DANIEL BELL
623
book titles published, the Hollywoodization of a continuous series of
writers . . . a dull local tradition in painting
[pace
Hilton Kramer]
combined with an offshoot of European non-representation which
ran its second-hand course in a decade and a half, a philosophic
waste .. .. Culturally we remain what we have been: a 'semi–
barbarian superstate of the periphery' ... with Rome and not
Athens the potential form of the future ."
Burnham, still the Machiavellian , declared: "Let us not build a
case out of counterfeit. The objective justification for the intellec–
tuals' 'reaffirmation and rediscovery of America' is in the first and
sufficient instance political and military ." Soviet totalitarianism "is
the worst possible secular evil," and "American power is thus the
lesser evil. " Therefore, "if it comes to full war," the case for America
is 'just and right, and rightly to be preferred."
• •
•
Thirty years later. Thirty years wiser? I wish to discuss three
themes: what one means by our
country;
who is the
our
we are talking
about; and the change in the nature of partisan intellectual divisions
in the last two decades.
Marx had said that the workers had no country and that one's
loyalty was to the international working class. Today , not only is
there no real international working-class movement, but there is less
internationalism among the workers than at any time in the twenti–
eth century when, at the Basle congress of the Second International
in 1912, Jean J au res threatened a European-wide general strike to
halt the threat of war.
If
not the working class, the leftist intellectuals
still cling to the lingering idea that
they
have no country. The idea of
alienation, which was resurrected only forty or so years ago (see, for
example, the failure to include an article on "alienation" in the stan–
dard
Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences
published in the late 1930s), has
represented the "true consciousness" of these intellectuals, the socio–
logical distancing of themselves from the society .
But what is the "society," and how does one establish one's at–
titude towards it? To assess the character of a country, one has to go
back to a distinction made by Burke between a
society
and a
regime.
A
society embodies the underlying values and beliefs, the cultural tra–
ditions, the commitment to the continuity of that character of a
country. A regime or administration is, by its nature, transitory .
In the Soviet Union, the regime identifies itself with the society,
but it is not
accountable
to the society and, based on a privileged class,
