Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class stands as a testament to both insightful social commentary and an unquestioning dogmatism of its contents in everyday academic discourse which verges on the commonsensical. Written at a time when the excesses of so-called late capitalism or postmodernity could scarcely be imagined by even the most gifted of social critics, Veblen’s belligerent and bombastic volume shatters the idyllic ambiance of the era with a scathing critique reaching back through the historical development of leisure and barbaric culture, as well as, unintentionally perhaps, into the future of consumer society. So powerful were his statements that one can even find mainstream media outlets parroting the famous concept of conspicuous consumption as they simultaneously peddle advertising slots to companies moving products through the ideological reflections of what consumption of these products might blissfully entail (a beautiful woman suddenly being interested in a geeky young chap just for using a body spray, for example). The empirical relevance of the concept in contemporary society is puzzlingly remarkable considering the original volume, as Veblen wrote it, is bereft of any empirical or theoretical citations, justified by the author by invoking the commonsensicality of the historical and empirical data, but also the onto-epistemological foundations on which Veblen’s thought rests.

But conspicuous consumption, what I consider the most politically salient concept in the book, has become conspicuous enough in everyday parlance to warrant a second look. The unreflexive usage of the term in both the academy and the media obscures, in my opinion, the critical insight that such practices reveal about consumer capitalism both historically and contemporarily. As a point of departure, this essay critically analyzes The Theory of the Leisure Class through the prism of Adorno’s critique of the book, which has largely been overlooked in assessments of Veblen’s sociological contributions. Even work comparing the two theorists in the tradition of “consumer critiques” have failed to take into account Adorno’s criticism of Veblen (Schor 2007), which would undoubtedly pull the rug from under commentators building careers off of condemning Adorno’s culture critique envisioning a functionalized cultural dope blindly consuming due to some false consciousness and superstructural reflection of the economic base. Adorno’s treatment of Veblen, in other words, provides analysts of consumer culture both a developed critique of Veblen’s foundational logic and the blind spots that develop from a strict adherence to said foundations, as well as a more penetrating appropriation of Veblen by transcending the simplistic reduction of his thought typically proffered by academicians building their niche.

Veblen’s thesis is quite easily grasped and the general framework he employs clearly develops in the first few chapters. His contention is rather simple in light of the profundity associated with it: contemporary society emerges from historically conditioned institutions that separate people according to their relationship with economic production—a proposition with similarities to that of Marx. But Veblen pushes further noting that the leisure class is an institution that gestates and develops from within lower barbaric culture until it reaches maturity in industrial society so as to be full-blown condition of the contemporary social system. Members of the leisure class owe their existence to those who labor in the production of subsistence goods and necessities, freeing them from the burden of labor, associated by Veblen with the creation of private property and ownership (1994:16). Possession of property becomes a sign of prestige necessitating a method by which it is evaluated, namely via exchange. From its incipient stages, then, possession functions as a symbolic method of distinction which ossifies through continued and normalized relations of exchange that become morally sanctioned. From this constant evaluation and valuation of what others possess and regularized exchange, Veblen draws the conclusion that visible success, particularly in goods, becomes its own end and forms the foundation for “utility as a basis of esteem” (1994:10). Rational choice, instilled through the mechanism of evaluation and subsequent invidiousness, becomes the general structure of decision making, which latches on to the so-called instinct of workmanship that Veblen takes as a natural condition of the human species.

As the theory develops, Veblen increasingly comes to differentiate between utility derived from industrial activity and utility derived from pecuniary ostentation, which becomes the expression of total domination. Conspicuous leisure is the first concept employed that highlights this bifurcation of capital forms, as Adorno calls it (1967:83). The ability to meet subsistence needs through non-productive means simultaneously devalues labor while imbuing leisure with prestige and power. As Veblen puts it, “Conspicuous abstention from labour therefore becomes the conventional mark of superior pecuniary achievement and the conventional index of reputability” (1994: 25). To be clear, Veblen considers leisure to be the non-productive use of time, or more clearly a waste of it. Waste, in Veblen’s book, best characterizes his critical use of the term “conspicuous” throughout, or as he declares: “In order to be reputable it must be wasteful. No merit would accrue from the consumption of the bare necessaries of life, except by comparison with the abjectly poor who fall short even of the subsistence minimum” (1994: 60). Conspicuous leisure is the ostentatious waste of time just as conspicuous consumption represents the waste of human productive capacity into the creation of objects which bear no real benefit to the one that consumes it—essentially anything consumed above subsistence level.

The importance of conspicuous leisure in the scheme of Veblen’s theory is that its historical appearance coincides with the refinement of tastes and the hierarchical organization of prestige as a semiotic system of distinction, which surely factored into Bourdieu’s treatment of class and prestige in Distinction (1984; see Trigg 2001). The differences are obvious enough, however, as the entirety of Veblen’s conspicuousness thesis revolves around the proximity to laboring activity. Conspicuous consumption, perhaps the most famous concept lifted from Veblen’s work, explicitly fuses prestige and status with the consumption of luxuries “directed to the comfort of the consumer himself, and is, therefore, a mark of the master” (1994:45). Luxuries, goods that dispense with any claims to subsistence, become markers of distinction and refinement as people attempt to emulate the leisure class that consumes them. The following chapters detail how such arrangements are possible, citing examples of the development of manners, landscaping, dog breeds, dress and uniform, and so on. Veblen’s critique hinges on puritanical enshrinement of labor cum expression of morality, and an equally evangelical denunciation of any activity removed from productive (read: required for subsistence) labor or its immediate reproduction. The predatory instinct that drives the irrational exploitation visible in modern society is nothing other than a vestige of history lagging behind technological and material changes, destined to evolve eventually, when the institution changes.

Perhaps it is difficult to fathom the implications of Veblen’s theory, particularly when we reduce its purview to the invidious machinations of “keeping up with the Jones’s.” Theodor Adorno, himself a widely cited cultural critic often reduced to a monochromatic reading of the “culture industry,” in one of his most penetrating essays on culture and society, critically evaluates the totality of Veblen’s commentary with the scathing dialectical criticism for which he was known. As I mentioned, reviewing Adorno on Veblen not only provides us with a frame through which we can examine Veblen’s claims, but such a move also gives voice to an Adorno who envisions the consumption of goods as being motivated by something more than ideological compulsion or superstructural determinism.

Adorno begins his analysis by highlighting what he sees as Veblen’s onto-epistemological foundations and sources: 1) Evolutionary school of American Pragmatism as the cornerstone of a theory of adjustment, 2) the content of which is furnished by the early school of Positivism (Comte, Saint Simon, Spencer), and 3) Marx and the theory of commodity fetishism, which in the end Adorno characterizes as an amalgam of positivism and historical materialism (1967:76-8). Adorno praises Veblen’s for insightfully recognizing the importance of consumption long before other social scientists, by focusing on “not the political economy of bourgeois society seen in terms of its foundations but the uneconomic life of that society” (Adorno 1967:77). It is his keen contribution of pseudo-uniqueness to consumption theory, long before the historical predominance of the culture industry, which Adorno admires so much in Veblen’s book.

While the similarities don’t end there, it is at this point in which the two diverge. For instance, due to Veblen’s puritanical insistence on productive labor as the supreme good and his abhorrence of ostentation and frivolity in consumption, Adorno contends that, for Veblen, culture is nothing more than kitsch rather than kitsch being a part of culture. “For him all culture becomes the distorted image of naked horror… Culture, which today has assumed the character of advertising, was never anything… but advertising” (Adorno 1967:79). The Veblen Adorno reads is a misanthropic curmudgeon, one who can only perceive “the bloody traces of injustice even in images of happiness” (79). Adorno, often portrayed as a cultural elitist, problematizes Veblen’s analysis on the grounds that it trivializes necessary consumption as pure utility and disavows non-utilitarian forms of consumption.

Another point of contention is the thesis of cultural lag and the predatory spirit. Sports, in particular, become the vehicle for demonstrating vestiges of barbaric, predatory culture in the present, whereby the condition of physical domination prevails as a form of entertainment and diversion in Veblen. Adorno, however, sees in sports the highest forms of contemporary totalitarianism combining cruelty, aggression, authoritarianism, and a strict observance of rules, both the condition of barbarism and the subjugation of the self to its requirements as the perfect metaphor of modernity in practice (1967:80). Veblen’s predatory spirit is predicated on doling out punishment and pain to others, while Adorno envisages a banal and contemporary sadomasochism of excessive brutality to others and a desire for pain to be inflicted on the self. The invidious and unjust mechanisms that Veblen excoriates as cultural lag, whereby barbarism trumps a natural instinct productiveness and rational utilitarianism get turned on their head by Adorno, dramatically revealed as the engines of modern society and its attendant terrorism.

It would, therefore, strike unsuspecting readers as odd that Adorno’s most penetrating point of contention revolves around the issue of happiness. Adorno claims that Veblen only pays lip service to the “fullness of life,” which he essentially reduces to a strong work ethic and frugality. Adorno mentions that Veblen’s “image of society is based not on the ideal of happiness but that of work,” and that “while he never tires of attacking taboos, his criticism stops at the sacredness of work” (1967:83). By lacking a concept of totality and a dialectical method, Veblen reduces all consumption to pure functionalism: it either is productive and useful for reproducing life or its use is embodied in a symbolic system of invidiousness and distinction, akin to Pierre Bourdieu’s prognostications. In his most illuminating statement on the subject, Adorno, criticizing Veblen’s morality of work and distaste for wasteful exuberance, claims:

“But the happiness that man actually finds cannot be separated from conspicuous consumption. There is no happiness which does not promise to fulfill a socially constituted desire, but there is also none which does not promise something qualitatively different in this fulfillment… Even the commodity fetishist who has succumbed to conspicuous consumption to the point of obsession participates in the truth-content of happiness.”  (1967:87)

The residual truth content of consumption, the happiness it has the potential to impart, remains even if we reduce consumption to a purely functional demonstration of power and prestige.

In the end, Veblen’s Leisure Class remains canonical for various reasons in various disciplines. Its insights presaged the rising importance of consumption studies throughout the Twentieth Century. Even so, the dogmatic acceptance of “conspicuous consumption” in many quarters of social science and popular media remains problematic, as it essentially reduces consumption to a semiotic functionalism. Such a system of signs is predicated on an assumption that all nonsubsistence and even necessary consumption is driven by a need to emulate others, whereby the currency and measure of such practices is the functional differentiation of people into a division of labor—the further from necessary labor one is, the more prestigious they will be. Objects get placed into this symbolic matrix under similar definitional criteria: the further from bare subsistence its use is removed, the more highly appraised the object will be considered. This is why Adorno considers Veblen’s critique an attack against culture, because it takes culture as a total condition of oppression and refuses to evaluate it by any other measure. Adorno’s critique, however, blossoms from the seeds Veblen plants, opening up culture and consumption to a variety of motivations and impulses, of which emulation and invidiousness remain important dimensions. Adorno, who sees Veblen clinging to a Rousseau-ian celebration of the primitive, locates Veblen’s utopia in the past due to his adherence to positivistic rigor and insistence on the primacy of scarcity and adjustment, which preserve the relations of power. Closing with a discussion of method and potential, Adorno highlights the essential difference between Veblen’s positivism and dialectics: “Today, adjustment to what is possible no longer means adjustment; it means making the possible real” (1967:94); the world remains a field of possibilities for the realization of a culture less barbaric and predatory than the one Veblen repudiates.

Work Cited

Adorno, Theodor W. 1967. “Veblen’s Attack on Culture.” Pp. 73-94 in Prisms, edited by T. W. Adorno. Trans. By S. Weber and S. Weber. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of  the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Schor, Juliet B. 2007. “In Defense of Consumer Critique: Revisiting the Consumption Debates of the Twentieth Century.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political Science. 611:16-30.

Trigg, Andrew B. 2001. “Veblen, Bourdieu, and Conspicuous Consumption.” Journal of Economic Issues. 35(1):99-115.

Veblen, Thorstein. 1994. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Dover Publications.

Robert Fenton is a Doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at George Mason University.  

Thorstein Veblen’s greatest conceptual achievement was conspicuous consumption, a term that has passed into general common sense. But on my reading, his discussion of conspicuous leisure resonated more with the contemporary moment. These terms are, of course, interrelated: for Veblen, conspicuous consumption serves to indicate one’s conspicuous leisure time, and therefore the absence of any need to produce. Both amount to displays of waste:

“…the utility of both alike for the purposes of reputability lies in the element of waste that is common to both. In the one case it is a waste of time and effort, in the other it is a waste of goods. Both are methods of demonstrating the possession of wealth, and the two are conventionally accepted as equivalents” (53).

Veblen saw conspicuous consumption of goods eclipsing conspicuous leisure: as goods grew more numerous, and as the “instinct to workmanship” mitigated any advances in noble indolence, conspicuous leisure would be overtaken by conspicuous consumption. But he overstated the case, particularly when consumerism is as full of “experiences” as objects. From paintball to cooking classes to luxury cruises, 21st century leisure is a fully documented, and therefore comparative, pursuit. Curated on Flickr and Facebook for public display, they are, to use Veblen’s characteristically caustic mode of understatement, conspicuous wastes of time all of them.

The need to re-evaluate conspicuous leisure emerges at a point where consumption is being rebranded. Under the weight of negative broadsides against alienation, wastefulness, and exploitation, conspicuous consumption, particularly among the 21st century leisure class, has slid into its dialectical complement: conspicuous underconsumption. Efficient cars, low-carbon diets, vegan muffins – these goods vaunt not their waste but their conspicuous lack of it. The regime of self-abnegation of the contemporary ruling class, its desires to simplify lifestyles, return to authenticity in the form of natural, recycled, and otherwise “ethical” products, is transparently the same old madness in new clothes: Steve Jobs’ simple and casual turtleneck.

