Arguing the World

I finally got around to watching Arguing the World, Joseph Dorman’s 1998 film about four of the most important New York intellectuals: Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Irving Howe, and Irving Kristol. I’m not sure what took me so long getting around to this, since it’s a film all US intellectual historians should watch, especially those, like me, interested in postwar political culture. I’m currently in the midst of writing a chapter on the neoconservative response to the sixties New Left—important to the early formation of what would later come to be called the culture wars. Kristol, and to a lesser extent, Bell and Glazer, figure in this chapter, so it seemed like a good time to watch the film. (Plus, I recently noticed it is available to stream at Netflix.)

I really enjoyed Arguing the World. I think it nicely captures the intellectual history of these four men. It focuses on all the important episodes in recent American history that shaped and changed their ideas. Often, however, the film parrots the views of the subjects without interrogating them more thoroughly. For instance, echoing arguments he made back in the 1950s, Howe claimed that the anti-Stalinist leftists at Partisan Review were cultural highbrows while the Popular Frontists were cultural middlebrows. Trotskyists read Proust, Communists and Fellow Travelers read Howard Fast. Warren Susman later expanded on this analysis, calling the 1930s Popular Front culture conservative in its kitschy celebration of “the people,” made clear in how the Popular Front song, “The Ballad of the Americans,” was co-opted as the theme song of the 1940 Republican Party National Convention.

The film accepts these normative claims at face value. In his important 1997 book, The Cultural Front (the subject of my first ever USIH blog post in January 2007!), Michael Denning makes a compelling argument against Howe and Susman’s interpretations. Denning argues that what makes the Popular Front culture interesting, complex, and ultimately radical is not its celebration of “the people” but rather the way it “mediates on the absence of the people: on the martyrs, the losses, the betrayals, the disinherited.” I’m not here suggesting Arguing the Worldneeded to consult Denning, whose book likely came out just as the film was in the final stages of production. Rather, this is my mild way of saying that the filmmaker might have done a better job challenging the assumptions of the subjects.

As the film moves forward in time, as the subjects themselves began to take on very different points of view, the film gains an easier mechanism for challenging their ideas. They began to argue with each other, mediated through interviewers. For instance, in the early stages of the Cold War, all but one of these former leftists became Cold War liberals. Howe, the one holdover, started Dissentmagazine in his attempt to keep the flames of social democracy alive in what he thought of as a conformist intellectual culture. He even wrote a famous essay on conformity where he was critical of several of his former comrades. Kristol said he never took Dissent seriously because it seemed like nothing more than “echoes from the past.” Glazer said Howe and Dissent were too bitter about “sell outs.”

Conversely, Howe, Glazer, and Bell all had critical things to say about Kristol becoming one of the leading intellectuals of the conservative movement by the 1970s. Bell said Kristol had become the embodiment of the thing that the two of them hoped to stamp out when they founded The Public Interest in 1965: “ideological.” Bell was particularly taken aback by Kristol’s infamous claim in the early 1990s that his Cold War was just getting started—that it had morphed into a war against liberalism. Glazer, who, aside from Kristol, came closer to being a full-blown neoconservative than the others, was mildly critical of Kristol for having given up any hope that government can improve people’s lives. Howe, of course, was the most scathing. He said he still felt attached to most of his old Alcove No. 1 comrades, including Glazer and Bell, but not Kristol, for whom he wished “a long life filled with many political failures.”

One of the underlying assumptions made in the film—in interview after interview with the subjects and with scholars, including Morris Dickstein—is that no matter their political trajectories, these four New York intellectuals “carried over a cast of mind of Marxism.” What made this the case, according to Arguing the World? They sought to espouse a universal understanding of the world, and believed that any problem, no matter how provincial, should be related to larger forces at work. I agree with this assessment. In my chapter I argue that they maintained the analytical Marxist tendency for diagnosing problems in relation to root causes, internal logics, and overarching structures. Do you agree? Is this a Marxist thing?

Vanderlan Responds to Haberski

I want to thank Ray Haberski for his thoughtful and positive review of Intellectuals Incorporated. Haberski judges the book important, he captures the general thrust of the argument, and he effectively chooses some of the more significant figures – MacLeish, Macdonald, and Agee – to illustrate his points. Most gratifying to me, Haberski finds the portrayals of the individual writers to be compellingly complicated. I hoped to offer a book that advanced a provocative argument about the place of intellectuals in mid-century America while still retaining a sense of the messy peculiarities of each writer’s life. It is encouraging to see Haberski respond to both aspirations.

