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JAMES GILBERT
Left historians were suggesting that liberalism was not the enemy
of capitalism, but was rather one of its political forms, and that a
flexible reformist state was the greatest defense for private property.
How strange it seemed, to find the conventional Left guarding the
leftward ramparts of liberalism.
In another field, the same kind of criticism was being made.
C. Wright Mills, like the radical historians, worked toward a critique
of American political society through radical criticism of
his
col–
leagues, the sociologists. His analysis cut through the myths of
liberalism to the one crucial question which had been dodged in
those innumerable formalists' apologies for the American system–
"Who rules?" Mills's concern for the workings of power led him to
suggest that bureaucratic centralization grew almost inevitably from
the modern reform movements, and that liberalism and communism
shared an inexorable faith in centralization. But while Mills criticized
the intellectuals for willingly serving the corporation, he placed a
high value on their potential power as a social group. Mills's discus–
sion of the power elite brought into question the role of the intel–
lectual in social change in a way which immediately opened a debate
on the New Left, a debate which has lasted for a decade.
There were other tensions
in
early New Left scholarship. While
it was friendly to the professions and the University, it was poten–
tially critical in that it saw the role they played in the defense of
the status quo. Yet the first wave of activity on the campus was
essentially reformist, aimed at improving student-faculty relations or
at strengthening the liberal position of the University itself. And
during the Vietnam teach-ins in '65, when faculties responded
to the proddings of the students, and mustered academic power
against the war, it even seemed that the University might remain
base of operations for the Movement. But the debate has shifted
grounds, as the University becomes more and more a battleground,
instead of a neutral zone, of political activity, and the New
Left
more and more alienated from the radical professors. It is impossible
at this point to believe that the University
is
solely committed to the
transmission of learning.
The third radicalizing force was the Cuban revolution. The
spectacle of the enormous weight of the American political economy
seeking to change the direction and the scope of the revolution was
