Gouldner, Marxism, and the intellectuals

Review essay 593 Gouldner, Marxism, and the intellectuals A discussion of Alvin W. Gouldner, Against Fragmentation: The Origins of Marxism and the Sociology of Intellectuals (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). PAUL BREINES Department o f History, Boston College In writing this book, Gouldner was on terrain he relished - that of confronting Marxism (as he had elsewhere confronted sociology) with what he deemed its dark secrets, tabooed themes, and unseemly birth marks. His aim, he would likely have said, was not to humiliate Marxism, but to get closer to its rationality by disclosing its limits; to embarrass it into self-reflection. He chose an ideal issue for this sort of critical excavation. Against Fragmentation is hardly the first foray into the question of Marxism and intellectuals; nor is it unflawed. But it is altogether the most provocative and juicy recent study of the question, one with which all subsequent efforts will need to contend. The book reminds us that the whole contemporary discussion of social theory and of Marxism in particular is diminished by Gouldner's death. Against Fragmentation has three parts; you could call them three fragments on the verge of a unity, whose absence causes fewer problems than its arrival might. The first and briefest part, "Marxism and the Intellectuals," catches Marx and some Marxists in the act of repressing the question of Marxism's own class origins; discloses a sort of return of the repressed in a number of big ambiguities in Marxist theory; and formulates the book's main thesis that Marxism is not the consciousness of the proletariat but of intellectuals as a New Class who turned to the proletariat in the face of their own weakness as a force for social transformation. The second part, "The Ecology of Marxism," reconstructs the development of Marx's thought as a journey through a series of environmental pressures, chief among them being popular materialist thought in Germany in the 1830s and 1840s, artisan and worker socialism around the 1848 period, and the great disputes with Bakunin in subsequent years. If Part I is a sociology of knowledge, and Part II a social Theory and Society 15: 593-605 (1986) 9 Martinus N i j h o f f Publishers, Dordrecht - Printed in the Netherlands 594 history, Part III, "Against Fragmentation," is a theory of theory. Against Althusser's "epistemological rupture" thesis, Gouldner sees Marx's originality as a transgression of the borders of several contemporary syntheses "in which Marx's work was totally immersed, with which it was fully continuous, without which it would have been impossible" (203). This dense and sometimes belabored discussion goes on to dissect Marxism as a palimpsest of symbols and metaphors aiming at "recovery" (humanity's arrival at self-knowledge beyond the veil of reification) and "holism" (life beyond fragmentation). Aware that the impulses to recovery and holism have generated mystification and worse, Gouldner nevertheless contends that they are also the core of Marxism's rationality and will be key components of the self-critical community of social theorists that is yet to emerge. It is, in short, an ambitious undertaking. Regarding the posthumous publication, Janet Gouldner and Cornelis Disco indicate in their preface that the manuscript was completed prior to its author's death. They carried out the final editing and made some organizational changes. Karen Lucas, who had worked closely with Gouldner on his whole Marxism project, contributed parts of two chapters (on artisans and intellectuals in Part II and on the theory of creativity in Part III). Gouldner's plan, announced in The Two Marxisms (1980), to complete three subsequent new works on Marxism - on the theory's origins, its rationality, and on major Marxists since Marx - was evidently changed, with the first two proposed volumes being compressed into Against Fragmentation. The third, Gouldner's study of Luk~ics, Gramsci, Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Sorel and Althusser, is now being prepared for publication. Against Fragmentation, Janet Gouldner and Disco remind us, builds not only on The Two Marxisms but on The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology (1976) and The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (1979) as well. It is no wonder that, when he was asked to comment on the question of Marxism and the intellectuals, Oskar Goldberg, without a moment's hesitation, said "oi." The question, after all, is dripping with paradoxes. Marxism, for example, attributes to the proletariat the decisive role in social transformation and yet, from the learned founding fathers through the leading Russian Revolutionaries (who until 1917 spent most of their revolutionary careers, as Hannah Arendt noted, in libraries) down to the present day in the United States (where nearly all that remains of Marxism is its