Reappraisals (3 page)

The twentieth-century welfare state is conventionally dismissed today as European and “socialist”—usually in formulations like this: “I believe history will record that it was Chinese capitalism that put an end to European socialism.”
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European it may be (if we allow that Canada, New Zealand, and—in respect of social security and national health for the aged—the USA are all for this purpose “European”); but “socialist”? The epithet reveals once again a curious unfamiliarity with the recent past. Outside of Scandinavia—in Austria, Germany, France, Italy, Holland, and elsewhere—it was not socialists but
Christian Democrats
who played the greatest part in installing and administering the core institutions of the activist welfare state. Even in Britain, where the post-World War II Labour government of Clement Attlee indeed inaugurated the welfare state as we knew it, it was the wartime government of Winston Churchill that commissioned and approved the Report by William Beveridge (himself a Liberal) that established the principles of public welfare provision: principles—and practices—that were reaffirmed and underwritten by every Conservative government that followed until 1979.

The welfare state, in short, was born of a cross-party twentieth-century consensus. It was implemented, in most cases, by liberals or conservatives who had entered public life well before 1914 and for whom the public provision of universal medical services, old age pensions, unemployment and sickness insurance, free education, subsidized public transport, and the other prerequisites of a stable civil order represented not the first stage of twentieth-century socialism but the culmination of late-nineteenth-century reformist liberalism. A similar perspective informed the thinking of many New Dealers in the United States.

Moreover, and here the memory of war played once again an important role, the twentieth-century “socialist” welfare states were constructed not as an advance guard of egalitarian revolution but to provide a barrier against the return of the past: against economic depression and its polarizing, violent political outcome in the desperate politics of Fascism and Communism alike. The welfare states were thus
prophylactic
states. They were designed quite consciously to meet the widespread yearning for security and stability that John Maynard Keynes and others foresaw long before the end of World War II, and they succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. Thanks to half a century of prosperity and safety, we in the West have forgotten the political and social traumas of mass insecurity. And thus we have forgotten why we have inherited those welfare states and what brought them about.

The paradox, of course, is that the very success of the mixed-economy welfare states, in providing the social stability and ideological demobilization which made possible the prosperity of the past half century, has led a younger political generation to take that same stability and ideological quiescence for granted and demand the elimination of the “impediment” of the taxing, regulating, and generally interfering state. Whether the economic case for this is as secure as it now appears—whether regulation and social provision were truly an impediment to “growth” and “efficiency” and not perhaps their facilitating condition—is debatable. But what is striking is how far we have lost the capacity even to conceive of public policy beyond a narrowly construed economism. We have forgotten how to think politically.

This, too, is one of the paradoxical legacies of the twentieth century. The exhaustion of political energies in the orgy of violence and repression from 1914 through 1945 and beyond has deprived us of much of the political inheritance of the past two hundred years. “Left” and “Right”— terminology inherited from the French Revolution—are not quite without meaning today, but they no longer describe (as they still did within recent memory) the political allegiances of most citizens in democratic societies. We are skeptical, if not actively suspicious, of all-embracing political goals: The grand narratives of Nation and History and Progress that characterized the political families of the twentieth century seem discredited beyond recall. And so we describe our collective purposes in exclusively economic terms—prosperity, growth, GDP, efficiency, output, interest rates, and stock market performances—as though these were not just means to some collectively sought social or political ends but were necessary and sufficient ends in themselves.

In an unpolitical age, there is much to be said for politicians thinking and talking economically: This is, after all, how most people today conceive of their own life chances and interests, and any project of public policy that ignored this truth would not get very far. But that is only how things are
now
. They have not always looked this way, and we have no good reason for supposing that they will look this way in the future. It is not only nature that abhors a vacuum: Democracies in which there are no significant political choices to be made, where economic policy is all that really matters—and where economic policy is now largely determined by nonpolitical actors (central banks, international agencies, or transnational corporations)—must either cease to be functioning democracies or accommodate once again the politics of frustration, of populist resentment. Post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe offers one illustration of how this can happen; the political trajectory of comparably fragile democracies elsewhere, from South Asia to Latin America, provides another. Outside of North America and Western Europe, it would seem, the twentieth century is with us still.

OF ALL THE TRANSFORMATIONS of the past three decades, the disappearance of “intellectuals” is perhaps the most symptomatic. The twentieth century was the century of the intellectual: The very term first came into use (pejoratively) at the turn of the century and from the outset it described men and women in the world of learning, literature, and the arts who applied themselves to debating and influencing public opinion and policy. The intellectual was by definition committed—“engaged”: usually to an ideal, a dogma, a project. The first “intellectuals” were the writers who defended Captain Alfred Dreyfus against the accusation of treason, invoking on his behalf the primacy of universal abstractions: “truth,” “justice,” and “rights.” Their counterparts, the “anti-Dreyfusards” (also intellectuals, though they abhorred the term), invoked abstractions of their own, though less universal in nature: “honor,” “nation,” “
patrie
,” “France.”

So long as public policy debate was framed in such all-embracing generalities, whether ethical or political, intellectuals shaped—and in some countries dominated—public discourse. In states where public opposition and criticism was (is) repressed, individual intellectuals assumed de facto the role of spokesmen for the public interest and for the people, against authority and the state. But even in open societies the twentieth-century intellectual acquired a certain public status, benefiting not only from the right of free expression but also from the near-universal literacy of the advanced societies, which assured him or her an audience.

It is easy in retrospect to dismiss the engaged intellectuals of the last century. The propensity for self-aggrandizement, preening contentedly in the admiring mirror of an audience of like-minded fellow thinkers, was easy to indulge. Because intellectuals were in so many cases politically “engaged” at a time when political engagement took one to extremes, and because their engagement typically took the form of the written word, many have left a record of pronouncements and affiliations that have not worn well. Some served as spokesmen for power or for a constituency, trimming their beliefs and pronouncements to circumstance and interest: what Edward Said once called “the fawning elasticity with regard to one’s own side” has indeed “disfigured the history of intellectuals.”

