Schumpeter hardly meant to praise the intellectuals, yet until
a few years ago many of them would have accepted it as both truth
and tribute, though a few of the more realistic ones might have
smiled a doubt as to their capacity to do
all that.
Schumpeter's picture of the intellectuals
is
not, of course, with–
out historical validity, but at the moment it seems spectacularly, even
comically wrong· And wrong for a reason that Schumpeter, with
his
elaborate sense of irony, would have appreciated: he who had in–
sisted that capitalism
is
"a form or method of economic change and
not only never is but never can be stationary" had failed sufficiently
