484
PARTISAN REVIEW
Similarly, it's odd that Whitfield, wntmg about Macdonald
to discuss larger themes, fails to consider the puzzling reasons for
Macdonald's harsh and impatient 1952 review (in
Partisan Review)
of
C . Wright Mills's
White Collar,
a subject discussed at some length in
Irving Louis Horowitz's illuminating biography of Mills. On the face
of it, Macdonald, who loved to
epater les bourgeois,
should have been
sympathetic to the book's unremitting disdain for middle-class life.
Was he simply weary and impatient with Marxist theorizing, annoyed
by Mills's humorless, abstracted didacticism? Or, as Dennis Wrong
suggests, was there something more profound at work? Mills's critique
of the "salariat" was considered pathbreaking at the time. But it may
have been far less original than it appeared. To someone like Mac–
donald who was intimately familiar with the 1930s and 1940s Marxist
debates on, in Wrong's words, whether the "salariat" would join the
proletariat, the book may have seemed like old hat. Looking back on
the review twenty-two years later, Macdonald tied the harshness of
White Collar
to Mills's later ardor for Castro . Mills's "stuff," he said,
"became rather
too
clear, and one-sided, for my taste: i.e., he judged
capitalist America with a severity he didn't apply to socialist competi–
tors like Castro's Cuba." "The double standard," Macdonald went
on, "is as unattractive in politics as in sex."
It appears that Whitfield closed his eyes to these questions - the
quote on Mills is readily available in Macdonald's 1974 collection
Discriminations: Essays and Afterthoughts,
1938-1974-
because they
undermine the book's meager rationale . That rationale, as becomes
apparent only in the penultimate chapter, "The New Left's Ancestral
Voice ," is to claim Macdonald as forefather of the sixties. This is
peculiar, not because the idea is odd, but because it is so obvious–
when Macdonald edited
Politics,
James Burnham accused him of "a
program of revolution in one psyche" - and because the delineation
has been repeatedly elaborated, most notably in Richard King's
The
Party of Eros: Radical Social Thought and the Realm of Freedom,
written
more than a decade ago.
The chapter on the New Left is a genealogical exercise. Whitfield
rocks back and forth, noting the similarities and differences between
Macdonald's "personalism" developed in his
Politics
years, his hostility
to established authority (he urged the readers of
Politics
to "get the
national state before it gets us"), and the ideas of Tom Hayden,
Staughton Lynd, and Noam Chomsky. Whitfield is wrong when he
tries to filter Chomsky's and Macdonald's larger views through the
