Chapter 1: Post-War Intellectual History
Some of the most important works of social criticism since WWII appeared in the ‘50s. All concerned themselves with the most critical issue of the day: the relation between the individual and society. In 1951, Hannah Arendt published one of the most perceptive works of the 20th century on this subject: The Origins of Totalitarianism. The title was somewhat misleading, as Arendt argued that totalitarianism was an entirely new phenomenon. One novel element of totalitarianism, for Arendt, was the deployment of terror not only as a means of obtaining power but also as a method of governance. Arendt observed the effort of totalitarian regimes to destroy intermediary institutions like churches, political parties, and labor unions in their attempt to centralize power. Without such institutions to provide any institutional buffer between the individual and the state, the totalitarian state submerged the individual into the mass. “[T]yranny,” Arendt contended, “can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people.”1 However, Arendt “emphasized repeatedly” that totalitarianism was not just any kind of tyranny. For her, it was a completely novel form of government, one more extreme and all-encompassing than ever before. In addition to its deployment of terror as a means of governance, Arendt observed that the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, despite their ideological differences, aimed to obliterate any intermediary institutions between the state and the individual. Totalitarian governments often accomplished this by supplanting such cultural and social institutions with groups under the control and leadership of the totalitarian party. As she put it, “the means of total domination are not only more drastic but that totalitarianism differs essentially from other forms of political oppression known to us such as despotism, tyranny and dictatorship. Wherever it rose to power, it developed entirely new political institutions and destroyed all social, legal and political traditions of the country.”2 Thus, by destroying all intermediary institutions and supplanting them with its own, the totalitarian state seeped into and exercised control in nearly every aspect of society and culture, destroying both. The state became all-encompassing, hence totalitarian. Though Arendt’s book mostly discussed Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, she still cautioned against the prospect of conformity leading to totalitarianism in the U.S. Alarmed by the Red Scare, Arendt lamented “we have reached the point where even free democracies, as, for instance, the United States, were seriously considering depriving native Americans who are Communists of their citizenship.”3
Several other social theorists criticized the conformity of American society in the ‘50s. Riesman published The Lonely Crowd in 1950, and many other intellectuals echoed Reisman’s ideas, including C. Wright Mills. A professor of sociology at Columbia, Mills went on to become the intellectual grandfather of the “new left,” a term he helped popularize.4 One year after the publication of Reisman’s book, Mills published White Collar. In it, he observed that white collar workers resembled a new Marxian “lumpenproletariat”: an underclass lacking class-consciousness. For Mills, white collar work resembled the impersonal, repetitious, and meaningless tasks performed by 19th century industrial workers. Mills called this new class “the lumpen-bourgeoisie.”5 Like the 19th century factory laborer, white collar workers had little ability to defend their political and economic interests. Also like the factory worker, white collar workers had little control over their work. Furthermore, Mills argued that, in some ways, white collar workers were worse off than 19th century industrial workers. Though he acknowledged that factory workers were subject to much more physical danger, Mills contended that white collar workers sold not only their time and energy, they also sold their personalities. As he put it, “[w]orking for wages with another’s industrial property involves a sacrifice of time, power, and energy to the employer; working as a salaried employee often involves in addition the sacrifice of one’s self to a multitude of ‘consumers’ or clients or managers.”6 This observation closely resembled Riesman’s idea of other-directed behavior. The white collar worker derived his sense of identity from external rather than internal sources and adjusted his or her personality to accommodate pressures from society and the marketplace. Thus, in this “personality market,” as Mills termed it, internal moral values no longer motivated acts of kindness and respect. Rather, external factors increasingly dictated such behavior. Genuine acts of goodwill gradually gave way to insincere niceties driven by the desire to get along with the group and, ultimately, succeed. In this work-place culture, Mills lamented, “[k]indness and friendliness become aspects of personalized service or of public relations of big firms, rationalized to further the sale of something. With anonymous insincerity the Successful Person thus makes an instrument of his own appearance and personality.”7 Indeed, success in this white collar world Mills described had much to do with conformity.
