PARTISAN REVIEW
361
When this process works , men as such cease to be the enemy and the set of
conditions which lead men to play,oppressive roles comes into focus ; a social
reality comes alive. One of the great failures of the antiwar movement of the
last decades, by contrast, was its inability
to
organize discontent among
soldiers because many people in the antiwar movement so personalized the
war that every soldier was treated as responsible for the war unless he some–
how could prove himself innocent. The idea of the woman's movement that
intimate
r~lations
can be transformed into social relations is based on the no–
tion that the destructive features of
Gemeinschajt
can be eliminated if peo–
ple resolve truly to understand the origins of their feelings .
Destruction of
Gemeinschajt
from within is obviously a difficult busi–
ness: chancy in its outcome, perhaps too idealistic in its assumptions, cer–
tainly dependent on considerable character strengths for the people in–
volved. The other strategy against this modern
Gemeinschaft
is no less diffi–
cult. To weaken
Gemeinschajt
from without would mean renovating an im–
personal social world in which people could escape their families or the bur–
dens of
thei~
own feelings . The classic terrain of such a social world is the
cosmopolitan city . Yet how can one revive crowd life, a social existence
passed among relative strangers at bars, theaters, and cafes, when all the
pressures of the culrure are oriented to restoring human scale, creating en–
vironments in which people get to know each other as individuals and other
forms of oppressive localism? Or when the city itself is fled as a place of dan–
ger, dirt, Negroes; when the logic of capital development follows the cul–
rural logic of withdrawal? No one could argue that the city in its present
state is very attractive, nor that the
fllineurs
of Baudelaire's Paris or the sense
of the
monde
of Marivaux's can be recreated as though city planning were an
essay in nostalgia. Yet the only concrete strategy against the psychological
morality of modern capitalism, the only countervailing power from without
against destructive
Gemeinschaft,
lies in renovating the city as a human set–
tlement. The word crisis is abused but it has a meaning: there is a moral
crisis in advanced capitalism and there is an urban crisis in it; these rwo have
a real relationship, for until we learn how to create a living, impersonal en–
vironment in which people can wear the masks of sociability, and so disguise
themselves, the pursuit of a true, essential, and authentic self will continue
to be our moral compulsion.
