Closing of the American Mind

by Allan Bloom

  Whatever the merit of Weber’s analysis and categories, they became holy writ for hosts of intellectuals. They were, as Weber recognized, not only an academic exercise. They expressed his vision of the crisis of the twentieth century. This is a case where the alleged facts also spoke the values. The tradition-based regimes had exhausted their impulse and were on their way to extinction. The ones based on rationality were simply becoming the administration for “the last man,” the intolerable negative pole. Imperative, then, was a stab at some form of charismatic leadership in order to revitalize the politics of the West. The whole undertaking rested on the assurance that Nietzsche was right that the last man is also the worst possible man, or more generally that his critique of reason was correct.

  The problem with charismatic politics is that it is almost impossible to define. There may be examples of it in the past, but they are inimitable. If politics is like art styles (a thought picked up in Weber’s invention of the term “life-style”), nothing can be prescribed to it beforehand. There are no fixed principles and no program of action. All that one can say is “Be yourself!”; “Be original!”; “Let go!” or something of the kind. Charisma is a formula for extremism and immoderation. Moreover, the leader must have followers, so there is every temptation for him to act out his role as they define it. And, finally, genuine charisma is so difficult to judge. Persuasive tests for the genuineness of the charismatic leader, whose grace comes from God, were notoriously hard to come by. The leader whose grace emanates from the much more enigmatic self proves practically impossible to test. The modern situation as diagnosed by Weber requires radical remedies, and the charismatic leader is such a prescription.

  Just over the horizon, when Weber wrote, lay Hitler. He was a leader, Führer, who was certainly neither traditional nor rational-bureaucratic. He was the mad, horrible parody of the charismatic leader—the demagogue—hoped for by Weber. Hitler proved to the satisfaction of most, if not all, that the last man is not the worst of all; and his example should have, although it has not, turned the political imagination away from experiments in that direction. Weber was a good man of decent political instincts who would never have had anything but disgust at and contempt for Hitler. What he wanted was a moderate corrective to the ills of German politics—about the same as De Gaulle brought to French politics. But when one ventures out into the vast spaces opened up by Nietzsche, it is hard to set limits. Measure and moderation are the real aliens there. Weber was just one of many serious persons who were affected by Nietzsche and popularized him without believing in the extremism that Nietzsche himself asserted is the result of positioning oneself beyond good and evil. The open-ended future contains many surprises, and all these followers of Nietzsche prepared the way by helping to jettison good and evil along with reason, without assurance of what the alternatives might be. Weber is of particular interest to us because he was the chosen apostle for the American promised land. It is not only the popularity of the heavily freighted language he bequeathed us that is surprising, but also the persistence among supposedly serious persons of his articulation of the political phenomena. Hitler did not cause a rethinking of politics here or in Europe. All to the contrary—it was while we were fighting him that the thought that had preceded him in Europe conquered here. That thought, which gave him at least some encouragement and did nothing to prepare us to understand him, remains dominant.

  During the thirties some German Social Democrats became aware that Hitler, as well as Stalin, just would not fit Weber’s terms of analysis, which they had previously used; and they began to employ “totalitarian” to describe them. Whether this is a sufficient corrective to Weber’s narrowly conceived political science is questionable. But “charismatic” did indeed fit Hitler, unless charismatic necessarily means something good—a favorable value judgment. I suspect that those who abandoned Weber in this way did so because they could not face how wrong he had been, or the possibility that the thought they had embraced and propagated might have helped to support fascism. Hannah Arendt gave perhaps unconscious witness to my suggestion, in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she used the now celebrated phrase “the banality of evil,” to describe Eichmann. It is not difficult to discern the “routinization of charisma” under this thin disguise. Hitler, then, must have been charismatic. After Hitler, everybody scurried back under the protective cover of morality, but practically no one turned to serious thought about good and evil. Otherwise our President, or the pope, for that matter, would not be talking about values.

