472
LEWIS COSER
MARX A LA MODE
POWER IN AMERICA: THE POLITICS OF THE NEW CLASS.
By
David
T. Bazelon. N.ew American Library. $7.50.
Bazelon's
The Paper Economy
was not a very original book
to be sure, but it brought Thorstein Veblen up to date, and that was
a worthwhile enterprise. In his new book Bazelon attempts to bring
James Burnham up to date, and the result is dismaying.
"Intellectuals favor ideals too much," argues Bazelon, "and our
more practical men lack both the ideals and ideas. ..." The author
proposes to remedy these deplorable deficiencies; he offers a realistic
preachment to the New Class, that "group
of
people gaining status
and income through organizational position," on how
to
overcome
their present frustrations, to become "thinkers-ahead," tough-minded
molders of America's future. C. Wright Mills once called Burnham
a Marx for the Managers; Bazelon sounds like a Lenin for Scarsdale.
Comparing Burnham to Bazelon is an injustice to the former;
he at least wrote in a clean and sparse style while Bazelon's hepped-up
pseudofolksy manner would make one wince even were he to agree
with the book's content. A writer who starts a sentence with, "Now
doesn't it turn a bulb in your
head~"
who proposes to "lay a stetho–
scope on the heart of the House" and who refers to the Supreme
Court as "nearly the core-slice of American Apple Pie" (incidentally,
what on
earth
is
the core-slice of an apple pie?) either thinks vulgarly
or believes that such vulgarity is necessary in addressing the as yet
insufficiently developed sensitivities of the New Class. To judge from
the evidence of Bazelon's earlier writing, I
think
that the latter is more
likely.
Bazelon's reasoning is as shoddy as his writing is corny. When
speaking of members of the New Class who, regrettably, "over-identify
with some more traditional grouping," he mentions "the urban Jews
[who over-identify] with problems of social justice." Why is social
justice a traditional grouping? And what's wrong with overidentifying
with justice anyway? Sometimes it is literally impossible to understand
what the author is driving at. I have shown the following passage to
