The Party of Eros: Radical Social Thought and the Realm of Freedom

By Emma Chichester Clark

In this provocative study, the author treats Goodman, Marcuse, and Brown as the three most important radical social theorists in America since the end of World War II. His reasoned conclusions will attract anyone interested in the nonpolitical background of today's radical social thought.

Originally published 1972.

A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781469639970

Emma Chichester Clark

Emma Chichester Clark studied art at the Royal College of Art. She has worked as a freelancer for magazines, publishers and advertising agencies as well as teaching art for several years, but now dedicates most of her time to children’s books. She was nominated for the Kurt Maschler Award for Illustration twice and ‘I Love You, Blue Kangaroo!’, was shortlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal.

Book preview

The Party of Eros

The Party of Eros

RADICAL SOCIAL THOUGHT AND THE REALM OF FREEDOM

by Richard King

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

CHAPEL HILL

Copyright © 1972 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

No part of this hook may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

Manufactured in the United States of America

ISBN 0-8078-1187-4

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 73-174785

TO TERRY WALTER O’HARA

1941-1965

Contents

Introduction

1. The Framework of American Social Thought

2. Freud And Reich

3. Paul Goodman

4. Herbert Marcuse

5. Norman O. Brown

6. The New Transcendentalism

Notes

Bibliography

Index

The Party of Eros

INTRODUCTION

The student of American intellectual history is plagued by the relationship of America to European thought. If one focuses exclusively on American thought, then a study tends toward the parochial. Conversely, if one treats American thought as an inferior derivative of European sources, one misses the unique features of the American experience and thus tries to fit themes of our intellectual development into theoretical structures formulated in significantly different historical and cultural contexts.

This study by no means escapes this dilemma. Its focus is on the way the thought of Sigmund Freud, no friend of America, has been used by three radical social theorists in the quarter century since the end of World War II. The temptation is thus to focus upon Freud and not the American thinkers who made use of his insights. Yet common sense and even a slight knowledge of the way ideas are transformed by diffusion through space and time reveals that there are many Freuds and many ways his teachings can be applied to social analysis, an area of concern in which Freud was only tangentially interested. The problem, however, does not end there. A minor, more submerged theme of this study is the fate of orthodox Marxist theory in postwar America and the effort to formulate a radical social theory, adequate to deal with unprecedented social and cultural developments, upon the ruins of the Marxist ideology which many considered to be morally and intellectually otiose by the middle 1940s.

There is finally American thought itself. It can be argued quite convincingly that American thought goes astray when it depends too closely upon European intellectual systems of whatever variety. Particularly since World War II one could maintain that, far from being a satellite caught in the orbit of European thought and experience, America has finally assumed the role which Gertrude Stein once attributed to her of being the oldest modern western nation. The possibility of general affluence, the emergence of a society given shape by bureaucratic and technological structures, the development of a far-reaching and all pervasive communication nexus, the political and cultural importance of youth have all become givens which Europeans are just now beginning to see emerging on the continent. Thus the most pertinent social theory concerned with advanced industrial societies should be detectable in the American rather than the European context. Indeed, another theme is that in the first quarter of the century, American social thinkers—Lester Ward, Thorstein Veblen, Randolph Bourne, John Dewey—were handling problems that would emerge with much more urgency after World War II and thus set the terms for much of the analysis that we will be examining here.

Several recent studies have touched upon the theme of radical Freudianism and, though I deal with them at greater length in the main body of this work, a word or two about each of them is in order. The first and most important of these studies is Philip Rieffs imaginatively conceived The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966). In a sense my study is an application of some of Rieffs ideas to the particular context of American social and cultural thought. Paul Robinsons The Freudian Left (1969) appeared when I was nearly finished with the first draft of my study.¹ Though Robinson deals with Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse specifically (along with Geza Roheim), he takes them to be European thinkers primarily and does not concern himself with their place in or influence upon American thought. I do disagree with Robinsons rather uncritical discussion of Marcuse, but The Freudian Left is thorough and often incisive and thus of much use. The Making of a Counter Culture (1969) by Theodore Roszak appeared shortly after Robinsons work. Roszak devotes much attention to Paul Goodman as well as to Marcuse and Norman Brown as intellectual gurus of today’s cultural dissidents. His chapter on Brown and Marcuse is often quite good, but his treatment of Goodman remains generally on the surface. In general, Roszak slights the development of each mans thought; and the implication is that the main values and themes of the counter culture have emerged almost ex nihilo within the last decade.

