PARTISAN REVIEW
249
according to his ability, to each according to his work. In this uni–
versalism, intellectuals were essentially sanctioning the requirements
of the
educated
sector of the middle class while embarrassing the
propertied
sector of the middle class, which believed that its property
entitled it to unearned incomes. They were also commonly critical
of established, respectable religions; if intellectuals were by no means
uniformly atheists, they were often modernizers who felt that religion
needed to adapt to the requirements of modernity. They also com–
monly resented and challenged authority based on lineage and ascrip–
tion, affinning the rights of the talented, whether talent was seen as
due to educated practice or to inborn genius. While some Romantic
intellectuals might nostalgically idealize rusticity, even they were not
slow to seek their fortunes in salons, courts, marketplaces, and other
urbane environments, and they had the cosmopolitans' urge to keep
in touch with the urban centers.
If
intellectuals did not always say
(with Socrates) that the city was their teacher, they had no doubt
that the people of the city were important audiences and markets.
In contrast, Maoist socialism does not regard either urbanization
or "Westernization" as the last word.
It
is
not
obvious, moreover, that
Maoism even conceives itself as engaged in "modernization." It is not
modernization but "cultural revitalization" to which the Chinese
Revolution seems committed; it seeks an historically unique kind of
revitalization, since it does not look to the glories of the past, and in
that sense is not "nativistic," and does not aim to change itself by
Westernization. It is this unique "development" policy that under–
girds the educational policies of the Cultural Revolution and its
ef–
fort to alter the intelligentsia. In the self-understanding of Maoism,
the aim is to debourgeoisify the intellectual, to eliminate the rift be–
tween intellectuals and masses, to change the class character of in–
tellectuals by changing their class origins, so that in future they de–
rive predominantly from workers or peasants, and themselves have an
extensive personal experience of laboring as peasants or workers. This,
to repeat, is Maoism's self-understanding of its policy toward the
intelligentsia.
Yet if Maoism is a critique of the bourgeois intellectual in tenns
of egalitarian values, if it rejects the old intellectuals because they
were an elite set above the masses, it remains difficult to understand
, why Maoism has allowed a great gap to persist in the income levels of
