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Shopping for Revolution
| Article
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11102 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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3 / 1986 |
1,496 Words |
| Author
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Paul Gottfried
Paul Gottfried is a senior editor of the Modern Thought
section of The World & I and author of The Search for
Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American Right. |
Alvin Gouldner was a thinker obviously proud of his intellectual pedigree. He filled his writings with the statements and ideas of nineteenth-century revolutionaries like Marx and Bakunin and the interwar synthesizers of Marx and Freud associated with the Frankfurt School for Social Research. In doing a review of The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, I was struck by the speculative and fragmentary nature of Gouldner's work. Anyone who demands that an author treat his subject systematically would do well to look elsewhere. Gouldner's essays are not likely to please those who desire rigorous proofs. Nor will they please those who share his contempt for middle-class civilization but who wish to hear leftist pieties and nothing else. Though Gouldner provides those pieties, he often presents them in the context of discussing complicated social theories in arcane language. Like one of his mentors, Herbert Marcuse, he gives anti-American radicals what they want if they are willing to unravel his syntax.
Gouldner places modern intellectuals, what he calls the "New Class," into a role analogous to Marx's proletariat. Despite their middleclass origin, disgruntled intellectuals are the ones who are most persistently critical of what they see as the misery produced by the capitalist West. Like the Frankfurt School for Social Research, Gouldner interprets oppression as a kind of deprivation that is more psychological than material. He associates this deprivation with the fragmented, and presumably unnatural, form of existence that marks human life in advanced capitalist society. He predicts that the establishment of socialism (which he identifies with self-described socialist regimes but in a highly selective way) will end human misery in America. Humankind will become reintegrated into its environment, without the
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