CHOOSING TO CONFORM
BEYOND CONFORMITY.
By
Winston Wh ite. Free Press. $5.00.
It's all a little sad! Here is the first major effort of a socio–
logist to analyze central themes in the thinking of contemporary Ameri–
can intellectuals and to understand their criticism of, and alienation
from, society. Yet, the result reminds one of what it would be like to
talk about color with a blind man. Winston White has conscientiously
plowed through
Partisan Review, Commentary, Dissent, The American
Scholar,
and
The Atlantic Monthly
in order to find out what intel–
lectuals were thinking about
in
the nineteen fifties; his notes contain,
literally, hundreds of references from these magazines. Leading ideas
are carefully codified, classified, and mounted for display-and the end
effect of all this labor is one big misunderstanding.
White classifies American intellectuals into two broad categories:
the "moralizers" and the "reformers." The first are men who, like Joseph
Wood Krutch, Archibald MacLeish or William H . Whyte, Jr. see
modern conformity rooted in a failure of individuals and seek for a
solution in the revival of an ethic of individualism. The second, men like
Erich Fromm,
J.
K. Galbraith, Irving Howe, and the writers for
Dissent,
trace conformity to structural defaults in contemporary society and see
modern man victimized by bureaucratization, mass culture, alienated
labor, and the like. These ideas are sufficiently familiar to readers of
Partisan Review,
so that there is no need to spell them out in detail.
These critical views White dismisses summarily, and then counter–
poses his own version of panglossian sociology: The major phenomena
deplored by critical intellectuals are by-products of the increasing diff–
erentiation and complexity of modern society. "Progress," he writes in
an amusing, if unconscious, paraphrase of the old bolshevist simile about
omelettes that cannot be made without breaking eggs, "has never been
gained without cost." What the intellectuals deplore are but the
tran–
sitory inconveniences of a beneficial drift which frees modern man from
the narrow loyalties and constraining allegiances of simpler societies and
makes available to them greater mobility and greater freedom. The
complex and differentiated society which is now emerging will allow a
more efficient mobilization of resources, an increased capacity to pursue
whatever goals are deemed desirable, and greater freedom of choice for
more individuals.
White's discussion of alienation provides a useful example of his
approach. He suggests that this concept, which has, of course, been a
