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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 end of a period.¹

The American people, and the peoples they control, may yet become free; but the liberating force will have to come, somehow, from outside, that is, outside the American system.

It is clear, however, that Marcuse was using the word “outside” in a complex metaphorical way. He did not mean to deny that there could be fruitful contradictions “inside” the American system. His one example of radical action (immediately following the long passage quoted above) involves the civil rights movement: a movement which, when the book appeared in 1964, included whites as well as blacks, middle-class as much as lower-class people, students from the most prestigious universities alongside “the unemployed and the unemployable.” In other words, large groups within the American system could, if they tried, get into the revolutionary “outside.” One-dimensional men might yet discover—or create—new dimensions in themselves. Of course, once we grant the complexity of Marcuse’s idea here, new problems arise. If it is really possible for a great many “insiders” to join the “outside” forces, without giving up their positions within the system, we might wonder whether the inside–outside dualism is a helpful way of talking about social reality. Marcuse himself, in his next work, An Essay on Liberation (1968), tacitly abandoned this dualistic scheme; but other men, with flatter minds, have kept it alive.

If we move forward from 1964 to 1969, and examine the first Weatherman manifesto, which came out of the great split in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), we will find some of the same words, but in what seems like a different world. Marcuse’s language and general scheme are retained: a people that is internally monolithic is opposed by radical forces from “outside.” But the Marcusean sociology has been transformed into a Manichaean cosmology. The Weathermen take the idea of “outside” force with a crude, grim literalism: The basic opposition is one of geography. “America” is condemned, root and branch, as an “oppressor nation” whose sole source of support is the life and labor of “the peoples of the world.”² The American oppressors include not only the rich, the owners of wealth and property, the bourgeoisie, but “virtually all of the white working class,” blue- and white-collar alike, who enjoy small “privileges but very real ones, which give them an edge of vested interests and tie them to the imperialists.” The Weathermen judge all white Americans and find them wanting, totally lacking in human potential. It is wrong, they say, for radicals to concentrate on the “internal development of class struggle in this country,” wrong to work for better conditions in shops and factories and hospitals, wrong to fight to “reform [the schools] so that they can serve the people,” for this kind of action diverts Americans from the central issue: “Imperialism is always the issue.” The role American radicalism can play is thus radically restricted:

the vanguard of the “American Revolution”—that is, the section of the people who are in the forefront of the struggle, and whose class interests and needs define the terms and tasks of the revolution—is the workers and oppressed peoples of the colonies of Asia, Africa and Latin America … The Vietnamese (and the Uruguayans and the Rhodesians) and the blacks and the Third World peoples in this country will continue to set the terms for class struggle in America.

The only Americans for whom there is any hope turn out not really to be Americans at all: “Black people,” the statement says, “are part of the Third World and part of the international revolutionary vanguard.”

Although the Weatherpeople write off all white Americans with apparent impartiality, they are especially scornful toward the group from which most of them themselves have come: the literate, educated, white-collar men and women of American metropolitan areas and university towns. This group is not easily defined. Some sociologists classify it as “new middle-class,” some put it into the “new working class,” some say it spans both. What everyone agrees, however, and what is important for my point, is that there is something distinctively “modern” about the group, something endemic to societies that are “advanced,” highly “developed”—therefore I will refer to this group as “modern men,” as “us.” The Weatherpeople take great pains to disaffiliate themselves from us. When they learned “to reject the ideal career of the professional,” it did not occur to them to try to create their own career models, or to connect themselves with radical traditions within their own country, their own culture, their own class. What they did was to “look for leadership to the people’s war of the Vietnamese,” to “look to Mao, Che, the Panthers, the Third World, for models, for motion.” The closest the Weatherpeople are willing to come to home is “the ‘people’s culture’ of black America,” which they have learned from “Chuck Berry, Elvis, The Temptations.” It does not seem even to occur to them—they never mention the idea, not even to dismiss it—that anything further might be happening here. (The radical potential which they concede to “youth culture” seems to consist entirely in its capacity to identify with radical forces “outside.”) If they speak to us at all, it is only to give us notice that our “television set, car and wardrobe already belong … to the people of the world.” Until the repossessors arrive, the one worthy thing we can do is “support the blacks in moving as fast as they have to and are able to, and … keep up with that black movement enough so that white revolutionaries can share the cost, and the blacks don’t have to do the whole thing alone.” In other words, we can serve as a sort of Fifth Column for the Third World, but not for ourselves—since we’re not worth saving. Our role, our historic mission, is to be overcome someday.

