Alvin Gouldner wrote important books all his life, and his last, Against Fragmentation, most emphatically was one of them. Combining the themes of The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (1979) and The Two Marxisms (1980), Against Fragmentation is the better work. Avoiding the reductionism of the former and the temptation to "Marxology" of the latter does, however, involve some costs: Gouldner does not quite manage to synthesize fully the results of his reading of theory. As a result, the work, a veritable gold mine of insights, does not ultimately hold together. Its weaknesses, however, are almost as instructive as its strengths.
The theory of the intellectuals as the "New Class" is, of course, well known. It is, however, a bad theory in spite of its venerable lineage. Saint-Simon and Comte, Bakunin and Machajski, Sorel and Benda, the theorists of the managerial revolution and of the New Class, as well as some of today's neo-conservatives, are part of the history of the concept. Gouldner's own treatment belongs in particular to a tradition going back to Lukacs and Mannheim of turning historical materialism against itself. Such Marxian analysis of Marxism is also the background of a recent work of the Hungarian dissidents Szelenyi and Konrad.
Along with the other theories of this latter type, Gouldner's is not only far more sophisticated than those of its non-Marxist competitors (especially the neoconservatives) but also suffers from ailments peculiar to its own project. The book on the intellectuals contains all the usual fallacies, paralogisms, and antinomies of the classical Marxian theory of class. Even worse, it cannot avoid the obvious logical circularity of discrediting precisely the theory that the whole analysis presupposes. If Marxism reduces to the class interests of the intellectuals, what is the basis of the truth claims of a Marxist critique of Marxism? Either the thesis (about the link of intellectuals and Marxism) is true, and one would need a different theoretical basis for saying it, or the original theoretical bases (Marxian theory) are to be defended, but then the thesis cannot be completely true in relation to Marxian theory as a whole or true at all in relation the parts relied upon by Gouldner. Either Marxian theory or the thesis about the intellectuals, or, preferably, both must be reconstructed or treated in a far more differentiated way in order to say at least some of what Gouldner wanted to say.
The major weakness of Against Fragmentation is its unwillingness to put into perspective and weaken the explanatory claims of the New Class thesis. About this I will say little since Jean Cohen has effectively criticized not only the thesis in particular but also its theoretical foundations. Intellectuals (in Gouldner's own typology: bureaucrats, technical intellectuals, humanistic intellectuals) hardly constitute a class "in itself or for itself," and class as a category cannot in any case explain either the structure of domination or the chances of movements of emancipation in complex (or probably any other) societies. Neither in contemporary capitalist nor in authoritarian socialist societies is there a single economically based mechanism of stratification that accounts for all inequalities of power, status, and wealth: furthermore, forms of opposition do not draw upon homogeneous populations of any kind. Neither structure nor conflict-oriented explanations will save the old theory, and the long exploratory journey that sought to identify the really relevant classes according to everrenwed criteria (new working class, new middle class, new petty bourgeoisie,
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