Leisure, a social practice and not an object, underpins this kind of conspicuous ethical consumption. But rather than take leisure at Veblen’s word, we should bring a few more points of view to the table to enrich our understanding of leisure. A series of radical critiques of leisure emerged in the century after Veblen, with analysis sharply at odds with his own pronouncements. Leisure, rather than waste, was understood as an actual part of the labor process, an essential function of workers under consumer capitalist economies. In a late essay, Theodor Adorno dubbed free time “a continuation of the forms of profit-oriented social life” (189). Industries commercialized leisure, making free time “nothing more than a shadowy continuation of labour” (194). The Situationists similarly pointed out that leisure exists “in an uneasy and admiring submission to the requirements and consequences of the production system”: “Thus, what is referred to as a ‘liberation from work,’ namely the modern increase in leisure time, is neither a liberation of work itself nor a liberation from the world shaped by this kind of work” (Debord 26). Leisure is an empty fetish, an impoverished, alienated husk of what it promises to be, and what it once was for the privileged few.

What is interesting about Veblen’s take is how little the essential content of leisure matters to his analysis. Whether an alienated commodity or a fully authentic creative experience, the relevant measure of leisure is that it is comparative, competitive – it therefore must be conspicuous. Adorno, remarking upon the “hobbyist” artist that “What they create has something superfluous about it,” which for him indicates “the inferior quality of the product” (193). For Veblen, this superfluity is precisely the point, as a demonstration of the measure of one’s independence from productive work.

And so a tension between the two positions emerges: what is the nature of the “productivity” of leisure that so disturbs Adorno and Debord, and appears as leisure’s competitive aspect to Veblen? It is a specific kind of work itself. Veblen’s division of labor is a primarily a performative one. Certain occupations lend themselves particularly well to displays of inutility: cultural ones such as religion, artistry, and, with a dose of self-reflective irony, scholarship. Productivity in these cases is measured by “immaterial goods”:

“The criteria of a past performance of leisure therefore commonly take the form of ‘immaterial’ goods. Such immaterial evidences of past leisure are quasi-scholarly or quasi-artistic accomplishments and a knowledge of processes and incidents which do not conduce directly to the furtherance of human life” (29).

In other words, knowledge of trivia, connoisseurship, and endeavors into art-making take on the characteristic of goods used in performative display. Other personal attributes — “manners and breeding, polite usage, decorum, and formal and ceremonious observances generally” – work in a similar fashion. Knowledge of the obscure, a distinct bend towards the artistic, a mastery of codes for social interaction – what Veblen describes sounds uncannily like the 21^st century figure of the hipster.[1] As Mark Greif describes it,

The hipster is that person, overlapping with the intentional dropout or the unintentionally declassed individual—the neo-bohemian, the vegan or bicyclist or skatepunk, the would-be blue-collar or postracial twentysomething, the starving artist or graduate student—who in fact aligns himself both with rebel subculture and with the dominant class, and thus opens up a poisonous conduit between the two.

What is crucial for Greif, for all his begrudging affection, is that the hipster appropriates the practices of oppositional cultures in ways that open them up to the kind of commodification bemoaned by Adorno and Debord. And similarly, Greif concludes his essay with a yearning for hipsters to pursue this opposition authentically, via politics, rather than through consumption. But we should push his description in another direction, and see hipsters not merely as conspicuous consumers, as Greif does, but also as workers engaged in productive activity. Rather than classify hipsters as a form of consumer, we might appropriate another definition: that of the “creative class” of culture workers described by Richard Florida, whose chief function is developing new avenues of consumption, including leisure.

Take, for example, a work from the poster child of hipster literature, Tao Lin. The plot of Shoplifting From American Apparel, whose main character Sam is clearly autobiographical, is certainly suffused with apparently non-productive consumption of time. The book opens with Sam awaking at 3:30 PM and chatting online with a friend. “You know those people that get up every day, and do things,” the friend muses. “And like get things done, and never quit their jobs. Those people suck” (14). Here is a clear echo of what Veblen identifies as the leisure class’s “sense of the unworthiness of productive work” (28). “We get shit done too,” Sam protests, “Look at our books.” “I know, but that brings in no money.” This ambivalent relationship to productive labor lurks in the background of Lin’s book. Sam gets a job at a vegan restaurant, but doesn’t do any work outside of showing up to a company party. He shoplifts, less out of need than from boredom. The rest of the plot floats listlessly between beds and parties in an ether of flat affect.

Shoplifting ends with Sam in Florida, watching bands at a house party. He has been invited to give a reading. In the book’s last lines, a girl asks him what he wanted to be when he grew up. “Marine biologist,” he replies. And so a book of leisure is bookended by commentaries on work. Indeed, Sam’s life of idleness is a kind of work itself, the labor required of artists who must also be hipsters, who must conspicuously consume leisure in order to produce valuable immaterial goods in a competitive marketplace. Sam’s voluminous online chatting occurs while he pecks away at some poetry; the parties he attend raise his profile among celebrities and cognoscenti; his trip to Florida one of business, not pleasure, at least not exclusively. The autobiographical nature of the book works along these lines as well: Sam’s exploits in petty thievery are lifted in exact detail from Lin’s own life – shoplifting becomes the groundwork for the plot of Lin’s novel, a kind of creative labor. Sam is an updated version of Paul Auster’s author-characters, but rather than emphasizing the isolation of writing, Sam shows the transformation of cultural work into that of conspicuous leisure.

In the dialectical transformation of leisure into labor, the hipster becomes worker by way of conspicuous, compulsory, wastes of time. The creative class is one that is perpetually on the clock, the collapse of the distinction between labor and leisure that the Situationists demanded realized in perverse form. But if indeed the hipster works, then in what sense does the term “leisure class” actually apply?

Here Veblen’s account of vicarious leisure is most instructive. According to Veblen, “there arises a subsidiary or derivative leisure class, whose office is the performance of a vicarious leisure for the behoof of the reputability of the primary or legitimate leisure class” (37). He is describing the servant classes of the wealthy, who engage in non-industrious pursuits such as gardening and taking care of animals, often in an ostentatious uniform. Today they are known as the service sector. “[T]he leisure of the servant class exempt from productive labour is in some sort a performance exacted from them, and is not normally or primarily directed to their own comfort. The leisure of the servant is not his own leisure” (38). So in effect there are two leisure classes: a legitimate ruling class and its low-paid near-parodic imitation. And so we might consider two types of hipster: those trendsetters who have no need for remunerative work – think of the billionaire Olsen twins as style icons, Seagram’s heir Ben Bronfman starting bands and record labels. And then there are the less-well-off creatives consigned to the service sector until they “make it”: waiting tables until their acting career takes off, doing graphic design work until the DJ gigs pay the rent, sponging off credit cards and student loans during the rough patches. Their leisure is their work, and their (poorly paid) work is leisure, and this all stems from the necessity of pecuniary emulation of the true leisure class. It’s a sad state of affairs — for Veblen, nothing more than advanced barbarism.

Endnote

[1] Veblen even refers to the fad for “limited edition” books among the leisure class (99), which echoes the similar hipster craze for limited edition books, records, clothes, etc.

Work Cited

Adorno, Theodor. “Free Time” in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Trans. London: Routledge. 2001. pp. 1987-197.

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1995.

Lin, Tao. Shoplifting from American Apparel. New York: Melville House, 2009.

Veblen, Thorstein. Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Dover Publications, 1994.

Gavin Mueller is a Doctoral Student in the Cultural Studies Program at George Mason University.

Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class sets out very specific definitions of words that we think we understand, use on a regular basis, and for which believe we know the definitions. However, Veblen challenges these assumptions, providing us with a new set of terms such, as “conspicuous consumption” and “vicarious leisure” as well as new definitions for familiar words and phrases that we thought we understood.  One of these terms, and the definition that he gives for it, in many ways determines the entire text: “leisure.” The Oxford English Dictionary provides us with a definition of this word that would have been in place when Veblen was writing at the turn of the last century. The dictionary defines the word this way: “The state of having time at one’s own disposal; time which one can spend as one pleases; free or unoccupied time.” However, Veblen demonstrates how our society, in particular our capitalist, pecuniary society, has altered our understanding of this word as it has warped our understanding of what is often considered its opposite: work.

Similarly, German philosopher and theologian Josef Pieper expresses concern for the societal twisting of the terms “work” and “leisure.” In his text Leisure, The Basis of Culture he also challenges our definition of the term “leisure” as the opposite of work as well as how we choose to spend our “leisure time.” For Pieper it is not simply “free or unoccupied time;” rather, it is time spent well and thoughtfully, time in the true art of celebration…and the complete opposite not of work, but of time wasted, that is of idle time.

Both authors reveal the distortion that leisure has taken on in light of a capitalist society in which we have lost any healthy relationship to work or money and so fall victim to Veblen’s “conspicuous consumption.” Veblen was critical of what he terms the leisure class, what we might now call, borrowing a term from the Occupy Movement, “the one percent,” but Pieper’s critique is more pressing for the rest of us, reminding us that how we understand the term “leisure” as a society dictates the health of the entire society as does the way that we spend our leisure time. It is not with merely “the one percent” that either Veblen or Pieper is concerned. Rather, it is how our definitions of “leisure”, which for Veblen can be seen most clearly in the leisure class itself, have warped and twisted our societal understanding of what it means to be a human being.

However, for Veblen and Pieper alike, the understanding of leisure is rooted in an understanding of sacred gesture. Velben sees good manners as sacred symbols indicative of “conspicuous leisure” very much connected to wealth and his “conspicuous consumption.” For Pieper, true, healthy leisure is rooted in celebration, and particularly in religious celebrations. Together their critiques of our social working definition of the term “leisure” point out the flaws inherent in our thinking and the dehumanization we express in our twisted “sacred” expressions.

Pieper begins his essay by providing the ancient Western definition of leisure:

“…for leisure in Greek is skole, and in Latin scola, the English ‘school’. The word used to designate the place where we educate and teach is derived from a word which means ‘leisure’. ‘School’ does not properly mean school, but leisure” (19-20). Such a definition immediately challenges our modern idea of leisure time as empty, frivolous space in our otherwise busy, work-filled schedules. Here, leisure is inherently connected to education and learning, to activity and thought. But Pieper further pushes this idea explaining that it is not just our understanding of leisure that is the problem; it is also our understanding of work. He explains, “The original conception of leisure, as it arose in the civilized world of Greece, has, however, become unrecognizable in the world of planned diligence and ‘total labor’; and in order to gain a clear notion of leisure we must begin by setting aside the prejudice—our prejudice—that comes from overvaluing the sphere of work” (20). By “total labor” he is referring to “a world of nothing but work” (20), our world which he contrasts to the Greek conception that “leisure [rather than work] is the center-point about which everything revolves” (21) as even the word for “work” demonstrates: “ ‘To be unleisurely’—that is the word the Greeks used not only for the daily toil and moil of life, but for the ordinary everyday work. Greek only has the negative, a-scolia…” (21). Such vocabulary implies a society much more focused on leisure, skole, than work. Indeed Pieper quotes Aristotle’s famous statement, “We work in order to have leisure,” by recasting it closer to its original terms: “We are unleisurely in order to have leisure” (20). This recasting also refocuses the conversation at its true center— not work, but leisure.

But none of this makes much sense until we see what Pieper actually means by leisure. What he does not mean is idleness, restlessness or sloth and actually links sloth in particular to an unhealthy attitude towards both work and leisure. Citing the Middle Ages he explains, “…sloth and restlessness, ‘leisurelessness’, the incapacity to enjoy leisure, were all closely connected; sloth was held to be the source of restlessness, and the ultimate cause of ‘work for work’s sake’” (43). He further links idleness to not only an unhealthy relationship to work and true leisure but to humanity itself: “Idleness…means that a man renounces the claim implicit in his human dignity” (43). It is this idea of human dignity that becomes essential to Pieper’s understanding of leisure and work. And becomes the point of connection between Pieper’s thought and Veblen’s.

Veblen’s entire text is focused on “the leisure class” but it might be better to refer to this group of people as “the idle class” or “the idle rich” which is more traditional. As the group of people he describes are, precisely due to their idleness, and in particular their conspicuous idleness, unable to engage in true leisure. It is not true leisure that Veblen seems to have a problem with. Rather it is demonstrative, flaunted, envied idleness, an idleness that Pieper claims diminishes human dignity, a theme that recurs throughout Veblen’s text as he references women and the service class, in many ways the victims of “conspicuous” and “vicarious” leisure. However, nowhere is this critique clearer than in his chapter titled “Conspicuous Leisure.”

In this chapter, Veblen explains that the most pressing imperative of the leisure class “is the requirement of abstention from productive work” (28) as “labour is felt to be debasing” (29). Such an understanding of both work and leisure exemplifies the unhealthy relationship that our society has to both of them, which Pieper has attempted to point out in contrast to the Ancient Greek notions. Work itself, that unleisurely activity that Pieper mentions becomes debasing rather than humanizing and leisure become mere idleness. But what is most interesting in both Pieper and Veblen’s texts is that these ideas take on a spiritual dimension.

Veblen develops this idea by acknowledging that a capitalist society perceives a certain ugliness to work: “It is felt by all persons of refined taste that a spiritual contamination is inseparable from certain offices that are conventionally required of servants” (29). Two things stand out in this quotation. The first is that Veblen alludes to “persons of refined taste” which in many ways sets the tone of the entire chapter, which will end with a discussion of manners and their role in a pecuniary society as defining those among the upper classes. And it seems that only these people, with their correct manner and idleness, and of course money, are able to see the contaminating quality of work. And this becomes part of the problem of conspicuous leisure. Any truly productive activity becomes debasing, and therefore the upper classes are able to see the lower, the workers, as less than human and somehow lacking in dignity. This is seen most clearly in Veblen’s discussion of women and the lower classes as the original objects of ownership (39-40).