When the great day comes, none of us will get to share in its fruits. Liberation for the world will mean only repression for us. According to the late Ted Gold, after American imperialism is defeated abroad, “an agency of the peoples of the world” will be set up to run the American economy and society, presumably to give our television sets, cars, and clothes back to their rightful owners. Africans, Peruvians, Vietnamese will move in and take over—making every John Bircher’s worst dreams come true. Indeed, said Gold, in his last published words before his tragic death, “if it will take fascism, we’ll have to have fascism.” Americans are so innately, irreparably, radically evil, that “it will take fascism”—the twentieth century’s realest vision of hell on earth—to give us our just deserts. And the handwriting on our palace walls is just as clear as the words over the gate of the Inferno: All of us must abandon all hope for ourselves.

When the Weatherpeople burst on the scene in the summer of 1969, their manifesto stirred a storm of bitter invective on the left. What seemed most outrageous about them—even more than the terrorist tactics they were to develop a few months later—was their overwrought self-hatred, at once personal, racial, and cultural. Critics with a sense of irony were quick to pick up echoes of that old reliable “liberal guilt.” But there were greater ironies which no one was ready to confront. This guilt trip, sick as it was, struck a deeper chord in a great many radicals’ sensibilities than they cared to admit. For the Weatherpeople were only working out, to its absurdly logical conclusion, that idea of the American people as “one-dimensional,” which most American radicals had accepted uncritically for years. By taking it seriously—dead seriously—the Weatherpeople made it plain to all of us how cruel, how antihuman an idea it was. But none of us on the Left had a clear alternative. If the mass of the American people, if “modern men” as a class, were not one–dimensionally evil, exactly what were they—or, rather, what were we? Everyone was embarrassed because no one could say. Hence, the critiques of the Weathermen, as illuminating as they are, all have a curiously hollow ring. There is an emptiness at the center, where an idea should be. What’s missing is a theory of the American people—and more, a theory of “modern” people, of the men and women whom highly developed societies create; a theory of the tensions and contradictions in the life we live, of our strengths and limitations, of our hidden capacities and potentialities.

To try to fill this vacuum, we must go back to the beginning of the modern age. For the peculiar emptiness that afflicts the New Left is close to the very center of the life and experience of “modern man” as such. Ever since the first modern societies began to take on a distinctive form, and people like us emerged in their midst, one of our deepest drives has been to get outside ourselves. So much of the paraphernalia of the sixties—from beads to psychedelic drugs to sentimental idealizations of the “Third World”—expresses an archetypical modern impulse: a desperate longing for any world, any culture, any life but our own. This impulse has made the life of modern men and women strangely paradoxical, maybe even absurd, at its core. On the one hand, it has enlarged our sympathies and sensibilities, deepened our feelings, developed our understanding, helped us grow; on the other, it has led us, in affirming other people’s lives, to turn against and deny and negate our own. It is only too typically modern that the New Left of the 1960s should gain at once a three-dimensional vision of so many other kinds of people—blacks, Indians, the Third World, women, homosexuals, schizophrenics, and on and on—and a one-dimensional view of themselves. This is only the latest punchline in a sick joke that gives some of the flavor of modern society’s sickness, and yet, ironically, manages to express some of its health as well.

