Social Criticism & Intellectual History

Two recent essay collections give us an opportunity to explore the long-running relationship between social criticism and history. Adam Shatz and George Scialabba both write about politics and literature of the present, but with deep historical consciousness. In their book reviews, reportage, and thought pieces, they seek to lift radical lessons from the past’s presence in contemporary life.

Each is particularly keen to investigate what Shatz calls the “radical imagination.” Shatz does so through journalistic reportage, particularly on the Arabic and French worlds, but also with an awareness of his US American perspective. Scialabba too draws on non-US sources, especially the analyses of European social critics in the Frankfurt School tradition, but like Shatz, he brings things back to US intellectual history and culture. Both Shatz and Scialabba strive to achieve a kind of humble fierceness of thinking about the now that is shaped by an awareness of the then. They seek an agile critical confrontation with the conundrums of modernity infused with history.

Neither Shatz, nor Scialabba believe social criticism can change society easily, but they still see it as a necessary and maybe even an honorable pursuit. “If only arguments moved the world,” Scialabba sighs, realizing how futile social criticism can feel sometimes, even when it is smart and perceptive (xxix). “But of course,” Shatz responds, without realizing he is in dialogue with Scialabba, “We are always, whether we realize it or not, trying to move the needle.” For Shatz, “even those writers who don’t think of themselves as political are driven by a sense of commitment” (12). It is this tension between ineffectuality and persistence that marks both of the writers’ social criticism as it relates to their historical awareness. The possible pointlessness of social criticism (or historical thinking for that matter) is overcome by the decision to do it anyway. A combination of humility and doggedness gives rise to writerly engagements with radicality as a way of being, acting, and thinking in the world.

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Adam Shatz is the US editor of the London Review of Books. He has written about jazz, literature, and Arabic and French politics and culture, among other topics. In Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination, he addresses radicalism not as a static leftwing politics, but rather as an effort to reach to the fundamental roots of things (the actual meaning of the term radical, after all). His goal is not to heroize the figures he encounters, mostly writers from marginalized perspectives who want to get to the bottom of things. Instead, it is to bring a fine-tuned intellectual history to bear on our understandings of their thinking. He wishes to grasp the ideas of these writers who sought to “speak truth to power,” particularly when neither the truth, nor the power they were addressing were simplistic or straightforward.

The art critic John Berger, Shatz informs us, argued that subtlety is the luxury of the privileged. Shatz remains unconvinced. “It seems to me,” he writes “that subtlety and nuance are indispensable tools of criticism. …Irony, skepticism, doubt, and detachment are increasingly treated as expressions of elitism or privilege, but I have always found them to be necessary instruments of radical critique…” (11). So while he avoids more “polemical writing” because of a “conviction that ideologically driven writing usually ended up in bad places,” he remains acutely focused on “commitment.” V.S. Naipaul, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and essayist, told Shatz that one could either be a writer or a missionary, which is to say either a keen observer or a pontifical moralizer, but not both. Shatz is not so sure, however. He decides that “the line between description and advocacy is more porous than we think” (12). Navigating the continuum between the writer and the missionary becomes the work of striving, with history on the mind, to explore the “radical imagination.”

Shatz’s book is divided into four parts. The first explores Arabic intellectuals who, by and large, have sought to become “more modern, but on the down low,” which is how the Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud describes his fellow countrymen (41). Daoud, the author of The Meursault Investigation, an alternative version of Albert Camus’s The Stranger, takes Shatz on a trip through contemporary Algeria as the critic absorbs Daoud’s complex interpretations of his country, from the legacies of French colonialism to the lack of commitment to a shared public life to ongoing struggles between Islamic beliefs and secularism. Shatz is an empathetic listener, taking in Daoud’s ambivalent perspective without trying to constrain his interlocutor to a single position. When it comes to another writer’s more conservative turn during the War on Terror, however, Shatz grows more critical. Without dismissing Fouad Ajamis pro-American and pro-Israel sentiments, he is unafraid to criticize how Ajami’s positions do not hold up well in light of the historical shortcomings of Western interventions in the Middle East.

A heartbreaking essay follows on the Israeli-Palestinian theater activist Juliano Mer-Khamis, who was murdered by a in a Jenin refugee camp after his binational work with his Freedom Theater. Then, by way of reviewing Timothy Brennan’s biography of Edward Said, the Columbia professor and Palestinian activist, Shatz probes Said’s negotiations of his love of Western classics and his anti-Western theory of Orientalism. This combination, Shatz decides, produced an “ethics of complex resistance, not an escape from complexity” on Said’s part (90).

