BOOKS
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"principle" that resists reification, so that every so-called realization tends to
betray it.
It
is always in process and therefore incomplete. But every process
excludes other processes and is therefore a potential tyrant. A gaze (a fa–
vorite Blochian word) always directed toward the future may involve the
repression of the vital forces of past and present. At his best, Bloch, I think,
would agree.
EUGENE GOODHEART
FROM '68 TO '88
THE RADICAL RENEWAL: THE POLITICS OF IDEAS IN
MODERN AMERICA. By Norman Birnbaum. Pantheon. $17 .95 .
The sixties have been taking a beating lately. An era which was
so fond of debunking has in turn been debunked. The madness, the mindless
mysticism, the descent into drugs and violence whose afterlife is being played
out across America's disintegrating cities is by now obvious to almost all but
the most devoted fans ofJohn Lennon. And insult of insults, revisionist histo–
rians like Jack Diggins go so far as to argue that the forties and fifties were
fur more fertile culturally and intellectually.
The distinguished sociologist Norman Birnbaum will have none of this.
His book,
The Radical Renewal,
an analysis of the politics of ideas over the
past two decades, doesn't so much criticize the revisionist view of the sixties
as ignore it. Birnbaum's tone, his sneering dismissal of conservative
"imbeciles," call upon the vanished certainties of the late 1950s when the
Republicans were still "the stupid party" and the promise of "advanced" social
theory was still untested.
Birnbaum's points of reference are firmly rooted in the early years of
the then new left when he was one of the few to challenge the formalist
sociology ofTalcott Parsons while praising the "populism" of C. Wright Mills.
Now, a quarter ofa century later, Birnbaum, a man justly renowned in the
fifties and sixties for his independent perspective, stands as the guardian of
left-wing orthodoxy. The truths Saint
C.
Wright revealed are, he insists, as
valid now as they were then.
The bulk of
The Radical Renewal
is devoted to updating the received
radical wisdom by way of loosely connected short summaries of recent
