AGAINST FRAGMENTATION: THE ORIGINS OF MARXISM AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF INTELLECTUALS
Alvin W. Gouldner
Oxford University Press, 1985
333 pages
THE FUTURE OF INTELLECTUALS AND THE RISE OF THE NEW CLASS Alvin W. Gouldner
Continuum, 1979
121 pages
The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of," Pascal observed. One of the greatest mathematicians of his time, he knew that in the final analysis religious commitment does not and cannot base itself upon proof. But that being said, it remains true that most Christians take seriously St. Peter's injunction to "be ready always to give an answer to every man that ask the you a reason of the hope that is in you." They do so not only because they wish to bear witness to others, but because they recognize the problematic character of what Kierkegaard called the "leap of faith." There have been those, after all, who have made existential decisions for Nazism and, less darkly, for passing enthusiasms such as environmentalism and jogging. And a great many continue to decide for Marxism, especially intellectuals who, however much they advertise their critical proclivities, have been more than ready to hail that complex ideology as an authentic revelation.
Habits of The Heart
To be sure, Marxist intellectuals do not consider their commitment to be irrational. On the contrary, before World War I they understood Marxism to be a rigorous science of society and history. Marx had taught, or so they believed, that in advanced industrial societies a large, immoderate proletariat would, in the fullness of time, become conscious o its messianic mission and rise up in victorious revolt against the ruling bourgeoisie. This self-emancipation would, at the same time, constitute a general human emancipation because the proletariat was a universal class and hence no class at all. What lent these metaphysical claims a scientific aura was the elaborate logic of transformation that Marx and Engel's spelled out and the sense of necessity that they were able to impart to the entire process. History was not hostage to the presence or absence of progressive ideas or utopian visions; "the theoretical conclusions of the Communists," Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto, "are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under out very eyes." Because that movement was propelled by the motor of economic development, it followed that economically-defined social being determined consciousness and not vice versa. In such a view, bourgeois intellectuals had little role to play in the drama of human redemption. Marx did speak of those few, like himself, "who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole," but he did not explain how they were able to do so if their consciousness was a mere epiphenomenona. In any event, they would do nothing more than comprehend what must be.
Somewhat ironically, it was orthodox Marxism's deterministic character that tamed its revolutionary impulses. Human volition was out of
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