BOOKS
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legalitarian offshoots of the 1960s. Is Foucault's critique of even the most
benign instruments of collective power left or right wing? Was the defense of
madness mounted by radicals left or right wing when it issued in the legal
rights of the homeless to freeze to death on the streets of New York if they
so chose? Similarly, if one of the heroes of the post-sixties academic left,
Jacques Derrida, is right, if grammar
is
fascist-if, like sheltering the homeless,
it is an illicit means of social control, then what becomes of the traditional left–
wing values, values I share with Birnbaum, which emphasize shared under–
standings as the basis of social solidarity?
The wish is clearly father to the thought on these pages. So strongly
does Birnbaum want to imagine a coherent "left" that he tells us that the
Critical Legal Studies Academics, who insist that law is merely politics, and
Ronald Dworkin, who argues that law is the expression of natural rights
which exist prior to politics, are really birds of the same feather. Similarly
while he speaks repeatedly of the value of citizenship and participation, he
also unreservedly endorses the judicial activism which displaces self-govern–
ment
The intellectual fragmentation ofwhat Birnbaum nostalgically describes
as the left is paralleled by its social fragmentation, another vast topic beyond
his ken. The political left, the left that operates on or within the Democratic
party, has precious little connection with campus radicalism. The proliferation
of specialized scholarly journals-there are now one hundred twenty-six in
sociology alone-has allowed would-be radicals to write for one another in the
semi-private language of academic jargon. The "leaf-rakers" of the academic
left have become a world unto themselves, a world in which one need never
write for the "imbeciles" outside the university gates. Those beyond don't
seem to much mind, however. A phenomena Birnbaum barely mentions, the
think tank, has evolved to supply the political ideas which once came from the
academy. The one significant politicaVintellectual movement within the
Democratic party, neoliberalism, came from journalists, not academics.
The Radical Renewal
is significant despite its rehash of familiar argu–
ments, because it is part of an emerging genre of books,including Sidney Blu–
menthal's
The Rise of the Counter-Establishment
and Robert McElvaine's
The End of the Conservative Era,
devoted to reviving left-wing fortunes.
They are what I call "from '68 to '88 books." They are books which leap
from the halcyon days of the sixties to the promise of new glory in the late
eighties while saying as little as possible about the interregnum. Like Michael
Dukakis, who constantly evoked John Kennedy, they have tried to revive
leftism or liberalism without coming to grips with its intellectual and social
failures of the past twenty years. If liberalism is to revive without the aid of
an economic crash, and for the good of the country, it should, it
will
do so by
