MORRIS DICKSTEIN
505
thirty years as movie directors, union officials, or university professors
disappeared from their professions without a trace, became unpersons,
a solemn warning to others; those in less exalted positions were un–
done even more anonymously. The pressure of this environment on
the intellectual life can be observed in Marcuse's best book,
Eros and
Civzlization
(1955), an attempted synthesis of Marx and Freud in
which the magic word "Marx" is never mentioned. It's hard to tell
how much this self-censorship is due to the paranoia of the refugee,
how much to prudent calculation, and how much to Marcuse's own
desire to reach an audience inoculated against radicalism.
It's worth asking ourselves why the Freudian radicalism in Mar–
cuse's book, and in the work of Paul Goodman and Norman O.
Brown, came to fruition at the time it did, in a period so unsympa–
thetic to radicalism of any kind, and why it had such a dramatic
influence on the intellectual life of the sixties. After all, the most
striking quality of the cultural life of the sixties, the combination of
political militancy and cultural bohemianism, the thirties and the
twenties, was precisely in line with those earlier theoretical conjunc–
tions of Marx and Freud. This is not to say that Marcuse was respon–
sible for the counterculture, any more than
C.
Wright Mills created
the New Left or Goodman fomented the campus uprisings. (Good–
man would later be amused and dismayed by young people who
spouted his ideas but ·seemed never to have read a book, spouted
them
at him.)
What happened was more than intellectual fashion or
Mephistophelean influence. Our society changed for its own deep–
seated reasons; society responded in its massive and lumbering way
to the same grievous conditions that had first provoked certain intel–
lectuals into critical protest and utopian speculation. As Auden said
of Yeats, "Mad Ireland hurt him into poetry."
It's safe to say that few kids became radicals, hippies, or freaks in
the sixties from reading
Eros and Civtfization
or
Growing
Up
Absurd.
Similarly, the rioters of Watts, Detroit and Newark had not learned
their discontent from LeRoiJones, Stokely Carmichael, or even Martin
Luther King. Like the children of the white middle class, they were
acting out the logic of their own lives, though it sometimes took the
language of ideology to convince them that their discontent mattered.
The tremors of the sixties, which shook institutions in so many remote
corners of society, were generated from society's own deep core, from
