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vague resentment. He has looked into the faces of the American elite
and realized with dramatic pleasure that they are blank. It is the mis–
fortune of the socialist critic in our time, equipped with better social
psychology than his forebears, to look into the faces of the mass and
see that these too are irremediably blank. Masses are merely the poorer
relations of elites. For all Mills' middle-western devotion to the idea
that American power is won on the playing fields of Exeter, and other
such eastern places, the fact is that the elites are quite as mindless as
the mass and share a similarly empty inner life. False consciousness is
here to stay;
it
is the happy psychic condition of a mature and still
dynamic industrial civilization that has worked back through a religion
of transcendence to a religion of immanence based on a supra-primitive
fetishism of infinitely variable commodities. Criticism, when it serves no
religion of transcendence, not even a secular one, such as socialism,
becomes another bright and shiny thing, to be admired and consumed.
All the same, even if blame can be bought like praise nowadays, he
who blames is still to be preferred to he who praises.
Philip Rieff
INTELLECTUALS: NO IDEAS
THE MANDARINS. By Simone de Beouvoi r. World. $6.00.
I cannot help but sympathize with the intention behind the
wrItmg of Simone de Beauvoir's n ew novel,
The Mandarins.
It was
nothing less than to describe the state of contemporary intellectual con–
sciousness, the author's assumption being, no doubt, that in the modem
world the decisive spiritual attitudes are assumed and formulated not
by regular politicians, businessmen, scientists, or scholars, but by intel–
lectuals, and literary intellectuals at that. All of the leading characters
in
The Mandarins
are writers; all that is, except Anne Dubreuilh, who
appears as a psychiatrist, but whom we at once recognize to be the
author herself. (One of the weaknesses of the novel is that this character
is so completely unconvincing as a psychiatrist.)
In some six hundred pages Simone de Beauvoir describes the char–
acteristic experiences of the literary intellectuals of her own generation.
Reading
The Mandarins,
one gets a very clear picture of what it means
to be a Parisian intellectual who came to maturity during or just after
the Second World War. The problems of sexual choice and political
commitment-not so different, to the author's way of thinking-are pre-