To understand the modern predicament, it might be useful to look at Rousseau, for he was the first truly modern radical. Living in the midst of the first great wave of modernization, he was the first radical thinker to address himself directly to the problems springing up in its wake. He was the first to get the jokes that modern men were playing on themselves. Unfortunately, some of Rousseau’s radical impulses led him up a blind alley, one which prefigures and may illuminate the impasse in which the New Left is stuck today. But Rousseau also found in himself the insight and imagination to see beyond his impasse, and I believe that those of us on the Left may find in him a way to see through—and, hopefully, to break through—our own.

II

Among the many notes in Rousseau’s writings that strike close to home, one of the most arresting is the uninhibited rage and violence with which he attacks the modern city, its culture and its people. A typical remark: “In this age of calculators, it’s remarkable that no one should see that France would be far more powerful if Paris were annihilated.” Burn it down! Rousseau’s tone here is far more typical of the 1960s than of the 1760s. (Typical of the 1960s too, that he should be shocked and perplexed when some Parisians treat him as a menace.) But he insists that his feelings about Paris are nothing personal; he aims his malevolence at the modern city per se: “A big city, full of scheming, idle people, without religion or principle, whose imagination, depraved by sloth, inactivity, the love of pleasure, and great needs, engenders only monsters and inspires only crimes.” Thus, “Men are not made to be crowded together in ant-heaps; they should be scattered over the earth which they have to cultivate. The more they gather together, the more they corrupt themselves.” We can see here the birth of a distinctively modern apocalyptic language and one-dimensional vision—a language which we survivors of the 1960s have heard, and a vision we have seen, all too well. This language and vision borrow the rhetoric and imagery of Jewish, early Christian, and medieval apocalypse, raging against the Great Whore of Babylon (an image of which the Black Panthers and their white followers are particularly fond), hoping for its destruction. But the perspective now is secular and post-Christian: These radicals yearn not for a transcendental, purely spiritual redemption, but for a kingdom that will be immanent, material, in and of this world.

In fact, Rousseau’s one-dimensional view of the city was only a small part of a much larger one-dimensional picture. He was well aware that, at the very moment he was condemning the “great cities,” they were just emerging as the centers of energy in a vast social, political, and cultural evolutionary process—a process of development which is still going on today. In condemning them, Rousseau was condemning the esprit générale of modern society and the historical movement that was bringing this society into being.

We can find somewhere in Rousseau’s work just about every objection to modern society that anyone has thought of, left, right or center, in the last two hundred years: It is too free, it is not free enough; men are too “leveled,” they are too unequal; people cannot get close to each other, they are thrown into intense and indecent intimacy. But Rousseau’s most concrete account of his confrontation with modern society is in his romantic and political novel, The New Eloise, in which Saint-Preux, the young, sensitive, intellectual hero, who is stifled by the rigid class prejudices and emotional deadness of his native petit-bourgeois provincial society, comes to Paris, in search of a place to which he and his love, Julie, can flee, a social structure into which individualistic and romantic people can be integrated, can build and live a life. Rousseau’s treatment of the trip is perhaps the first modern instance of what has since become an archetypical modern theme, both in art and in life: The Young Man from the Provinces Comes to the City. As Lionel Trilling points out, Rousseau himself—“a shiftless boy from Geneva, a starveling and a lackey, who becomes the admiration of the French aristocracy, and is permitted by Europe to manipulate its assumptions in every department of life”—is “the father of all Young Men from the Provinces, including the one from Corsica.”³ Confrontation with the great city, exposure of the self to its promises and perils, is an ultimate test of who a person is, of all that he or she can be.

Saint-Preux is immediately thrilled by the energy and vitality of Paris, the “great spectacles,” the “enormous diversity of things,” the “many attractions which offer so many charms to the newcomer.” The most striking thing about life here is its fluidity. He feels himself “thrown into a torrent” that overruns all social barriers and generates an unprecedented social mobility. Everyone is approachable and accessible; thought and speech in this city lead to action; there is a seemingly infinite range of opportunity. “Nothing is shocking, for everyone is accustomed to everything.” No society has ever been more “full of original men,” because none has ever opened up so much social space for individuality to develop.