Readers will inevitably wonder about the omission of certain thinkers. I have chosen not to deal with Erich Fromm because he is, quite simply, not a sexual radical. As Goodman and Marcuse make clear, and as Fromm would admit, he abandoned Freud’s libido theory quite early and generally plays down the importance of sexuality in individual and social analysis. A stronger case could be made for the inclusion of Norman Mailer, since he was profoundly influenced by Wilhelm Reich, the real father of the effort to combine doctrines of sexual and social liberation. Whatever Mailer’s strengths as a participant-observer of sexuality in our society, and I think they are considerable, he is not a systematic thinker, but primarily a novelist and imaginative writer and thus does not receive much attention here.

I was not interested in writing a history of psychoanalytic thought in post-World War II America and for that reason have not dealt with Erik Erikson, psychohistorians Robert Jay Lifton and Kenneth Kenniston, or the so-called Third Force psychology represented by Abraham Maslow and Henry Murray. (I do deal with Gestalt therapy, but only in reference to the development of Paul Goodman’s thought.) Each of these approaches quite obviously takes off from Freud, but in doing so lacks the sexual and/or the radical component which is my central concern.

My main interest is in ideas. For that reason I have avoided as much as possible a psychoanalysis of the thinkers in question. Such a study would possibly be fruitful; Marcuse and Brown, for instance, came relatively late and rather surprisingly to Freud from intellectual backgrounds having little to do with psychoanalytic interpretations of social and cultural reality. Nor have I gone into great detail concerning the sociological context within which these men formed their ideas or which proved receptive to their work. A major weakness of intellectual history is that it tends to degenerate into a catalogue of names and ideas linked by a vague something called influence. Where tracing influences should be suggestive, it is too often exhaustive. Everything is discussed except the ideas themselves, their elaboration, and their validity. Thus much of my study is taken up with the development of certain ideas by certain thinkers. I have tried to be critical without nit-picking; and I have hopefully avoided excessive influence-mongering.

One might also wonder about the absence of any sort of theoretical discussion of race or black radicalism. As far as I know, few social critics have dealt with such problems as racism or racial identity on a theoretical level.² A white psychiatrist, Joel Kovel, has written an interesting study, White Racism (1970), which makes extensive and systematic use of Freud, Brown, and Marcuse. In the last chapter of Soul on Ice (1967) Eldridge Cleaver sketched out, in a prototheoretical way, the structure of sexual and social relationships in American society. And Harold Cruse has noted the debilitating effect that orthodox Marxist ideology has worked upon black radicalism and radical theory generally in twentieth-century America. Other than these studies, which touch upon the relationship of race to social and sexual theory, most students of American race relations have remained contented to apply psychosocial concepts at an individual or group level. Otherwise they have tended to use psychoanalytic terminology (such as paranoia) as a screen for moral judgments. All of these efforts are important, but it would seem that the answer to the questions that the black movement has raised about the nature of western culture and society, its value patterns, its crucial institutions, e.g., the family, would profit from an examination of thinkers such as Wilhelm Reich, Goodman, Marcuse, and Brown, though none of them deals with race to any significant degree.

To a certain degree the opposite is true of the radical ideology of Women’s Liberation. Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics exhaustively catalogued the male bias in Freud’s thought and in general psychoanalyzed western society and culture to death. Millett also noted the importance of Wilhelm Reich as an alternative to Freud. (The irony here is that Reich personally was guilty of the most blatant sexual double standard and abhorred all deviations from genital sexuality.) As we shall see, Goodman’s thought is very decidedly male-oriented, despite or because of his bisexuality. For Marcuse and Brown, men and women become Man in general, while sexual identity and differentiation receive little mention.

In summary, then, I do not deal with the problems of racial and sexual identity because Goodman, Marcuse, and Brown do not. To criticize them on these grounds has a certain validity, but seems to me beside the point. It is not the task of social theory to deal with each particular social and cultural problem. What social thought loses in specificity, it gains in generality by delineating the structures of existing social and cultural reality and then projecting a more desirable alternative. If, for example, there is a general connection between domination as cultural value and our sexual organization, as Marcuse and Brown would have it, then the assumption is that such is true for male and female, black and white.

These previous remarks should also make clear that I am by no means discussing radical social theory as a whole, but rather a particular facet of postwar radical ideology. In fact, as the last chapter indicates, the implications of much of what Goodman, Marcuse, and Brown say are nonpolitical in the usual sense of the word. Because of a concern with fundamental values and attitudes implicit in western society, their thought has lent itself to what is often called cultural radicalism. In contrast with political and social radicalism, cultural radicalism is concerned with transforming consciousness, with changing the way we see and understand our reality, beyond any specific concern with such matters as elections or the ownership of the means of production. It is the argument of the cultural radicals that for external changes to be lasting, values and attitudes must also (or first) be changed.