Similarly to Mills and Riesman, William Whyte observed conformist trends in American society. In The Organization Man (1956), Whyte observed the Protestant ethic of hard work, responsibility, and delayed gratification giving way to a social ethic of the organization. Individuals, not just white collar workers, found meaning only as a unit of society and convinced themselves that organizations made better decisions than individuals. Thus, the only way to advance in society was through an organization, not personal initiative.8
One of the most striking examples of conformity in popular culture that Whyte described was Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny (1951), “the biggest-selling novel of the post-war period.”9 The book’s central character was Lieutenant Stephen Maryk, the executive officer of the minesweeper U.S.S. Caine. Maryk represented an organization man. He liked the system, and even resisted suggestions from fellow sailors of Commander Queeg’s psychopathy. But Maryk became disillusioned at the climax of the novel when the ship encountered a typhoon, which sank three other battleships. Instead of turning into the wind, Queeg tried to run the ship away from the storm, a decision that would have ensured a watery grave. As Maryk begged Queeg to turn into the storm, Queeg’s behavior devolved into a state of fear and paralysis. Using Article 184 of the Navy Regulations, Maryk temporarily relieved Queeg of command, turned the ship around, and steered into the wind and out of the storm to safety. But in Wouk’s novel, Maryk was no hero. Since Maryk relieved a superior officer during wartime, the military tribunal charged Maryk with mutiny and had him court-martialed. Barney Greenwald, though strongly opposed to Maryk’s actions, defended Maryk in court and won with a masterful cross-examination exposing Queeg as an incompetent coward. At the party celebrating the acquittal, Greenwald expressed his disapproval of the celebrations, because, he said, men like Queeg represented a system that defeated the Nazis who boiled Greenwald's Jewish grandmother into a bar of soap. In disgust, he threw his glass of champagne at one of the Lieutenants.10 Later, one of the junior officers reflected on this episode in a letter, “I see that we were in the wrong.”11
In his analysis of these scenes, Whyte could not have put his critique of Wouk any better: “Here, certainly, is an astounding denial of individual responsibility. …We are asked to accept the implied moral that it would have been better to let the ship and several hundred men perish rather than question authority–which does seem a hell of a way to keep a ship going. …the lesson is plain. It is not for the individual to question the system.” Perhaps even more astonishing, in addition to its preeminence in popular fiction sales, was the “overwhelmingly favorable” critical reception of the book. Thus, to Whyte’s horror, the deference to conformity in Wouk’s novel not only appealed to ordinary people, but educated literary critics as well. “The ‘smart’ people who question things, who upset people–they are the wrong ones.” Thus, for Whyte, “The Caine Mutiny rationalized the impulse to belong and to accept what is as what should be.” This conformity, he exclaimed, had the potential to descend into authoritarianism: “If we can be shown there is virtue in following a Queeg, how much more reason to welcome the less onerous sanctions of ordinary authority!”12
Questions of conformity, authoritarianism, and the relationship between the individual and society also spilled onto the pages of significant theological theological works. One of these was The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (1944), by Rienhold Niebuhr. In a 2011 edition of this book, Gary Dorrien of Union Theological Seminary identified Niebuhr as “the leading American Christian social ethicist of the twentieth century.”13 Similarly to Arendt, Niebuhr saw Stalin and Hitler as two manifestations of totalitarianism. From Niebuhr’s theological perspective, both leaders were guilty of the same “original sin” of Adam and Eve: intellectual pride. In The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, Niehbur argued that “children of light,” radical communists motivated by utopian visions, and “children of darkness,” fascists driven by the will to power, both placed themselves above others and were willing to destroy anything or anyone in their way. Niebuhr advocated neo-orthodoxy, or a return to an emphasis on original sin: the idea that humans were inherently sinful, and thus their institutions were inherently imperfect. Therefore, neo-orthodox theologians promoted humility on the individual level. In a broader sense, this sensibility contributed to a general distrust of large institutions and bureaucracies–namely, the government.