Moreover, as Raymond Aron once remarked apropos his French contemporaries, intellectuals seemed all too often to make a point of
not
knowing what they were talking about, especially in technical fields such as economics or military affairs. And for all their talk of “responsibility,” a disconcerting number of prominent intellectuals on Right and Left alike proved strikingly irresponsible in their insouciant propensity for encouraging violence to others at a safe distance from themselves. “Mistaken ideas always end in bloodshed,” Camus wrote, “but in every case it is someone else’s blood. That is why some of our thinkers feel free to say just about anything.”

All true. And yet: The intellectual—free-thinking or politically committed, detached or engaged—was also a defining glory of the twentieth century. A mere listing of the most interesting political writers, social commentators, or public moralists of the age, from Émile Zola to Václav Havel, from Karl Kraus to Margarete Buber-Neumann, from Alva Myrdal to Sidney Hook, would fill this introduction and more. We have all but forgotten not only
who
these people were but just how large was their audience and how widespread their influence. And to the extent that we do have a shared recollection of intellectuals, it is all too often reduced to the stereotype of a rather narrow band of left-leaning Western “progressives” who dominated their own stage from the 1950s through the 1980s: Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Günter Grass, Susan Sontag.

The real intellectual action, however, was elsewhere. In the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, opposition to Communist repression was for many years confined to a handful of courageous individuals “writing for the desk drawer.” In interwar Europe both Fascism and “anti-Fascism” could draw on a talented pool of literary advocates and spokespersons: We may not be altogether comfortable acknowledging the number and quality of nationalist and Fascist intellectuals in those years, but at least until 1941 the influence of writers like Ernst Jünger in Germany, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle and Louis-Ferdinand Céline in France, Mircea Eliade in Romania, or Henri de Man in Belgium was probably greater than that of their left-leaning contemporaries whom we more readily celebrate today: André Malraux, John Dewey, or even George Orwell.

But above all, the twentieth century saw the emergence of a new intellectual type: the rootless “voyager in the century.” Typically such persons had passed from political or ideological commitment in the wake of the Russian Revolution into a world-weary skepticism: compatible with a sort of disabused, pessimistic liberalism but at a tangent to national or ideological allegiances. Many of these representative twentieth-century intellectuals were Jewish (though few remained practicing Jews and fewer still became active Zionists), overwhelmingly from the Jewish communities of Eastern and Central Europe: “chance survivors of a deluge” in Hannah Arendt’s words. Many, too, came from cities and provinces that for all their cultural cosmopolitanism, were geographically peripheral: Königsberg, Cernovitz, Vilna, Sarajevo, Alexandria, Calcutta, or Algiers. Most were exiled in one way or another and would have shared, on their own terms, Edward Said’s bewilderment at the appeal of patriotism: “I still have not been able to understand what it means to love a country.”

Taken all in all, these men and women constituted a twentieth-century “Republic of Letters”: a virtual community of conversation and argument whose influence reflected and illuminated the tragic choices of the age. Some of them are represented in the essays in this book. Of these, Arendt and Albert Camus may be the only names still familiar to a broad audience. Primo Levi is of course widely read today, but not, perhaps, in ways he might have wished. Manès Sperber is sadly forgotten, though his distinctively Jewish trajectory is perhaps the most emblematic of them all. Arthur Koestler, whose life, allegiances, and writings established him for many decades as the intellectual archetype of the age, is no longer a household name. There was a time when every college student had read—or wanted to read—
Darkness at Noon
. Today, Koestler’s best-selling novel of the Moscow show trials is an acquired, minority taste.

If young readers find Koestler’s themes alien and his concerns exotic, this is because we have lost touch not only with the great intellectuals of the past century but also with the ideas and ideals that moved them. Outside North Korea, no one under the age of forty today has an adult memory of life in a Communist society.
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It is now so long since a self-confident “Marxism” was the conventional ideological reference point of the intellectual Left that it is quite difficult to convey to a younger generation what it stood for and why it aroused such passionate sentiments for and against. There is much to be said for consigning defunct dogmas to the dustbin of history, particularly when they have been responsible for so much suffering. But we pay a price: The allegiances of the past— and thus the past itself—become utterly incomprehensible.

If we are to understand the world whence we have just emerged, we need to remind ourselves of the power of ideas. And we need to recall the remarkable grip exercised by the Marxist idea in particular upon the imagination of the twentieth century. Many of the most interesting minds of the age were drawn to it, if only for a while: on its own account or because the collapse of liberalism and the challenge of Fascism offered no apparent alternative. Many others, some of whom were never in the least tempted by the mirage of Revolution, nevertheless devoted much of their lives to engaging and combating Marxism. They took its challenge very seriously indeed and often understood it better than its acolytes.

The Jewish intellectuals of interwar and postwar Central Europe were especially drawn to Marxism: in part by the Promethean ambition of the project, but also thanks to the complete collapse of their world, the impossibility of returning to the past or continuing in the old ways, the seeming inevitability of building an utterly different, new world. “Žydokommuna” (“Judeo-Communism”) may be an anti-Semitic term of abuse in Polish nationalist circles, but for a few crucial years it also described a reality. The remarkable Jewish contribution to the history of modern Eastern Europe cannot be disentangled from the unique attraction to Central European Jewish intellectuals of the Marxist project. In retrospect, of course, the intellectual and personal enthusiasms and engagements of the age seem tragically out of proportion to the gray, grim outcome. But that is not how things seemed at the time.