Why should anyone want to burn down a place like this, in which all human potentialities can be fulfilled? This potentiality itself turns out to be the city’s greatest pitfall. In an age when individuality has become freer and more important than ever, Rousseau sees nothing more precious, more valuable, than the wholehearted commitment of one individual to another. Personal commitment, for him, is what gives romantic love a moral dignity. Indeed, by virtue of its power to generate commitment, romantic love acquires a political dignity as well: The romantic couple is the primary community, the nucleus of the social contract. Early in The New Eloise, after the young lovers have secretly slept together and pledged themselves to one another, Julie is racked with guilt; she considers rejecting the man she loves and marrying instead the noble lord her father is trying to force on her. But Saint-Preux insists that her guilt is misplaced: Their love springs not from immorality, but from a new morality, in which fidelity becomes the highest virtue, a political as well as sexual issue. Lovers must be steadfastly, monogamously devoted to one another, in the same way, and for the same reasons, that the true citizen must be faithfully devoted to his community. Moreover, for lovers and citizens alike, fidelity will be valuable only if it is freely given, given out of “the soul of a free man,” given by a person who has the power to withhold it. For modern men and women, in the modern metropolis, at a time when a bourgeois economy and society is just coming to life—in other words, in a world of infinite options—fidelity takes on a unique, irreplaceable human value. Ironically, however, the same social conditions that make free personal commitment possible seem at the same time to make it impossible. This contradiction is what makes Saint-Preux and Rousseau feel that modernity has got to go.

“Everyone,” says Saint-Preux, “constantly places himself in contradiction with himself … and this opposition doesn’t bother anyone”—because self-contradiction is what makes this world go round. But indeed, if “nothing is shocking, because everyone is accustomed to everything,” doesn’t it follow that “everything is absurd”? Amid all these quick changes, what is worth hanging onto? If anything (or anyone) that is here today can be gone tomorrow, what standards can we legitimately use to decide what is right? For that matter, in the great city, do words like legitimate and right have any meaning at all? All the old moral touchstones seem to crumble in this new world. “Of all the things that strike me, none of them holds my heart, but the totality disturbs my heart, and dislocates my feelings, to the point that I forget what I am and whom I belong to.” The modern city enables the self to expand its activity enormously; but where is the self to find a center, a core that will hold its identity together? The endless parade of possibilities which modernity presents disturbs the heart, dislocates the feelings, and forces the individual to choose, to decide, every day, every night, not only where he or she is going to go, whom he or she is going to belong to, but what he or she is going to be.

Paradoxically, the enormous range of possibilities destroys the possibility of a stable, integrated, indissoluble “being” which the self can securely call its own.

When one night Saint-Preux goes to bed with a girl he has met, his hysterical guilt leads him to draw reactionary political conclusions from the sexual politics of the affair—he was led astray by freedom; from now on, he will seek escapes from this ambiguous, dreadful freedom.

The impulse which Saint-Preux blames for his infidelity, and tries to reject in himself, is an impulse which he shares with all modern men, a force that animates them and drives them all, and gives modern society its distinctive form: this is what Rousseau calls avidité, “avidity.” In the Social Contract it will appear as the motive force behind “the turmoil of commerce and the arts, the avid pursuit of profit”—a force which Rousseau considers absolutely incompatible with democracy. Here it appears at the heart of Parisian life, and Saint-Preux condemns it as the real motive for his crime. “They looked at me with a violent avidity”—and he looked back. Avidity is linked with avarice, the bourgeois desire for money and profit; but it is a great deal more than avarice. As Rousseau sees and feels it, it can express itself just as well in sexual desire or in aggressive violence. Indeed, it floats freely between one object and another. This ambiguity is a key to the deeply ambiguous character of the social system it sustains. In modern society, sex, money, and violence are hopelessly entangled with one another, need and greed are intertwined, for modern society both liberates impulses and mixes them up, with catastrophic results. What is to be done? From this point, Rousseau went off in two radically opposite directions. Sometimes, as we will see later, he tried to make distinctions, to disentangle the different kinds of avidity, to separate need from greed, creative from destructive energy. At other times, as we have seen already, he saw them all as one, condemned them all, root and branch, and tried to reject modernity as a whole.