The second idea that stands out here is Veblen’s use of the term “spiritual.” Veblen is not particularly fond of religion and this emerges in this text in its full force later on. However, in this chapter he makes several references to spiritual or liturgical ideas, usually negatively. Nonetheless, his use of these terms to describe social interactions is profound as it implies that capitalism itself somehow functions on a spiritual level. This begins to become more apparent as the text continues to describe the attitude of the leisure class:

“…vulgarly productive occupations are unhesitatingly condemned and avoided. They are incompatible with life on a satisfactory spiritual plane—with ‘high thinking.’…a degree of leisure and of exemption from contact with such industrial processes…has ever been recognized by thoughtful men as a prerequisite to a worthy or beautiful, or even a blameless, human life. In itself and in its consequences the life of leisure is beautiful and ennobling in all civilized men’s eyes.” (29)

Thus Veblen establishes a religious and moral dimension to the roles of work and leisure within a pecuniary society, pointing out as well that such roles are determined by “civilized men’s eyes” which leads directly into his discussion of manners, and it is here that his language takes on a particularly religious tone in relation to human dignity. He explains, “Manners presently came…to be possessed of a substantial utility in themselves; they acquired a sacramental character in great measure independent of the facts which they originally prefigured….good breeding is…an integral feature of the worthy human soul” (36).

Giving good manners the weight of a sacramental character once again gives the discussion not only a religious dimension but also gives manners a particular symbolic quality as sacraments are more than symbols. They carry a heavier weight theologically, as they “symbolize and make present the graces” which they represent (Catechism 1131). In Veblen’s analysis these manners not only reflect conspicuous leisure, as only someone with ample idle time (and so money) can master them—or even care about them—they also perpetuate the same pecuniary culture and emulation. As Veblen explains, “The knowledge and habit of good form come only by long-continued use…because good breeding requires time, application, and expense, and can therefore not be compassed by those whose time and energy are taken up with work….acquiring accomplishments that are of no lucrative effect” (36). So for Veblen manners are another reflection of conspicuous leisure and so of wealth and connected not to true leisure, as Pieper defines it, but to what is better termed “idleness.” This is especially evident in the last part of the above quotation, which concerns “accomplishments of no lucrative effect.” These manners do not produce anything, one of the constant critiques Veblen makes of the leisure class. So in this lack of production they once again reveal a type of wealth that need not work for monetary gain, but can instead pursue idle, demonstrative gestures. But gestures that somehow take on a sacred weight in this religion of conspicuous consumption.

It is this consumption of time that is at the heart of society’s misconception of leisure. Veblen explains, “…the greater the consumption of time and substance impliedly involved in [manners’] acquisition, the greater the resultant good repute” (37). Thus, the manners of “good breeding” and their sacralization reflect and result from a society which has equally sacralized the conspicuous wasting of time, that is idleness, baptizing it as the highest good of a pecuniary culture.

By contrast, Pieper in his critique points out that it is precisely this wasting of time that makes us completely incapable of leisure: “Idleness, according to traditional teaching, is the source of many faults and moreover of that deep-seated lack of calm which makes leisure impossible” (45). And it is in this discussion that Pieper places spiritual weight upon true leisure. It cannot be simply inactivity or lack of productivity. Leisure, by its ancient definition is something else entirely: “Leisure, it must be clearly understood, is a mental and spiritual attitude—it is not simply the result of external factors, it is not the inevitable result of spare time, a holiday, a weekend or a vacation. It is, in the first place, an attitude of mind, a condition of the soul….Leisure is a form of silence, of that silence which is the prerequisite of the apprehension of reality” (46).

Thus Pieper also casts leisure as a spiritual activity, but whereas Veblen’s analysis of the spirituality of leisure is negative, Peiper points out the positive spiritual attributes of true leisure. This silence that leisure (rather than idleness) can bring to us is best seen in celebration, and so in the scared gestures, the “sacraments”, of such celebration. He explains, “Leisure…in its character [is] an attitude of contemplative ‘celebration’…. Leisure draws its vitality from affirmation…. The highest form of affirmation is the festival” (48-49). Thus, we remember the ancient Greek understanding of work and leisure. It is work that receives the negative definition: “to be unleisurely”, rather than leisure. Pieper, in his analysis of leisure as affirmative turns our modern conception on its head. Leisure cannot be idleness, cannot be simply the absence of productive work as Veblen’s critique elucidates. Veblen’s mistake is to fall into the idea of thinking of leisure via the route of negation. For him leisure becomes non-work, inactivity, and so can hold no affirmation of life or beauty or human dignity as it is simply an absence. And as such Veblen rightly condemns it. But it is not true leisure that he is condemning; instead, it is idleness. Leisure in its true form is active, affirmative, positive. For Pieper such affirmation is seen most clearly in celebration and festival, and this is where sacred gesture enters into his critique. For him “ ‘[l]iturgy’…means the essence of celebration, of sacred mysteries, ‘a sacred action surpassing all others’” (In Search of, 107). What makes the society that Veblen describes so grotesque is the fact that such “sacred mysteries” have been so twisted that they celebrate nothing, except perhaps the lifeless, negating, idleness of the wealthy, if such a thing can be celebrated at all. The sacred gestures remain in the form of good manners, but rather than affirming human dignity and life, they serve only to promote selfishness and greed.

So we can see that both Veblen and Pieper critique the modern understanding of work and leisure and both do so via the means of analyzing sacred gestures. Veblen in a critique of the cult of manners and “good breading, Pieper in an analysis of idleness, true leisure and celebration. While Veblen presents the negative twisting of leisure into a showy parade of wealth and a false sense of virtue, Peiper provides us with its alternative, a true sense of sacred gesture that embraces what leisure is at its core: freedom rather that slavery to social norms and pecuniary emulation. As Pieper explains, “Only in genuine leisure does a ‘gate of freedom’ open. Through that gate man may escape from the ‘restricted area’ of that ‘latent anxiety’ which a keen observer has perceived to be the mark of a world of work” (Leisure 51). Such a freedom, no longer bound to a world defined by work and inactivity, allow the human being to embrace her full dignity as something more than a producer…or in Veblen’s critique, a non-producer. Veblen’s critique of the leisure class is their lack of contribution to the society as a whole. And this is a fair critique. But buried more subtly in his argument is that as an entire society we have so distorted leisure that we have become enslaved to its dehumanizing opposite: idleness, which twists us and binds us to religion of pecuniary emulation and conspicuous consumption so that we, in the end, we lose our capacity to celebrate and so to be free. We lose our ability to be leisurely and so to be truly human.

Works Cited

The Catechism of the Catholic Church. 2^nd ed. Washington, D.C.: Liberia Editrice Vaticana, 1997.

“Leisure.” Def. 3a. Oxford English Dictionary Second Edition; Online Version. Oxford English Dictionary, 1989. Web. 23 Dec. 2011.

Pieper, Josef. In Search of the Sacred. Trans. Lothar Krauth. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991.

_____. Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Trans. Alexander Dru. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009.

Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. Oxford: Oxford University Press,  2007.

Shannon Berry is a PhD candidate in systematic theology at the Catholic University of America. She teaches at The George Washington University and CUA.

Thorstein Veblen’s genealogy of leisure, echoing a method perfected by both Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud, works to continually pull back into the domain of “vulgar” conditions and impulses–a general economy of bodies, forces and classes–all things high-flown, decent, and untouchable (vi, 1994). The ambit of Veblen’s theory is such that it allows him to economically determine or “vulgarize” a whole series of seemingly disparate hegemonic practices now suddenly clustered and nameable along the axis separating leisure from labour. War, marriage, priestly service, governance, manners, sport are all absorbed into the debasing mill of emulation, the putative nobility or highness of each revealed as one long extended variation on power, avarice, and “exploit”(12). The state, the rich, the church, to say nothing of inherited bourgeois mores and conventions, all discover their beginnings in a shared history of repressed status and envy. Like all creatively designed systems, this is a project as ingenious as it is limiting and clumsy. That which stands to be lost in terms of sociological nuance returns in the form of a certain satiric elegance and universality, a critical breadth and incisiveness that we have not seen since the likes of Buñuel’s The Discreet Charms of the Bourgeoisie, but which once characterized fully the rich power and sloppiness of the entire surrealist moment. It has not since been as easy as we might think to defrock pope, banker, bureaucrat and general all at once.

What strikes one as apposite or odd depending on one’s definition of and relation to the word “philosophy” is Veblen’s implicit decision to include the latter among those practices scheduled for demotion by his critical genealogy.  “Learning”, from this angle, appears alongside statecraft and sport as yet another instrument of honour, dead languages or perfect syntax worn like dangling testaments to all of the time saved from labour in a life (45). Scholarship, and therefore knowledge itself, collapses into booty; at the same time the socio-historical distance separating the philosopher from the priest thins, revealing a common origin in the abhorrence of work and a tendency to consistently privilege the uselessness of ideas over the drudgery of things. Is the philosopher nothing more than a shadow of the priest (itself a shabby, little general)? Veblen was certainly not the first or the last to make this argument. So much of twentieth century thought—from the Heideggerian critique of metaphysics to Jean-Paul Sartre’s dialectical ontology, to the whole terrain linking semiotics, discourse analysis and Cultural Studies—falls within the relatively stable gesture of this philosopher taken for a priest.

Behind it, of course, lies a distinction as useful and necessary as it is fragile and obfuscating. I mean, here, that often lazy and predictable border separating something called “idealism” from another vague entity named “materialism”. According to contemporary theoretical doxa, the first stands entranced by a hypostasized good, venerates contemplation over action, and grounds itself in a never wholly articulated contempt of the body and its forces. It is moralistic, politically despotic, and inherently solipsistic. The second, meanwhile, finally broken or liberated, discovers history, contingency, and perception, replaces essence with existence, and arrives–at its furthest edge–at the disenchantment and superfluity of philosophy itself. Sociology, laughter, theory, cynicism, politics, identity: the names for the transmuted remains of philosophy are many. Of course, there is no small measure of truth in this narrative and its history: to dispense with it entirely would, no doubt, be politically and theoretically ruinous. Certainly any attempt to re-invigorate Platonism–whether through some secularized return to transcendent norms or via some new spiritualist ethics–is bound to fail miserably. But what should cause us to pause and think a little is the ease with which the rich, subversive frugality of philosophy–its existence as an historical practice–is absorbed into and annulled by the same gesture which simultaneously invents and disempowers the noun “idealism”. There is an elision, here, that I will argue our time–caught between the twin pincers of mercantile banality and ecological catastrophe–cannot afford to make.

To flesh out this argument I want to return to Veblen’s cultural economics. Arguably, the tension most pertinent to the status of knowledge in his work occurs within the implicit continuity he establishes between philosophy and “learning”. Certainly, there is a plausible case to be made for their resemblance, at least in so far as the category which mediates their sameness is defined in opposition to “whatever has to do with the everyday activity of gaining a livelihood”. In this sense, philosophy shares with scholarship, but also ecclesiastical activity a certain constitutive dependency on productive labour and on an organizational structure amenable to the production of an economic surplus. Furthermore, this dependency expresses itself in part as a revulsion coordinated precisely along the seam separating the two regimes of activity: Aristotle’s hierarchical distinction between the productive and the theoretical sciences, with contemplative metaphysics located at the summit of being and even identified as the very actualization of the human certainly casts a long historical shadow here. Both philosophy and learning, then, equally participate in an immateriality or sedentariness which can be framed in opposition to the brute, “uneventful[ness]” of industrial activity (14). Philosophy characterized as an art of contemplation, as eschewal of the body and its pleasures, as a certain remoteness taken vis-à-vis worldly matters–Platonism, in other words, as it comes to be imagined after Plotinus–can no longer really be distinguished from religion. In this, Veblen certainly captures a significant structural parallelism between the two traditions.

It remains the case, however, that the genuine satiric force of Veblen’s work–certainly untimely and prescient in its own historical context–retains its sharpness today only at the expense of what we might call a broader dialectical precision. The binary between industrial work and leisure remains too stable and his taste for wicked inversions too global and reaching. This disproportion, then, seems to suffer from two basic oversights. In the first instance, we might say that Veblen fails to recognize the work in the Idea, the exacting, engrossed, often nearly-industrial properties of philosophy itself. No doubt, a strong case can and should be made for the link between philosophical culture and what Veblen calls the predatory energies of “exploit”. No casual reader of Plato can miss his many allusions to the chase and hunt of dialectics, a game of aggressions and alliances which continually runs along a line distinguished at one end by flirtation, friendship and love and at the other by hatred, danger and even simmering violence. Thrasymachus–in whose mouth Plato places (two thousand years before Marx!) a sense for the fundamental link between might and right, class and power–“coiled himself up at like a wild beast about to spring…and hurled himself at us as if to tear us into pieces” (1992, 12).  The production of concepts has never been separable from the difference between winning and losing: the scene of philosophy is always clearly caught up in and claimed by the domain of the invidious. In addition to this, there is no lack of unequivocally misogynist references to the quietude and nothingness of women’s work in Plato’s oeuvre. What I want to point to here, however, is that precise point where the meniality of work and the tedium of philosophy meet in a state of rare indistinction–that place, in other words, where the philosopher is not so much an athlete as a grave-digger or helot.

