PARTISAN REVIEW
409
Left is close to the very center of the life and experience of "modern
man" as such. Ever since the first modem societies began to take on
a distinctive form, and people like us emerged in their midst, one of
our deepest drives has been ·
to get outside ourselves.
So much of the
paraphernalia of the sixties - from beads to psychedelic drugs to
sentimental idealizations of the "Third World" - expresses an arche–
typical modem impulse: a desperate longing for any world, any
culture, any life but our own. This impulse has made the life of
modem men and women strangely paradoxical, maybe even absurd,
at its core. On the one hand, it has enlarged our sympathies and
sensibilities, deepened our feelings, developed our understanding,
helped us grow; on the other, it has led us,
in
affirming other peo–
ple's lives, to tum against and deny and negate our own. It is only
too typically modem that the New Left of the nineteen sixties should
gain at once a three-dimensional vision of so many other kinds of
people - blacks, Indians, the Third World, women, homosexuals,
schizophrenics, and on and on - and a one-dimensional view of
themselves. This is only the latest punch line in a sick joke that gives
some of the flavor of modern society's sickness, and yet, ironically,
manages to express some of its health as well.
To understand the modem predicament, it might be useful to
look at Rousseau, for he was the first truly modern radical. Living
in the midst of the first great wave of modernization, he was the
first radical thinker to address himself directly to the problems spring–
ing up in its wake. He was the first to get the jokes that modem
men were playing on themselves. Unfortunately, some of Rousseau's
radical impulses led him up a blind alley, one which prefigures and
may illuminate the impasse in which the New Left is stuck today.
But Rousseau also found in himself the insight and imagination to
see beyond
his
impasse, and I believe that those of us on the left
may find in him a way to see through - and, hopefully, to break
through - our own.
1\
Among the many notes in Rousseau's writings that strike close
to home, one of the most arresting is the uninhibited rage and vio–
lence with which he attacks the modem city, its culture and its peo–
ple. A typical remark: "In this age of calculators, it's remarkable
