and chaotic as it is, could help build us anew. From alienation came freedom, and from modernity’s ruins came new life. “All that is solid melts into air” was Marx and Engels’s lament about what had happened to life under capital; for Berman this was also a credo for how to rebel against it.
The opening chapter of Politics of Authenticity is titled “The Personal is Political.” I’ve always wondered about this title—it being, even then, somewhat of a flat-tire turn of phrase. But I think what Berman meant was something more nuanced: that the political should be personal. As Corey Robin and others have pointed out, Berman’s historical and philosophical narratives were almost always suffused with personal trauma. This, perhaps, reached its fullest expression in All That Is Solid, where he moved from eighteenth-century Paris to his own midcentury New York, and also in his later essays collected in Adventures in Marxism. But his turn to the personal went well beyond the fact that he was now writing from his home turf; it was, rather, an attempt to make our politics more personal, more felt.
For Berman the failure of modern capitalism—in both its industrial and postindustrial phases—was as much about the emotional suffering it caused as its unequal distribution of goods and services. This was why Berman found the young Marx, who writes of alienation, and the young Lukács, who writes of a particular form of alienation (reification), so appealing. Their ideas were ways of explaining what Berman already suspected was wrong with the world he inhabited: It was not so much that his father was a failed garment-district middleman but that his father had suffered the psychic costs of this failure.
This personalization of Marx and of social criticism more generally was what lent Berman’s thinking its poignant erudition. It is what also drew him to the humanist side of the Left. “Even when capitalism was highly successful,” Berman wrote, Marx helped him realize that it “could be humanly disastrous, inflicting upon people insult and injury by treating them as nothing more than a commodity.” The great injustice of modern life was not just the inequalities it produced but also the high tax they placed on us: the ways in which they limited our range of expression as well as our formal freedoms, our libido as well as our workweek—the ways they helped turn whole neighborhoods into expressways.
One does not always practice what one preaches. But it was precisely this sensitivity to human feeling that made Berman so lovely as a person. He cared. His generosity came casually to him. He lent me Peter Gay’s Weimar Culture (a reason why I went to graduate school). He read a fellow editor’s four-year-old undergraduate thesis in an afternoon and then offered detailed notes and corrections. He even tried, unsuccessfully, to get Michael Walzer to listen to Bob Dylan.
A common refrain at Dissent meetings is, “So what do we think about this?” Berman often phrased it, “So how do we feel about this?” When I was at something of a romantic impasse several years ago, he steered our lunch conversation away from edits on a review of his to narrate a comically failed early romance.
That review—one of his late classics—told the story of Ka, Blue, and Ipek, the characters that form the sad, mostly unconsummated love triangle that anchors Orhan Pamuk’s Snow. For Berman, the center of the novel was not the clash between the secular and religious, the modern and the traditional. It was love: love won but also, more commonly, lost. This was our most modern of disasters: the suggestion of freedom, the age of liberation, and yet nothing. We can speak and be heard, touch and embrace, but something about modern life seems to stop us from loving. Ka and Ipek, plotting to escape the religious violence of Anatolia, never catch their train. They dream of a place where they can overcome what keeps them apart. But the currents of history, or at least the currents of Pamuk’s novel, stop them.
Berman wrote:
In the history of modern culture, the archetypal couple presiding over Ka’s and Ipek’s fantasies and hopes come from the moment of the French Revolution: they are Papageno and Papagena, from Mozart’s Magic Flute. Ka and Ipek, two centuries later, would be a modernist variation on Mozart’s theme. Their embraces will be accompanied by all the latest mass media, by movies and television, by computer hookups and hyperlinks, and by dreams of America—of undubbed America (Pamuk highlights this), an America in as raw and direct a form as they can imagine. Americans can feel proud to be part of their dream life and their pursuit of happiness.
Why shouldn’t they have all this? In fact, it is only drastic last-minute plot intervention by the author that keeps the heroine off the train to freedom. Maybe Pamuk thought it would be a better story this way, and if he did, who knows, maybe he was right. Maybe stories of love crushed are more poignant than stories of love fulfilled. Or maybe the best story is love crushed after it’s fulfilled.
But for Berman, this was not enough. As he ended the review, turning back to his own life as he often did in his essays, he wrote:
But there’s a difference between the logic of a story and the logic of history. At the start of the twenty-first century, our history may be more open than our literature. A great many people have got out of nightmarish situations all over the globe, and America has given them space to breathe. On any Saturday or Sunday afternoon, at Herald Square, on Telegraph Avenue, in shopping malls in all sorts of American places I and Pamuk have never heard of, you can find couples that look a lot like Ipek and Ka (they are often of different colors), schlepping their babies around in ultramodern snugglies, overflowing with new life.
When I read these last passages of his review I was kind of surprised. It was early 2009, and not exactly a time, despite Obama’s election, to be proud of the United States. A great many people had certainly escaped nightmarish situations all over the globe, and sometimes because of our beneficence. But the United States also was one of the many sources of these nightmarish situations and certainly not always a place of relief.
But what troubled me most about these last paragraphs was not that Berman still could mine a deep reserve of hope and possibility in the midst of so much disappointment. It was that he had found, in a novel about political violence, a story of unfulfilled love: a narrative, as old as Mozart’s Magic Flute, that revealed the deeper sorrow of modern experience—our inability to connect with one another. This was, at least to me, a radically different type of criticism, a criticism that formulated not just social complaint but also psychic and spiritual pain. It was a criticism—a politics, really—of feelings.
When All That Is Solid was published, it was met with a wave of exuberant reviews. The Times called it “generous … and dazzling.” The Voice insisted that it was “a visionary work which by all rights ought to have the impact of such sixties bibles as Growing Up Absurd and Life Against Death.” It did, in many ways. And Berman always was grateful for the recognition it brought him, even if in later years I think he felt burdened and hemmed in by its success.
But the Left, being the Left, had a variety of responses, not all kind and perhaps none as stinging as Perry Anderson’s. Writing in the New Left Review, Anderson argued that the book confused modernist visions of release with radical ones of liberation. “For all its exuberance, Berman’s version of Marx, in its virtually exclusive emphasis on the release of the self, comes uncomfortably close—radical and decent though its accents are—to the assumptions of the culture of narcissism.”
For Berman, this must have particularly stung, because the underlying argument of All That Is Solid was that modernism can help people come closer together: Creative expression, in the street as well as in the museum, was an effort to find communion. Modernist art, urban culture—these were ways to repair our present state of alienation. They were means to overcome loneliness.
Always generous, Berman responded this way:
I am grateful to Perry Anderson for remembering The Politics of Authenticity, and for pointing out the continuities between that work and
