PARTISAN REVIEW
399
the idea of postponing those pressures seems a fantastic one unless
you propose the still more fantastic idea that the young can
be
kept
unaware of the kind of society they are going to spend their lives in
until that "single high-pressure year which comes
after
the student
has left college" and during which he would
be
preparing for grad–
uate and professional school admissions exams.
In a society characterized not merely by hierarchy, but by hier–
archies in which one's place
is
determined by a more or less skillful
suppression of "irrelevant" human resources, it
is
incredible that peo–
ple would postpone their necessary self-mutilations until the age of
twenty. What incentive would there be to spend three years com–
pleting "a critical stage of intellectual maturation" when other young
people are (as Wolff would allow them to do) already working at
jobs related to their future careers or busily taking courses only in
related fields? Not to give credit for such courses would make very
little difference: with or without credit, the early specializers would
continue to have the advantage over the others on the market. Similar–
ly, if "the elite [professional] jobs would still
be
won by those young
men and women who either did--or showed promise of doing-orig–
inal research," graduate students would have to
be
very foolish–
Ph.D. thesis or no Ph.D. thesis--not to get on the research band–
wagon as quickly as possible. What Wolff calls "unavoidable facts" of
American society are the essential structures of that society, structures
which,
because
they are pervasive economic ones, define the bound–
aries within which learning takes place as well as the procedures and
substance of learning. Wolff's "practical proposals for Utopian reform"
would indeed lead to a sort of Utopia: an ivy space of "intellectual
maturation" sublimated from the social body. With the risk, of course,
that the suppressed knowledge about social realities would make of
youth a state of anguished suspense.
The most exasperating quality of the liberal mind
is
its apparent
capacity for sympathy.
An
extraordinarily elastic imagination con–
ceives and even approves of almost anything because its very elasticity
protects it from the objects it sympathizes with. Sympathy and elas–
ticity are the procedural norms
and
the values of the liberal imagina–
tion, and openness itself may require a constant closing of the door
on any total claim on one's being. The condition for a permanent