Although it has become fashionable to advocate as well as analyze, I must confess my ambivalence toward sexual radicalism and its offshoot, the ideology of the counter culture. My misgivings arise from the apparent tendency of Wilhelm Reich and Marcuse, and to a lesser extent, Goodman and Brown, to make public all private aspects of existence; to metaphorically see the bedroom as the battleground for change; in short, as Reich put it, to politicize sex. I suppose such a concern reflects my adherence to the classical liberal idea that it is not the duty of the state to promote the personal happiness of its citizens, but rather to minimize their unhappiness. Expressed another way, we are treading on dangerous ground when happiness becomes a public concern. Behind the concern with the transformation of basic values and attitudes lurks, as well, the doctrine of positive freedom, by which one may be forced to be free against his own conscious wishes. What we have with thinkers such as Marcuse, particularly, is an identification of freedom with happiness. Thus in our time the idea of positive freedom has become one with what we might call the idea of positive happiness. The further assumption is that there are some—an intellectual-political elite—who know the true content of freedom and happiness. Thus the old political question reappears: who rules the rulers?

And yet if there is anything that Marx and Freud and their epigones have taught us, it is that our inner selves are formed by external forces and that the dichotomy between public and private is largely a myth. I would nevertheless argue that individual autonomy is a useful fiction; but more, that individuals are more than the sum of the forces impinging upon them; and that one vital task of radical social theory is to extend the realm of choice, not hand it over to benevolent elites, and zealously guard the private and the personal realm, rather than speaking of its illusory nature. It is perhaps for these reasons that I find Paul Goodman a much more appealing thinker than Wilhelm Reich, Marcuse, or Brown.

My feelings about the ideology of the counter culture are much less divided. My suspicion is that a new culture or consciousness is not consciously created, but rather emerges imperceptibly over time. Thus I object most strongly to the impulse at large in the counter culture to promiscuously create a new religion, out of nothing or out of everything. It remains basically a narcissistic enterprise. One must, I suppose, grant that its heart is in the right place, that much of what the counter culture objects to deserves attack, and that some of its impulses are good. Yet this seems to me insufficient grounds for joining up, since as the hoary old cliché has it: The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

1. THE FRAMEWORK OF AMERICAN SOCIAL THOUGHT

The End of Ideology

By the 1950s many observers felt that radical social thought and ideological politics, save for some atavistic rumblings from the Right, were things of the past. As early as 1948 Richard Hofstadter pointed to a historical consensus in American thought and politics when he wrote: The sanctity of private property, the right of the individual to dispose of and invest it, the value of opportunity, and the natural evolution of self interest and self assertion ... have been staple tenets of the central faith in American political ideologies.¹ As if to drive the point home Hofstadter noted in his Age of Reform (1955) that Franklin Roosevelt had been no radical at all, but rather the pragmatist par excellence, working to preserve by modification America’s received economic and political structures. Moreover Hofstadter observed that the New Deal as an intellectual movement for all its ferment of practical change produced a very slight literature of social criticism.... [It] produced no comparable body of political writing that would survive the day’s headlines.²

Others echoed Hofstadter’s consensus theme. To explain the historical paucity of interesting and systematic thinking about society and politics in America, Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America (1955) focused on two factors—Americas lack of a feudal past and hence a society stratified on class lines, and the hegemony of the Lockean tradition of social contract and political individualism. And although addressing himself to two conservative thinkers, Morton White reenforced the Hofstadter-Hartz line when he wrote in the new preface (1957) to his Social Thought in America: It seems to me a sad commentary on the social thought of today that two of the most popular social thinkers on the American scene (Walter Lippmann and Reinhold Niebuhr) can produce nothing more original or natural than the doctrines of original sin and natural law as answers to the pressing problems of the age.³ For White, Hofstadter, Hartz, and others, such as David Potter in his People of Plenty (1954) and Lionel Trilling in The Liberal Imagination (1950), the flabbiness of liberal social thought, the irrelevance of conservative thought, and the nonexistence of a radical ideological tradition ill-served Americas attempts to deal imaginatively or wisely with domestic and international problems in the post-World War II world.

Not all consensualists were of this unhappy, or at least worried, turn of mind. In 1953 Daniel Boorstin published his The Genius of American Politics which was followed in 1958 by The Americans: The Colonial Experience. Boorstin focused in Turnerian fashion on the influence of the American environment on men and ideas in the New World. The central message which he emphasized repeatedly was that American experience had rendered European theory, i.e., ideology and Utopian dreams, irrelevant to the formation of the American polity and character. By implication Boorstin was saying that Americans had been misled whenever they attempted to adopt European intellectual systems to American reality; indeed they had gone astray whenever systematic thinking had been attempted at all. Thus, although doubts might have arisen in the reader’s mind (what then was the relevance of the colonial experience to contemporary reality? Was common sense and a hardy no-nonsense approach still efficacious?), Boorstin clearly celebrated his consensus theme with few if any qualifications.

