EUROPEAN/AMERICAN RELATIONS: WHO LEADS?
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and its people, whom they accused of anti-intellectualism, the worship
of the almighty dollar, and general crassness.
That the social demand for the role of the intellectual is universal
does not yet imply that it is performed well and answers the demand for
the articulation of the culture. This role is difficult to perform in mod–
ern society, where rules are complex, although less difficult in collec–
tivistic ethnic nations whose national consciousness is relatively uniform
and coherent, and which have preserved a relatively well-defined hier–
archy in the midst of a loose stratification system . Thus, Russian and
German intellectuals acquit themselves of the task rather well; their
authority is recognized, and all they have to do is to reaffirm the values
formulated by their predecessors in the nineteenth century : great writers
and literary critics in the one case and liberal arts professors in the other.
In civic and individualistic nations, such as France, Britain, and the
United States, dedicated to contradictory values and ridden by anomie,
the need for the articulation of culture is much greater, but so is the dif–
ficulty of the intellectual role. The clergy on whom it devolved earlier,
more or less by default, both in Britain and the United States, lacked the
distinctive sensitivity to the secular reality necessary for the articulation
of modern culture. Because the need for it was sharp, it was attempted
by others who initially did so without any social sanction (and so with–
out authority). They took it upon themselves because they felt the need
for such articulation, were puzzled or bothered by and needed to under–
stand modern society. They were people of remarkable intelligence and
imagination, though rarely of formal education beyond some early
schooling. Some, such as Adam Smith, were philosophers, but the
majority were writers of fiction, a genre that was born in Britain as the
novel of manners and then was transformed into the "modern novel,"
as Edith Wharton defined it in
The Art of Writing Fiction.
But philoso–
phers, like the fiction writers, created imaginative models; and fiction
writers, like philosophers, believed that what they described was based
on observation and (to quote Dickens) "as true as gravity." In the great
anomic nations of France, Britain, and the United States, the majority of
intellectuals who actually assumed that role, uncovering and making
explicit the innersprings of their national cultures, were creative writers.
Few recorded their analytical motivations or exposed their methodology
in their publications. Many more did so in private correspondence or
conversations with friends. Balzac's intellectual intention-to spell out
the underlying principles of modern society-in
The Human Comedy,
which he divided into
Etudes analytiques, Etudes philosophiques,
and
Etudes de moeurs,
dealing with the social structure, cultural dictates,