From there, Shatz travels to France, where in essays that usually grew out of book reviews, he probes the lives and work of Richard Wright, Chester Himes, William Gardner Smith, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Houellebecq, Claude Lanzmann, Jean-Pierre Melville, Jean-Paul Sartre and Arwa Salih. He is most moved, in a way, by Barthes, about whom Shatz writes, “he was the only French theorist about who can be said to inspire genuine love…. The joy of reading him is that you always feel you’re in the presence of a friend who accepts your moods and imperfections and sympathizes with your desire not to be pigeonholed” (204). One could say the same about Shatz himself, particularly when he turns to his sophisticated essay on the great novelist and travel writer V.S. Naipaul’s distinction between writers and missionaries, the binary that gives Shatz the title of his book. To be a “writer, who describes things as he or she sees them,” or a “missionary or the advocate, who describes things as he or she wishes they might be under the influence of a party, movement, or cause”: this remains for Shatz the challenge that Naipaul lays out for the social critic (307). Naipaul, famously cranky and critical, wanted to be a writer, but Shatz sees this as a kind of cop out. The radical imagination demands a continual, honest, and frank navigation between writerly observation and missionary recommendation.

The tension between the writer and the missionary surfaces in Shatz’s own efforts to make sense of Algeria. The country’s colonial struggle against France, “made a mockery of my nostalgia for the heroic certainties of anticolonialism and cured me of my lingering Third-Worldism,” Shatz explains (311). History forced him to stop romanticizing the far-away place. “The problems of post-independence Algeria could not be divorced from the history of colonization, but the failures were also homegrown, and they could not all be laid at the foot of France, the native bourgeoisie, or even le pouvoir,” the name for those in power since independence (313). Instead, Shatz was “forced to own up to my own uncertainty and to make it a part of my writing” even though “this is easier said than done” since “readers want to be informed, not given a lecture on the limits of knowledge” (313-314). Nonetheless, drawing on ideas of the Algerian novelist Mouloud Feraoun, Shatz concludes that being honest with history requires a writer to inquire into the unstable nature of key ideas such as liberty, dignity, independence, truth, lies, solutions. One must question them both as abstractions and as they play out in actions and real-world situations. “A writer’s job,” Shatz concludes, “is to ask these questions, even when—especially when—they are inconvenient. And the answers lie in verbs, not in nouns. They lie in the distance, sometimes in the chasm, between words and deed” (316).

The problem for a critic, however, as Shatz points out, is that words are the coin of the realm. “How do we reach the space between the words, when our only way of doing so is through words?” Shatz asks. His answer to this dilemma: “I would suggest it is largely a matter of listening, observing, and describing—with a sense of history, and without false consolations” (320). The social critic must try to record what is happening as honestly as possible, with a keen sense of the past. This means resisting “clichés and stereotypes” and it means avoiding “the missionary temptation to mistake one’s hopes for realities” (320). One must avoid stale formulae and rigid theories for history’s complexities and the ever-changing map of the present they create and be attuned to “dizzying complexity” instead of “comforting logic” (326). Only then can social criticism pursue a truly radical imagination. History, reckoned with in the present, destroys platitudes, even good ones, and demands analysis at its most humble, its most savvy. That’s a good aspiration for writing—and for intellectual history too. As part of what it means to write about the world, interpret it, and maybe, just maybe, try to change it for the better, it turns out that the most effective advocacy work, the best kind of commitment, comes not from missionary zeal, but rather from a continual assessment of the slippery distances between how things are and how they should be.

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“What are intellectuals good for?” George Scialabba asks at the beginning of his recent collection of essays, Only a Voice. For him, what is most crucial about the intellectuals he admires is their “combination of discrimination and democratic passion” (xx). He is most drawn to those figures who, even when they made mistakes (Dwight Macdonald’s pacifism during World War II or Irving Howe’s disdain for the younger New Left radicals of the 1960s), also strived to “orient themselves in a political world without wholehearted partisanship” and “kept their critical antennas pointed in all directions” (xx). He turns to thinkers who, for him, insist that “democracy entails not merely that the people should be governed well but also that the people should govern” (xxi).

