Late Modernism. Robert Genter

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СКАЧАТЬ many ways, Riesman offered the most famous discussion of the so-called American character in the 1950s, a discussion that centered on the critical capacities of ordinary citizens to resist the allure of political movements and to challenge the pressures of social conformity. His 1950 best-selling book The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character was just one of many books published by critics that detailed how postwar social and economic changes had unsettled the lives, expectations, and outlooks of most Americans. But unlike high modernists such as Theodor Adorno or Lionel Trilling, who saw nothing but confusion and uncertainty in the eyes of ordinary citizens in an age of mass politics and mass culture, Riesman saw a new American character that, while still beset by many of the same psychological hang-ups as past generations, had developed a more flexible personality structure. This American character possessed the capacity for positive adjustment and mutability, traits that not only helped individuals escape the lure of political movements but also pointed to a more open form of selfhood than that imagined by other critics. According to Riesman, high modernist critics, who held fast to a notion of “psychological integration,” had underestimated “the amount of disintegration and inconsistency of response that an individual can stand” (424). In response, he called for “a more robust view of man’s potentialities, not only for evil, about which we have heard and learned so much, not only for heroism, about which we have also learned, but also for sheer unheroic cussed resistance to totalitarian efforts to make a new man of him” (425). In this sense, debates over modernist aesthetics were also about the nature of identity in modern America. In The Lonely Crowd, Riesman, like other late modernists, offered an entirely different vision of man’s capabilities and capacities for change.

      Discovering the Authoritarian Personality

      In a 1954 Saturday Review article on Allan Valentine’s The Age of Conformity, William Barrett, the associate editor of Partisan Review, argued that Valentine’s indictment of the authoritarian tendencies within American life was “nothing new.” For Barrett, “there could hardly be a subject that has been so thoroughly scoured and picked apart by this time by journalists, sociologists, pundits, and assorted visiting firemen from foreign shores.”³ Indeed, the firemen from abroad to whom Barrett referred helped to shift discussions dramatically within the United States about a general breakdown of Western society. Growing fears about the concentration of power within the United States had of course already appeared in diverse works such as James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution (1941), Peter Drucker’s Future of Industrial Man (1942), and Dwight Macdonald’s The Root Is Man (1946), but the emigration of prominent European intellectuals who had firsthand experience of totalitarianism added a certain gravitas to the American debate. From psychologists such as Erik Erikson, Wilhelm Reich, and Bruno Bettelheim to writers such as André Malraux, George Orwell, and Arthur Koestler to critics such as Hannah Arendt, Paul Tillich, and Franz Neumann, arriving European intellectuals taught a horrifying lesson to their American listeners, and their concerns were quickly translated into the pages of Partisan Review, Commentary, New Republic, Encounter, and Politics. As fanaticism, nationalism, and ethnic and racial intolerance swept through Europe, chastised American and emigrant European intellectuals surveyed the landscape of the United States for evidence of such burning embers.

      The book that first attempted to explain the rise of totalitarianism in the heart of civilized Western Europe and the book that first implored American intellectuals to begin fretting over the situation in their own country was Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1941). A practicing psychoanalyst and former member of the Institute for Social Research, Fromm emigrated from Germany in 1933 and established himself as a penetrating critic of the socioeconomic conditions that had produced fascism. Blending psychoanalysis and empirical studies, Fromm linked recent historical changes in capitalism to the widespread psychological malaise affecting the millions of Europeans who were willing to sacrifice themselves to the authoritarian state. The breadth of his historical perspective accounted for the appeal of his book as did his trenchant depiction of the loneliness of the modern individual, who, according to Fromm, had begun, in a tragic reversal of history, to bemoan the litany of freedoms provided by Western civilization. Borrowing themes from Max Weber and Karl Marx, Fromm sketched the historical emergence of the modern individual: the development of the capitalist market system had freed the individual from bondage and servitude; the rise of Protestantism had challenged the authority of the church; and the French and American revolutions in the eighteenth century had ushered in civil and political liberties. Freed from the “primary ties” of family, church, and caste found in medieval society, the individual had emerged upon the world’s stage, “independent, self-reliant, and critical,” liberated from the “old enemies of freedom” in the name of self-discovery.⁴ But this sense of freedom, cautioned Fromm, was illusionary and ignored the “new enemies of a different nature.”⁵ In fact, the individual now needed to confront the “inner restraints, compulsions, and fears” that arose with the collapse of “outer restraints.” Free to determine his way within the democratic state, the individual had been deprived of any markers for a positive sense of freedom, leaving him “more isolated, alone, and afraid” (104). Overwhelmed by the bureaucratic indifference of modern organizations, the modern individual came to consider the demands of freedom too burdensome. Unable to withstand the feelings of “isolation and powerlessness,” the individual tried to “escape from freedom” (133). Under such conditions, the modern individual, according to Fromm, had developed sadomasochistic impulses. This “burden of freedom” was overcome by forgoing “the independence of one’s own individual self” and masochistically fusing “with somebody or something” (140) in order to acquire the strength the individual lacked. These “masochistic strivings” were satisfied by subordination to a “bigger and more powerful whole” whether in the form of “a person, an institution, God, the nation, conscience, or a psychic compulsion” (154). According to Fromm, this new “authoritarian character” took pleasure in submission to state authority and joy in the willful destruction of others as scapegoats for the individual’s own powerless condition.

      Fromm’s book had an immediate impact. Most, if not all, discussions of totalitarianism in the United States were filtered through his analytic lens. Fromm’s discussion of the sadomasochistic structure of the modern personality was appropriated, for instance, into psychologist Abraham Maslow’s oft-cited 1943 Journal of Social Psychology article “The Authoritarian Character Structure,” which was the culmination of his five-year study of authoritarian beliefs in America. Social scientists, such as Harold Lasswell, Hadley Cantril, and William Kornhauser, all of whom conducted extended investigations into political pathologies, borrowed from Fromm’s speculative framework. The book, however, that most readily translated Fromm’s analytic framework into an American vernacular was Arthur Schlesinger’s 1949 book The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom. He argued, with a certain Eliotic inflection, that modern America, with “its quota of lonely and frustrated people, craving social, intellectual and even sexual fulfillment they cannot obtain in existing society,” had become a breeding ground for individuals who “want to be disciplined.”⁶ According to Schlesinger, the impersonality of American society had forced the individual to find “outlets for the impulses of sadism and masochism” (54). For most of these critics, three factors in particular seemed to be producing the sadomasochistic character that Fromm had analyzed. The first was the economic turmoil of the Great Depression. The effect of the unemployment crisis of the previous decades was a tremendous amount of uncertainty and confusion, effects that seemed to linger into the 1950s when the surprising postwar abundance should have mitigated such anxieties. For example, contributors to Daniel Bell’s The New American Right (1955) noted that the hysteria surrounding the threat of Communist subversion in the United States, which had produced the demagoguery of Joseph McCarthy, was linked to a perpetual “status anxiety” on the part of a rising lower middle class fretting that international events might disrupt its recent socioeconomic gains.

      The second factor supposedly producing this sadomasochistic personality was the gradual disappearance of early industrial society of the late nineteenth century. The apparent completion of the industrial revolution through advanced automation and computer-based СКАЧАТЬ