BOOKS
463
THE RADICAL CIRCLE
THE NEW RADICALISM IN AMERICA, 1889-1963: The Intellectual
lIS
a Social Type.
By
Christopher Lasch. Alfred
A.
Knopf. $6.95.
Christopher Lasch has written a subtle, disturbing and im–
portant book. A composite portrait of the American intellectual from
the end of the nineteenth century to the K ennedy administration, it
IS
also an essay on the place of intelligence in modern society.
Lasch's historical method is psychological, and his psychology is
an amalgam of biographical and social analysis. He begins with J ane
Addams and ends with Norman Mailer (among those he treats are
Randolph Bourne, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Colonel House, Lincoln Stef–
fens, Reinhold Niebuhr and Dwight Macdonald); and he identifies the
symptomatic aspects of the lives of his subjects, the personal crises which
are idiosyncratic versions of common difficulties.
But the strength of the work is, perhaps inevitably, a source of
weakness. History is here recounted like a late bourgeois novel, a curious
Bildungsroman
whose hero--the American intellectual-seems unable
ever to reach maturity, compelled indefinitely to repeat the follies of his
youth. Lasch maintains the unity of his own critical thought by insisting
upon the traits common to his subjects. A fully achieved portrait is the
result, but the era's inner movement comes rather short. In the end, he
has very little to say about the changes in our circumstances; living his–
tory turns out to be, disappointingly, not entirely alive and moving.
The "new radicalism in America," Mr. Lasch feels, is less a fixed
doctrine than a set of attitudes, a system of preconceptions-fundamen–
tally, a critique of the quality of American life. The new radicals looked
for "scientifically" ascertainable principles applicable to cultural recon–
struction. H aving found them, they sought to uSe politics to change
culture and ended with an impossibly swollen conception of politics.
Unable to accept the American version of bourgeois culture, certainly
unable to overthrow it, they have oscillated between self-pitying aliena–
tion and sententious conformism. Demanding the impossible of politics,
they have gone from illusion to disappointment to illusion in a cycle
which trancends generations. Each generation has thought of itself as
more emancipated and more honest than the last. Each, however, has
had the same obsessions. The urge to remake society by scientific mani–
pulation has alternated, frequently in the same lives, with a resigned ac–
ceptance of existing historical possibilities as the sole source of value.