The same logic that led Rousseau to despair of Saint-Preux’s capacity for fidelity in the modern city also led him to despair of the capacity of modern men for democracy or community. What made them such bad material for democratic citizenship and participation in communal life, Rousseau believed, was their free-floating avidity. Every modern people, he said, is “noisy, brilliant and fearsome,” “an ardent, avid, ambitious people … given to the two extremes of opulence and poverty (misère), of license and slavery.” The basic trouble with people like this is that they can’t be counted on: They are never fully committed to anyone or anything except the pursuit of their personal interests. “A prey to indolence and all the passions it excites, they plunge themselves into debauchery, and sell themselves for satisfaction; self-interest makes them servile, and idleness makes them restless; they are either slaves or rebels, never free men.”

III

When Rousseau turned away from the great city in search of “love, happiness and innocence,” he turned toward those traditional, rural societies in the backwaters and backwoods of Europe (or beyond Europe altogether) not yet affected by the process of modernization. For it was only in undeveloped societies, he often argued, that radical democracy could take root. The impact of Rousseau’s thought here has been enormous: We can see his influences on the Russian Narodniks and American Populists of the nineteenth century, and, more recently, on Mao and Fanon and many ideologues of the Third World today.

Rousseau did not think rural societies of his period were fine just as they were: He despised the fashionable pastoral conventions and saw, as clearly as anyone in his time, the starvation and oppression and misery that choked the countryside. Still, he believed that the very misery of rural life generated human qualities that were indispensable to a democratic citizenry. Peasants know how to endure, to hold on; thus they are “attached to their soil” far more tenaciously than modern men are committed to their cities. The life of the traditional peasant commune is “happy in its mediocrity”; it leaves its members “incapable of even imagining a better way of life.” What is striking and disturbing about these views is that they glorify narrowness, rigidity, ignorance, even stupidity—precisely those qualities Marx later stigmatized as “the idiocy of rural life.”

One of history’s most compelling collective dreams has been that the last shall be first. Rousseau made the dream seem plausible. Backward people, he argued, by virtue of their very backwardness, are really able to preserve virtues which advanced peoples have had to repress in themselves in order to get ahead. Two centuries of populism, anarchism, socialism, and communism have given Rousseau’s language an elaborate and complex vocabulary, which we can use to translate his ideas into ideologies of our time. The dream that the last shall be first emerges as the contemporary political theory—or, maybe, political myth—that the undeveloped societies can make the leap from feudalism or colonialism to socialism directly, without having to pass through a capitalist stage.

Rousseau’s most fully realized vision of an unmodernized radical democracy occurs in The New Eloise, when the Swiss mountain community of the Upper Valais is experienced and evaluated for us through the eyes of Saint-Preux. In the structure of the novel, it corresponds to Saint-Preux’s evocation of Paris; in the structure of Rousseau’s ideas, the Upper Valais is an antithesis to Paris, an archetype of the Rousseauean alternative to modernization. This idyllic society, however, contains inner contradictions of its own, contradictions even more severely destructive than the ones they were meant to overcome; and the radical democracy of the rural commune turns out to be most inauthentic for precisely the people who need and want it most avidly.

Saint-Preux greets the new society with a rush of exaltation, which Rousseau presents to us as a sudden illumination, an ecstatic vision. For the first time in Saint-Preux’s life, people are going out of their way to be nice to him. Unlike the Parisians, who constantly try to pull him into their worlds, the Valaisians, he reports, “went about their lives as if I wasn’t there, and I was able to act as if I had been alone.” They are totally devoid of avidity. Their hospitality flows from a “disinterested humanity,” a genuine “zeal to please every stranger that chance or curiosity sends them.”