The best known of consensualists, however, was Daniel Bell, the author of the controversial essay The End of Ideology in the West. Like Boorstin, Bell was a veteran of thirties’ radical-Marxist battles, and also, like Boorstin, was just as happy to see ideology go. Focusing his essay on the postwar American scene rather than the broad sweep of American history, yet taking into account intellectual developments in Western Europe as well as America, Bell departed from the traditional concept of ideology as formulated by Marx. According to the Marxist notion, an ideology was an intellectual construct used, consciously or unconsciously, to mask an individual or group’s real interests. But Bell, drawing upon Karl Mannheim, saw ideology as an all inclusive system of comprehensive reality ... a set of beliefs, infused with passion, [which] seeks to transform the whole of a way of life.... Ideology, in this sense,... is a secular religion.⁴ Thus consigned to the category of religion and superstition, ideology could be written off as the opiate of the intellectuals. Bell’s essay was complicated by the fact that he was both describing a historical situation in which ideologies seemed dead and old passions spent⁵ and making a normative judgment in calling for an end to ideology, the end of rhetoric, and rhetoricians, or revolution.⁶

Though others have analyzed Bell’s essay at some length,⁷ a further comment or two is in order. Bell’s descriptive claim concerning the end of ideology was valid, if one identified ideology, as Bell did, with left-wing revolutionary doctrines coming out of the Marxist tradition. Clearly most European and American intellectuals had cast aside traditional Marxism as a world view and a guide to action. On the other hand, Bell’s judgment as to the desirability of the end of ideology was acceptable only if one agreed with Bell that ideology, as a secular religion aiming to transform the whole way of life, was necessarily rhetorical and led inevitably to degrading means in the name of some Utopian or revolutionary end.⁸ That ideology and the latter undesirable traits were identical was not at all self-evident.

Bell correctly observed, as Dwight Macdonald had earlier in The Root Is Man, that the old labels—left and right, radical and conservative—were devoid of content and that new problems were at hand with which older, received ideologies found it hard to deal. His analysis fell short, however, because he could only think according to the traditional Marxist categories—or in terms of the new consensus ... the acceptance of the Welfare State; the desirability of decentralized power; a system of mixed economy, and of political pluralism.⁹

Indeed in retrospect this was the failure of most of the above-mentioned observers. Lurking behind the consensus school of analysis was the concern with the relevance of Marxist ideology to American reality. No intellectual or ideological alternatives seemed to exist besides a discredited Marxism, a general celebration of American life, or the new and slightly critical consensus liberalism. In so closely identifying Marxism with radical social theory, these men blinded themselves to other theoretical possibilities. With Marxist ideology thus disposed of, critical thinking about American society as a whole seemed passé—or positively dangerous.

In reality Marxism as a total ideology has never influenced American social thought very deeply. As T. B. Bottomore has noted, the Americans who wrote first-rate studies of Marx and Marxism during the thirties—Sidney Hook and Edmund Wilson-made no attempt to relate their studies to American social reality in the Depression decade.¹⁰ To understand why Marxism has never taken root in American soil as well as to identify certain continuing themes and concerns of twentieth-century American social thought, it is necessary to examine briefly the social thought of the Progressive period. Having done this, we can better understand the post-World War II attempt to forge a radical social theory which, abandoning Marx and encompassing Freud as well as some of the older themes of American social thought, would be pertinent to the realities of advanced industrial society.

Two Strands of Progressive Social Thought

Central to the Marxist view is a theory of class conflict in which the industrial proletariat serves as the embodiment of the contradictions inherent in an industrial, capitalist society. Underlying the Marxist position is the further assumption that revolutionary possibility emerges only in an industrial society which, though divided along class lines, is ethnically and racially homogeneous. By way of contrast the nineteenth-century American liberal-radical tradition focused on the farmers rather than the nascent working class as the group from which social and economic change would arise. When America began its industrialization in a thoroughgoing way, the working class that emerged was in no sense a homogeneous body. It was made up of a hodgepodge of native Americans and recent immigrants who, literally as well as figuratively, could scarcely communicate with one another. Thus the development of a class-conscious working class was all but impossible. Furthermore with the migration of Negroes from the South into northern urban-industrial areas, the situation became even more complicated. Though native Americans, the blacks were seldom regarded by the white working class, whether of native or foreign origin, as potential allies in a class struggle; indeed the appearance of Negroes on the industrial scene was usually perceived as a threat to the other workers.

To these factors we should also add that of mobility. Some observers have suggested that the very fact of geographical mobility in American society has militated against the development of class consciousness.¹¹ Socioeconomic mobility has also been of crucial importance. Historians and sociologists have long debated the possibility of upward mobility in American society throughout its development. One would, however, be hard put to deny the pervasive belief Americans have held that they could better their lot. Thus neither farmers nor workers have seen themselves as farmers or workers per se. American farmers have been agrarian capitalists and, violent though labor