214
PARTISAN REVIEW
years ago , although they refer to what was a daily, evident, un–
questioned experience for the majority of Americans . (I cannot be so
certain in the case of the Soviet Union.) We Europeans have many
reasons to sympathize in this situation: in our childhood we accepted
as self-evident the existence of English, French, even (for those of us
who grew up before Nazism) German civilization. But for a long time
now, these ideologies concealing the power of a few have been under
attack . Today , we know that the terms have lost all meaning: of
course, specific traits of Western society and culture exist in Great
Britain, or France, or Germany , but none of these countries can be
considered an historic totality formed by the congruence of political
and military powers, economic decisions, and cultural behavior. In
France, De Gaulle could assert a political will only when he spoke
in his own name, rather than in the name of French society.
In Germany, economic power is linked with an almost total absence
of that nation from the realm of international politics.
The same crisis of order and hegemony afflicting these ideologies
affects the United States, but in a different way; and if we were better
informed or more attentive, we would discover that it affects the
Soviet Union just as deeply . America is the more interesting case,
although the Soviet situation is equally important . The United States
has long defined itself in terms of movement and progress rather
than in terms of a powerfully integrating political order and ideology.
The country's capacity for cultural innovation, social controversy, and
institutionalized negotiation of disputes remains strong despite the
growing power of government apparatus and conservative ideologies.
As a result, it is in the United States that the crisis of order has the
best chance of encouraging cultural innovation, social conflict, and
modes of expression and conduct which might characterize the new
society to which I referred when I began.
The crisis of the American order might be interpreted as a dis–
integration of American society, but it might also constitute re–
discovery of the social reality concealed behind layers of ideological
encrustation . One would like to be able to say something similar re–
garding the crisis of Soviet society, caught up as it is in a self–
justifying rhetoric and a strict set of categories which serve to repress
cultural innovations as well as social and political conflicts. Indeed,
mustn't we go f\Jrther and hope that this crisis of the dominant
