And Yet-It Moves

MAY I COMMENT on Professor Lipset's piece which appeared in the CRIMSON 24 November, 1970? On the evidence of the article, the collapse of Lipset's world-view and his all-too-recent apodictic certitudes on contemporary industrial society has inflicted him with so shattering an intellectual crisis, that he has taken refuge in fatality and historical cycles. I fear Professor Lipset risks wholly abdicating the intellectual's endeavor to understand the world-one might add, not only to interpret the world but to change it. Such an abdication portends serious consequences for his work.

If the best a scholar can do now is assert that tomorrow's weather will be much the same as today's, then the intellectual in such a setting is dead and in his place civilized mysticism and astrological superstition will flourish most luxuriantly. Here one is not being merely speculative. Oswald Spengler-another famous twentieth-century cynical historian-veers dangerously close to this position. In the second volume of The Decline of the West he wrote that "The regular periodicity of certain events is yet another indication that the cosmic surgings in the form of human life on a small planet are not something self-contained but rather stand in profound harmony with the unending movement of the universe....[Thus] the relationship of periods of war to those of the weather, sun-spots, and certain planetary conjunctions is established and accordingly a great war is foretold for 1910-1920. But these and innumerable other connections which are accessible to our senses conceal a mystery we have to respect." Indeed the unraveling of such a mystery calls for the soothsayer's skills, not the scholar's powers of analysis and understanding.

Secondly, it is not quite correct to state that "no one... anticipated the rise of student and intellectual radicalism as a major phenomenon of the second half of the '60's." Prevailing orthodoxy, to be sure, dutifully assures us that "an affluent, consumer-oriented capitalist society has bred contented cows," that one dimensional technological society has reduced all its citizens to mindless automata. But even while Professor Lipset was solemnly proclaiming the end of an ideological era in which "fundamental political problems of the industrial revolution have been solved.... This very triumph of the democratic social revolution in the West ends domestic politics for those intellectuals who must have ideologies or utopias to motivate them to political action." Even while, as Lipset also declared, it was almost universally believed that "the workers have achieved industrial and political citizenship," that "class conflict is minimized," if not altogether eliminated. Yet, even at the same conjuncture it was possible for another scholar observing the same forces in the same societies to arrive at radically different conclusions. Ernest Mandel, for one, never ceased insisting that it is perfectly possible in the present general economic climate-that of "neo-capitalist-affluence" or the "mass consumption society"-for increased radicalism and revolutionary tendencies to develop as a result of a whole series of social, economic or even military crises. And he was writing precisely at the same time as Lipset was visualizing the end of politics and of class conflict, and long before the events of May 1968 so decisively exploded the ruling orthodoxy. It was thus possible-before the event-to locate the source of student and intellectual radicalism within the structure of the "mass consumption society" and its accumulation of historical contradictions. In that light, student and intellectual radicalism can be seen as crystallizing the revolt of modern productive forces as a whole against bourgeois relations of production.

Finally, Professor Lipset's view of historical cycles is, of course, none too eccentric a view of history: Plato, Polybius, Machiavelli, Vico, Spengler form an impressive pedigree. He need not even be too cautious in predicting when the next conservative cycle will dawn. After all, Plato-boldly and rather sensibly, as it would be well-nigh difficult and unnecessary to prove him wrong-calculated that history returned upon itself in 72,000 years! From internal evidence there is no doubt that for Lipset the periodicity of this circular movement by which the history of the states returned, over and over again, to the same point, is of considerably shorter and more conceivable duration. The point however is that in Lipset-as in other conservative thinkers-such a doctrine of Fate inevitably terminates in the return of what is always the same. Plus ca change... Or, "a few years from now" we will return to the same original and persistent position-in fashion as in the movement of history. Doubtless, Alfred Kroeber's discovery of "an irregular cyclical pattern" in Paris fashion may well be a profound anthropological achievement of the age; but before we knuckle under his authority, we might consider the findings of Madge Garland in her witty and erudite book, The Changing Form of Fashion. There, it seems, Mrs. Garland has produced a canvas whose warp is the skillful weaving together of art, literature, history and anthropology, and whose weft is the adroit contrast in the change-not of a recurring cycle, however irregular-between past and present in fashion.

As for the movement of history, one thinks of those eloquent words which Harold Laski wrote of de Maistre-whose willful obscurantism sought to exorcise the French Revolution: "The world that had seen the fall of the Bastile," he wrote, "was bound to be a different world. To tilt against its fundamental principles may have been courage, but it was the courage which has been immortalized by the dangerous pen of Cervantes." But for "cyclical" Lipset there is never "a different world." It is ever and always the same, a world of domination. For as Adorno observed of Spengler, the principle of relentlessly self-per-petuating domination is hypostasized as something eternal and inexorable. James Shotwell in his penetrating critique of Spengler is worth pondering in this juncture. In his own words: "Winter followed Autumn in the past because life was repetitive and passed within limited areas of self-contained economy. Intercourse between societies was more predatory than stimulative because mankind had not yet discovered the means to maintain culture without an un-just dependence upon those who had no share in its material blessings. From the savage raid and slavery down to the industrial problems of today, the recurring civilizations have been largely built upon false economic forces, backed up by equally false moral and religious casuistry. The civilizations that have come and gone have been inherently lacking in equilibrium because they have been built upon the injustice of exploitation. There is no reason to suppose that modern civilizations must repeat this cataclysmic rhythm. It is these forms of exploitation and domination that are being challenged by the revolt of modern forces of production as a whole against bourgeois relations of production. And the fall of contemporary Bastilles will usher in a new and a different world. For as one contemplates a world in tumult and a world in travail, the riposte is inescapable: "And yet-it moves."

It is to be hoped that Professor Lipset will not give in to despair.

( Azinna Nwafor is Assistant Professor and Chairman of the Board of Advisors in Afro-American Studies. )