Haberski rightfully describes my book as a “portrait of the abdication of intellectuals to the ethos of the market.” Ironically, I would add, the abdication took place not so much on the part of the writers who struggled to work for Luce and his magazines – writers such as MacLeish, Agee, Whyte and others – but instead by those who insisted that intellectuals must not work for mass culture magazines. Writers such as Irving Howe, C. Wright Mills, and Dwight Macdonald spent the post war years insisting that mass culture was hostile to intellectual life. As Howe put it in 1952, when intellectuals “became absorbed into” organizations such as Time Inc. “they not only lose their traditional rebelliousness but to one extent or another they cease to function as intellectuals.” This is a familiar argument, and Haberski is right to suggest that combatting that notion lies at the heart of my motivation in writing the book. Too often, as I try to demonstrate, such criticism left intellectuals cut off from the main currents of society.

Haberski understands this. At other times, however, Haberski comes close to echoing the assumptions I try to call into question. Noting the many works produced by Time Inc. intellectuals for other publications, Haberski concludes “it was their moonlighting that gave them integrity.” I disagree, in two ways. First, I seek to show that is was possible – difficult, but possible – to write with integrity for Time and Fortune. My book is an argument against the idea that it is necessary to discard your values in order to work for an organization. Second, while it is true that the best work by these intellectuals usually appeared in other places, I repeatedly show how that work was crucially and necessarily tied to their journalism in the Luce magazines. The examples Haberski cites, Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Hersey’s Hiroshima, Whyte’s Organization Man, all owe their existence to each author’s journalism for Time and Fortune. Writing as journalists for Luce was crucial to each writer, selecting their topic, informing their technique, and frequently providing a practice of conventional journalism to argue against.

At the risk of sounding churlish, one note in Harberski’s review caught me off guard. He complains that Luce “plays a minor” role in the book, noting that he does not even appear in the index. Haberski is right. Luce does not appear in the index, but the reason is quite the opposite of what Haberski suggests. The publisher’s index guidelines suggest not constructing index entries for the main subjects of a book, and given that Luce’s name appears on 207 pages of the book (ah, the fun of searchable pdf.’s), we decided to leave him out. The decision seemed reasonable at the time; now, given Haberski’s reading, not so much.

More seriously, though, Haberski is half right to note that Luce’s actual role in the book is somewhat minor, especially (and unsurprisingly) compared with Alan Brinkley’s recent biography. Luce figures quite heavily in the early portion of Intellectuals Incorporated (much of the second chapter, on the creation of Time and Fortune, is devoted to him). But he does retreat to a less central role once his magazines are established, and this is purposeful. It is my contention that Luce was less important to the content of his magazine’s than previous accounts suggest.

Careful readers of Brinkley’s biography might have noted a paradox. Like most previous scholars, Brinkley treats Time, Fortune, and Life magazines as reflecting Luce’s view of the world. The magazines, he asserts, were an accurate representation of Luce’s beliefs. At the same time, Brinkley acknowledges the many, many times Luce complained that his editors and writers ignored his wishes, publishing views they knew he opposed. Brinkley never reconciles the paradox, but it disappears if we take seriously the efforts of the editors and writers whom were actually publishing the magazines on a weekly and monthly basis. Much of the time Luce was absent from the daily fights over the contents of his magazines, and even when he was present he was only one voice, and not always the most important voice, in the discussion. Recognizing this is important, I believe, in better understanding the possibilities for individual intervention, even within the heart of the so-called culture industries.

At the heart of the neo-liberalism discussion, and at times, seemingly, at the heart of our entire contemporary culture, lies the frustration that the logic of free market economics seems so all encompassing, so unassailable. And at the same time, corporate power seems so pervasive, often cloaked by comforting images of individual entrepreneurs and efficient profit maximizers. Haberski sees something “brilliant and tragic” in my story “because one can see the last vestiges of a community willing to reflect on itself in light of imperatives and values larger than its own self-interest.” I agree, though I am unconvinced it must be that way, unconvinced that the sorts of arguments contesting self-interest offered by the intellectuals I write about – arguments based on notions of service, of responsibility, of factual and moral inquiry, of representation – cannot still find purchase in our world.

Haberski leads his review with Archibald MacLeish. Writing in “The Irresponsibles,” MacLeish criticizes those writers who seek to wall themselves off from the larger world, either through devotion to the private claims of art or the parochial demands of scholarship. He offers an unfashionable bold assertion of the role of the poet and the power of ideas: “poetry alone imagines, and imagining creates, the world than men wish to live in and make true.” We don’t have to subscribe to MacLeish’s idealism to recognize the power in that conviction. Or to seek to recover its power.

Vanderlan Responds to Haberski

I want to thank Ray Haberski for his thoughtful and positive review of Intellectuals Incorporated. Haberski judges the book important, he captures the general thrust of the argument, and he effectively chooses some of the more significant figures – MacLeish, Macdonald, and Agee – to illustrate his points. Most gratifying to me, Haberski finds the portrayals of the individual writers to be compellingly complicated. I hoped to offer a book that advanced a provocative argument about the place of intellectuals in mid-century America while still retaining a sense of the messy peculiarities of each writer’s life. It is encouraging to see Haberski respond to both aspirations.

