Daniel Bell
OUR COUNTRY-1984
The title of the original
Partisan Review
symposium of 1952
was "Our Country and Our Culture," and the question was whether
the situation of the intellectual and the artist had changed in Ameri–
can society, whether the alleged hostility of the country to art–
which had sent the nineteenth-century writers packing to London,
and the twentieth-century writers to Paris- was now different. And
this was the issue to which almost all of the original participants,
twenty-four in number, responded.
I do not wish to speak about "Our Culture," for two reasons.
One is that in the last thirty or so years, I have not heard much that
is new about traditional culture, popular culture, folk culture, mass–
cult, mid-cult, lowbrow, highbrow, class culture, elite culture,
adversary culture, counter-culture, modernism, postmodernism,
avant-garde and kitsch, or
pompier
and
spettacolo;
and I, at least, have
nothing to add.
The other reason is that the original
Partisan Review
statement
had a more pregnant theme, one which was almost submerged and
which was put in just one sentence: "Politically, there is recognition
that the kind of democracy which exists in America has an intrinsic
and positive value: it is not merely a capitalist myth but a reality
which must be defended against Russian totalitarianism."
If
the symposium thus represented a turning point in the at–
titude of the writers and intellectuals, it was not in the "celebration"
of America culturally, but in the retreat from a moral relativism that
had dominated left-wing thinking for so long. This was the idea, go–
ing back to Marx's analysis of liberalism in
The German Ideology
(where he dubbed Kant "the white-washing spokesman of the Ger–
man bourgeoisie"), that political democracy was "bourgeois de–
mocracy," and that "bourgeois freedom" was a sham. It was the basis
of the doctrinaire belief that the ruling class only "tolerated" democ–
racy and would jettison it when threatened, and that "proletarian de–
mocracy" (in the Leninist version, as interpreted by the Party) was of
Editor's Note: This is a revised version of remarks at the Y.M .H .A. colloquium on
January 12, 1984, on the original
Partisan Review
theme .
