386
LEO BERSANI
tionally critical methods of inquiry, the possibilities
within
those meth–
ods
for a betrayal of radically critical inquiry. The particular opinions,
conclusions and even techniques of investigation of the men I
will
begin by speaking of have frequently been attacked, but I don't
think
that the representative and pervasive modes of their
thinking
and of their language have been adequately explored. By looking
closely at some of their statements, I want to show the ease
with
which an intolerant dogmatism can appropriate the vocabulary and
even the procedures of a free and dispassionate analysis of experience.
Among the sociologists in question, the very notion of a free
exchange of ideas
is,
in
a sense, a totalitarian one: from the start
it precludes the exercise of freedom except for the exchange of ideas.
It
will
per,haps not be surprising to find a closed system masquerad–
ing as an open disposition in Talcott Parsons and Seymour Martin
Lipset. But the fact that some of the observations we can make
about them are
also
relevant to men whose specific social and
psy–
chological commitments are antagonistic to those of Parsons and
Lipset makes it worthwhile, I think, to isolate the intellectual pro–
cedures which -
toutes proportions gardees
-
create a certain con–
tinuity between Parsons's inert academicism and the radical politics
of, say, Dotson Rader. For certainly a primary function of radical
criticism
is
to determine the congruence or the discrepancy between
the ideology implicit in our
approach
to issues and the ideology
proclaimed in the stands we take
,on
issues.
Equally important, deceptively simple questions about the books
I'm about to consider are these: what are tlley trying to commu–
nicate, and to whom? The latter
is
an especially poignant question,
for the subject of all these
books is
the young - or rather the radical
young. You find attacks, scoldings, sympathy, complicity in a liter–
ature about the young so massive as to be fast approaching the
status of a Field of Concentration. But in their most radical behavior,
the young are not asking for "measures" of either approval or
dis–
approval. Rather, they seem to be offering spectacles which we can
either participate in or tum our backs on. Observers of youth often
remarks with satisfied sophistication that the extravagances of the
young are "theater," are "symbolic." The young themselves are fully
aware of that aspect of their conduct, and the issue is rather to know
how to respond to theater. The use of literary terms is appropriate.
