Lasch—Intellectuals as a Status Group

Christopher Lasch
The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963:
The Intellectual as a Social Type
(1965)

[ix] The intellectual may be defined, broadly, as a person for whom thinking fulfills at once the function of work and play; more specifically, as a person whose relationship to society is defined, both in his eyes and in the eyes of the society, principally by his presumed capacity to comment upon it with greater detachment than those more directly caught up in the practical business of production and power. Because his vocation is to be a critic of society, in the most general sense, and because the value of his criticism is presumed to rest on a measure of detachment from the current scene, the intellectual's relation to the rest of society is never entirely comfortable; but it has not always been as uncomfortable as it is today in the United States. "Anti-intellectualism" offers only a partial explanation of the present tension between intellectuals and American society.
[x]
The rest of the explanation lies in the increased sensitivity of intellectuals to attacks on themselves as a group. It lies in the intellectuals' own sense of themselves, not simply as individuals involved in a common undertaking, the somewhat hazardous business of criticism, but as members of a beleaguered minority. The tension is a function, in other words, of the class-consciousness of intellectuals themselves.

...

The growth of a class (or more accurately, a "status group") of intellectuals is part of a much more general development: the decline of the sense of community, the tendency of the mass society to break down into its component parts, each having its own autonomous culture and maintaining only the most tenuous connections with the general life of the society—which as a consequence has almost ceased to exist.

...

[xiii] Everyone who has studied the history of American reform agrees that the reform tradition underwent a fundamental change around 1900. Some people identify the change with a changing attitude toward government, a new readiness to use government (particularly the federal government) as an instrument of popular control. Others associate it with an abandonment of the old populistic distrust of large-scale institutions, like corporations, and an acceptance of the inevitability of the concentration of wealth and power. Still others define the
[xiv]
change as a movement away from the dogma of natural rights toward a relativistic, environmentalist, and pragmatic view of the world. All of these developments, in truth, were going on at the same time, and all of them contributed to the emergence of the new radicalism. Equally important was a tendency to see cultural issues as inseparable from political ones; so that "education," conceived very broadly, came to be seen not merely as a means of raising up an enlightened electorate but as an instrument of social change in its own right. Conversely, the new radicals understood the end of social and political reform to be the improvement of the quality of American culture as a whole, rather than simply a way of equalizing the opportunities for economic self-advancement. It is precisely this confusion of politics and culture, so essential to the new radicalism, that seems to me to betray its origins in the rise of the intellectual class; for such a program, with its suggestion that men of learning occupy or ought to occupy the strategic loci of social control, has an obvious appeal to intellectuals newly conscious of their own common ties and common interests.

This

confusion of politics and culture

is a theme throughout the study and does seem important. The thesis of a status group looking out for its own interests, meanwhile, is quite a bit more cynical and a bit less convincing, even nowadays with the credibility of intellectuals continuing to take a beating.

Half a lifetime later Lasch would admonish "elites" to meet representatives of poor and working class communities on equal democratic footing rather than poaching them for induction into elite circles and thereby robbing their communities of any competent leadership. This I find compelling, but it also raises the question, for me, of what exactly we are to mean by detachment here. It's the same question I have about defining the "aesthetic" outlook as "contemplative." These are loaded terms which plant the writer's flag behind enemy lines while the terms of battle are still being worked out. There's plenty of evasive rhetoric available to the skpetic here: contemplation can be unconscious too, working in the background to put it in brain-as-computer terms; legislators don't need to be (and usually aren't) particularly intellectual but they do need a certain amount of detachment; etc., etc. If these traits are not so exclusive to the intellectual or the aesthete, how can they serve as the defining features? How closely are the functions of the intellectual or the aesthete tied to their styles of engagement?

[xv] The intellectual in his estrangement from the middle class identified himself with other outcasts and tried to look at the world from their point of view. This radical reversal of perspective was still another distinguishing feature of the new radicalism, socialist or progressive. ...

That point of view—the effort to see society from the bottom up, or at least from the outside in—seems to me to account for much of what was valuable and creative in the new radicalism. On the other hand, the very circumstance which made this feat possible—the estrangement of intellectuals, as a class, from the dominant values of American culture—also accounted for what seems to me the chief weakness of the new radicalism, its distrust not only of middle-class culture but of intellect itself. Detachment carried with it a certain defensiveness about the position of intellect (and intellectuals) in American life; and it was this defensiveness, I think, which sometimes prompted intellectuals to forsake the role of criticism and to identify themselves with what they imagined to be the laws of historical necessity and the working out of the popular will.