university-based scholarly elaborations), Marxism has been dominated by intellectuals. Even in those numerous instances where 595 militants rather than intellectuals were in command, they too had to prove themselves as theorists. August Bebel is the main nineteenthcentury example of this phenomenon. In the present century, one thinks of the different case of Stalin, who in fact broke the power of intellectuals in the Communist movement, yet capped his triumph by declaring himself their greatest representative. Mao Zedong and Enver Hoxa would follow Stalin's lead, blessing their era not simply with their achievements as men of power, but with their Collected Works as well. Engels had spoken of the proletariat as the heir of classical German philosophy, but when it came to questions of power in Marxist organization, calloused hands could rarely compete with formally educated minds. One could even say, without great exaggeration, that the need to publish or perish was operative in the Marxist movement before it invaded academia. The preeminence of intellectuals and intellect in Marxism is, on reflection, hardly surprising. Marx himself, after all, had attributed a decisive role in the coming revolution not only to the proletariat but to philosophy and theory as well. In a paragraph of dazzling aphorisms from 1843, Marx had spoken of theory becoming a material force when it grips the masses; of theory finding its material weapons in the proletariat; of philosophy as the head of the revolution, the proletariat its heart. Beneath the confidence of these formulations, Gouldner sees Marx's doubts about the proletariat's intellectual capacity to fulfill its historic mission - and his repression of those doubts. Crucial, in Gouldner's account, is that Marx speaks of philosophy and theory but not of their bearers, the intellectuals. Communists have nothing to hide, the Communist Manifesto had announced; nothing but the fact that they were bourgeois intellectuals,. Gouldner adds (7). What Marx had repressed, Karl Kautsky in the 1890s and Lenin soon after would make explicit: Left to their own devices, workers will not reach socialist consciousness, thus necessitating the intervention and vanguard role of the socialist intellectuals. While they never developed it, Marx and Engels, in a now well-known passage of the Manifesto, had in fact provided a capsule account of their own role. Just as in the crisis of the ancien rdgime a section of the aristocracy had gone over to the revolutionary Third Estate, so with the intensification of capitalism's crisis, a section of the bourgeoisie, specifically bourgeois ideologists, break with their class of origin and join the revolutionary proletariat, the class with the future in its hands. They do this, Marx and Engels indicate, because they are able t o grasp the 596 "historical movement as a whole." Yet here, too, Gouldner sees an evasion. If, for example, Marx's materialism is correct that consciousness is determined by social being, then how are the bourgeois intellectuals who become Communists able to make this change? And why should they do so? Merely to save their skins by siding with the class that has the future in its hands? Or are more substantial social and intellectual processes involved? Many Marxists since Marx have, of course, written at length on the role that intellectuals should play in Marxist movements, and on the typical errors to which intellectuals are supposedly prone. But they have written rather less about why intellectuals become Marxists in the first place, and on what this might disclose about Marxism as a whole. Sixtythree years after Karl Korsch called for an application of historical materialist methods to historical materialism itself, Gouldner can say quite rightly that "Marxism remains without an accounting of its own paradoxical class origins" (20).1 The story has further ironies. For if the Marxian theory of proletarian revolution provides intellectuals with a place of some prominence in the process, Marxist movements are also distinguished by a high level of hostility to intellectuals, ranking in this regard a close third to syndicalism and fascism. Gouldner notes Marxism's "distrust of intellectuals," but does not really pursue this dimension of the story (13-14), indicating only the well-known fact that Mao Zedong made the distrust of intellectuals a pillar of his whole program. Perhaps the forthcoming study of the post-Marx Marxists will take this up in more depth, but for the moment, one can turn to Dietz Bering's Die Intellektuellen: Geschichte eines Schimpfwortes (The Intellectuals: History of an Invective). 