Fantasies of the New Class by Schryer Stephen;

Author:Schryer, Stephen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004020, Literary Criticism/American/General, SOC000000, Social Science/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-02-21T16:00:00+00:00

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EXPERTS WITHOUT INSTITUTIONS

NEW LEFT PROFESSIONALISM IN MARGE PIERCY AND URSULA K. LE GUIN

For Alvin Gouldner, one of the clearest examples of the new class’s growing restiveness was the dramatic emergence of the New Left in the 1960s. This movement, he noted, attracted students from disciplines most closely associated with the culture of critical discourse: the humanities, the liberal arts, and the social and theoretical sciences. It also attracted activists who grew up within professional households; their parents “commonly taught that authority was not right just because it was authority, that people had to be given reasons for their actions and policies.”1 This ingrained sense of professional autonomy, in Gouldner’s account, ran up against the bureaucratic structure of the postwar university and other U.S. institutions. The New Left was thus a movement of young professionals who hoped to disseminate their version of the culture of critical discourse throughout the welfare state. Tom Hayden described the New Left’s class consciousness as follows: “Most of the active student radicals today come from middle to upper-middle class professional homes. They were born with status and affluence as facts of life, not goals to be striven for. In their upbringing, their parents stressed the right of children to question and make judgments, producing perhaps the first generation of young people both affluent and independent of mind. And then these students so often encountered social institutions that denied them their independence and betrayed the democratic ideals they were taught.”2 Amplifying the new-class fantasies of the postwar era, the New Left envisaged themselves as the saving remnant of the educated middle class, attuned to anti-instrumental values in an era dominated by technical rationality.

However, this new-class politics pulled the New Left in at least two different directions. As Gouldner and Hayden’s comments suggest, the student movement was in part an expression of the educated middle class’s newfound sense of independence, which chafed at any restrictions placed on professional autonomy. In order to become “part of the system,” Mario Savio complained in 1964, university students “must suppress the most creative impulses that they have” and conform to a “depersonalized, unresponsive bureaucracy.”3 As several intellectual historians have suggested, this individualist tendency was not really at odds with the changing dynamics of postindustrial society, which tended to pit the entrepreneurial creativity of individual knowledge workers against the rigidity of established institutions. George Vickers argues that the New Left objectively represented “a force for the rationalization of social relationships and cultural values within capitalist economic organization, rather than a force for the abolishment of that economic form.”4 Sean Mc-Cann and Michael Szalay similarly argue that the student radicals were unknowing harbingers of expert professionalism—the newer model of professionalism that conceived of experts as independent entrepreneurs who sell their knowledge and abilities to the highest bidder. They point out that, as Hayden and other activists recognized, “[A] little noticed but important battle was shaping up between young professionals and the very organizational structures that had shielded their disciplines but that increasingly seemed hidebound and outmoded.

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