Saint-Preux discovers the social foundations of these lovely qualities. The Valaisians are small independent farmers and artisans; their community is a democratic republic. The basic social units here are the extended family and the village commune. There is only the most rudimentary division of labor or exchange, and money is virtually nonexistent, for it is superfluous. The community as a whole is self-sufficient; it seeks nothing outside itself. Its economy has no luxury, but no poverty either; it is free from the economic extremes that tear the modern city apart; it produces a modest but real “abundance for all.” Valaisian society is not classless, but it eliminates the inequities of feudal stratification. There is plenty of freedom here, but unlike the dreadful freedom of the metropolis, it leads to no trouble. The children seem to accept freely their parents’ institutions and forms of life—forms and institutions which have brought them a freedom which they cherish deeply and use sparingly. The basic psychic fact about the Valaisians, which enables them to live at once freely and traditionally, is that their needs and desires are structurally limited. They work until certain basic needs are fulfilled, and then they stop; as a result, they have ample leisure and look upon their work as a pleasure.

Rousseau has shown us here the deep affinity between the ideal of romantic love and that of radical democracy. He has created the vision of a world—“a new world,” high in the mountains, remote, serene, unknown or ignored by the world below, free from time and change—in which these two dreams, the personal and the political, can be fulfilled. Rousseau’s vision prefigures the one moving so many of our young people today—up in the mountains, out in the desert, away in the undeveloped Third World, they can feel free from the pressures of modern life. And many of Saint-Preux’s successors—many of my students—have done just this, dropping out of the modern world and into old yet “new” ones. And yet Saint-Preux himself doesn’t. Why? Because he gradually realizes that something is wrong with the idyllic picture.

What is wrong becomes visible in the kind of sexual experience it generates. Up here, too, Saint-Preux is free and alone, surrounded by attractive women, committed to another woman who is far away. Saint-Preux is in the most provocative situation we could imagine, yet he is not in the least provoked. What is lacking, Saint-Preux comes to realize, is in fact avidity, that power that animates the metropolis. In the Upper Valais, nothing leads anywhere, thought and action are totally disassociated from one another—this is what makes social life so free of tension. The happiness that men pursue up here is a “peaceful tranquility” which comes to them “not through the enjoyment of pleasure, but rather through exemption from pain.” Indeed, “all our desires which are too alive are deadened here.” At the heart of the idyllic dream, Rousseau makes clear to us, is a wish for death.

For some time, we have recognized the death wish—conscious or unconscious—as an ominous undertone in the cultural mythology of romantic love, but Rousseau’s vision of the Upper Valais shows us how the self-destructive impulse can animate radical politics as well. We can see it now as a longing to turn off. If only, as Baudelaire said, we could make a leap “anywhere out of the world”; if we could detach ourselves from body, weight, movement, time; if we could be less ardent, less avid, less passionate, less profound, less human, less alive; if we could turn off “all the desires that torment men in the world below”; if, once and for all, we could just stop being ourselves—then we could be happy! Rousseau’s image of the Valaisian republic projects this longing onto a social and political plane. The recipe reads like a morbid parody of the Social Contract. It is as if the Valaisians have mutually agreed to turn off and tune out, to tranquilize themselves. When people are drained of avidity—or brought up in such a way that avidity will never develop—freedom will no longer be risky; men and women can be secure in their fidelity, and citizens will be perpetually loyal and totally committed to the state. Here, at last, a final solution to the problems of modernity. The urge to get away from it all is, in the end, a death trip.

IV

Avidity is at the heart of Rousseau’s dialectic. On the one hand, avidity compels men to pursue profit and power, to compete against and exploit one another. On the other, avidity alone can infuse men with the daring to get through the masks, to feel and know themselves and each other, and to fight to fulfill their real potentialities. Avidity has liberated human energy for bourgeois society—it has set men and women free to develop their powers in pursuit of power over one another, ending only in death. Now, Rousseau argues, it will take avidity to liberate human energy from bourgeois society—so that people working together, in a genuine community, can develop themselves and each other more fully than possible before.