2 Focusing on the era of the Weimar Republic, Bering traces the role played by the term 'intellectual' as an invective in fascist, bourgeois democratic-humanist, and Marxist movements. Regarding the latter, the picture Bering paints provides a partial corrective to Gouldner's. In the Marxist left of the Weimar period, for example, far from being repressed, the question of the intellectuals' role in the revolutionary workers' movement was debated incessantly. And critically, at least in the narrow sense that intellectual was largely a term of abuse. In this connection, Bering distills from the Marxist left's debates a typology of the flaws that were seen as characteristic of intellectuals, among them intellectualism, bossism, lack of discipline, individualism, arrogance, lack of revolutionary instinct, phrase-mongering, opportunism, skepticism, negativism, outsiderness and petty bourgeois impulses. A typical episode was Zinoviev's denunciation of Luk~ics and Korsch as "Professors" at the 1924 Con- 597 gress of the Communist International. It is true, and more compatible with Gouldner's account, that the varied denunciations of intellectuals were often levelled by other party intellectuals. In such cases, the invective "intellectual," could serve as an instrument of the continued and concealed preeminence of intellectuals in the movement. But this is not so clear. For not only in German Marxism between the world wars, but in Marxism in the West and East generally in that period, the guiding influence of intellectuals was on the decline, giving way to dominance by party functionaries of diverse class roots and by the party line imposed from Moscow. Lucien Goldmann aptly suggested some years ago that, by the mid-1920s, the heroic or classical period of intellectuals in Marxist movements had come to a close - at least in the industrialized countries. One of Stalin's major achievements was to have eliminated the spaces that had been occupied by Marx, Engels, Kautsky, Bernstein, Lenin, Plekhanov, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Luk~ics, Gramsci and so on - intellectuals of the first rank who were also political leaders. 3 From the late 1920s, most creative Marxist theorists stood scattered around the fringes of the Marxist political organizations, a development that would have some bearing on the academicization of Marxist theory and theorists in the 1960s and after. For the Communist movement, as it developed through the 1950S, in effect chased independent-minded Marxist intellectuals into the universities where, after the Red Scare, they managed to settle. Gouldner himself hints at some of this with reference to the Soviet Union: "The purges of the thirties, then, were not as much aimed at the New Class or at blocking their class privileges, as Louis Althusser fancies, but rather at destroying their political autonomy and, especially, crushing their traditional impulse toward the critique of authority, thus preventing their link-up with the anti-Stalinist faction. Once that had been done, and his own political power entrenched, Stalin continued the Leninist policy of support for the intelligentsia and, indeed, of special privileges for them" (emphasis in original, 45). But Gouldner does not pursue the two main implications of this observation: first, the Soviet chapter, where Gouldner's New Class retained its privileges but had become a politically entrapped class serving power; and second, the ramifications of this for the situation of Marxist intellectuals in the West. This points to some problems in Gouldner's provocative thesis, which has the great merit of opening new analytic doors, but which also, as a "Marxism of Marxism" (193), suffers from some of the reductive and static aspects of the Marxism it dissects. Following the lead of some nineteenth-century anarchist critics of Marxism, primarily Michael 598 Bakunin and the more obscure Waclaw Machajski, who he had acknowledged in previous writings but does not mention this time, Gouldner wants to cut through the web of ironies and paradoxes by looking more closely at "the social group that conceived the shaped Marxism... what they wanted and who they were" (6). Readers of The Future of Intellectuals and The Rise of the New Class will be familiar with the argument's main contours. His opening passage might well read, "a spectre haunts a Marxism; the spectre of Bourgeois intellectuals." As it is, it is disarmingly simple: Marxism, Gouldner writes, "begins in the theoretical work of two very advantaged sons of the well-to-do. It arises out of their privileged education, reading, leisure, and critical independence another class privilege." Its creators were, to be sure, responding to the traumas unleashed by the industrialization of Europe, the anguish of the new working class, and its emergent struggles with capital. But, Gouldner insists, Marx, Engels and the left Hegelian milieu from which they came were also radicalized by material and ideal interests of their own. They were, in short, representatives of a new social group, a New Class, a "cultural bourgeoisie" who felt themselves to be not only deeply at odds with the older aristocratic and the newer capitalist elites, but as their rightful successor as representatives