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GAY
the world about which he wrote so wittily: "I trust that I have learned
something from modern scholarship and from the literature of the past
four decades," he wrote, "but my instinctive sympathies lie with the
representative thinkers of the age that ended in 1914."
This glimpse of intellectual autobiography is suggestive rather than
conclusive. The nineteenth century, after all, was enormously varied in
it~
temper. But, fragmentary as this little confession may be, it place,
George Lichtheim and makes sense of his polemical animus. The repre–
sentative thinkers of the nineteenth century, I would argue, were, in the
largest sense of that word, liberals. They valued decency, enjoyed culti–
vation, had a healthy respect for reason. They believed in politics. They
recognized its seamier side, but they expected that this bloodless strug–
gle for place and power was less damaging to society, more humane
and less destructive, than the posturing of crowned heroes or the glitter
of imitation Caesars. Besides, they saw the play of politics as a device
for solving, at least in part, the grievous problems that modern indus–
trial civilization had thrown into the laps of the powerful. Even Marx,
whose writings occupy so large a place in Lichtheim's mind and work,
believed in politics. While he saw the machine of history in irresistible
motion, impossible to stop and hard to deflect, he thought that intelli–
gent and purposeful political action could speed and straighten its course
and minimize the number of its victims. The nineteenth century had
other thinkers, of course, apocalyptic visionaries and ruthless critics of
political culture, but these - Carlyle and Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky and
Nietzsche - were not representative of th.eir time. They found their
public posthumously and, though they lived in the nineteenth century,
they were properly twentieth-century thinkers.
Our century, like the nineteenth, is obviously far too complex to
be summed up in a phrase or two. But the revulsion against nineteenth–
century liberal rationalism is too pervasive to be denied. It
is
no longer
fashionable to say that the cure for the defects of liberalism is more
liberalism; if thoughtful persons in the nineteenth century were some–
what naive in seeking public remedies for private ills, we, their sad
heirs, have become largely anomic in seeking private remedies for pub–
lic ills. That is why Lichtheim was right to think of himself as essentially
a nineteenth-century man: he too believed in politics, for he was,
with
all his tough-minded realism, a rationalist. And that is why he did not
spare his invective with typical twentieth-century prophets like Heideg–
ger, who have used their reason not merely to diagnose, but to celebrate,
unreason. It was Lichtheim's personal tragedy, as
it
is all our tragedy,