Rousseau persistently felt an urge to run away from modernity, and he was inexhaustibly brilliant in imagining idyllic ways out. But he saw that though idyllic rural society, untouched by modern life, could indeed generate an “equality of soul,” a “perfect tranquility” that modernization would shatter forever, there was something barren here. If mankind remained fixed at this point, turned off to his desires and impulses, unaware of the freedom (and hence not possessed of any genuine freedom) to choose, “there would be no goodness in our hearts, no morality in our actions.” And, “our understanding would not … develop itself; we would have lived without feeling anything, and we would have died without having lived; all our happiness would have consisted in not knowing how miserable we really were.” If the great thing is to be fully and intensely alive, then we must affirm the life-giving force of modernity—even if it makes us too alive for comfort. Thus the impulses and ideas that led Rousseau away from modernity, when they are pursued most avidly, must lead him back, and back into his own life as a modern man.

For despite its decadence, the metropolis develops in its men and women “that exquisite sensibility which moves the heart when friendship, love and virtue are manifest, and makes us cherish in others those pure, tender and honest feelings which we no longer have ourselves.” The presence of this sensibility among the Parisians was no accident; it was integral to the character of modern men—indeed, it was a survival skill which they could not do without. The very moral imagination which enabled modern men to use ideals as screens, behind which to manipulate and exploit each other, preserved for them an inner sense of what these ideals might really mean. The insight which empowered them to see through one another today might drive them tomorrow to see through themselves.

What did Rousseau want them to see? Above all, the contradiction between the fullness of their powers and potentialities and the bourgeois imperatives which had brought these powers and potentialities into being. The necessities of the social struggle had put a premium on reason, imagination, spirit, beauty, strength—insofar as they could be used as competitive assets; beyond this one use, however, everything was excess baggage. This process had infused men and women with a newly intense sense of themselves, devotion to their personal interests, love of their individuality. But insofar as modern men defined themselves in competitive terms, they were forced “always to ask others who we are, never daring to ask ourselves”; to be “happy and satisfied with themselves on the testimony of other people, rather than on their own”; to “live constantly outside themselves,” so that the individual “depends on the judgment of others for the very sense of his own existence.” The amour propre which the bourgeoisie defined and celebrated as “self-love” was actually an inner emptiness, a total poverty and bankruptcy of self. Modernization had indeed developed the spirit to “almost the highest point of its perfection”; but the embourgeoisment which animated modernization had alienated it radically from actual human feelings and needs.

I think we can find in Rousseau a strategy that may be even more fruitful in our time than it was in his. It is to appeal to modern men on the basis of their own sensibility and awareness of life. Rousseau believed such an appeal was possible because modern society had developed in its men and women a mode of consciousness capable of transcending it. If this consciousness could be developed further, into self-consciousness and into social consciousness, then modern people—people who were intensely “ardent, avid, ambitious,” who strove constantly to turn their thoughts into actions, their fantasies into realities—might be able to resolve their personal and their political problems together, to reform radically their society and themselves from within.

Rousseau’s strategy was profoundly dialectical: it was to “draw from the evil itself the remedy that can cure it.” The first step was negative: to show modern man, “who thinks he’s happy, how miserable he really is.” This was the purpose of Rousseau’s most probing and penetrating psychological and political writing. The next step was positive: “to illuminate his reason with new ideas, and warm his heart with new feelings, so that he’ll learn that he can best multiply his happiness and expand his being by sharing them with his fellowmen.” Even the most avid egotist could be made to understand “how his own personal interest demands that he submit to the general will.” Then, “with a stout heart and a sound mind, this enemy of mankind would give up his hatred with his fallacies; the very reason that drew him apart from humanity would lead him back to it. Then he would become a good, virtuous, sensitive man. Instead of a vicious outlaw, he would want to be the firmest pillar of a good society.”