of more rational, just, and cultured society. Gouldner several times notes the blank spot in Marx's oeuvre on the question of what today is called the radicalization of intellectuals, including Marx himself. Marx was silent, Gouldner proposes, because he could have pursued this question only at the risk of exposing the New Class interests underlying the intellectuals' commitment to proletarian revolution. These interests, in Gouldner's account, are material and ideal, though their respective weights are not fully clarified. Taking Marx and his cohort as the case study, Gouldn'er argues that the intellectuals' radicalization in the early 1840s stems from their commitment to subjecting to critical scrutiny all statements and values; this includes their rejection of such non-rational elements as status, reputation, social position, political power, and so forth as grounds for the validity of statements and values. Only "context-free" claims count. The intellectuals, in other words, constitute a critical "speech community," whose chief loyalty is to a "Culture of Critical Discourse," notions that, as Gouldner affirms, parallel some of Habermas's. This all constitutes the source of the intellectuals' radicalization because it propels them into conflict with the mid-nineteenth-century elites rooted in either landed, aristocratic power or in the logic of capitalist production. Gouldner's intellectuals see themselves also as bearers of specifically cultural values - what 599 Marxists would call cultural use values - that clash with the dominance of exchange values in capitalism. 4 This pushes them further along the road to rebellion and revolution. The process is then capped, in Gouldner's view, by the experience of career blockage, exclusion from the ranks of the establishment, from power, as in the left Hegelians' loss of university posts in the early 1840s. This constitutes the material interests of the revolutionary intellectuals, who seek new careers in the revolutionary movement. Ignited by their commitments and interests, Gouldner's critical discoursers turn to a revolutionary socialist perspective, but at the same time discover their own powerlessness as a force for social change. They need allies in their impending contest with those in power. An important but insufficient alliance can be struck with capitalism's technical intelligentsia, whose commitments to rationalization and planning make it a potential enemy of the anarchy of the capitalist market. The technical intelligentsia is also, Gouldner argues, attracted to the positivist and scientistic elements of Marxist theory, elements they in turn amplify as they enter the Marxist movement. The decisive alliance, however, is struck with the proletariat, whose anguish and revolutionary potential is quickly discovered by the revolutionized critical discoursers. The great Marxian fusion of theory (and theorists) with the proletariat thus originates not in an objective meeting of historic forces, but in the intellectuals' sense of themselves as a more able and just ruling class and in their sense of powerlessness (21). For Gouldner, then, the Marxist critique of alienation and of the capitalist state are not what they claim to be. They are, rather, parts of the ideology of an intellectual elite, a cultural bourgeoisie without power. Marxism as a whole is the "politics of the new class" (the title of chapter 2). Here, too, the ironies proliferate. For Marxism's grounding in the status interests of intellectuals is, Gouldner observes, ambivalent. As a vision, Marxism keeps shooting beyond the interest in which it purportedly originates. As the bourgeoisie that, at an earlier stage, had announced to the world its own class interests in the name of universal human rights, so the New Class announces its interest in terms of a universal, socialist, and egalitarian commonwealth. In one of the book's numerous powerful insights, Gouldner shows that much of the subsequent history of Marxism consists of a sort of civil war between its promise of equality and community, of a world in which the separation of mental and manual labor has been overcome, versus the realities of Marxist elites and bureaucracies. Within the frame of Against Fragmentation, this civil war 600 gets played out in the clash between Marx and Bakunin, which Gouldner sees rightly as having been so intense precisely because Bakunin's attacks on Marxism's elitism, bureaucratism, and bourgeois moderation ultimately came not from outside Marxism but from within; from a part of Marxism's own fragmented soul. The civil war within Marxism is intense for another reason. It involves not only a clash of conceptual poles, but an actual social conflict between intellectuals and artisans-workers out of which Marxism emerged between the 1840s. On this matter, Gouldner's (and Karen Lucas's) observations join those of several recent social historians. In his discussion of "Artisans and