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from Lipset'll account of the American political system, what one is left
with is nothing more than the J?icture of a money-ridden society governed
by economic interests. Mr. Lipset's vision of American society corresponds
almost point by point with the classic materialist diagnosis-with the
exception that his two values, superadded to the whole, are like some
magical icing supposed to transform the cake, or perhaps to disguise it.
It would, however, be unjust to Lipset to hold him personally
responsible for these so-called values, these potent yet ever-so-immaterial
agents. This isn't the first time that equality and achievement have been
discussed as essential parts of the American Dream. In point of fact, a
whole generation of social commentators have established themselves
through analysing that dream. One may be permitted to wonder to
what extent they also fabricate it. For if one follows Lipset's efforts
with reasonable care, one can hardly miss seeing such familiar mechan–
isms as displacement, condensation, secondary elaboration, as well as
repression, at work. (After all, who formulates to a large degree the
consciousness of a time? It's certainly not the man in the street.) In the
American Dream of Seymour Martin Lipset, even the primary processes
can be seen breaking through, revealing what is being repressed. And
although Lipset himself is a convenient subject for the study of such
processes, whole generations of social scientists have been busy stowing
away the same object of anxiety: it is the corpse of that unwelcome,
unacknowledged, and illegitimate ancestor in their lineage which still
keeps growing right in the middle of their parlor, like the corpse in
Ionesco's
Amedee.
This spectre which keeps haunting the family of
modern sociologists is the very material ghost of St. Marx. And social
scientists, in large numbers, still keep trying to take this very material
ghost and fly up with it to the heaven of eternal ideas, of "values."
They hope to "translate" him and so exorcise his spirit. But so long as
exorcisms of Lipset's kind are being administered-he believes he has
borrowed the formulae for his incantations from Max Weber, whose
spirit,
he says, he feels indebted to-I wonder whether Marx's analysis
of the production of ideologies (only another name for rationalization,
in this case of a social unconscious) is not still substantially correct. For
in
the largest number of instances "value analysis" means little more
than a handy way of dispensing with Marx, and with the problems
that his theories and analyses raise.
Karl August Wittfogel
in
his "Marxist Study" on
Das Wissenschaft
in der buergerlichen Gesellschaft
(1922), seems to have been right when
he said that to disprove or argue against Marx too vigorously makes a
scholar suspect and may even damage his career, for intensive concern