Anyone gripped by the necessity of philosophy knows well this place where understanding joins hands with an almost quantitative, utterly procedural, process of exposition. What was once the scintillating combat of dialectics, what Veblen calls “prowess”, is here a quiet, otherless intensity, a being-occupied which wholly absorbs the subject in the simple immediacy of something difficult (12). It is mere “diligence”, that quality associated by Veblen precisely with the drudgery of the industrial.  Though we should be clear to insist on the difference between the brutal history of physical internment and its persistence as a figure within philosophical life, it nevertheless is the case that slavery, labour at its most abject and forced, often comes to be identified by Plato with the philosophical life itself. In Book VI of The Republic Socrates makes it very clear to Adeimantus that it is precisely this figure of the philosopher as slave, a certain captive, laboriousness of the Idea, which is the primary obstacle to the diffusion of the philosophical habit. This motif will echo throughout Plato’s entire moral philosophy. The choice in Plato is never between freedom and obedience, as it is for example in the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, but always between two species of subjection, two general ways of being enslaved. One is enslaved to the body, to pleasure, to the domain of appearances, and to that which just happens to be; or one is enslaved to truth–to its sight–caught up and suspended in the endless work of being an expedient lover and friend to knowledge. This is a notion extended deep into Christianity: freedom is precisely that of a being-bound or occupied. Throughout Plato’s dialogues we discover continual invocations of the physically and mentally exhausting nature of the dialectic along with enjoinders to fortitude and perseverance that we cannot simply brush aside cynically as mere performance.

What matters here is not just the fact of coerced labour, a kind of enthrallment to thought which cannot be sworn off or renounced, but the very meniality of the labour itself. To do philosophy, says Socrates, is to live the life of the poor itinerant: it is to be despised, misunderstood, to live out being on the margins of wealth, comfort, and reputation. It is, in other words, to necessarily risk expulsion from the customary safety of life in the polis. To simply bracket philosophy’s historical marginality, the fact that it has always been in some very real way utterly powerless, but also the many flights and persecutions of a Spinoza or Rousseau, is a very typical contemporary amnesia, one which encourages the reductive conflation of philosophy with metaphysics (or science) and metaphysics (or science) with a kind of monolithic historical supremacy (as if, for example, Spinoza’s naturalism was not in some very significant way “minor”, underground, and deeply subversive of period norms). The historical animus between philosophy and many of Veblen’s own targets—“consumerism”, the pomp of scholarship and religious rite, the whole enervated life of aristocratic taste and ostentatious display—should cause us to pause before throwing Rousseau or Kant into the same bonfires set aside for  all of the generals, bishops and magnates.

At the same time, so intent is Veblen on accenting thought’s distance from itself, its purely emulative dimensions, that he empties ideas of their historical distinctness and potency; we are left with a monotonous impression of avidity, one paradoxically resonant with Hobbes psychological egoism and the liberal/utilitarian/pragmatist sequence it came to feed (a sequence, indeed, consistently critiqued by Veblen). “Nonsense on stilts” said Jeremy Bentham with respect to natural rights; however, what other option remains available to readers of Veblen than to extend this apothegm to the entire world-historical destiny of the Idea. A gap, then, appears between Veblen’s “ought” and his “is”, between his normative, political imaginary–a socialism grounded in finally efficient production–and the descriptive sociology which anchors it. If philosophy–the production and sustenance of concepts–dissolves tout court into the invidious bickering of scholars, and if politics fares no better, conflated with a statesmanship which looks suspiciously like sport, what transformation needs to take place in the assemblage linking ideas and things such that political imagination can escape its own emulative cynicism and impotence? It is precisely this deposition of philosophy and of the political saliency of the idea which conditions Veblen’s emphasis on the engineer (or “technician”) and technological development as the fundamental agent of (non-revolutionary) social change (1982, 63).

What is missing entirely from this schema is the category of truth itself. This is not because Veblen exchanges a transcendent referent–God or the Good–for some bad relativism of forces and partial viewpoints, but because he fails to recognize that truth itself is never merely a game played between selves, but an energy of disjunction capable of entirely recombining the plane on which words and things cohere. Certainly, he has a sense for something like an episteme or a “spirit of the age”, one probably traceable to Durkheim’s notion of collective representation, but what he appears to repress or forget are the antagonisms at work between the regimes of truth subsumed by a time, to say nothing of the disruptive, subjective, relationless truth procedures described so precisely by Alain Badiou.  This last conception of truth as abyssal rupture is wholly proscribed by Veblen’s image of thought as inherently invidious: though Badiou’s subject of truth is certainly combative, she is never reducible to the usual funny games, all of the codes or logics which frame a self’s pursuit of distinction and belonging. Truth, for Badiou, breaks wholly with the particularity of selves transfixed by booty or interest. The very possibility of actual negation, then, would appear to be absent from Veblen’s generalized agonism, but also anything in the way of a contingent, political universality, the power of the Idea to function as a site of shared subjective identification and possibility lost to endless micro-circuits of interest and desire.

There are, then, at least two ways in which we can begin to speak of an economics of philosophy. The first, broadly in line with Veblen’s own method, but also owing debts to Rousseau and Marx, decomposes philosophy by forcing contact between its own subjectivity and an outside it represses to remain stable. Returned from its own rules of engagement to a naked domain of force, interest and oppression philosophy receives a subpoena flush with foreign criteria and unexpected indictments. This is, of course, the purview of Marx’s eleventh thesis and Nietzsche’s infamous down-going, of Foucault’s genealogies and Bourdieuian sociology, but also all of the great, canonical feminist and postcolonial critiques of philosophical pretension and truth. Philosophy’s distance from the world, already fully coded as a motif in the classical rumours surrounding Thales’s clumsiness; its fetish of autonomy, discernible in Plato as much as it is in Descartes’s self-uncovering cogito or Spinoza’s rational (slightly stoical) egoism; the predilection of at least one of its dominant strains for the eternal and immutable: all of this is submitted, and should be, to the humiliating economy of interests. Confronted with this outside philosophy, like economics itself or every religion, either defensively struggles to preserve the rights and pleasures of its game, the prerogatives of any self-reproducing tradition or practice, or learns from the persuasive force of the social. That is, it stubbornly remains in its own skin or riskily mutates and learns how to live dialectically.

If then one possible effect of taking seriously the economics of philosophy is to find oneself asking questions about the conditions which undergird the philosopher’s rarity, the second fantasizes her universality and commonness. This latter option departs from the skeptical, disjunctive tendencies of the first and instead begins with an affirmative, even utopian gesture very much within the horizon of Veblen’s own commitment to thinking a radically new politico-economic order. Rather than dismantling the repetition of philosophy it instead delights in the structural monotony of the philosophical meme. It notices that apart from the actual content of any given philosophy there remains the bare mechanism of the thinking body itself, a habit and its space, despite all of the exceptions, which is morphologically stable across a remarkable spread of times, places and ideologies. It notices the frugality of philosophy. Speech, argument, absorbed thought;  sometimes friendship, peregrination, books written and read: the task is to see in these classical figures of the philosophical life not merely cleft binaries in need of amendment or inversion, but economic behaviour itself, a habitus that shares with a handful of other rare (but also somehow common) practices a truly unique ecological weightlessness.  To conceive of philosophy in this manner is to echo, yet vary the structure of Immanuel Kant’s moral imperative; it is to extrapolate speculatively the material and ecological costs of the becoming-universal of a given act, practice or pleasure. What kind of potentialities exist embedded in the “atomic fact” of a practice such that to unfold them would be to unpack and spread out an entirely different life-world?  In other words, what are if philosophy were as common as cigarettes?

Conceding the indispensability of the critiques made above, it must nevertheless be admitted that there is something exceedingly curious about the philosophical life and its imaginary, this walking, hungry poverty that is also a plenum of the rarest sort. At its best, philosophy is kind of sublime needlessness, a pleasure which comes as close to sustaining itself as any one can imagine. The trick is to envision this needlessness not from the angle of existing conditions, but from the perspective of a future in which its autonomy would cease to index not an unjust absorption, a bad secession from the real, but a life lived realistically. This is the properly political question: how do we get from one regime of addictions to another? And: are there habits that make us freer than we might otherwise be, addictions that can liberate us? To pose the question in this way is to subtly displace the problem away from the coordinates of Kant–away from duty’s deposition of self-interest and delight–to those of philosophical pleasure and of a superabundance equated with the cogitating body itself.

The only credible economy of the future is one in which infrastructurally “empty” or “naked” practices arithmetically outnumber those reliant for their utility on equipment. Friendship, love, sport, speech; remembering something, wandering, falling asleep on the beach: these are the only “growth industries” of our planetary long durée. This is neither to naively invoke a future economy shorn of technological progress, infrastructure, or “stuff” nor to rehearse Rousseau’s fantasy of a squalid modern individual no longer adequately “inside” itself: no such economy is imaginable, logical or desirable. Rather, it is enough to accent the scope of the difference between the systemic options which now present themselves: either expansion “forever”, which is to say, until the wheels fall off, or managed, democratic, intelligent constriction on a planetary scale. An economy grounded in the instantaneity and blindness of price or one which can divert an eye to millennial time without falling into the temptations of political indecency. This frugality, this needless absorption, on a planet needy for less as more; severed from every trace of historical destiny, this is perhaps what remains for us today of what was once spoken of as finally  actualizing philosophy. In its classical content this formula invoked the final adequation between the idea and its real; phenomenology, perhaps too abstractly, transformed it into a return to the body and to the rich immediacy of perception. What can this actualization allow us to hope for today? Not a reality finally in line with a complete Idea (a conception too total for us today), nor a body freed to its forces, but a frank admission of the political and ecological beauty of an old, problematic habit called philosophy.

Works Cited

Plato. The Republic. Translated by G.M.A Grube. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1992.

Veblen, Thorstein. The Collected Works of Thorstein Veblen.  Volume 1. London: Routledge, 1994.

Veblen, Thorstein.  The Engineers and the Price System. Transaction Publishers, 1982.

Andrew Pendakis teaches at the University of Alberta

Thorstein Veblen’s analysis of America’s capitalist society in The Theory of the Leisure Class contains one chapter toward the end of his argument on religion, or, as he articulates it, “devout observances” (191).  The substance of Veblen’s critique of religion fits well within his larger treatment of the leisure class—indeed, the forces at work in religion seem to mirror much of what he finds wrong with capitalist societies.  But, Veblen also brackets his critique of religion to distinguish it from a more general, spiritual dimension, referenced elsewhere throughout his work.  In what follows, I discuss Veblen’s critique of religion and consider ways in which Veblen’s analysis and vision for capitalism contains a spiritual dimension.

Veblen’s critique of religion is essentially a critique of the leisure class applied; religion serves as one institution, added to the long list of others falling under his gaze, whose presence and inner-working is exposed for what it is.  In religion, Veblen finds an overt display of leisure class power and influence in defining class distinctions, mores, and attitudes.  Through the institution of religion, the leisure class signifies its fealty to an established status quo, a social structure whereby valuation and status is determined by a select few at the expense of the many.

Veblen argues that “priestly education, priestly service, pilgrimages, fasts, holidays, and household devotions all serve to extend and protract the vogue of those habits of thought on which an anthropomorphic cult rests” (Veblen, 200).  He continues:

“[Devout observances] further the habits of thought characteristic of the regime of status. They are in so far an obstruction to the most effective organization of industry under modern circumstances; and are, in the first instance, antagonistic to the development of economic institutions in the direction required by the situation of today” (201).

Religion, or at least devout observances of a certain character, seems worthless for Veblen.  Judged against the backdrop of burgeoning industrial capitalism it offers nothing useful or productive by its terms and only serves to impede economic progress.  Consequently, religion operating in contemporary industrial society offers Veblen a useful parallel to all that is wrong with the consumptive sensibilities of the leisure class rooted as they are in the same barbaric tendencies to exploit, aggrandize oneself and one’s office, and generally further a system that serves the pecuniary interests of the leisure class.  He notes this by charging:

“There is a striking parallelism, if not rather a substantial identity of motive, between the consumption which goes to the service of an anthropomorphic divinity and that which goes to the service of a gentleman of leisure—a chieftain or patriarch—in the upper class of society during the barbarian culture.  Both in the case of the chieftain and in that of the divinity there are expensive edifices set apart for the behoof of the person served.  These edifices, as well as the properties which supplement them in the service, must not be common in kind or grade; they always show a large element of conspicuous waste” (200).

In religious organizations and institutions Veblen finds a crude class system that affords those in power, the clergy and some laity, preternatural authority over others based ostensibly on religious creed.  This hierarchical structure within the church not only mirrors that of larger society but it operates according to the same archaic traits.  In fact, Veblen contends that religious adherents conceive of angels and saints in the same way as the lower class conceives of the leisure class—as a “superhuman vicarious leisure class” looking to earn good favor and esteem from God through emulation (202).

The conspicuous waste and vicarious leisure of the priestly class, defined largely by religious leaders control of language, exclusionary status, use of decorum, abstinence from industry, and reverence of traditional forms and beliefs, run counter to Veblen’s perceived logic of industrial progress.  “The characteristic traits of the devout temperament are a hindrance rather than a help,” he charges, mostly due to devoutness being understood as a way to gain personal status and good repute, the hallmark motivation for men of leisure (207).

Concluding his critique of religion, Veblen revels in the trends he sees among industrializing countries.  The rise of industry and what he terms “effective work” seems to be ushering in an era of secularization—emancipation from old habits and customs that were propped up by religious institutions.  Habits of toil, in an industrial economy, engender certain habits of thought; people’s enlightened status directly correlates with proximity to industry.  Conversely, those classes or societies that still exhibit a degree of devoutness are those relatively untouched by industry, including rural areas, among women, and the residual aristocratic class of agrarian economies (210).

The contours of Veblen’s critique of religion here are certainly nothing new.  Indeed, his ideas resonant clearly with both Marx and Weber in that he demonstrates a keen interest—even an obsession—with the meaning of industrial capitalism at the turn of the 19th century.  But unlike Marx or Weber, both of whom predicted capitalism’s demise in different ways, Veblen offers a different take on the ideal trajectory of industrial capitalism, one in which material progress and scientific sensibilities form a sort of raison d’être such that capitalism can finally flourish (158-160).

