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PARTISAN REVIEW
PATRIOTISM,
LEFT
AND RIGHT: Once upon a time the left-wing intelli–
gentsia was patriotic, and no one was more patriotic than the Jacobins.
George Canning
(I770-I827)
wrote of the "The Jacobin": "A steady
patriot of the world alone / The friend of every country but his own."
He referred to British sympathizers with the Jacobins rather than the
French who invoked, after all,
l'amour saere de la patrie
in their
anthem. True, at the time of the French revolution it was said among the
educated classes in Europe that everyone had two homelands- one's
own and revolutionary France. And the Soviet Union became the "sec–
ond fatherland" for its admirers, to use a phrase now forgotten but
widespread at the time. The attraction exuded by the French revolution
and even the Russian one is easy to understand; it is more difficult to
fathom the Taliban or Saddam's Iraq as a second fatherland.
The French Right became patriotic only much later, and it will be
recalled that it was not very patriotic during the
I930S,
when it stood
for appeasing Hitler and later for collaboration.
In the postwar years when William Phillips and Philip Rahv edited
Partisan Review,
American intellectuals supported the "Cold Warrish
policy" of their government, as a perusal of the volumes of the maga–
zine shows. Why did most American intellectuals not find extenuating
circumstances for political and cultural Stalinism or at least take a posi–
tion of equidistance?
(It
is, up to a point, an autobiographical question; my first article
expressing premature anti-Stalinist views in
Partisan Review
appeared,
under a pseudonym, in
I947.
My views were very much to the left but
having lived through the age of the dictators I could not possibly share the
conviction, widespread at the time, that the supreme political and moral
commandment of the hour was to show sympathy to Soviet communism.)
True, Sartre was published in these pages, but Raymond Aron was
even more often. The symposium "America and the Intellectuals" pub–
lished in the late
I940S
showed that the professional thinkers had
embraced "greater American" patriotism. Why was Truman not
attacked as a moron and warmonger in the years of the Truman Doc–
trine and the Korean War? Truman, after all, had never attended a uni–
versity and his cultural tastes were middlebrow at best. Why did
Partisan Review
not follow an anti-anti-communist line? Was it a con–
ditioned reflex generated by World War II and the battle against
Nazism? According to mainstream thinking fifty years later it is the
rai–
son d'etre
and the moral duty of intellectuals to be critical, and critical
means opposition to one's government.
It
is the assignment of the politi-