For Scialabba, there are no simple answers to questions of discrimination and democracy. “Confusingly,” he points out, “there is no longer a one-to-one correspondence between embracing science and progress, on the one hand, and humane, democratic values on the other” (xxii). Instead, there is a need, as with Shatz’s contentions, to get radical in the sense of trying to get to the root of things. To do so requires a historical perspective brought to bear on social criticism as a reactive force, but also not assenting to the inevitability of certain modes of progress. Social criticism, for Scialabba, requires the careful weighing of past and present, tradition and modernity, preservation and transformation.

His book is divided into three parts: essays on the problem with progress as a concept and a politics, essays on the legacies of the left, and essays on the role of the critic. There is a conservative streak to Scialabba, but not in opposition to the radical imagination; rather, in service of it. How, he asks again and again, did modernity get off track, or maybe better put, stay too firmly on track in its insistence on forward motion at all costs? What might be a way to suture stability to equality, balance to democracy, and continuity to change? Figures such as Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, Isaiah Berlin, Ivan Illich, Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald, I.F. Stone, Pier Paolo Passolini, Leszek Kolakowski, Edmund Wilson, Ellen Willis, Christopher Lasch, Vivian Gornick, and even conservatives such as Hilton Kramer (no relation to the author) and Roger Kimball become intellectuals for Scialabba’s own questioning of any uncomplicated path to radical progress. “I have learned, with some reluctance,” he writes in an essay entitled “Progress and Prejudice,” “how readily things go wrong, how ingeniously progress can be faked” (12). An emancipated radicalism is not merely the abandonment of a backwards conservatism, it turns out. Instead, for Scialabba, the social critic (a “citizen-critic” he calls himself at one point, 228) must discern a warping dialectic between past and present, between the resources of the old and the much-needed emancipation from its chains.

The best parts of Only a Voice take up the challenge of imagining a radical future that might be chastened by history’s tragic weight. Scialabba is no anti-modernist in a simple sense. “Of course,” he writes, “no one wants—or at any rate will admit wanting—to roll back modernity altogether” (67). Even antimodernists want the dentist to fix their cavities. At the same time, it is important to identify modernity’s most pernicious effects. These range from a mindless focus on technological solutions for political and social and personal problems to a failure to grasp the forces of both market and state expertise weakening the capacities of citizens to think and work for themselves. To be sure, Scialabba resolutely rejects recent forms of conservatism, which in various libertarian and fundamentalist tones, also clang the cracked bell of antimodernism. No Cato or Claremont Institute for him. After all, he points out, today’s reactionaries are often the utmost revolutionaries, wanting to destroy everything in their path in a kind of infantile fantasy of a lost past. We can’t make America great again, he knows, because it never was great to begin with. Nonetheless, for Scialabba, this does not mean that modernity defined as progress at all costs will suffice for a radical way forward.

Scialabba wants us to notice that liberals and the left in the US have also often come up short in their efforts to make progress toward what would make for a more humane and flourishing society. Most have emphasized the delivery of expertise and services to a passive citizenry rather than developing stronger foundations for a common life shared by independent, autonomous individuals. Managerial administration of the good society, Scialabba explains by way of a marvelous essay on the complicated historian and social critic Christopher Lasch, is no good society at all. Modernization without some type of humility shaped by historical awareness and insistence on “human scale” interaction by rough equals “was not the solution but a new form of the problem—the problem, that is, of domination” (89).

Others on the left, Scialabba contends, have turned to an emphasis on cultural freedom, sexual liberation, and economic abundance as the way forward. Smash the patriarchy, they declare, but in doing so end up unintentionally in league with capitalism’s goal of melting all that is solid into air. For Scialabba, thinkers such as one of Lasch’s fiercest critics, the radical feminist Ellen Willis (herself one of the best essayists to read on the topic of the radical imagination, whether one agrees entirely with her or not), are worth listening to carefully even if he ultimately disagrees with her perspective. Reacting to the constraints on women in patriarchal culture, economics, and politics, Willis called for a left-wing libertarianism that would say goodbye to all that. Radical freedom, for her, was to be found in taking the leisure culture of modern consumer capitalism to the max. “The impulse to buy a new car and tool down the freeway with the radio blasting rock and roll,” she wrote, “is not unconnected to the impulse to fuck outside marriage, get high, stand up to men or white people or bosses, join dissident movements.”[1] A psychic revolution of pleasure, an “overflow of happiness, not the bitter fruit of self-denial” was the path to a radical future.[2]

