This seems relevant. Wilfred McClay reviews Todd Gitlin’s The Intellectuals and the Flag, a critique, from the left, of the left’s intellectual malaise and the academic world that it dominates.
“The left embraced the smug disassociation from existing society epitomized in the sweeping call by Herbert Marcuse for a ‘Great Refusal’ of the confining ideals and crass manipulations of the modern capitalist political economy. But the embrace of Marcuse's slogan has amounted in practice to a ‘great withdrawal,’ a narcissistic retreat into self-proclaimed ‘marginality,’ an obsession with ever more minute forms of identity politics and the infinite ‘problematizing’ of ‘truth,’ a reflexive opposition to America and the West, and an immurement in ‘theories’ whose radicalism is so pure that they never quite touch down to earth - follies all underwritten and protected by the perquisites and comforts of academia.”
Yeah. I remember "And the Band Played On."
Posted by: Dan Collins | October 08, 2007 at 12:29
How very odd. So today's peace march, banned by the police, is going to be sparsely attended, then, while their ranks are off somewhere practising identity politics and problematizing notions of truth?
The quotation above makes it sound as though we're all navel-gazers, in a perpetual trance, who have voluntarily taken up residence in an academic cave far removed from society. But it really is possible to be practically and intensely involved, as social activists, and also to be interested in theory. Like anyone else, we enjoy doing things, but we also like to reflect on why we're doing them.
Posted by: Dr.Dawg | October 08, 2007 at 15:21
Dr Dawg,
Heh. I understood it as a taking of the general political weather or a thumbnail sketch, rather than as an intimate evaluation of every single self-defined leftist, including your good self. But it’s a sketch with some resonance, as many reputable figures on the left have noted, and as the archive here has illustrated, more than once.
Posted by: David | October 08, 2007 at 15:38
Some people may attend the peace march for right wing reasons as well as left wing reasons. Dislike of abroad, suspicion of foreign entanglements, these are all good Tory reasons to join it. Enoch Powell, were he still alive, would almost certainly attend.
I've read a few commentaries in The Guardian by antiwar Tories like Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins. Hastings is particularly bizarre to read. He seems to have become a peacenik purely out of snobbery.
None of this alters the fact that the Iraq war was always a folly, and is now probably unwinnable - at least at any price a US or UK electorate would be prepared to pay.
When the Neocons go, America will probably adopt a less ideological, more Kissinger-like foreign policy. Instead of Nixon in China, we may have Hillary in Teheran...
Posted by: georges | October 08, 2007 at 23:03