356
PARTISAN REVIEW
fashionable, receiving social honors and recognition, belonging to a
cohesive and sustaining subculture, having secure employment and
being active in public affairs . Being estranged today may also mean
access to new sources of self-esteem attendant upon the role of the
righteous social critic and the self-assurance that comes from the
knowledge of exposing social evil. Increasingly the sense of identity
of many humanistic intellectuals has become tied in with their self–
conception as both social critic and voice of secular morality in a cor–
rupt and irrational society.
The sense of estrangement from society - that is to say, the
strongly felt conviction that this society is altogether worthless and
unjust - is also compatible with a reasonably cheerful personal dis–
position and the untroubled enjoyment of the available pleasures of
life: material, social, aesthetic.
It
is easier today to be a social critic
in the United States because the gloom, withdrawal, marginality
and disadvantage earlier associated with alienation and sustained
social criticism have largely receded.
Thus estrangement has survived as it acquired a certain respect–
ability. Even the most vehement denunciations of the social order
ceased to be viewed as acts of defiance, nor was any risk attached to
them. On the contrary such critiques have become a badge of be–
longing to certain subcultures. Alienation and rejection of society
could no longer be associated with nonconformity, dissent or inno–
vative social criticism; estrangement itself has become a new subcul–
tural norm, a new form of conformity. When hundreds of thousands
of people act out jointly their "nonconformity" it does become a new
form of conformity, as happened to many forms of social criticism,
deviant values, "alternative life styles" and attitudes associated with
the counterculture.
These changes in the substance, quality and context of estrange–
ment and social criticism had numerous consequences. While cri–
tiques of American society have become increasingly standardized,
repetitive and unoriginal, the groups and institutions devoted to their
articulation and dissemination have multiplied. They include radical
"think tanks" (such as the Institute of Policy Studies and its auxilia–
ries), large segments of academia, of the media and the churches.
Gradually much of radical social criticism has become transformed
into an established part of our intellectual discourse and a form of
conventional wisdom.
While intellectual life in the United States has become more
polarized, as the verities of the adversary culture no longer go totally