Intellectuals: Socialism and the Revolution of 1848" (chapter 5), for example, Gouldner highlights the conflict between Marx and the German worker-socialist thinker, Wilhelm Weitling, coming close to Wolf Sch/ifer's thesis that the Marx-Weitling confrontation exemplifies scientific socialism's suppression of the thought of the working class. Proceeding along lines strikingly similar to Gouldner's, Schiifer contends that what Marx in 1843 had called the "ruthless critique of the existing order" (that is, Marxism), stops short of a "critique of the social position of the learned." The ruthless critique, Sch/ifer continues as Gouldner might, stopped short of criticism of the dominance of philosophy in the revolutionary movement. Why, he asks, does philosophy find in the proletariat only what Marx had called its "material weapons?" Because, Sch/ifer answers, philosophy and the philosophers were challenged and threatened by the proletariat's own intellectual weapons; by "collective thinking from below," whose methods Sch/ffer goes on to elaborate as an alternative to scientific socialism) In a closely related vein, Jonathan R6e's excellent Proletarian Philosophers traces the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century emergence of self-educated theorists from the British working class whose influence within the Communist Party of Great Britain was systematically abolished by the professional philosophers who entered the party's ranks in the 1920s and 1930s.6 In its successful struggles with the artisan socialism of the 1840s, Marxism began its refraction toward Scientific Socialism. But the success was only partial, at least in Marx's lifetime, for as Gouldner vividly notes, the whole business proved to be a "kind of recurrent bad dream in which Marx found himself inextricably enmeshed" (141), the final phase being the great battles with Bakunin, on whose side Gouldner firmly plants himself. Anticipating Zamyatin, Orwell, and Gouldner himself, Bakunin, after all, had seen the future envisaged by Marx as "the reign of the 601 scientific mind, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant and contemptuous of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and bogus learning, and the world will be divided into a dominant, sciencebased minority and a vast ignorant majority. And then let the masses beware" (quoted, 154). Between Weitling and Bakunin, of course, there stands Proudhon, whose conflicts with Marx would seem to have fit nicely into Gouldner's account. Proudhon, one of whose legacies was the French anarcho-syndicalist slogan, "No white hands: only hands with callouses!," looms comparatively large in another recent work that parallels but also contrasts with Gouldner's own, James BiUington's Fire in the Minds o f Men. 7 The French mutualist-federalist anarchist, though, makes only fleeting appearances in Against Fragmentation. Gouldner's analysis of Marx's confrontations with the artisans and with Bakunin is part of his larger effort to situate original Marxism in its creator's experiences in a specific, historical milieu. One among several rich case studies in this connection is Gouldner's commentary on the way important features of Marx's theoretical and political armory were products of the radical intellectuals' vulnerability to the exclusionary practices of artisan and worker organizations in the 1840s. That is, one of the dynamics in which Marxism was forged was the strong tendency of artisan and worker organizations in the 1848 period to exclude socialist intellectuals as interlopers with no real understanding of working peoples' experiences and needs. The artisan socialists sought in their own way to suppress the socialism of the intellectuals. Marxism was in part a response to this situation. It was also shaped by its contact with a bourgeois "popular materialism" that, according to Gouldner, prevailed in the intellectual culture of the middle class in the 1830s and 1840s (55- 87). This intriguing discussion, which deemphasizes Marxism's Hegelian-idealist roots and ignores some of the religious dimensions of the 1840s artisan environs that are stressed in Billington's Fire in the Minds of Men, includes Gouldner's sharp dissection of Marx's view on the so-called Jewish question that, among other things, was "wilfully obtuse and a travesty of scholarship" (76). It also leads Gouldner to his fine account of Marx's "binary fission of popular materialism." Marx, the argument runs, refined popular materialism by spiritualizing it, by generating a "symbolism o f . . . redemptive labor" (73). On one side, Marx upheld a kind of materialist utopianism, which views industrialism as honest, Gentile, masculine, healthy, rational, and so forth, while on the other, he rejected the negative side of popular materialism, namely, capitalism, which he saw as pathological, venal, 602 Jewish, feminine, and so forth. The critical conclusion here is that Marx in effect