If this is the case, where does this position Veblen as critic of religion?  Is the rejection of a spiritual realm wrapped up in his critique of religion, or does he make some concessions to an animating raison d’être or “spirit” of capitalism?   

My contention is that while Veblen offers a strident critique of religion’s official manifestation from barbaric times to current, the content of his critique centers more on religion as a symptom rather than a disease.  To point, the problem with religion, in his estimation, seems to be the extent to which leisure class tendencies—values, attitudes, and consumptive trends—have infiltrated religion, co-opted it, and used it to further class power and distinction.  Thus, the problem with capitalism is not one of systematic deficiencies but of latent proclivities and misdirected loyalties.

The inherited habits and patterns of consumption that define the leisure class are rooted ultimately in archaic notions of value: what is beautiful, worthy, and sublime are those things that add distinction and solidify a certain class position among others in society.  These values are in need of a re-valuation, argues Veblen, from archaic notions of what is important to more modern, rational, and productive notions of what is important and what humans ought to strive for in the end.

In line with this point, Veblen does not hesitate in assuming humans to be creatures driven by meaning or telos, often noting these motivations as falling under a spiritual realm.  Indeed, Veblen’s proposed system of capitalism, where society is organized around effective industry, driven by scientific progress, and beholden to the logic of cause and effect, is one predicated on teleological assumptions.  The force of both his critique and his proscriptive vision for capitalism would seem to suggest the significance and meaning with which humans act.  He writes early on that:

“Man is, in his own apprehension, a center of unfolding impulsive activity—“teleological” activity.  He is an agent seeking in every act the accomplishment of some concrete, objective, impersonal end.  By force of his being such an agent he is possessed of a taste for effective work, and a distaste for futile effort” (16).

The force of his critique of the leisure class, from pecuniary emulation to conspicuous consumption, relies on a seemingly irrational compulsion to consume—symbolically, for status, and personal repute.  This tendency, treated as something innate to humans from barbaric times, does not seem positioned to completely erode away but simply shift from one set of religious symbols and habits to another, what Veblen sees as the true spirit of capitalism itself.

Given Veblen’s assumptions about human telos, he seems to imply a circumscribed place for a spiritual dimension.  For instance, he notes that, “devoutness is to be looked upon as a survival form from an earlier phase of associated life—a mark of arrested spiritual development” (198).  If the presence and preponderance of the leisure class serves to render spiritual development stagnate, Veblen connotes not a withering of spirituality but an appropriation of it in proper context and form.  The focus on telos is also clear in the dialectic between capitalism as it is and capitalism as it should be returned to often during the course of his argument, designating the working out of contradictions inherent to a system.

Summarily, Veblen’s vision for capitalism relies on the elevation of science and rationalism not only to provide material benefits to all but also to provide a sense of meaning and purpose to life in that system.  The fact that this set of symbols and patterns of behavior fly under the guise of rationalism, material productivity, and the value of industrial labor or “effective work” is ancillary; they prove the appropriation of a spiritual dimension all its own and one that comports more adequately to the demands of his vision of capitalism.  If a re-valuation of the sort Veblen implies is afoot it would seem to position the logic and efficiency of industry, scientific progress, and capitalism itself as the transcendent ideal approaching that of religious creed.

So what of the contours of Thorstein Veblen’s critique of religion and his treatment of the spiritual today?  Given my reading, Veblen seems a more astute and possibly a more cautious observer of religion than his immediate contemporaries and critics of industrial capitalism, hailing as they did the end of religion as the eventual end of the spiritual: faith, and belief as such.  In such a way, it may be argued that Veblen’s work seems akin to a postmodern treatment of religion, that treats the spiritual in a much broader and freer light, not encumbered or threatened by its claims to truth or ultimate meaning.  This proves a conundrum for Veblen however, as his methodology of critique is one that posits a purely objective conceit, or “view from nowhere”, while his assumptions about human nature’s innate desire for meaning, either through conquest and status during barbaric times or at the shrine of industry, usefulness, and rational progress seem to run contrary.

The thrust of Veblen’s insight into religion also recalls modernity’s first tangle with reconciling the demands of traditional faith with enlightenment politics around the question of authority, made most forcefully by Rousseau.  Religion, for all its vagaries and abuses, says something fundamental about the human condition and human yearning and therefore must be transformed to more useful ends not rejected.  Implicit in Veblen’s critique of the leisure class and his allegiance to science and progress—emblemized in the dispassionate, coolly objective industrial engineer as capitalism’s savior—is that same hope: that what appeals to humans about religion may be redirected in the service of more efficient and productive economies and societies.  That may be why, for instance, Veblen hesitates to reject capitalism whole clothe, as his own ideal-type takes on a sort of religious character, providing a system of meaning and value centered on empirical science, industrial progress, and a commitment to usefulness as a standard of value.

Work Cited

Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Aaron Stuvland is a doctoral student in political science at George Mason University’s Department of Public and International Affairs, where he also earned a Master’s degree in 2009.

I. An Inter-Jewish Schism

Have Jews gone right-wing? Even as the question may seem simplistic or politically incorrect, it presupposes agreement concerning the meaning of “left” and “right” in our post-cold war world of ideological disorientation. The French political commentator Daniel Lindenberg, in his Le Rappel à l’ordre: Enquête sur les nouveaux réactionnaires (Call to Order: An Inquiry into the New Reactionaries) includes a chapter entitled in English “When Jews Turn Right.”[2] His analysis of the situation is categorical. Preferring to err on the side of caution, I have turned his assertion into a question.

But why in a French text does Lindenberg announce his foregone conclusion in English? A preliminary response may be that to have said the same thing in French, in a work essentially critical in nature, would have been as unacceptable as calling the Jews, as de Gaulle did in an infamous 1967 press conference, “an elite, arrogant, and dominating people.” Indeed, in the past thirty years of French intellectual and literary life, and in its media culture, it has become almost unthinkable to label oneself as a partisan of the right. If in France today one speaks of a droite décomplexée—a right wing that has gotten rid of its complexes—it is precisely because all sectors of the right have long been identified, fairly or not, with Vichy and Pétain. Thus if you announced you were on the right, you were immediately suspected of harboring xenophobia, of tending toward fascism—or of simply being an outright fascist. As René Rémond put it in his massive study of the right in France, “identification with the tragic Vichy years has led to a long-term discrediting of the right wing in the eyes of public opinion—a discredit from which it has taken the right decades to recover.”[3] Rémond adds that “Collaboration with the Nazis was far from being the sole prerogative of the political right. . . . One could find a great number of trade-union activists and socialists who rallied to the cause for a variety of reasons and motivations: pacifism, anticommunism, anticapitalism, etc.” And, on the other hand, “not everyone on the right was pro-Vichy” (232.).

The fact remains that in an ideological climate where that sector of the political spectrum has so long been associated with the wartime collaboration, claiming that Jews have shifted to the right comes down to insinuating they have accomplished their own conservative, “nationalist” revolution; it suggests that, after having been fervent partisans of internationalism and of universalism, they have turned away from the world and inward upon themselves, that they have immured themselves within a petty, fearful community. According to Jean Daniel, a progressive Jewish intellectual of the same stripe as Lindenberg, Jews have in the last decade descended into a “Jewish prison” (such is the title of this book)—a ghetto of their own construction.[4]

This brings us to a second possible response to why Lindenberg resorts to English. Putting the sentence that way ties French Jews to the post-9/11 American neoconservatives who, before switching ideological sides, had been active in the 1960s New Left. In this scheme of things, not only did French Jews en masse allegedly support U.S. interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. To make matters worse, they have allowed themselves to be Americanized, that is, sectarian. Indeed, in Lindenberg’s view, which presupposed a French national unity that spurns community particularisms, the American social model is characterized by fragmentation, balkanization. Such so-called American “communitarianism” is inevitably condemned as reactionary when placed next to the French republic’s model of assimilation—a progressive concept in Lindenberg’s judgment. French Jews—unlike their American counterparts who stem from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires—are divided half and half between those of Eastern European extraction and those whose forbears came from the Mediterranean basin. Thus Lindenberg, who is Ashkenazic, has a ready-made culprit on hand: Shmuel Trigano, a Sephardic intellectual whom he accuses of being guilty of no less than “Sephardist [sic] populism.”

But none of this should really come as a surprise. Beginning with their immigration to France when North Africa was decolonized in the 1950s, Sephardim have been perceived as the noisy, visible Jews, as opposed to the more discreet Ashkenazim already on French soil. Mutatis mutandis, they are the equivalent of the Ostjuden arriving in France starting in the 1880s: an embarrassing reminder of Jewishness that resisted dissolution into European modernity, civility, and plain old good taste à la française. In sum, they represented the disintegration of the identity elaborated by the native French Jew, who preferred the appellation “Israelite.”

However, when Lindenberg puts “Sephardist populism” (not to say separatism) on trial, the indictment is hardly limited to a denunciation of some terrifying “identity politics.” Indeed, it is not enough to accuse French Jews of “turning right,” of becoming sectarian, or of betraying the Republic, secularism, and traditionally muted Franco-Jewishness. Lindenberg suggests that French Jews have actually been exploiting a wave of antisemitism that first erupted around 2000-2001 (and largely attributable to Muslim youth). But that’s not all. Lindenberg’s charges are aggravated by the fact that this swell of antisemitism (and here his argument intersects with that of Guillaume Weill-Raynal, another Jewish polemicist) would in fact be nothing other than a more or less imaginary, ideological construction of Sephardic Jews, the ultimate aim of which is to justify baser, chauvinistic political penchants like those celebrated by the early 20th-century French nationalist writer Charles Maurras.

So how is one to make heads or tails out of such ideological hodgepodge? How do we resolve the paradoxes? After all, Maurras’s doctrine—calling for defense of Western, and French, cultural and racial purity—is explicitly shot through with antisemitism and xenophobia. And indeed, according to certain self-proclaimed “leftist” Jewish journalists and intellectuals, French Jews have somehow become fascinated by and attracted to a Jewish remake of the Maurrassian doctrine, a version in which Zionism figures as an “Occidentocentric” ideology that is vaguely fascist and frankly racist. Thus Jean Birnbaum also supports, in his cleverly-titled pamphlet Les Maoccidents,[5] the hypothesis of a 180-degree turn among French Jews: from the extreme left to the extreme right; from the Red East to the West; from Maoist political activism in the ’60s to the Maurassian Action Française.

Here is Birnbaum’s argument in a nutshell: in the mindset of pre-World War II antisemites, the Jews embodied cosmopolitanism, a borderlessness that posed a threat to the integrity of the French nation. Jews—hard-line partisans of a doctrine of belonging everywhere and nowhere, of unaffiliation—represented transgression of boundaries and limits. They were fantasmatic figures of excess, of the inassimilable as such. Indeed, according to Birnbaum, present-day intellectuals—such as Jean-Claude Milner, a Chomskyan linguist and former Maoist who has disavowed his commitment to what he now sees as revolutionary “easy universalism”—have quite simply converted to a kind of philosemitic and Zionist ideology of the superiority of Western culture. According to Birnbaum, when Milner denounced shortly after September 11 the principle of borderlessness embodied in the post-World War II expansion of Europe, he was reactualizing the metaphysics of identity dear to the Action Française—minus the antisemitism, of course.[6] Milner would thus have invented a kind of a Judeo-Maurrassianism.

For Milner, the Jews who in 1948 set up a political entity circumscribed within the boundaries of the traditional nation-state pose ipso facto an ideological challenge to the limitless expansion that is at the heart of the postnational European democracy, basking in the postwar Pax europea. This Europe without borders finds its dialectical counterpart in the limitlessness of jihad and the expansion of Islam. This expansionism is a detriment to the Jewish people, caught between the rock of European decline and the hard place of Muslim anti-Semitism.

Milner allows himself, then, to draw a paradoxical equivalence between peace and jihad. Pacifist and postnational ideologies would thus also find their counterpart in a terrorism that is every bit as transnational. Hence, for Milner, contemporary anti-Zionism in Europe and support for the Palestinians would somehow bear witness to the constitutive limitlessness of Enlightenment Europe—a limitlessness that is the direct heir to the genocidal expansionism of the Third Reich. In Milner’s hyperbolic vision, there’s no essential interruption between Nazi anti-Semitism and contemporary European anti-Zionism; no hiatus separating the exalted celebration of war by the Third Reich from the kratos without a demos of the seemingly unreal, polemophobic, anonymous bureaucracy that present-day Europe is, run by eurocrats in Brussels.[7] As the abhorred conveyors of a biblical “difficult universalism” (as opposed to the “easy universalism” of Saint Paul, Marx, or Mao—the distinction is Milner’s), the Jews somehow constitute an obstacle to the spread of European Enlightenment, somehow obstruct the bulimic pacifism of democratic Europe.

Even if Milner’s argument has its limits, Birnbaum’s hypothesis, infinitely more superficial on a theoretical level, fails to convince. If he is to be believed, the defense of Israel articulated by certain current French philosemitic intellectuals must be understood as a direct continuation of the pro-Western ideologies of the past—formations that were also, of course, antisemitic! Pro-Israel Jews and non-Jews in Europe today (Shmuel Trigano, Daniel Sibony, Éric Marty, Jean-Claude Milner, Pierre-André Taguieff, and Alain Finkielkraut, to name a few) would be mere puppets moved by the strings of an antisemitic and racist Western unconscious, and their philosemitism nothing more than the ugly mask of Occidentocentric racism. And the “real” Jews—the underdogs—would be the Arabs, or, rather, the second and third-generation immigrant youths living in the suburbs of France. The inassimilable Other for these philosemites is apparently Islam itself. Here, Birnbaum singles out Benny Lévy as the very exemplification of his hypothesis. Lévy (a.k.a. Pierre Victor, the nom de guerre by which he was known during his involvement with the Proletarian Left—before his “return” to Jewish orthodoxy) declared at the end of his life in 2003 that in order to mobilize and revolutionize the immigrant lumpenproletariat back in the ’60s, one would have to settle the nationalist squabbles dividing the Algerians, Moroccans, and Tunisians (Birnbaum, 62). Lévy can thus—and not without a sense of humor—brag that he invented the Palestinians to this effect.