  This entire language, as I have tried to show, implies that the religious is the source of everything political, social and personal; and it still conveys something like that. But it has done nothing to reestablish religion—which puts us in a pretty pickle. We reject by the fact of our categories the rationalism that is the basis of our way of life, without having anything to substitute for it. As the religious essence has gradually become a thin, putrid gas spread out through our whole atmosphere, it has gradually become respectable to speak of it under the marvelously portentous name the sacred. At the beginning of the German invasion of the United States, there was a kind of scientific contempt in universities for the uncleanness of religion. It might be studied in a scholarly way, as part of the past that we had succeeded in overcoming, but a believer was somehow benighted or ill. The new social science was supposed to take the place of morally and religiously polluted teachings just as Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, et al., had, according to the popular mythology, founded a natural science that crushed the superstitions of the Dark Ages. The Enlightenment, or Marxist, spirit still pervaded the land; and religion vs. science was equal to prejudice vs. truth. Social scientists simply did not see that their new tools were based on thought that did not accept the orthodox dichotomies, that not only were the European thinkers looking for something akin to religious actors on the political scene but that the new mind itself, or the self, had at least as much in common with Pascal’s outlook as it did with that of Descartes or Locke. The sacred—as the central phenomenon of the self, unrecognizable to scientific consciousness and trampled underfoot by ignorant passers-by who had lost the religious instinct—was, from the outset of the value teaching, taken seriously by thinkers in Germany. That was because they understood what “value” really means. It has taken the softening of all convictions and the blurring of all distinctions for the sacred to be thought to be undangerous and to come into its own here.

  Of course, as we use it, it has no more in common with God than does value with the Ten Commandments, commitment with faith, charisma with Moses, or life-style with Jerusalem or Athens. The sacred turns out to be a need, like food or sex; and in a well-ordered community, it must get its satisfactions like the other needs. In our earlier free-thinking enthusiasm, we tended to neglect it. A bit of ritual is a good thing; sacred space5 along with some tradition must be provided for, as a generation ago culture was thought to be a useful supplement. The disproportion between what all these words really mean and what they mean to us is repulsive. We are made to believe that we have everything. Our old atheism had a better grasp of religion than does this new respect for the sacred. Atheists took religion seriously and recognized that it is a real force, costs something and requires difficult choices. These sociologists who talk so facilely about the sacred are like a man who keeps a toothless old circus lion around the house in order to experience the thrills of the jungle.

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  5 Note how space—used to mean one’s apartment, workshop, office or whatever—has become a trendy word.

  THE NIETZSCHEANIZATION OF

  THE LEFT OR VICE VERSA

  I have spoken little of Marx and referred to few of his terms so far, although the whole world is divided into two parts, one of which traces its intellectual lineage back to Locke and the other to Marx, and the latter is much readier to acknowledge its parent than is the former. But this relative neglect is inevitable when one begins with the souls of young Americans, fo
r Marx does not speak to them, and the so-called Marxist teachers who attempt to influence them do not use Marxist language. To put it crudely, Marx has become boring—and not only to American youngsters. In some backwaters, grim autodidacts may still thrill to the rhetoric of “Workers of the world …” while Third World presidents of one-party states focus their resentments by invoking the authority of Marx. But in the centers where people keep up-to-date and ideologies are made, Marx has been dead for a long time. The Manifesto seems naive. Capital just does not persuade its readers that it is the truth about economics or about the inevitable future of man, and therefore worth the hard work it demands to be digested. A few brilliant essays still charm but are not enough on which to found a worldview. The intellectual death of their eponymous hero has not stopped much of the Left from continuing to call itself Marxist, for he represents the poor in their perennial struggle against the rich, and their demand for more equality than liberal societies provide. But beyond that, the Left’s nourishment comes from elsewhere. Nothing in Marx resonates in souls furnished by Sartre, Camus, Kafka, Dostoyevski, Nietzsche and Heidegger. Rousseau can still overpower where Marx falls flat.

  As an illustration of what has happened to Marx’s influence, consider ideology, one of the few terms of his that has anything like the popular currency of Weber’s terms. (I will discuss the American use of dialectic later.)

  In Marx, ideology meant the false system of thought elaborated by the ruling class to justify its rule in the eyes of the ruled, while hiding its real selfish motives. Ideology was sharply distinguished in Marx from science, which is what Marx’s system is—i.e., the truth based on disinterested awareness of historical necessity. In Communist society there will be no ideology. “The pure mind,” to use Nietzsche’s formulation, still exists in Marx’s thought, as it had in all philosophy—the possibility of knowing the ways things are, an intellectual capacity irreducible to anything else. Ideology is a term of contempt; it must be seen through in order to be seen for what it is. Its meaning is not in itself but requires translation back into the underlying reality of which it is a misleading representation. The man without ideology, the one possessing science, can look to the economic infrastructure and see that Plato’s political philosophy, which teaches that the wise should rule, is only a rationalization for the aristocrats’ position in a slave economy; or that Hobbes’s political philosophy, which teaches man’s freedom in the state of nature and the resulting war of all against all, is only the cover for the political arrangements suitable for the rising bourgeoisie. This point of view provides the foundation for intellectual history, which tells the story behind the story. Instead of looking at Plato and Hobbes for information about what courage is—a subject important to us—we should see how their definitions of courage suited those who controlled the means of production.