retained capitalism's own logic of efficiency and productivity, which in turn would blossom into Scientific Marxism. Gouldner's emphasis on the milieu-groundedness of Marx's thought is a preparation for his thesis on Marx's creativity and originality, which seeks to put to rest Althusser's coupure 6pistemologique. Against the image of a leap or break, Gouldner offers that of "boundary transgression." Here Marx's originality is depicted as his capacity to cross the boundaries of traditions and contemporary syntheses (Hegelian, SaintSimonian, materialist, romantic, positivist), which constituted what Gouldner calls Marx's theoretical resources. Marx's achievement was his capacity to "escape control by a single perspective" (204). But the syntheses from which Marx was able to generate the new synthesis of Marxism would also generate its fissions, civil wars, and the "two Marxisms." Having mapped out the terms of Marx's originality, then, Gouldner returns at the end to the paradoxes, occlusions, silences, and prospects. In a discussion (Chapters 9, 10 and 11) that is unnecessarily hermetic and jargonistic, but also more suggestive than a review can convey, Gouldner depicts Marxism as a set of metaphors and symbols that are often presented in diverse and divergent languages. This enables the theory to be effective in such a range of political and social settings; enables it to put revolution on the agenda in almost any time or place. Crucial here, in Gouldner's view, is what he considers Marxism's deepest metaphor, that of enslavement, which lies "nested," "encysted," "secreted" beneath a hierarchy of other metaphors, most of them more technical than enslavement (proletariat, exploitation, class struggle and so on). In given circumstances, one or another metaphor may be highlighted or deemphasized; sometimes as in the Manifesto, they can appear in combination, as in the insistence (based on technical metaphors) on specific historical prerequisites for revolution, and the solidarity (based on the enslavement metaphor) with every revolutionary movement against all existing conditions. No wonder Marxism has survived numerous unfulfilled predictions and failed party lines. The momentary crumbling of specific Marxist metaphors does not damage the continuity of its deep, enslavement metaphor. Again, Gouldner is interested in the role of metaphoricality not just in shaping Marxism's irrationalities and flaws, but in shaping its overall rationality and truth as well. His effort to sort things out brings him to a discussion of Marxism's drive toward recovery (of lost knowledge) and 603 holism (life beyond fragmentation). Whether he considered these metaphors is not clear, though that is the sense I make of them. In any case, the discussion also retrieves the book's initial thesis, for Marxism's drive toward recovery and holism is what cements its bonds with the New Class. Beneath the slew of insights and problems that come bouncing out of these concluding chapters there sits a simple idea. George Bfichner, Flaubert, and Dostoyevsky noticed it in the nineteenth century, as have numerous writers, often ex-Communists, in the twentieth. "The quest for the new secularized Logos becomes the mission of alienated intellectuals," Gouldner writes (283). Particularly susceptible to its vision, the alienated intellectuals become "the new functionaries of the totality;" they seek to bridge the gap between the high and technical languages of the cultural tradition and the lower, popular languages of the people. Totality? Not without reason but not without some false consciousness as well, it has become fashionable today to see nearly any affirmation of the concept of totality as the first step toward a social theory's totalitarian outcome. But for Gouldner, such affirmation can be a source of promise as well as of pathology. He believes there is a selfcritical and self-limiting vision of a world beyond fragmentation, although it is not automatically self-limiting. Work is required, and it begins and ends in self-analysis. "I believe," Gouldner concludes, "that one of the central tasks of social theory in our time is to rethink the position of theory's own group involvements and to re-examine the conditions, social and organizational, requisite for the development of an effective community of theorists committed to the understanding o f the social totality" (299). Does Gouldner's community of theorists have a chance? The opening gathering will likely generate debate between those who favor as a slogan, "Against Fragmentation," and those who like "For Fragmentation." Having resolved that delicate matter, a next step would be giving the New Class thesis a more differentiated and historical cast than it now has. Should it function as a sociological ideal type, as Gouldner implies in some parts of the book, or is it meant to encompass the full range of empirical material, as he implies in others? Is Marxism as the "politics of the new class" an imputed class consciousness in Lukdcs's sense? If so, what is its relation to the immediate or psychological consciousness(es) of the new class in its diverse stages and situations? Regarding these questions, Gouldner is on the whole strong in the period of Marx's lifetime, but for the century since, he tends to get sketchy, which is acceptable, and flip, which is not. His forthcoming book on the 604 post-Marx thinkers will presumably make substantial contributions. In Against Fragmentation, though, the problem is that for all of Gouldner's lush phenomenology of the New Class, it nevertheless emerges as a too static entity, a kind of sociological thing-in-itself that traverses history but is not itself sufficiently historical. Gouldner gestures often to the post-Marx chapters of the New Class story, but nearly all of these refer to Soviet, Maoist-Chinese and Third World examples. After 1883, aside from several references to Lukfics, the West virtually vanishes. We will need therefore, to develop some of Gouldner's insights and intuitions in analysis, for example, of the vibrant non-Marxist radicalization of European intellectuals between the 1880s and 1920s; of the alienated intellectuals' enthusiasm for World War One; of the appeals of Fascism and Nazism to segments of the New Class; of the mobilization of academic Marxism today. Are the New Class' interests, aspirations, and blind spots the same throughout? Or are they altered significantly, as Debray might argue, by the shifting loci of intellectual life, from books through universities to the electronic mass media, s Investigation along these lines would not necessarily overturn the New Class thesis; they could, though, give it some of the historical amplification it requires. But it is, after all, Gouldner who provided this and much else to work with. He might have preferred that a review of his book end critically, but this will end gratefully. Having referred to some jargon-laden sections of Against Fragmentation, let it be said, as many of his readers know, that Gouldner also wrote with unusual skill and vivacity. Consider the following passage, in its clarity and cadence, a stylistic gem; in its sub -~ stance, a brilliantly compressed account of the intellectual origins of Stalinism, of Marxism's deepest flaw, and a good reminder to all of us would-be functionaries of the totality: The central strategy of the Marxist project, its concern with seeking a remedy to unnecessary suffering, was thus in the end susceptible to a misuse that betrayed its own highest avowals. The root o f the trouble was that this conception of its own project redefined pity. Sheer h u m a n suffering alone did not qualify, in the Marxist view, to justify concern for others, or efforts on their behalf, or to invite sympathy, or to feel solidarity with the afflicted. The h u m a n condition was rejected on behalf of the historical condition. In short, Marxism, like any ideology, s h u n n e d the tragic. It s h u n n e d that suffering to which the flesh is universal heir - indeed its historicism casts doubt that any such is universal - and attended to the suffering which m e n at certain times and places may, through struggle, avoid. The trouble here is not only that this limits the scope of Marxism's capacity for h u m a n solidarity a n d sympathy. The trouble, rather, is that if the Marxist pro- 605 ject is the reduction of needless suffering, one may not only turn one's back on certain sufferings, holding them to be presently beyond correction, but then, going one step further, one may now claim the highest moral sanction for the infliction of new suffering under the justification of necessity. The historically necessary becomes the sacred. Men acting in the name of this higher necessity are acting on behalf of something which can sanction almost any cruelty. Convincing ourselves that we are acting only as the agent of necessity, we may then become the Grand Inquisitor and Sacred Torturer of History (260-261). Notes 1. Mention could have been made of Michael L6wy, Pour une sociologie des intellectuels revolutionnaire~" L'evolution politique de Lukdcs, 1909-1929 (Paris: Presses universit.aires de France, 1976), and Robert J. Brym, The Jewish Intelligentsia and Russian Marxism: A Sociological Study of lntellectual Radicalism and Ideological Divergence (New York: Schocken, 1978). 2. (Frankfurt-am-Main: Ullstein, 1982). 3. Lucien Goldmann, "La R6ification," Les Temps Modernes, 14:156-157 (Feb. -Mar., 1959): 1433-1474. 4. Lowy, Pour une sociologie des intellectuels revolutionnaires, 17-105. 5. Wolf Sch/ifer, "Collective Thinking From Below: Early Working-Class Thought Reconsidered," Dialectical Anthropology 6 (1982): 193-214. 6. (New York: Oxford, 1984). 7. (New York: Basic Books, 1980). 8. R6gis Debray, Teachers, Writers, Celebretieg" The Intellectuals of Modern France, David Macey, trans. (London: New Left Books, 1981).