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 by a social system shot through with political and religious, economic, and militaristic exploitation. What makes the city, London, so fearful a place is that it reveals the general exploitation (“the mind-forg’d manacles”) in such a diversity and profusion of forms: a different mark on every man. But Blake never rejects urban life in itself; it is only incidental to his picture of the modern world, a world essentially defined by repression and exploitation. The city of today is a vast exhibition hall for the “arts of death”; yet its dark Satanic mills will provide the foundation for that new Jerusalem, to be built with all the “arts of life,” in which Blake’s visions and prophecies of liberation will be fulfilled.
If we examine Wordsworth’s sense of alienation, as it is explicated by Williams from Book Seven of The Prelude, we will see how radically opposed to Blake’s his perceptions are. Wordsworth is undertaking here to describe London—for him, the epitome of the modern world—and his first, “alienated” reaction to it. We will notice, however, that for all Wordsworth finds to deplore in the city, his vision is marked by none of the poverty, squalor, privation, and slavery that Blake was so plagued by. (Granted, there is some vague generality about the city’s “low pursuits”; and the brief entrance of a beggar, who, however, is explicitly labeled as a symbol for Man and the Universe.) Not that Wordsworth is being callous: His vision of London is not really marked by anything else either. What is most striking about his response to the city—in contrast to his perennial response to the country, to nature—is its lack of concreteness. The doors of his perception are closed tight to what is actually going on in this place at this moment in historic time. The alibi he offers—that in fact nothing is going on around him, that here there are only “trivial objects, melted and reduced / To one identity”—only gives away the narrowness of his perception, the breakdown of his imagination. That he fails so dismally to grasp and evoke the contents of life in one particular city can be traced, I think, to his overriding and bitterly hostile preoccupation with the general form of urban life as such.
What is it about this urban life that upsets him so? The city is a mad rush, which, he feels, lays the “whole creative powers of man asleep.” It is a wild conglomeration of “self-destroying, transitory things” from which he seeks refuge in the “composure and ennobling Harmony,” which the vision of rural nature can provide. As a primary symbol for citification and its discontents, Wordsworth uses the Fair of St. Bartholomew, which he describes ironically:
The Wax-work, Clock-work, all the marvelous craft
Of modern Merlins, Wild Beasts, Puppet-shows,
All out-o’-the-way,