Are we supposed to understand, then, that the Palestinian cause was the brainchild of a Jewish Maoist seeking to channel the revolutionary potential of Arab immigrants? Would Pierre Victor be none other than a little-red-book-carrying progenitor of the Palestinians in the same way that Moses the Egyptian created the Jews, according to the historical romance contained in Moses and Monotheism? If this Freudian Witz were true, then it would be one of the many dirty tricks history has played on the Jews. The Judeo-Maoists—i.e., yesterday’s de-Judaized revolutionary Jews—would have thus created the very conditions of possibility of the ideological about-face that was awaiting them a couple of decades down the line. That is, of course, provided (a) that this about-face has in fact taken place, and (b) that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has indeed been the determining factor in this ideological shift. (All the same, it is difficult to see how Benny Lévy’s conversion to Orthodox Judaism has anything to do at all with pro-Westernism or Maurrassianism.)

All things being equal, that pro-Israel intellectuals have fundamentally become political reactionaries is also the hypothesis put forth by a young French Jewish philosopher, Ivan Segré.[8] Contrary to Birnbaum or Lindenberg, Segré (who is close to Benny Lévy’s son, René Lévy) styles himself as a juif de l’Étude, “Jew of [Torah] study.” This inter-Jewish conflict—upon whose attendant Latin Quarter skirmishes I am merely attempting to cast some light—is thus complicated by overlapping biographical, personal, and indeed Oedipal dimensions. It’s a veritable family affair. Shmuel Trigano taught rudiments of Hebrew to none other than Benny Lévy. In 2000, the latter founded, along with Alain Finkielkraut and Bernard-Henri Lévy, the Institut d’Études Levinassiennes (Institute of Levinassian Studies) in Jerusalem. This is the very Finkielkraut whom Ivan Segré denounced as a pro-Western hack in his doctoral thesis—a thesis directed by Benny’s son René, the Marxist anti-Zionist philosopher Alain Badiou, and the late Trotskyite philosopher Daniel Bensaïd.

Indeed, as an acolyte of Badiou, who wrote a preface for one of the two volumes of his published dissertation,[9] Segré represents the synthesis of Benny Lévy’s two lives: involvement in the Proletarian Left, and conversion to Orthodox Judaism.[10] In The Philosemitic Reaction (La Réaction philosémite), Segré takes aim at Jewish and non-Jewish, French and other European intellectuals alike (he includes Oriana Fallaci on his list of offenders), for whom, in his view, Islamophobia and defense of Israel are two sides of the same coin. According to Segré, the intellectuals Lindenberg condemns as “communitarians” imprisoned in Jewish tradition are anything but that: on the contrary, they are traitors to an “authentic” Judaism insofar as they regard Western values as sacred, and to the extent that this very gesture of sanctifying Western values partakes of the history of anti-Semitism in France. It is thus in the name of this supposedly authentic Judaism that Segré lambasts these “communitarian” French intellectuals who, under the guise of denouncing anti-Semitism, revive Maurras’s nationalist doctrine.

We find ourselves, then, confronted with a constellation of texts and authors who all posit some kind of Judeo-Maurrassian conspiracy, or at the very least detect a Judeo-Maurrassian tropism among certain French and European intellectual defenders of Israel. As divergent as may be the textual and epistemological approaches of Lindenberg, Segré, Weill-Raynal, and Jean Daniel (one could add to this list the historian Esther Benbassa and the psychoanalyst Élisabeth Roudinesco), they all come, more or less, to the same conclusion: French Jews, taken in by Zionism, have veered right.[11] They’ve been Westernized.

Yet little consensus exists concerning what the term “right” could possibly mean in this context. Does being on the right entail rejection of the European Enlightenment (following the counter-revolutionary, antimodern posture of the early 19th-century ideologue Joseph de Maistre)? Or on the contrary, does it mean rallying to the cause of Western modernity in order to defend it from “Oriental obscurantism”? (This latter alternative identifies the right wing with the European colonists’ supposedly civilizing mission, placing it on the side of the arrogance of the Enlightenment.) Does being on the right mean seeing in the values of the West (which here includes Israel) a rampart against obscurantism?

Among the authors discussed here favorable to Israel, two contradictory possibilities emerge. (1) European Enlightenment thinkers are in their very essence hostile to the Jews; this is the position of Milner, Benny Lévy, and Trigano. (2) Inversely, the Jews and Israel are the guardians protecting the West and its Enlightenment legacy from being overwhelmed by a new wave of totalitarian obscurantism; Finkielkraut, for example, sees in advocacy of Israel a defense of France in both real and ideal terms, as an ethnically indivisible republic. Indeed, in Finkielkraut’s estimation, neo-antisemitism and anti-Israel rhetoric are the corollaries of a new kind of Francophobia accompanying the rejection of Western civilization.[12] Jean Birnbaum neatly sums up this division among those who defend Israel: “Some affirm that the West has built itself on the ruins of Israel; others assure us that Israel is the sentinel of the West” (Birnbaum, 84). The title of Segré’s text, The Philosemitic Reaction­ is disconcerting. Is he implying that love of Jews is reactionary? And if philosemitism is reactionary, would it not then follow that antisemitism is progressive? Or, simply, are we to hear in “reaction” the fact that certain intellectuals “react” (in a purely physical or mechanical, rather than ideological sense) to antisemitism by developing excessive fondness for Jews? The title is at the very least ambiguous. Reading Segré’s book, one gleans that “philosemitic” here means pro-Zionist, or pro-Israel. But we have to ask if the defense of Israel and of the Zionist project is in and of itself reactionary. Can such defense only be articulated from an anti-progressive stance? To put it bluntly: does being pro-Israel mean being on the right?

II. Israel, the Jews, & the Left: Primal Scene

Not content with analyzing current developments in this inter-Jewish conflict ravaging the cafés of the Latin Quarter, I’d like to trace our way back to the source of all these paradoxes and misunderstandings. For what is taking place today on the Parisian literary and intellectual scene is simply an acting-out, the manifestation of the turbulence gripping French Jewish consciousness ever since the creation of Israel.

We don’t have to start from the Six-Day War—and even less from the two Intifadas—to observe Israel’s being assigned to the reactionary camp. From its very inception, any defense of the Jewish state as a utopia-come-true aroused suspicion; and as soon as the left began identifying with anticolonial struggles in the 1950s, it distanced itself from Israel. Up until then, the new Jewish homeland had not only been perceived as the fruit born out of the struggle against the British Empire, it was also supposed to be the solution to the alienation of European Jewry. In other words, Israel could be seen as a manifestation of political progress within the terms of class warfare, or indeed along the lines of the various struggles for national liberation. Throughout the 1950s, however, the left construed Israel more and more as a henchman of political reaction. By 1965—two years before Israel’s territorial gains in the Six-Day War—Emmanuel Levinas had the following to say concerning the watershed events of 1948: “Founders of the state found themselves suddenly on the side of the colonizers. Israel’s independence was immediately called imperialism, oppression of the natives, racism. Reality didn’t measure up to utopia. . . . For perhaps the first time in their history, the Jews found themselves thrown in with all that was reactionary, and their hearts were torn between an instinctive sense of belonging and a progressivism just as unshakeable.”[13]

Let us turn our attention, then, to the primal scene of this alienated French-Jewish either-or, this split between trueness to oneself and fidelity to an ideal of progress. The division is not so much between the Jewish community and the republic (rehashing that tired accusation of constituting a “nation within the nation,” of harboring dual loyalties), as it is between attachment to Israel and identification with the left; between attraction to the social (even somewhat socialist) democracy which the Jewish state was at its inception and sympathy for the anticolonialist Arab nationalism that became a touchstone of the French left during the struggles for independence in North Africa.

Claude Lanzmann, in a recent larger-than-life memoir entitled Le Lièvre de Patagonie (The Patagonian Hare), recalls: On the eve of the Six-Day War, Les Temps Modernes—the journal founded by Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir—launched an issue on the Arab-Israeli conflict that would ultimately clock in at some one thousand pages. Just before its appearance, Lanzmann, le Castor (i.e. “the Beaver,” Sartre’s hardly translatable nickname for de Beauvoir), and Sartre himself went to Egypt; they were invited there by Mohamed Hassanein Heykal, editor of Al-Ahram, an important national daily, as well as a personal friend of Nasser. We thus find our ambassadors of the Left Bank off on a mission to the Orient, visiting Cairo’s museums, the City of the Dead, Luxor, the Valley of the Kings. To top it all off, they took in the tantalizing spectacle of a belly-dance. The description of it treats us to an avatar of Flaubert’s courtesan Kuchuk Hanem—or perhaps a new Salomé. In any event, we are so privileged as to witness the death spasms of the French literary eroticization of the Orient, before the heavy hand of political correctness suffocated it altogether: “The most famous belly-dancer in all Egypt was whirling around the table. . . She took my hand and pulled me center stage, where I stood perfectly still, quite like a totem pole, under the eyes of Sartre, the Beaver, Ali. All the while, the gyration of her hips, the audacious thrusting and sudden withdrawing of her pubis, offered the latter to me and took it from me, unbearably.”[14]

Despite these very official distractions, Sartre—strangely preoccupied, overwhelmed by his various commitments—drowned in alcohol worries that revealed themselves to be more political than existential. On one occasion, the great writer, having unwound a bit more than may have been advisable, let it all out. “During our Egyptian trip, Sartre was visibly prey to tensions pulling him in two contradictory directions. His schedule was frenetic. . . and he let himself go at night by drinking excessively. . . . More than once, Ali and I had to lead him staggering back to his hotel suite. . . . One night, drunker than usual, as we were holding him up, he began to insult us in slurring voice, calling us ‘faggots’ and insinuating that we were the best example of a solution to the conflict” (Lanzmann 400).

So Judeo-Arabic homoeroticism was the solution to a conflict already two decades old! Why hadn’t anyone else thought of that before? Some fifteen years earlier, in his 1952 Saint Genet, to Jean Genet’s avowal that he could never have sex with a Jew, Sartre amusingly quipped: “Israel can sleep in peace.”[15] And yet, what comes out in the final analysis from these inebriated and sarcastic Sartrian ramblings is that if only the Jews and the Arabs would sleep together, everyone could sleep peacefully at night.

As demanded by the punctilious impartiality of an issue of the Temps Modernes, the Egyptian stay would be followed up with a trip to Israel, a country Lanzmann had already visited in 1952, four years after its independence. It was over the course of this first stay that Lanzmann, an assimilated Jew, had the following epiphany, which he later shared with Sartre and which led Sartre to revise the central argument of his Anti-Semite and Jew, which had it that Jewish existence itself was a dialectical response to their adversaries’ actions. Lanzmann realized “the Jews didn’t have to wait for antisemites to appear in order to exist” (248), thus discovering the particularity of being Jewish.

At this point in narrating their Egyptian epic, Lanzmann sketches the portrait of a Sartre flattered by Nasser’s invitation and drawn to the cause of Arab nationalism. But what about the “visible tensions pulling him in two contradictory directions” that he could calm only by emptying a bottle of booze every night? For Lanzmann, the problem was that Sartre was dragging his feet. He dreaded the idea of the trip to Israel: “Sartre was torn between his preference for the charming and splendid Egyptians who were our hosts, for the Arab cause in general, and unconscious anxiety at the idea of departure for Israel. I understood that for him I was a constant reminder of the impending journey, a kind of statue of the Commander for Don Giovanni, a guardian of Israel keeping watch lest we fail to maintain a minimum degree of impartiality. Thus I was preventing him from fully enjoying Arabic seductions” (Lanzmann 401).

Let us pause to consider the richness of these remarks that constitute, provided we pay sufficient attention to the actual signifiers, a political psychoanalysis of Sartre; perhaps even more forcefully, they adumbrate a metaphysical psychoanalysis of the ambiguities inherent in the left’s position vis-à-vis the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Note the anxiety that attaches itself to Israel; the charm of Egypt and of the Arab cause; and the statue of the Commander. Lanzmann, or, as Milner would put it, “le nom juif” (the Jewish name or signifier), functions here as the incarnation of the Law, the “guardian of Israel,” the brake on, or obstacle to, the plenitude of jouissance, sexual enjoyment. Israel, in other words, figures as a super-ego reminding France, and Europe, of their guilt. We have already encountered these problematics in the marvelous, and now classic, study by Éric Marty of l’angoisse du bien [the anxiety of goodness] in Jean Genet’s oeuvre. However, though Sartre justified the recourse to terrorism (he condoned in particular the Munich attacks on Israeli athletes during the Olympics), unlike Genet he remained prey to an inner split with respect to what he termed—well before Jean-François Lyotard introduced the term into the philosophical lexicon—the “Judeo-Arabic différend.”[16] Concerning Sartre’s pangs of conscience, Lanzmann’s testimony is invaluable: despite his support of Algerian, and then Palestinian terrorism, France of the 1970s owes Sartre “a debt for not having known violence perpetrated by small extremist cells ready to imitate their Italian or German counterparts” (Lanzmann 416).[17] However, there is no better synthesis of the moral, or indeed metaphysical, dilemma confronting Sartre, and perhaps the left in its general posture towards Jews and Israel, than the following exhortation from his introduction to the special issue of Les Temps Modernes, articulated in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict that had exploded in the region, and in the context of Israel’s abandonment by de Gaulle: “Let us not forget that these Israelis are also Jews” (Lanzmann 406).

