The New York Intellectuals (10th Anniversary Edition) by Alan M Wald

Author:Alan M Wald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2017-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

MEYER SCHAPIRO: SOCIALIST INTERNATIONALIST

Of the several articles in the Partisan Review that addressed the question of the war, the most sensational was the debate between Sidney Hook and Meyer Schapiro that was published in 1943. The exchange grew out of a series of articles that Hook had begun on “The New Failure of Nerve.” In the first article, Hook seemed to be mainly defending science and reason against the growth of religious and nonrational ideas in the work of Reinhold Niebuhr in the United States and several of his counterparts in Europe.57 But in a second essay, “The Failure of the Left,” Hook declared that scientific thinking could only be demonstrated by giving support to U.S. government policy in World War II; he merged left critics of the war and revolutionary internationalists with the antirationalists, arguing that they shared a common “utopianism.”

Hook’s article was more than simply a defense of a prowar position, which was in itself a bit surprising but hardly implausible in the face of the Nazi threat. It also testified to his reconciliation with forces he had once so vigorously urged others to oppose, and it represented a repudiation of the very values by which he had lived his own life since World War I. Hook’s thesis was that the appearance of a current of thought among liberal intellectuals who were struggling “to break out of our time of troubles by a faith that would serve sinners, but also lead to a better social order” had its parallel in the radical left: “For in its own way the political left shows just as definite a failure of nerve as the more numerous and conservative groups to which it aspires to give leadership. In virtue of its pretentious claims, its failure is even less excusable.”

Hook’s attack was undoubtedly directed against his one-time allies, the Trotskyists of both the SWP and the WP as well as against a few unaffiliated intellectuals such as James T. Farrell. The Communist Party was dismissed as irrelevant to the discussion because it was “little more than the American section of the G.P.U.” Hook by now was regularly characterizing everyone on the left in the same kind of vulgar, dehumanizing language with which he himself had been traduced in the early 1930s by such Communist functionaries as Earl Browder and V. J. Jerome. The Trotskyists—Hook said he would not specifically name the groups because one (the SWP) was “currently being subject to unjust and foolish prosecution by the government”—should be characterized as “Platonic Revolutionists”: “They worship a system of Ideas originally projected as instruments of social action. Historical experience, having long since been impolite enough to reveal the inadequacy of these Ideas, is no longer regarded as capable of exercising a veto power over them. And so they have become transformed into shining fetishes valid in their own right.” In Hook’s view the Trotskyists’ position on the war was tantamount to “political insanity”: the SWP’s recently modified strategy of fighting for socialism and against

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.