and celebrated as “self-love” was actually an inner emptiness, a total poverty and bankruptcy of self. Modernization had indeed developed the spirit to “almost the highest point of its perfection”; but the embourgeoisment which animated modernization had alienated it radically from actual human feelings and needs.
I think we can find in Rousseau a strategy that may be even more fruitful in our time than it was in his. It is to appeal to modern men on the basis of their own sensibility and awareness of life. Rousseau believed such an appeal was possible because modern society had developed in its men and women a mode of consciousness capable of transcending it. If this consciousness could be developed further, into self-consciousness and into social consciousness, then modern people—people who were intensely “ardent, avid, ambitious,” who strove constantly to turn their thoughts into actions, their fantasies into realities—might be able to resolve their personal and their political problems together, to reform radically their society and themselves from within.
Rousseau’s strategy was profoundly dialectical: it was to “draw from the evil itself the remedy that can cure it.” The first step was negative: to show modern man, “who thinks he’s happy, how miserable he really is.” This was the purpose of Rousseau’s most probing and penetrating psychological and political writing. The next step was positive: “to illuminate his reason with new ideas, and warm his heart with new feelings, so that he’ll learn that he can best multiply his happiness and expand his being by sharing them with his fellowmen.” Even the most avid egotist could be made to understand “how his own personal interest demands that he submit to the general will.” Then, “with a stout heart and a sound mind, this enemy of mankind would give up his hatred with his fallacies; the very reason that drew him apart from humanity would lead him back to it. Then he would become a good, virtuous, sensitive man. Instead of a vicious outlaw, he would want to be the firmest pillar of a good society.”
I remember an SDS meeting at the New York Community Church on a sweltering July night in 1966. A black man spoke, from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) I think, and told us—as Malcolm X had been telling us for a year or so before he was killed—that there was an important role for white radicals in “the Revolution,” but that this role wasn’t in the black ghetto. What we needed to do, he said, was to go back home, wherever we came from, and “work with our own kind.” The white radicals in the audience didn’t take this very well. One of the ablest and most courageous I know, a community organizer in Newark, said: “So you’re telling us to go back to our parents?” In effect, said the SNCC man, yes. “But I have more in common with oppressed blacks in the ghetto than I have with my parents in Scarsdale. I have more in common with sharecroppers in Georgia, Indians on the reservation, Bolivian tin miners, Vietnamese—for Christ’s sake, I have more in common with anybody than with my parents! That’s why I’m in the movement in the first place.” Most of us agreed. But the man from SNCC persisted: We had more in common with our parents than we liked to think.
For a great many of us there could be no greater insult. But the truth is that there are some very deep impulses which we and our parents share; impulses which are frighteningly ambiguous, but which are in themselves nothing to be ashamed of; impulses which have radical possibilities for fathers and sons, mothers and daughters alike. They are what Rousseau called perfectibility and—in its most distinctively modern expression—avidity. Perfectibility: the unwillingness to settle back and rest content, the need to change constantly one’s life for the better. Avidity: the desire to turn thought into action, to do it, here and now. It is perfectibility and avidity that lead our parents, in Scarsdale or wherever they are stuck, to trade in their car for a new one every year. How to judge them? Is it absurd to think that a new car will make them happy? Of course, this is precisely the sort of absurdity that makes the American economy and our middle-class life run. But it is not at all absurd for our parents to feel that their old car and all the other things they have now do not make them happy. Indeed, it is the beginning of wisdom. And it is far from absurd for them to want to do something to change their lives! What we have to make clear to them is that it’s not so much the car, as the system that built it, that needs changing—and that we can’t trade a social system in, we must build a new one.
The perfectibility and avidity that have driven our parents in contradictory directions have been driving us too. We’ve demanded “Power to the people!” and we’ve identified with any and every people in the world—except our people. This drive has been genuinely liberating for many of us; it has enabled us, by getting into other people, to expand and deepen ourselves. This is what the word “psychedelic” legitimately means and what so much of the 1960s was all about. But getting into other people, identifying ourselves with them, is not enough for radicalism. Radicalism means going to the roots, and (as Marx said) the root for man is man, and if we mean to be men—Menschen, human beings—if we want our souls to expand authentically, we must make room for ourselves at the center. In the course of the sixties, we have learned to affirm, avidly, militantly, everyone but ourselves. Now we must affirm ourselves as well. We must move, must grow, from apocalypse to dialectic.
It is worth pointing out that the New Left began with dialectic, with a document Rousseau would have understood: the Port Huron Statement of 1962. “Some would have us believe,” the statement says, “that Americans feel contentment amidst their prosperity.” But the fact is, it goes on to say, most people are tormented by “deeply felt anxieties about their role in the world … [which] produce a yearning to believe that there is some alternative to the present, that something can be done to change the school, the bureaucracies, the work-places, the government … It is to this yearning, at once the spark and the engine of change, that we address our present appeal.” The signers of the statement were determined to discover or to create new forms of political life and action that would express people’s “unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding and creativity”; forms that would fulfill their “unrealized capacities for reason, freedom and love.” These goals can be achieved only by transforming America into a “democracy of individual participation.” The New Left, at its birth, embarked on a “search for truly democratic alternatives to the present, and a commitment to social experimentation.” It invited the American people as a whole to take this trip with it. Thus spoke the founders of the SDS in 1962. Where are they now? How often, since then, have we been side-tracked?
The question is, how can we start again? One thing we should have learned is not to go it alone, isolated from the “modern men”—and modern women—who share our discontents and our hopes. As Rousseau indicated, this requires an understanding of the contradictions of modern life—contradictions which Rousseau faced with remarkable clarity and courage. He was the first to explore the uncharted, perilous open sea of modernity. He left us logs and maps that we can use to learn where and who we are.
This essay originally appeared in the Partisan Review, Winter 1971–2.
The best story I’ve ever heard about The Communist Manifesto came from Hans Morgenthau, the great theorist of international relations who died in 1980. It was the early seventies at CUNY, and he was reminiscing about his childhood in Bavaria before the First World War. Morgenthau’s father, a doctor in a working-class neighborhood of Coburg, often took his son along on house calls. Many of his patients were dying of TB; a doctor could do nothing to save their lives, but might help them die with dignity. When his father asked about last requests, many workers said they wanted to have the Manifesto buried with them when they died. They implored the doctor to see that the priest didn’t sneak in and plant the Bible on them instead.
This spring, the Manifesto is 150 years old. In that century and a half, apart from the Bible, it has become the most widely read book in the world. Eric Hobsbawm, in his splendid introduction to the handsome new Verso
