nihilistic, market-driven capitalism that envelops the whole world today. That means it will have plenty of work to do for a long time to come.
There is a wonderful image that emerged early in the 1990s—at least that is when I first heard it, at my school, City College of New York—from the street life of America’s black ghettos, and particularly from today’s hip-hop music scene, where music becomes itself not by being harmonized, but by being mixed. Here’s the image: caught up in the mix. “She’s all caught up in the mix”; “I got myself caught up in the mix.” This image has stuck because it captures so much of so many people’s lives. My father was caught up in the mix. So were the friends who betrayed him. I think Marx understood better than anybody else how modern life is a mix; how, although there are immense variations in it, deep down it’s one mix—“the mix”; how we are all caught up in it; and how easy, how normal it is for the mix to go awry. He also showed how, once we grasped the way we were thrown together, we could fight for the power to remix.
Marxist humanism can help people feel at home in history, even a history that hurts them. It can show them how even those who are broken by power can have the power to fight the power; how even survivors of tragedy can make history. It can help people discover themselves as “rich human beings” with “rich human needs” (89–91), and can show them there is more to them than they thought. It can help new generations to imagine new adventures and arouse their powers of desire to change the world, so that they not only will be part of the mix, they will get to do part of the mixing.
This essay was first published in Adventures in Marxism, Verso, 1999.
The idea that I have called “the politics of authenticity” is a dream of an ideal community in which individuality will not be subsumed and sacrificed, but fully developed and expressed. This dream is at once old and new. “New,” first of all, in that it is modern: It presupposes the sort of fluid, highly mobile, urban society, and the sort of dynamic, expansive economy which we experience as distinctively modern, and which nearly everyone in the West lives in today. But it is “old” too: It has been a leitmotif in Western culture since early in the eighteenth century, when men began to feel modernization as an irreversible historical force and to think systematically about its human potentialities. This ideal was one of the deepest and most pervasive themes of the Romantic Age, the years roughly from 1789 to 1848. It is central to the work of Blake and Carlyle, of Chateaubriand and Stendhal, of Schiller and Novalis and Hegel. Marx and Engels invoke it in the Communist Manifesto: “In place of bourgeois society, with its classes and class conflicts, we will have an association in which the free development of each will be the condition of the free development of all.”
The Manifesto appeared in 1848, on the eve of the revolutions that would bring to a climax a century of Romantic dreams. But this climax turned out to be a catastrophe: The defeats of 1848 to 1851 generated a disenchantment and despair so deep that the very memory of the dream was lost, wiped out, submerged; for a whole century, the politics of authenticity virtually disappeared from the Western imagination. Thus, from the start of the 1850s to the end of the 1950s, in nearly all arguments between radicals and their opponents, both parties identified the capitalist economy and the liberal state with “individualism” and equated radical aims with a “collectivism” that negated individuality. Political thought was frozen into this dualism until the cultural explosion of the 1960s redefined the terms. The New Left’s complaint against democratic capitalism was not that it was too individualistic, but rather that it wasn’t individualistic enough: It forced every individual into competitive and aggressive impasses (“zero-sum games”) which prevented any individual feelings, needs, ideas, energies from being expressed. The moral basis of this political critique was an ideal of authenticity. This outlook was new and yet old, radical yet traditional. Thus the New Left’s lasting cultural achievement—one that may outlive the New Left itself—has been to bring about a return of the repressed, to bring radicalism back to its romantic roots.
When I first thought of writing a book on “the politics of authenticity,” American culture had come very close to those roots. But the road was murky and tortuous, and no one knew how close we all were. I was just coming of age then, and the 1950s were beginning to turn into the 1960s. The teachers who were teaching me most, in the fervidly genial atmosphere of Columbia College, were thinking very intensely and deeply about “the self” as an intellectual and cultural problem. They had good reasons of their own for thinking this way. They had been burned badly by the radical politics of the 1930s, a politics that had led them to the verge of a monstrous self-betrayal, or of a nightmarish self-dissolution. Now, shaken but intact, reincarnate as academic humanists and cultural critics, they were hoping to salvage whatever elements of decency and beauty they could find in a wrecked, bleak world and to put together fragmented but honest lives for themselves. Their concern with personal authenticity grew out of a loss of political faith, hope, and love. And yet, even though they had cut themselves off from all radical movements, there was some thing unmistakably radical in the way they moved. Although they denounced every Romantic hope, we could see something vividly and beautifully Romantic about the very intensity of their despair. Even as they spurned and cursed Marxism for its spiritual emptiness, they themselves embodied a different kind of Marxism, a Marxism with soul. The vibrations they unconsciously gave off were far more powerful than the ideology (or, as they would have said, anti-ideology) they tried so hard to transmit. Ironically then, so many of the great teachers of that time opened doors for their students which they had closed on themselves; they turned us on to currents of desire and hope, of feeling and thought, which they hoped to turn off forever.
Thus the same sensibility and awareness, which led them away from politics and from radicalism in the 1940s and 1950s, led us back to politics and into a new kind of radicalism in the 1960s. The upheavals of these last years have generated a bitter conflict of generations in American intellectual life. In trying to clarify the political consequences of the search for personal authenticity, I have focused on an ultimate concern, which I believe both generations share. If we all come to understand what is involved in the desire to be ourselves, it may bring us closer together than we have been.
This essay first appeared as the preface to the first edition of The Politics of Authenticity, Cambridge: Atheneum, 1970.
Alienation, Community, Freedom
In his attempt to define an organic “structure of feeling” in nineteenth-century social thought, a structure capable of supporting the political Left and Right alike, Raymond Williams brings together much material that is of deepest interest to anyone who wants to rethink and refurbish socialist traditions.1 On the other hand, the very fact that he does bring such material together is a symptom of how dangerously vague and inchoate socialist traditions have become. In Williams’s view, the conservative-reactionary Wordsworth and the radical-revolutionary Blake, while pulling politically in opposite directions, are enveloped in a deeper, cultural unity of focus and insight: It is “the perception of alienation, even as a social fact, [which] can lead either way.” But to assimilate the Blakean “structure of feeling” to the Wordsworthian, even in such a limited way, seems to me misleading. A little scrutiny will show two sharply distinct perceptions in operation here, rooted in profoundly different systems of values; the covering term “alienation” only covers up their fundamental alienation from one another.
Consider, first of all, the passages cited by Williams in which “alienation” is supposedly expressed by Blake. Blake is lamenting the absence from the world of creative energy, spontaneity, exuberance, sexual expression, and sensual delight. These personal qualities are stifled