  But what applies to Plato and Hobbes cannot apply to Marx; otherwise the very assertion that these thinkers were economically determined would be itself a deception, simply the ideology for the new exploiters Marx happens to serve. The interpretation would self-destruct. He would not know what to look for in the thinkers who were inevitably and unconsciously in the grip of the historical process, for he would be in the same condition as they were. There are certainly historical preconditions of Marx’s science; but they do not detract from the truth of his insight, which is therefore a kind of absolute moment in history that no further history can alter. This truth is the warrant for revolution, and the moral equivalent of the natural rights that warranted the American Revolution. Without it all the killing is unjust and frivolous.

  However, by 1905, Lenin was speaking of Marxism as an ideology, which means that it too can make no claim to truth. In less than half a century Marx’s absolute had been relativized. The implausibility—on which Nietzsche insisted in his radical historicism—of the absolute moment and of a standpoint outside history had become commonly acknowledged and made Marx a fossil. This was the beginning of the inner rot that has finally made Marxism unbelievable to anyone who thinks. Marxism itself became ideology. The historicization of Marx’s thought, the turning of his method against him, now looked like the resolute taking of a stand within the universal flux, the sign of the creative man, a defiance of the meaninglessness of things—that is, it looked this way to those who had fallen under Nietzsche’s spell. A parody of this new look is to be found in the person of Sartre, who had all those wonderful experiences of nothingness, the abyss, nausea, commitment without ground—the result of which was, almost without fail, support of the Party line.

  Ideology today, in popular speech, is, in the first place, generally understood to be a good and necessary thing—unless it is bourgeois ideology. The evolution of the term was made possible by the abandonment, encouraged by Nietzsche, of the distinction between true and false in political and moral matters. Men and societies need myths, not science, by which to live. In short, ideology became identical to values, and that is why it belongs on the honor roll of terms by which we live. If we examine Weber’s three forms of legitimacy—tradition, reason and charisma—which cause men to accept a domination by other men founded on violence, we see immediately that we would call them ideologies, as well as values. Weber, of course, meant that all societies or communities of human beings require such violent domination—as the only way order emerges from chaos in a world with no ordering force in it other than man’s creative spirituality—while Marxists still vaguely hope for a world where there are values without domination. This is all that remains of their Marxism, and they can and do fellow-travel with the Nietzscheans a goodly bout de chemin. One sees their plight in the fact that ideology no longer has its old partner, science, in their thought, but stands in lonely grandeur.

  Moreover, ideology is no longer very distinctly tied to economics, nor is it simply determined. It has been cut loose from necessity’s apron strings in creativity’s realm. Rational causality just does not, since Nietzsche, seem sufficient to explain the historically unique event or thought. Capitalist ideology is now instinctively taken to be something more like the Protestant ethic than what is described in Capital. When one talks to Marxists these days and asks them to explain philosophers or artists in terms of objective economic conditions, they smile contemptuously and respond, “That is vulgar Marxism,” as if to ask, “Where have you been for the last seventy-five years?” No one likes to be considered vulgar, so people tend to fall back into embarrassed silence. Vulgar Marxism is, of course, Marxism. Nonvulgar Marxism is Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Heidegger, as well as the host of later Leftists who drank at their trough—such as Lukacs, Kojève, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre—and hoped to enroll them in the class struggle. To do this, they had to jettison that embarrassing economic determinism. The game is surely up when Marxists start talking about “the sacred.”

  Very early in this century the effects of the encounter with Nietzsche began to be felt within Marxism. An example is the significance of revolution. Revolution and the violence that accompanies it are, as we have seen, justified in modern political philosophy and provide the most arresting spectacles of modern political history. Revolution took the place of rebellion, faction, or civil war, all of which are obviously bad things, while revolution is the best and greatest event—officially and in the popular imagination of Englishmen, Americans, Frenchmen and Russians. Germany was the only one of the great powers not to have had one, and Marxism was partly invented to provide a bigger and better revolution for Germany, the natural fulfillment of German philosophy, as French philosophy culminated in the French Revolution. Of course, the spilling of blood is involved in revolution, proof of men’s preferring liberty to life. But great amounts of blood were not required, and the violence was not thought to be good in itself. The old regime was tottering and needed a push; behind it were the developed conditions for the new order, an order fully justified by nature, reason and history.