I remember an SDS meeting at the New York Community Church on a sweltering July night in 1966. A black man spoke, from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) I think, and told us—as Malcolm X had been telling us for a year or so before he was killed—that there was an important role for white radicals in “the Revolution,” but that this role wasn’t in the black ghetto. What we needed to do, he said, was to go back home, wherever we came from, and “work with our own kind.” The white radicals in the audience didn’t take this very well. One of the ablest and most courageous I know, a community organizer in Newark, said: “So you’re telling us to go back to our parents?” In effect, said the SNCC man, yes. “But I have more in common with oppressed blacks in the ghetto than I have with my parents in Scarsdale. I have more in common with sharecroppers in Georgia, Indians on the reservation, Bolivian tin miners, Vietnamese—for Christ’s sake, I have more in common with anybody than with my parents! That’s why I’m in the movement in the first place.” Most of us agreed. But the man from SNCC persisted: We had more in common with our parents than we liked to think.

For a great many of us there could be no greater insult. But the truth is that there are some very deep impulses which we and our parents share; impulses which are frighteningly ambiguous, but which are in themselves nothing to be ashamed of; impulses which have radical possibilities for fathers and sons, mothers and daughters alike. They are what Rousseau called perfectibility and—in its most distinctively modern expression—avidity. Perfectibility: the unwillingness to settle back and rest content, the need to change constantly one’s life for the better. Avidity: the desire to turn thought into action, to do it, here and now. It is perfectibility and avidity that lead our parents, in Scarsdale or wherever they are stuck, to trade in their car for a new one every year. How to judge them? Is it absurd to think that a new car will make them happy? Of course, this is precisely the sort of absurdity that makes the American economy and our middle-class life run. But it is not at all absurd for our parents to feel that their old car and all the other things they have now do not make them happy. Indeed, it is the beginning of wisdom. And it is far from absurd for them to want to do something to change their lives! What we have to make clear to them is that it’s not so much the car, as the system that built it, that needs changing—and that we can’t trade a social system in, we must build a new one.

The perfectibility and avidity that have driven our parents in contradictory directions have been driving us too. We’ve demanded “Power to the people!” and we’ve identified with any and every people in the world—except our people. This drive has been genuinely liberating for many of us; it has enabled us, by getting into other people, to expand and deepen ourselves. This is what the word “psychedelic” legitimately means and what so much of the 1960s was all about. But getting into other people, identifying ourselves with them, is not enough for radicalism. Radicalism means going to the roots, and (as Marx said) the root for man is man, and if we mean to be men—Menschen, human beings—if we want our souls to expand authentically, we must make room for ourselves at the center. In the course of the sixties, we have learned to affirm, avidly, militantly, everyone but ourselves. Now we must affirm ourselves as well. We must move, must grow, from apocalypse to dialectic.

It is worth pointing out that the New Left began with dialectic, with a document Rousseau would have understood: the Port Huron Statement of 1962. “Some would have us believe,” the statement says, “that Americans feel contentment amidst their prosperity.” But the fact is, it goes on to say, most people are tormented by “deeply felt anxieties about their role in the world … [which] produce a yearning to believe that there is some alternative to the present, that something can be done to change the school, the bureaucracies, the work-places, the government … It is to this yearning, at once the spark and the engine of change, that we address our present appeal.” The signers of the statement were determined to discover or to create new forms of political life and action that would express people’s “unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding and creativity”; forms that would fulfill their “unrealized capacities for reason, freedom and love.” These goals can be achieved only by transforming America into a “democracy of individual participation.” The New Left, at its birth, embarked on a “search for truly democratic alternatives to the present, and a commitment to social experimentation.” It invited the American people as a whole to take this trip with it. Thus spoke the founders of the SDS in 1962. Where are they now? How often, since then, have we been side-tracked?

The question is, how can we start again? One thing we should have learned is not to go it alone, isolated from the “modern men”—and modern women—who share our discontents and our hopes. As Rousseau indicated, this requires an understanding of the contradictions of modern life—contradictions which Rousseau faced with remarkable clarity and courage. He was the first to explore the uncharted, perilous open sea of modernity. He left us logs and maps that we can use to learn where and who we are.

This essay originally appeared in the Partisan Review, Winter 1971–2.