PARTISAN
REVIEW
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heart; who read his Aeschylus in the original; who had a boundless
respect for Shakespeare, whom he had his daughters memorize; who
took pleasure in reading two or three novels at one time, ranking
Balzac and Cervantes before other novelists; who, when disturbed,
might take refuge in algebra; and who actually wrote an infinitesimal
calculus.
In
a letter to his daughter Laura in 1868, he describes him–
self as "... a machine condemned to devour books.. . ." When
Marx died, on March 14, 1883, he was where one might expect
him - at his desk.
Whatever its ultimate destiny and destination, Marxism was
originally a creation of the West. Born of European culture, it is sim–
ply unthinkable without the complex of institutions that center on the
university, which trains and provides livings for a secular intelligentsia.
Marx and Engels, and all the epigones of every nationality that follow
after them, are unthinkable without the countless books, journals,
newspapers, libraries, bookstores, publishing houses, and even party
schools, whose cadres and culture constitute a dense infrastructure at
whose center there is the Western university: no university, no in–
telligentsia, no Marxism.
The gulf between Maoism and Soviet Marxism derives important–
ly from the fact that Soviet Marxism understands and respects this,
while Maoism, however, understands but rejects it. Soviet Marxism
and Stalinism sought to control the university and to guarantee the
loyalty of intellectuals and scientists to party precepts and leadership;
it never sought to stop the university and to eliminate the self- repro–
duction of the academic intelligentsia, as Maoism has.
Intellectuals are an historically recent social stratum, essentially
emerging with the bourgeois revolution during the onset of moderni–
zation in the West. They have, however, been largely recruited from
the secular professions of relatively older and more humanistic vintage.
They have more likely been scholars, journalists, academicians, artists,
writers, or lawyers, rather than engineers or scientists. Characteristi–
cally, then, the intelligentsia have been associated with long estab–
lished occupations, and were linked to educational and socializing
systems that possess and insist on some measure of autonomy.
Unlike the
new
engineers and scientists, who almost immediately
had greater career opportunities and public prestige with the advent
of the bourgeois economy, the occupations with which intellectuals
