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NORMAN BIRNBAUM
expresses the fascination exercised upon those who cannot, or who are
not allowed to,
think
freely by those whose metier is free thought–
or something like it.
Free thought, then, is a primary source of the intellectuals'
politics. Hence their tendency toward abstraction: the intellectuals of
a movement, or of a class, may be among the first to comprehend the
historical implications of the moment experienced by others simply in its
concreteness. The bourgeois thinkers (like Marx) who saw in the sects
of artisans and the inchoate protests of the new proletariat the begin–
nings of a totally new society, and the German imperial (and later
Nazi) theorists who pushed to logical conclusions the instinctive anti–
Semitism of more popular German groupings, each illustrate at opposite
moral and political poles a certain ideological consistency, even ruthless–
ness, among the intellectuals. Combined with their eccentric relation to
the market and later to the bureaucratic organization of intellectual
activity, these traits have often enabled the intellectuals to see the con–
tradictions of a society at a given moment in its development. There are
countless examples but one point is clear: the intellectuals' distance
from certain kinds of practical activity, their repugnance for certain
forms of bureaucracy, their attachment to abstract versions of bourgeois
tradition rather than to the substratum of bourgeois activity, their
familiar quest for sinecures in the interstices of bureaucratized intellectual
systems, combine to endow them with what was once an anticapitalist
and is now an antibureaucratic ethos.
It
does not follow that this must produce a socialist politics, since
it can also produce political conservatism and, indeed, even some
kind of fascism. At present, however, the intellectuals seem divided be–
tween two positions. The first encompasses what can be described as
critical endorsement of the bureaucratic organization of society.
An
alteration in priorities, a more just distribution of the social product, a
broadening of the basis of higher culture (assumed to be relatively
intact and in the possession of contemporary elites, of course) - in
short, perfectly plausible reformist solutions to present conflicts are
envisaged as not only compatible with the present political and social
system but very likely to be attained only by utilizing that system's
intrinsic possibilities. The second position supposes that bureaucratic
organization is not a simple instrumentality but an agency of domination,
that priorities cannot be altered in a system which functions so as to
obscure but invariably to maintain certain kinds of domination, and that
a newer and freer human culture can be created only
if
an entire system
of social constraints were to be removed. In brief, it is a position of
social criticism so profound as to generate a revolutionary politics. But
what revolutionary agency can intellectuals find, other than themselves?