Haberski rightfully describes my book as a “portrait of the abdication of intellectuals to the ethos of the market.” Ironically, I would add, the abdication took place not so much on the part of the writers who struggled to work for Luce and his magazines – writers such as MacLeish, Agee, Whyte and others – but instead by those who insisted that intellectuals must not work for mass culture magazines. Writers such as Irving Howe, C. Wright Mills, and Dwight Macdonald spent the post war years insisting that mass culture was hostile to intellectual life. As Howe put it in 1952, when intellectuals “became absorbed into” organizations such as Time Inc. “they not only lose their traditional rebelliousness but to one extent or another they cease to function as intellectuals.” This is a familiar argument, and Haberski is right to suggest that combatting that notion lies at the heart of my motivation in writing the book. Too often, as I try to demonstrate, such criticism left intellectuals cut off from the main currents of society.

Haberski understands this. At other times, however, Haberski comes close to echoing the assumptions I try to call into question. Noting the many works produced by Time Inc. intellectuals for other publications, Haberski concludes “it was their moonlighting that gave them integrity.” I disagree, in two ways. First, I seek to show that is was possible – difficult, but possible – to write with integrity for Time and Fortune. My book is an argument against the idea that it is necessary to discard your values in order to work for an organization. Second, while it is true that the best work by these intellectuals usually appeared in other places, I repeatedly show how that work was crucially and necessarily tied to their journalism in the Luce magazines. The examples Haberski cites, Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Hersey’s Hiroshima, Whyte’s Organization Man, all owe their existence to each author’s journalism for Time and Fortune. Writing as journalists for Luce was crucial to each writer, selecting their topic, informing their technique, and frequently providing a practice of conventional journalism to argue against.

At the risk of sounding churlish, one note in Harberski’s review caught me off guard. He complains that Luce “plays a minor” role in the book, noting that he does not even appear in the index. Haberski is right. Luce does not appear in the index, but the reason is quite the opposite of what Haberski suggests. The publisher’s index guidelines suggest not constructing index entries for the main subjects of a book, and given that Luce’s name appears on 207 pages of the book (ah, the fun of searchable pdf.’s), we decided to leave him out. The decision seemed reasonable at the time; now, given Haberski’s reading, not so much.

More seriously, though, Haberski is half right to note that Luce’s actual role in the book is somewhat minor, especially (and unsurprisingly) compared with Alan Brinkley’s recent biography. Luce figures quite heavily in the early portion of Intellectuals Incorporated (much of the second chapter, on the creation of Time and Fortune, is devoted to him). But he does retreat to a less central role once his magazines are established, and this is purposeful. It is my contention that Luce was less important to the content of his magazine’s than previous accounts suggest.

Careful readers of Brinkley’s biography might have noted a paradox. Like most previous scholars, Brinkley treats Time, Fortune, and Life magazines as reflecting Luce’s view of the world. The magazines, he asserts, were an accurate representation of Luce’s beliefs. At the same time, Brinkley acknowledges the many, many times Luce complained that his editors and writers ignored his wishes, publishing views they knew he opposed. Brinkley never reconciles the paradox, but it disappears if we take seriously the efforts of the editors and writers whom were actually publishing the magazines on a weekly and monthly basis. Much of the time Luce was absent from the daily fights over the contents of his magazines, and even when he was present he was only one voice, and not always the most important voice, in the discussion. Recognizing this is important, I believe, in better understanding the possibilities for individual intervention, even within the heart of the so-called culture industries.

At the heart of the neo-liberalism discussion, and at times, seemingly, at the heart of our entire contemporary culture, lies the frustration that the logic of free market economics seems so all encompassing, so unassailable. And at the same time, corporate power seems so pervasive, often cloaked by comforting images of individual entrepreneurs and efficient profit maximizers. Haberski sees something “brilliant and tragic” in my story “because one can see the last vestiges of a community willing to reflect on itself in light of imperatives and values larger than its own self-interest.” I agree, though I am unconvinced it must be that way, unconvinced that the sorts of arguments contesting self-interest offered by the intellectuals I write about – arguments based on notions of service, of responsibility, of factual and moral inquiry, of representation – cannot still find purchase in our world.

Haberski leads his review with Archibald MacLeish. Writing in “The Irresponsibles,” MacLeish criticizes those writers who seek to wall themselves off from the larger world, either through devotion to the private claims of art or the parochial demands of scholarship. He offers an unfashionable bold assertion of the role of the poet and the power of ideas: “poetry alone imagines, and imagining creates, the world than men wish to live in and make true.” We don’t have to subscribe to MacLeish’s idealism to recognize the power in that conviction. Or to seek to recover its power.