Israel, a mere slit of earth and sand, indifferent to the lavish splendor of the Orient, where a great man, even if he is Jean-Paul Sartre, is only—to use Sartre’s own phrase from his autobiographical Les Mots—“a man made of the same stuff as all other men, equal to other men and to whom any one at all is equal” (Lanzmann 215). “Upon our arrival, we were welcomed,” Lanzmann writes, “in the midst of a jovial, genial, and democratic chaos. The Israelis who invited us had done their best, but their means couldn’t possibly rival those of the Egyptian head of state” (Lanzmann 403). These lines contain a bitter assessment: to the egalitarian disorder of the young Israeli social democracy, Sartre would have preferred the sumptuous order of Nasserian power. To the egalitarian Jewish demos, the French Communist Party’s fellow traveler would have preferred the pomp and circumstance of an Arab autocrat.

The stay in Israel was a fiasco, or at least that’s the impression one gets reading Lanzmann’s memoirs.[17] Sartre refused to meet any Israelis wearing army uniforms (including women, laments Lanzmann, ever the ladies’ man, and who in this respect proves to be a bit more Don Juan than statue of the Commander), on the pretext that they were objective allies of American imperialism. Lanzmann retorted that to disavow the very raison d’être of the Israeli nation, i.e., “the reappropriation of power and violence by Jews,” amounted to willful misapprehension of Israel’s historical significance. In the end, the future director of the documentary Israel, Why returned to Paris, leaving Sartre and the Castor behind him.[18]

To conclude, I would like to ruffle the feathers of these Jewish leftist intellectuals, pamphleteers and ideologues, who attribute to their pro-Israel homologues racist, “Occidentalist,” “communitarian,” or Maurassian tendencies. To do so, I shall call to my aid Caroline Fourest, a feminist commentator who can hardly be suspected of harboring right-wing sympathies; she is a critic of the alliance between the far left and Muslim fundamentalism, and author of a study, Brother Tariq, that prefigures Paul Berman’s Flight of the Intellectuals by carefully picking apart the double-speak practiced by the all-too-groovy Muslim cleric Tariq Ramadan, as well as delving into his links to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.[19] In La Tentation obscurantiste (The Temptation of Obscurantism), in turn, Fourest identifies an obscurantist tendency presently operating at the very heart of the left, a tendency that had earlier produced the fellow travelers, the “useful idiots,” of communist totalitarianism.[20] Fourest’s conclusion is that the left suffers from a structural split into an anti-totalitarian movement on the one hand, and on the other a “third-worldism” that is the legacy of the anti-colonial struggles of yesteryear and that today manifests itself as an antiracism, antiglobalism, multiculturalism. In her view, nothing suggests that the objectives of these two factions necessarily coincide. Anti-totalitarian leftists would logically take a dim view of their third-worldist fellows who flirt with totalitarian, autocratic, or theocratic regimes and ideologies—all in the name of defense against neo-colonialism and Western racism. The anti-totalitarian left Fourest claims as her own ought to be dismayed by the support the other left brings to fundamentalist ideologues, on the pretext of combating the arrogance of Western civilization. This support, for example, sacrifices feminist principles on the holy altar of multiculturalism, as one sees in the strange tolerance third-worldists lavish upon the veil or the burqa. Yet condemning the various regimes that trample on the rights of man and woman suffices to have one immediately branded a party to West’s essential racism or a dupe of its colonial unconscious. At base, what Fourest laments in her attack on the third-worldist left is simply the latest avatar of the “treason of the intellectuals”—of the elite’s dalliance with a new form of totalitarianism.[21] Contrary to Ivan Segré’s hypothesis, the traitors here are not the so-called Judeo-Maurrassians, but the leftists accommodating Islamic fundamentalism, who write off the values of liberty and equality as collateral losses presumably made up for by advances towards a new equitable world order.

I’ll conclude, then, on a note that is only partially tongue in cheek. I began by asking if French Jews have veered off to the right. I described the assault by certain French Jewish polemicists on defenders and supporters of Israel. Then I interpreted the violence of these attacks as a symptom of the continuing shock undergone by Jewish consciousness starting in the 1960s, when Jews found themselves torn between faithfulness to Israel and loyalty to progressivism. Let us, then, consider the following: in his book, La gauche et l’égalité (The Left and Equality), Jean-Michel Salanskis defines the left as structured by a “critique of power taking the form of a critique of man’s humiliation at the hands of transcendence.”[22] From this definition, Salanskis derives a paradoxical postulate: it is necessary “to eliminate entirely the communist episode from the left,” for this episode partakes of the crushing of the people by one man who can “become the keystone of the world, restoring the attributes and the aura of royalty” (Salanskis 37). If Salanskis is right, wouldn’t it be just as legitimate to ask our difficult question of the left—in its third-worldist, multicultural, antiglobalist and antiracist iteration, i.e, the left that has cast lovesick glances at Stalin, Mao, Castro, Guevara, Nasser, Arafat, Khomeini, and more recently at Chávez and Ramadan? Wouldn’t we be as justified in asking if it isn’t that left that has veered to the right?

Notes

[1]The French version of this essay will appear in the French Jewish monthly L’Arche, 633, February 2011. Special thanks go to my friend Alan Astro for his invaluable suggestions and collaboration in making this essay easier to read for an English-speaking readership.

[2]Daniel Lindenberg, Le Rappel à l’ordre: enquête sur les nouveaux réactionnaires (Paris: Le Seuil, 2002).

[3]René Rémond, Les droites en France (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1982) 231.

[4]Jean Daniel, La Prison juive (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2003).

[5]Jean Birnbaum, Les Maoccidents: un néoconservatisme à la française (Paris: Stock, 2009).

[6]Jean-Claude Milner, Les penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique (Paris: Verdier, 2003).

[7]Pierre Manent, La Raison des nations: Réflexions sur la démocratie en Europe (Paris: Gallimard, 2006).

[8]Ivan Segré, La Réaction philosémite, ou la trahison des clercs (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Lignes), 2009.

[9]Segré, op. cit.

[10]On the singular path followed by Benny Lévy, see Milner, L’Arrogance du présent: Regard sur une décennie 1965-1975 (Paris: Grasset, 2009).

[11]Esther Benbassa and Jean-Christophe Attias, Les Juifs ont-ils un avenir? (Paris: Hachette, 2002) (see in particular the postface); and Élisabeth Roudinesco, Retour sur la question juive (Paris: Albin Michel, 2009). See also Esther Benbassa, “How One Becomes a Traitor” in Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in the Francophone World, ed. Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller (London: Routledge, 2009).

[12]Amongst his many writings on this topic, see Finkielkraut’s Au nom de l’autre: Réflexions sur l’antisémitisme qui vient (Paris: Gallimard, 2003).

[13]Emmanuel Levinas, Difficile liberté : Essais sur le judaïsme, 2d ed. (Paris: Albin Michel, 1976), 287.

[14]Claude Lanzmann, Le Lièvre de Patagonie (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), 399.

[15]Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr (London: Heinemann, 1988), 203. For a critique of Sartre’s reading of Genet and the Jews, see Éric Marty, Bref séjour à Jérusalem (Paris: Gallimard, 2003).

[16]On Sartre and the Arab-Israeli conflict, see Jonathan Judaken, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question: Anti-antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2006). One finds in this study some of the most elucidating and comprehensive analyses of Sartre’s and the French left’s ambivalences with respect to this conflict, torn as they are between commitment to anticolonial politics and a sense of historical responsibility to the Jewish people; consider the difficulty for them of construing Zionism and the creation of Israel as both a national liberation movement and a “colonialist” phenomenon.

[17]The account Judaken offers of the stay in Israel is more positive. We should note that Lanzmann praises Sartre’s prudence with respect to terrorism and regrets his reticence vis-à-vis his time spent in Israel, whereas Judaken, who is a historian, paints a picture of Sartre as a supporter, unlike the revolutionary left, of Palestinian terrorism, but who is all the same rather enthusiastic during his trip to Israel.

[18]Claude Lanzmann, dir., Pourquoi Israel (Israel, Why), Cinéart, 1973.

[19]Caroline Fourest, Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan (New York: Encounter Books, 2010).

[20]Caroline Fourest, La Tentation obscurantiste (Paris: Grasset, 2005).

[21]Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1928).

[22]Jean-Michel Salanskis, La gauche et l’égalité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009).

Russell Berman (“Cultural Studies & the ‘Cold War’ on the Left”) is the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford.  He received his B.A. from Harvard (1972) and his Ph.D. from Washington University (1979) in German Literature. He joined the faculty of Stanford in the same year. His books include The Rise of the Modern German Novel: Crisis and Charisma (1988) and Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture (1998), both of which won the Outstanding Book Award of the German Studies Association. Recent books include Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007) and Freedom or Terror: Europe Faces Jihad (2010). In his other books and articles he has written widely on German literary and cultural history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, critical theory, and cultural dimensions of trans-atlantic relations.  He has served in numerous administrative capacities at Stanford, and he is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is the editor of Telos, and he will become the President of the Modern Language Association in 2011.

Michael  Bérubé (“The Left at Bay”) is Paterno Family Professor in Literature at Pennsylvania State University, and the author of several books, including What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?, The Employment of the English, Life as We know It (which was a New York Times notable book and NPR book of the year), and The Left at War.  He has contributed to numerous magazines and writes a popular blog, Airspace, at michaelburube.com.

Gabriel Noah Brahm (“The Post-Left at War & the Cultural Studies Approach to U.S. Foreign Policy & International Relations”) is Assistant Professor of English, specializing in the History of Criticism and Theory, at Northern Michigan University, and a Schusterman Research Fellow in Israel Studies at Brandeis University.  His published work has appeared in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Democratiya, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Poetics Today, Rethinking History, The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory (Wiley-Blackwell 2011), and elsewhere.

Jeff Bloodworth (“The [Heterodox] Left at Peace: Or, Breaking Up is Hard to Do”) is an assistant professor of history at Gannon University. His articles have appeared in the Wisconsin Magazine of History, Pacific Northwest Quarterly, The Journal of the Historical Society, and The Chronicles of Oklahoma. He is currently completing a manuscript detailing the history of American liberalism from 1968-1992.

Bruno Chaouat (“Have French Jews Veered to the Right?”) is Associate Professor of French and director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota. He has edited one volume of essays on shame, and another volume on terror. He has published a book on the 19^th-century French writer, François-René de Chateaubriand, as well as numerous articles on 19th-, 20th- and 21st-century French literature and thought. His articles have appeared in France and the U.S. in journals such as Modern Language Notes, Diacritics, Critique, L’Esprit Créateur, L’Arche, and Yale French Studies. He has reflected on French debates concerning Jews in France, the memory and the representation of the Holocaust, and the impact of the Middle-East conflict in literature and theory. He has a book forthcoming on the different literary and philosophical responses to what he perceives as a malaise in liberal democracy in the aftermath of the Cold War. And he is finishing another book on Jews as a trope in French thought from literary theory in the1960s to contemporary debates about the Middle East conflict and the “new antisemitism.”

Nick Cohen (“The New ‘Manichean’ Left & the Old Right: Tolerating the Intolerable”) is a columnist for the London Observer. He is the author of several books including What’s Left? (2007) and Waiting for the Etonians: Reports from the Sickbed of Liberal England (2009).

Elizabeth Faucett (reviewing Kristiaan Versluys’s Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel) is an M.A. student in English at Northern Michigan University, where she is completing a thesis on the post-9/11 novel.

Paul Hollander (“Toward a More Rational Left?”)  is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies of Harvard University.  He is the author or editor of fourteen books, the latest one entitled The Only Super Power: Reflections on Strength, Weakness and Anti-Americanism (2009).  His next book, Extravagant Expectations: New Ways to Find Romantic Love in America, will be published in Spring of 2011.

Gregory J. Lobo (“For Liberalism & Thinking Politically Again: Reflections Inspired by Michael Bérubé’s The Left at War“) is Associate Professor in the department of Lenguajes y Estudios Socioculturales at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. He teaches courses in cultural theory and studies in the department’s pre- and post-graduate programs, and his research attempts to unravel the nexus of culture and power both in Latin America and beyond. He has been invited to speak on his work by universities in both Colombia and the United States, and was recently named International Visiting Scholar by the Northern Michigan University. His writing has appeared in various international venues and in 2009 he published the book Colombia: algo diferente de una nación (Bogotá: Uniandes, CESO). He is currently working on an expanded, updated English version.

Ted McAllister (“Can the Left Govern?”) holds the Edward L. Gaylord Chair of Public Policy at Pepperdine University, and is an intellectual historian specializing in modernity and its critics.  His published works include Revolt Against Modernity:  Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin and the Search for a Post-Liberal Order (Kansas 1995).  He writes widely on the history and philosophy of American conservatism, on the philosophy of history, and the historicity of human culture and identity.  A regular contributor to the online magazine, Front Porch Republic, his current projects include a book on Walter Lippmann and, subsequently, a history of the Baby-boomers.

Scott R. Paeth (“The Need for an Augustianian Left”) is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at DePaul University in Chicago, IL. He works in the fields of Christian Social Ethics and Public Theology. He holds a Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary and a Master of Divinity from Andover Newton Theological School. He is the author or editor of five books, including Public Theology for a Global Society: Essays in Honor of Max Stackhouse (Eerdmans 2010); Exodus Church and Civil Society: Public Theology and Social Theory in the Work of Jurgen Moltmann (Ashgate 2008); Who Do You Say That I Am? Christology and Identity in the United Church of Christ (United Church Press 2006); Religious Perspectives on Business Ethics (Sheed & Ward 2006); and The Local Church in a Global Era: Reflections for a New Century (Eerdmans 2000).

Luke Thominet (“Operation New Dawn: The Iraq War Debate Seven Years Later”) earned his BA in International Relations and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California, and is currently an MFA student in English at Northern Michigan University, working on his fiction thesis entitled, Falls.