In a similar vein of distrust for institutions, Friedrich Hayek, in The Road to Serfdom (1944), denounced any government intervention in the economy. Hayek argued that mixed economies tended toward totalitarian control because the government, with its advantage of not having to borrow money, would inevitably squeeze out private initiative. Furthermore, Hayek argued that political freedoms could not exist without economic freedom. Thus, the U.S. Constitution, with its emphasis on political rights and omission of economic rights, had its priorities backwards. Though Hayek did not put it in such stark terms, he maintained that if the government controls the individual’s money, it also controls the individual. His analysis indicated to many Americans that they were not only on the “road to serfdom” but on the highway to totalitarianism as well. Indeed, for Hayek, the former was one stop on the same road to the latter.14
Such intellectual preoccupations inevitably spilled over into concern about education, and all of the aforementioned post-war intellectuals expressed their opinions about American schools. Indeed, whenever they did so, it was frequently in the context of conformity and totalitarianism. In keeping with his fears that socialism tended toward authoritarianism, Hayek identified socialists as the initial promulgators of conformist indoctrination through education. For Hayek, successful centralized planning not only preferred conformity and uniformity of worldview among its citizens, it required it. “It is because successful planning requires the creation of a common view on the essential values that the restriction of our freedom with regard to material things touches so directly on our spiritual freedom. Socialists, the cultivated parents of the barbarous offspring they have produced, traditionally hope to solve this problem by education.” Hayek doubted education could effectively create complete conformity of moral and ethical values, but he lamented that this did not deter socialists from trying. As he put it, “[i]t is not rational conviction but the acceptance of a creed which is required to justify a particular plan. And, indeed, socialists everywhere were the first to recognize that the task they had set themselves required the general acceptance of a common Weltanschauung, of a definite set of values.” According to Hayek, it was out of such efforts to effect a mass movement guided by a singular Weltanshauung, or world-view, “that the socialists first created most of the instruments of indoctrination of which Nazis and Fascists have made such effective use.”15
In Germany and Italy the Nazis and Fascists did, indeed, not have much to invent. The usages of the new political movements which pervaded all aspects of life had in both countries already been introduced by the socialists. The idea of a political party which embraces all activities of the individual from the cradle to the grave, which claims to guide his views on everything, and which delights in making all problems questions of party Weltanschauung, was first put into practice by the socialists.16
Thus, for Hayek, socialism, by way of education, initiated an important mechanism by which totalitarian regimes pervaded their ideologies into all segments of society. Naturally, members of the emerging conservative movement found plenty of intellectual ammunition in Hayek’s arguments to attack socialist ideas and policies. But Hayek was not alone in his observation of totalitarianism’s socialist antecedents.
Arendt identified the same phenomenon. She also identified socialists as the progenitors of the first antisemitic parties. “Small as these first antisemitic parties were, they at once distinguished themselves from all other parties. They made the original claim that they were not a party among parties but a party ‘above all parties.’”17 Such a bold assumption not only implied the party above all other parties, but, ultimately, the party over the state itself. According to Arendt, however, “[t]he claim of a party to be beyond all parties had other, more significant, implications than antisemitism.” The combination of rising socialist sentiments in the late-19th century with overt antisemitism united the materialist plights of the common masses with underlying prejudices against Jews. This made for an ugly, and ultimately deadly, concoction. In such a political climate, the socialists “could pretend to fight the Jews exactly as the workers were fighting the bourgeoisie.” For Arendt, their political advantage lay in appealing to the stereotype of the Jews as “the secret power behind governments.” Thus, socialists, in addition to attacking class differentiation, “could openly attack the state itself.”18
(to be continued)
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1951), 128.
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 460.
C. Wright Mills, “Letter to the New Left,” New Left Review, 1960.
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 280. See also Hannah Arendt, “The Threat of Conformism,” Commonweal, November 24, 1954.
C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (Pantionos Classics, 2020, orig. pub., 1951), 34.
C. Wright Mills, White Collar, 143.
Mills, White Collar, 143.
William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002, orig. pub. 1956).
Whyte, The Organization Man, 243.
Whyte, The Organization Man, 245.
Whyte, The Organization Man, 245.
Whyte, The Organization Man, 246.
Gary Dorrien, introduction in Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011, orig. pub., 1944), ix.
Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007, orig. pub., 1944).
Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007, orig. pub., 1944), 142.
Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, 142.
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 38.
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 39. One example Arendt gave to illustrate this trend was the political success of Georg Ritter von Shoenerer: “Schoenerer's anti- semitism, at first almost exclusively directed against the Rothschilds, won him the sympathies of the labor movement, which regarded him as a true radical gone astray. His main advantage was that he could base his anti- semitic propaganda on demonstrable facts: as a member of the Austrian Reichsrat he had fought for nationalization of the Austrian railroads, the major part of which had been in the hands of the Rothschilds since 1836 due to a state license which expired in 1886. Schoenerer succeeded in gather-ing 40,000 signatures against its renewal, and in placing the Jewish question in the limelight of public interest. The close connection between the Rothschilds and the financial interests of the monarchy became very obvious when the government tried to extend the license under conditions which were patently to the disadvantage of the state as well as the public. Schoenerer's agitation in this matter became the actual beginning of an articulate antisemitic movement in Austria.” Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 43.