ARGUMENTS
UTOPIAI MYOPIA
David Caute
Quite a few of the twenty-six essays gathered in this collee–
tion
1
originated in
PRo
To take issue with Irving Howe in these pages
is probably a hazardous enterprise for a reviewer who can measure up
neither to Mr. Howe's maturity of experience nor to his extensive knowl–
edge of American politics and society. Dangerous, but perhaps excusable.
For Mr. Howe is worried about the generational gap on the American
Left. Not only did the generation born
in
the early thirties fail to spawn
its quota of radicals, but, more seriously, the Socialists who were born
after World War I have failed to establish a fruitful dialogue with the
New Left of the sixties. Whereas the students of SDS tend toward
empathy, Camus, the "existential" approach, nonleadership and a style
partly but not wholly divorced from that of the Beats, the meticulously
rational Howes, Rustins and Leaguers for Industrial Democracy, Tal–
mudic and impatient, jab at the inconsistencies of the New Left "like
skilled but insensitive matadors." (The phrase is Jack Newfield's.) Mr.
Howe regards the ethos of SDS, particularly its agnostic attitude
toward Communism, as hopelessly woolly, while Mr. Newfield in turn
complains that Mr. Howe "has not visited SDS or SNCC projects, or
spent any time on McDougal Street. He writes brilliantly in the ab–
stract, but lacks a feeling of community with the new movements be–
cause they are strangers to him."
l.
STEADY WORK: Essays
in
the Politics of Democratic Radicalism, 1953-
1966. By Irving Howe. Harcourt, Brace
&
World. $6.95.
