Modernism in the Streets. Marshall Berman
In short, it is precisely those qualities which Blake saw as the noblest expressions of man’s “Promethean” freedom and power, and with which he felt most deeply at home—energy, exuberance, diversity—which Wordsworth finds most alien in the city; he despises them as “freaks of Nature” and “perverted things” because they alienate him from the stable peace and cosmic harmony he so deeply craves. Thus Wordsworth’s political and social authoritarianism is no accident: The structure of his feelings places him firmly within the metaphysical Party of Order.2 He perceives, more clearly than Blake did, the elective affinities between the spirit of urban life and that dreadful freedom he hates and fears; that is why he is so anxious to escape it.
Williams does not recognize the conflict of values I have pointed out. Nevertheless, I would judge from his general tone, both here and in his previous works, that if forced to choose he would opt for Wordsworth against Blake, for the Country against the Town, for that tradition in English social thought which exalts and aims to recapture “a medieval unity and innocence.” I am deeply disturbed by the structure of feeling that lies behind these preferences. Consider Williams’s own response to the city, which—going beyond Wordsworth, who had his reservations (which Williams mentions, but does not take seriously enough to understand)—is not so much a description, let alone an evocation, as a conceit. Thus he ascribes to city life “a new kind of display of the self: no longer individuality of the kind that is socially sustained, but singularity—the extravagance of display within the public emptiness.” Wordsworth’s judgment is cited, in tones of approval:
All the strife of singularity,
Lies to the ear, and lies to every sense.
A man’s life can evidently be “true,” that is, personally authentic, only with—in the context of a community—a small, homogeneous, face-to-face society, necessarily rural, in which his identity is clearly “recognized” (to use Hegel’s term) or (in Williams’s own formulation) “socially sustained.” Once this idyllic community is eclipsed, individuality becomes possible only as a desperate form of overcompensation, a defense against being totally engulfed, hence in some sense a fraud, a lie. I have a feeling Williams has been influenced in these persuasive formulations by the first part of Georg Simmel’s classic essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” I only wish, however, that he had been influenced by the second part of the essay as well, in which, after presenting the thesis above, Simmel brilliantly overwhelms it with its antithesis: that personality, insofar as it is “socially sustained” within a rural Gemeinschaft, is jammed into a stifling system of established roles, constricted and crushed into a stereotype; and that only by breaking the bonds of community, and floating freely in the fluid anonymity of urban life, can individuality find the room it needs to breathe and to grow. This latter possibility seems never even to cross Williams’s mind—yet it is the fundamental principle of modern liberalism, a liberalism which socialism claims not to abolish but to fulfill.
Again, as the litany of urban alienations runs on, we are told that “it is not only the ‘ballast of familiar life’ [Wordsworth’s phrase] that is lost, but also all that makes one’s own self human and known: the acting, thinking and speaking of man at once himself and in society.” Williams’s language here is depressingly loose; but if his terms “human” and “himself” and “in society” are not tautologies, the only meaning I can wring out of them is precisely “the ballast of familiar life”: the definition of oneself in terms of some role in the stable, static, perpetually “familiar” community. In an urban milieu, this possibility indeed tends to get lost (though not at all as fast, or as inexorably, as social thinkers used to think: Neighborhoods, it has recently been noticed, live on). And yet, on the other hand, since the French and Industrial revolutions, a more open, mobile, urban social life has generated new modes of self-definition, of “making one’s own self human and known”: By cutting loose from the ballast of one’s life, by soaring adventurously into the unfamiliar—in other words, by asserting one’s freedom. Blake, the most radical of Romantics and the most “modern,” demanded a total, anarchic freedom in aesthetic and political, sexual and moral life. Wordsworth, though politically conservative and authoritarian, nevertheless recognized and exalted this new freedom within a limited sphere: for the “highest minds,” in the realm of the poetic imagination. Whether Williams, with his expressed preference for an art nourished by communal impulse and suffused with communal culture and tradition, would concede even this much—or how, by his own standards, he would justify any sort of concession—is not at all clear.
In saying all this I do not mean to cast aspersions on Raymond Williams’s personal devotion to liberty, which I know is exemplary. But it is distressing to see where his sentimental need to enfold radicalism in the communal coziness of a Great Tradition has led him. Because he has resisted making sharp conceptual distinctions between the conflicting values, which any broad cultural tradition must contain, Williams has managed to avoid a clear moral choice. He has thus been drawn—unconsciously, perhaps, but steadily—into a style of social thought whose mixed indifference and hostility toward personal freedom have far less in common with socialism than with that populist mystique of “blood and soil,” which has expressed itself in such sinister forms in our day.
This essay was first published in Dissent, Winter 1965.
I
One of the most intense and most disturbing arguments on the Left in the late sixties has been over the possibilities of modern man creating a decent society. The New Left has put the question this way: Can a socialist revolution be made by Western men, or along with them, or apart from them, or only against them? The real question is: Is there any hope for us? Radicals of the sixties have forced this question to the surface in every advanced industrial country. It has taken on a special urgency in the USA.
The responses of the American New Left have been shaky and ambiguous; they have exposed the cracks and strains at its foundations. On the one hand, the most vital impulse of New Left activity has always been populist, driven by a characteristically American faith in everyday people, a faith that, for all the inequities in American society and the oppressive acts of the American government internationally, the American people themselves are still a source of decency and hope. This is the faith that has inspired the continuing drive for participatory democracy and community control. On the New Left itself this faith has clashed with a darker view of “the people.”
The main left-wing idea of “the people” is formulated most systematically by Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man. “‘The people,’” Marcuse argues there, “previously the ferment of social change, have ‘moved up’ to become the ferment of social cohesion.” Thus, “The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment … The political needs of society become individual needs and aspirations.” The people within our society identify themselves totally, singlemindedly, with its ruling aims and values; between them and it falls no shadow. This is why it is legitimate to call them “one-dimensional.” Now it is obvious that people like these will be unable, by either inclination or insight, to liberate either their slaves or themselves. If hope for human freedom and happiness depended on these one-dimensional men, it would be a lost cause. But this is not the whole story. For, according to Marcuse, even in America, there is more to the human race than is dreamt of in their dimension:
underneath the conservative popular base is the substratum of outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors, the unemployed and the unemployable. They exist outside the democratic process; [they feel] … the most immediate and the most real need for ending intolerable conditions and institutions. Thus their opposition is revolutionary even if their consciousness is not. Their opposition hits the system from without and is therefore not deflected by the system; it is an elementary force which violates the rules of the game, and, in doing so, reveals it as a rigged game … The fact that they start refusing to play the game may be the fact that marks the beginning of the