RADICAL QUESTIONS
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sterility of total estrangement, the welfare state has heen an unset–
tling experience. Here are some of the characteristic responses of
leftist intellectuals in the past few decades:
• A feeling that the high drama (actually, the vicarious excite–
ment) of earlier Marxist or ((revolutionary" politics has been lost,
and that in the relatively trivial struggles for a division of social
wealth and power within a stable order there is neither much room
nor need for intellectual activity.
By now, this response is simply
tiresome. The snobbism of nostalgia can easily decline into a snobbism
of abstention; but those who care to act within history as it is, no
matter in how modest a way, must accept the possibilities of today
in order to transform those of tomorrow.
• A belief that the welfare state will, in effect, remain stable
and basically unchanged into the indefinite future; that conflict will
be contained within the limits prescribed by the welfare state; and
that the problems of technique (e.g., how to administer a poverty
program, how to retrain workers left jobless by automation)
will
supersede the ((irresponsible" tradition of fundamental criticism.
By
accepting the "givenness" not merely of the welfare state but also of
its
present forms and boundaries, this view underestimates the value
of basic moral-political criticism. To cite a simple example: is the
shameful failure to tear down the vast slum called Harlem due to
difficulties in technique and administration or is it due to moral
indifference, social timidity and racial meanness? Another example:
whether poverty can be entirely abolished within the present society
is not so much a matter for analysis or speculation as for experiment
and action. Such an effort might well require a radical restructuring
of the welfare state to include a large program of public works, a
degree of economic planning and a new allotment of social resources;
and what keeps it from being enacted is not so much difficulties in
execution as a failure of social will, responsibility and imagination.
If
I am right in saying this, the traditional responses of the intel–
lectual--even if these are dismissed
in
certain quarters as utopian,
impractical, etc.-remain quite as necessary as in the past. It might
be
maintained that even for new proposals to alleviate social troubles
within
the present society a degree of utopian perspective and intel–
lectual distance is required. For essential to such alleviation is a con–
tinued extension of the idea of the practical. One need not agree with
Paul Goodman's general outlook or his schemes for social improve-