Scialabba sees the attraction, but he is not so sure this is the way forward. “Imagination itself,” he argues, “is an evolutionary adaptation, whereby we master a threatening environment when young by binding or investing fantasy within nearby entities—parents, neighborhood, church, ethnic group.” For Scialabba, “these intense primary identifications can and should be gradually left behind, but they cannot be skipped, on pain of shallowness, instability, and—paradoxically—an inability later in life to stand firm against authority” (196). To Scialabba, Willis’s radical critique makes perfect sense, but her radical solution is less convincing. He prefers her focus on “tough-minded analysis” to her embrace of gleeful libidinous pleasure as a potential strategy of action, turning to no less a figure than Michel Foucault to make his case: “We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power,” Foucault remarked (196).[3] Scialabba agrees.

Willis herself would give the relationship of sex to power and feminism to capitalism more serious thought throughout her career, but she continued, for the most part, to locate conservatism within a larger history of patriarchy and its subordination of women. Scialabba, by contrast, believes there might be elements of conservative thinking beyond the patriarchy alone. These, he thinks, are worth preserving, or at least not dismissing outright. “As the global economy and mass culture lay siege to inwardness,” he writes, “plough up our psychic root system, and alter the very grain and contour of our being, conservation increasingly becomes a radical imperative” (196). He sees Willis’s point that “premodern cruelties and superstitions still bulk large,” particularly when they manifest in the fears of women and the fantasies of domination to be found in patriarchal thinking. For Scialabba, Willis’s “left-wing libertarianism is still the best answer” to these ills, but he decides that “to recognize the subtler entrapments of modernity requires, however, another variety of radical imagination” (197).

What would this variety be? For Scialabba, a model is to be found in the writings found in Dwight Macdonald’s politics magazine during the fraught years of the 1940s. “Some of the most remarkable radicals of the time were also contributors,” he notes, naming, Albert Camus, Simone Weil, Nicola Chairomonte, Victor Serge, Paul Goodman, George Woodcock, and George Orwell. What did they offer? They were, Scialabba writes, “morally fastidious, ideologically heterodox, and fed up with brutality and propaganda, both official and oppositional.” To Scialabba, “they made a program and an ideology of honesty.” Overall, “it was an impractical program and they accomplished nothing, but their writing illuminated those dark times better than anyone else’s” (222). The radical imagination, as Scialabba sees it, requires a combination of openness and probity, a willingness to engage, at times, ideas that at first might seem wrong or misguided and, simultaneously, an insistence on calling out actions that are flat-out incorrect, cruel, and harmful. Perhaps most of all, social criticism for him becomes “impractical,” but this is alright. Its value is in shining a light on the world’s many problems and perhaps proposing some possible answers, even if it cannot really solve them decisively.

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For both Shatz and Scialabba, decisiveness is required, of course, when the stakes of moral clarity are involved, however they both model a form of social criticism that seeks not so much to proselytize as to analyze. Essays are not policy papers, after all. They rarely offer a “program,” concrete steps to take, or action items (as managerial-speak now calls to-do lists). There is no precise agenda other than the general pursuit of honest judgment, a heightened sense of irony, ambiguity, and complexity, and, in the end, a striving for ethical clarity and humane principles. History, particularly the history of ideas, becomes a requirement for this approach. It deepens commentary on contemporary times.

The social critic, aware of history, is also then in some sense able to make history: not in the sense of changing anything at the point of a pen (or the tap of a computer keyboard), but rather by insisting upon a combination of immersive solidarity and comradely, distanced critique. The ability to see, even when what one glimpses remains fraught, vexing, or unclear, is what social criticism inflected by intellectual history might give us. To get to the roots of things by way of the radical imagination and historical consciousness also turns out to be a way, perhaps, to ascend to the highest branches—of knowledge, maybe even of wisdom. At the very least, good social criticism is able to take stock of both the forest and the trees. From there, as in the best moments of writing by Shatz and Scialabba, we maybe get a glimpse out of the thicket.

[1] Ellen Willis, Beginning to See the Light: Sex, Hope, and Rock and Roll (1981; reprint, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England/Wesleyan University Press, 1992), xvi.

[2] Ellen Willis, Don’t Think, Smile!: Notes on a Decade of Denial (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2000, 28.

[3] The quotation comes from Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), 157.