Elhanan Yakira (“Whose Left, Which War? A Comment from Jerusalem”) is currently Schulman Professor of Philosophy, and Chair of Philosophy, at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.  He holds a doctorate from the Sorbonne in France.  He is author of Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust: Three Essays on Denial, Forgetting, and the Delegitimation of Israel (Cambridge 2010).  He is working on a book about Spinoza.

Jonathan Franzen’s position in the contemporary American literary landscape is a curious one. His two latest novels – The Corrections (2001) and Freedom (2010) – have been more or less universally lauded by literary critics. Freedom was thus proclaimed a “masterpiece of American fiction” on the front cover of the New York Times Book Review, and in the Guardian it was hailed as nothing less than “the novel of the century.” And last fall The Corrections was chosen as the best novel of the past decade in a widely publicized poll involving several prominent authors and literary critics. Despite this lavish praise, Franzen’s novels have been largely neglected by literary scholars, at least compared to contemporaries like David Foster Wallace and Richard Powers, who have both had entire books and special issues of journals devoted to their work.

As the first book devoted entirely to the work of Jonathan Franzen, Stephen J. Burn’s excellent study goes a long way toward filling this critical lacuna. His book has a double aim: to provide a study of Franzen’s work (with particular emphasis on the novels), and to situate Franzen in a larger group of contemporary authors who can be loosely defined as the successors to literary postmodernists like Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, William Gaddis and John Barth. These successors, whom Burn tentatively labels as “post-postmodernists,” include David Foster Wallace and Richard Powers, who are also amply treated in the book.

In his preface Burn discusses Franzen’s critical neglect and he speculates that this neglect to a large extent stems from factors that are external to the author’s novels. Franzen has always been very vocal in his hostility toward the academy and this agonistic attitude may have discouraged scholars from venturing further into Franzen’s fictional woods. Furthermore, Franzen’s clumsy behavior when The Corrections was chosen for Oprah Winfrey’s book club in the fall of 2001 has drawn a lot of attention away from the work itself. (Oprah has apparently forgiven Franzen, since she promptly chose Freedom for her book club just after the novel’s publication. This time around, Franzen gracefully accepted the honor). Such external factors have without a doubt contributed to Franzen’s being passed over by many critics, and Stephen Burn therefore wisely chooses to bypass such distractions in order to focus on Franzen’s novels.

Before his analyses of the three novels (the study was published before the release of Freedom), Burn provides a valuable overview of Franzen’s early writing, much of which has so far remained unidentified. This overview is supplemented by an excellent bibliography at the end of the book, which includes Franzen’s juvenilia from high school and college, as well as his coauthored scientific articles on seismicity. After the chapter on Franzen’s early career, Burn moves on to Franzen’s novels which are treated in separate chapters. In all three chapters, Burn fully demonstrates what was also apparent in his book on Wallace’s Infinite Jest: that he is a very skillful close reader with a knack for detecting intricate patterns, digging up hidden allusions and parsing out complex chronologies. The three chapters confidently pin down the central themes of Franzen’s novels, and at the same time they draw thoughtful parallels to contemporary novels by Wallace and Powers. The analysis of Franzen’s debut The Twenty-Seventh City (1988) convincingly traces the novel’s elaborate intertextual dialogue with T. S. Eliot, while the chapter on Strong Motion (1992) focuses on Franzen’s innovative use of what Burn aptly terms “temporal form.”

The most comprehensive and convincing of the three readings, however, is Burn’s analysis of what remains Franzen’s most important novel, The Corrections. In this chapter Burn successfully shows how intricately patterned, densely interconnected and discreetly experimenting Franzen’s novel of the dysfunctional Lambert family really is, and his analysis constitutes a resounding answer to those critics who considered the novel a retrograde exercise in conventional realism. The most pertinent part of the analysis is Burn’s discussion of the novel’s different ideas of the self. In interviews, Franzen has stated that The Corrections is very much a novel about the self, and Burn demonstrates how different characters in the novel are refracted through different conceptions of the self: Chip’s Foucauldian idea of the self as shaped by institutional power structures, Gary’s materialist account of subjectivity as the inevitable outcome of certain chemical and electrical impulses, Alfred’s philosophical notions of identity, etc. Franzen doesn’t privilege any of these conceptions but stages an ongoing discussion between them, Burn argues.

The readings of the three novels draw a multifaceted portrait of Jonathan Franzen’s achievement, and at the end of the final chapter, I found myself hankering for a chapter on Freedom, which is both a logical extension of Franzen’s first three novels and a step in a new direction. That chapter will have to wait for the paperback edition of Burn’s study which will hopefully be published eventually. Such a subsequent edition could also benefit from a more elaborate discussion of Franzen’s non-fiction. Throughout the book, Burn exhibits a marked impatience with Franzen’s essays, where thorny contradictions are often glibly resolved through “rhetorical flourishes” (in Burn’s words). Burn rightly argues that such contradictions are held in tension in Franzen’s novels, which he therefore holds in much higher esteem than the essays, but his book could nevertheless profitably have included a chapter on the essays collected in How to Be Alone and on Franzen’s memoirs The Discomfort Zone, both of which remain integral parts of Franzen’s collected work.

As stated in the beginning, the purpose of Stephen Burn’s book is two-fold, and even though his introduction to Franzen’s work is very valuable in itself, the most important part of the study probably lies in its ongoing discussion of Franzen’s position in a larger American literary landscape. This position is primarily outlined in the first chapter of the book, where Burn draws a map of American fiction at the millennium, with particular emphasis on literary postmodernism and what came after. While postmodernism has gradually grown weary throughout the 1990s, a new generation of authors have come of age; a generation that attempts to move beyond the pervasive irony and self-reflection of postmodernism. This movement, which in addition to Franzen includes figures such as the late David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, William Vollmann, Dave Eggers, Nicole Krauss and Jonathan Safran Foer, is tentatively labeled post-postmodernism by Burn, who outlines three major characteristics of post-postmodern literature: 1) Post-postmodernism explicitly looks back to its roots in postmodernism. 2) It is informed by the postmodernist critique of the realist belief in language as a mere mirror of reality, but at the same time it is characterized by a greater urge to represent something real than its postmodern predecessors. 3) It is much more concerned with notions of character than postmodernism.

Burn apologetically admits that the term post-postmodernism is an ungainly one, but he rightly points out that the term has already been widely employed by e.g. David Foster Wallace and the critic Robert L. McLaughlin. Nevertheless, in its awkward accumulation of prefixes the term seems to be one of the more unfortunate names for a movement that has elsewhere been called for instance “postironic literature” or “the new sincerity.” Neither of these alternatives are perfect, but with their implications of the movement’s specific aesthetic and ethical aims, they seem preferable to Burn’s (and Wallace’s and McLaughlin’s) term, which mainly implies a purely chronological succession. And if we accept the label post-postmodernism, then what are we to call the literature of the 2030s: postpostpostmodernism? Maybe we should simply take our cue from Mark Nechtr, a character in David Foster Wallace’s novella Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, who like Wallace and Franzen wishes to move beyond the trappings of postmodernism:

Mark Nechtr desires, some distant hard-earned day, to write something that stabs you in the heart. That pierces you, makes you think you’re going to die. Maybe it’s called metalife. Or metafiction. Or realism. Or gfhrytytu. He doesn’t know. He wonders who the hell really cares. (Westward, 332-33)

Gfhrytytu really seems to be as good a name as any…

In addition to the name of the beast, one could also discuss the specific traits Burn includes under his post-postmodern heading. The three major characteristics outlined by Burn are a very good starting point, but the list could easily be extended to include for instance a fiercely ambivalent relationship to the electronic mass media, a critique of postmodern irony and a corresponding emphasis on sincerity, a marked interest in materiality and the body, a preference for the suburbs as a setting, a strong emphasis on family – all of which would add to the discussion of post-postmodernism’s corrections of the postmodern patriarchs and help bring the movement into clearer focus. Still, it must be emphasized that Burn’s lucid, sober and well-argued study of Jonathan Franzen and his post-postmodern peers marks an inspiring and indispensable opening of a discussion which will hopefully continue in the years to follow, as we try to plot a meaningful route through the tangled topography of contemporary American fiction.

Three months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Don DeLillo wrote in an essay titled, “In the Ruins of the Future”: “The writer wants to understand what this day has done to us. Is it too soon? We seem pressed for time, all of us. Time is scarcer now. There is a sense of compression, plans made hurriedly, time forced and distorted…The writer begins in the towers, trying to imagine the moment, desperately.”[1] DeLillo asks, as many have and continue to do in the time since that awful day, whether it is possible for literature to reconstruct what happened, to provide a medium for making meaning, and thus move beyond the traumatic. Kristiaan Versluys, in his critical examination of “9/11 fiction,” argues that while the great September 11 novel has not been written and maybe never will, there have been genuine attempts made to “affirm and counteract the impact of trauma” (13).

Versluys’s book is primarily, though not consistently, structured around this idea of the 9/11 novel as a means of, “wrenching trauma out of the realm of the inarticulate and nudging it toward expression [as the] first step in the healing process” (70). In the two strongest chapters, he examines the process of both national and self-recovery in the wake of September 11, as depicted in Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), a graphic representation, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005). Spiegelman’s depiction is worth noting in part, Versluys states, because he was a direct witness to the event. As such, he experienced the trauma in a way incomprehensible to those authors who have written about it from a remove and experienced it indirectly through the filter of the media, which Spiegelman charges with having “cheapened [the] trauma into mere sensationalism” (75).  His direct experience is said to allow Spiegelman to approach the subject matter with the authenticity necessary to ensure that the trauma of the day, and the difficult process of recovery that followed, is relayed appropriately–something that, in one of the few political discussions in Versluys’s text, it is charged the Bush administration failed to do when it, “hijacked September 11 and ‘reduced it all to a war recruitment poster’” (74).

Versluys is also keenly interested in Spiegelman’s work because of his role as an indirect witness to the Holocaust. As the child of Auschwitz survivors who, through the recording of the story of his father’s experience in Maus, also functions as a secondary witness to that tragedy, Spiegelman’s debilitating reaction to September 11 was, in part, a product of the history of trauma in the 20^th century. Spiegelman had, as he states in the introduction to In the Shadow of No Towers, stumbled upon “that faultline where World History and Personal History collide” (qtd. on 51). Through his engagement with Spiegleman’s “faultline,” Versluys is able to demonstrate the dangers posed by the continued “transmission of trauma” and the need for a means through which to come to terms with great shocks, something Spiegelman credits the writing of In the Shadow of No Towers with having done for him. The discussion regarding the role of trauma in 9/11 fiction continues fairly straightforwardly in regards to Foer’s Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close, which also provides an important examination of the role of language and the paradoxical inability of words to replicate the experience of trauma while remaining necessary for the working through of trauma.

Continuing the question of the resolution of trauma, Versluys discusses the continued reenactment of trauma in his critical reading of DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007). DeLillo’s work, however, is not credited with reaching the same cathartic outcome as Spiegelman or Foer’s. Instead, Versluys states that Falling Man “is, without a doubt, the darkest and the starkest” of 9/11 narratives because it “allows for no accommodation or resolution” (20). Situating his criticism of the novel within the context of the post-modern condition of drift, Versluys charts the novel’s apparent lack of central narrative structure. The characters experience little growth or development, plot lines are rarely, if ever, resolved, and the literal and figurative fall of man is a repeated theme. The explanation given for DeLillo’s choice of structure is that the novel is intended to serve as “a counterdiscourse to the prevailing nationalistic interpretations” (23). Versluys further suggests that the novel, “in stressing the paralyzing effects of September 11…is a novel contrary to the national trend” (30), and could “serve as a prelude to, or be used as an excuse for, wholesale, reactionary and even totalitarian movements of redress and moral restoration” (48). What remains unclear from Versluys’s argument, however, is to what extent he believes that rather than imagining a pessimistic outcome, DeLillo is simply reflecting in literature a very real and significant current that exists in society in the wake of September 11, and that the novel lacks resolution precisely because society has yet to find one.

The strength of these three opening chapters makes it difficult to fully understand Versluys’s decision to switch gears and refocus his discussion in the next chapter on the representation of hyperrealism in the critically panned, French novel Windows on the World (2004) by Frédéric Beigbeder.  The choice of Windows on the World is especially confusing, as Versluys himself admits the book to be a “shallow” examination in which “the cliché wins out” (121). The novel is characterized by what Beigbeder terms “hyperrealism,” taken in this context to mean a “departure from the strictures of conventional realism” (125). However, the technique, in this case, seems to be less a way of adding depth to the narrative, as DeLillo’s unconventional narrative techniques do in Falling Man, and more a way of justifying poor writing. Versluys tries to excuse Beigbeder’s technique by stating that it reflects the notion that, “there is no narrative ploy strong enough to deflect the event, no trope or stylistic device capable of stopping the irreversible progress of time” (144). Even if there were such an argument to be made here, however, the chapter, like Beigbeder’s book itself, meanders too much away from this line of thought and focuses instead on arguing that September 11 was a globally experienced event that had as much of an impact on those outside the United States as it did for individuals who directly experienced the event in New York. Versluys even tries to justify his inclusion of Beigbeder by stating that it is an important representation of the “international dimension [of] this discussion” (121). There is no denying that September 11 had global repercussions; but this argument by Versluys seems to only prove Spiegelman’s assertion that the trauma of that day has been hijacked (74).

Versluys’s final chapter lacks an obvious connection to the rest of the book, but it has merit. In the epilogue to the book, in which he briefly discusses Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2006) and Anita Shreve’s A Wedding in December (2006), two novels that only indirectly deal with September 11, Versluys admits that as time continues to pass, “the concerns expressed [in 9/11 fiction] will be less directly related to the experience of trauma” (183). Instead, he recognizes that the literature is already shifting toward the aftermath of the event, dealing instead with, “the confrontation with the Other” (183). In this respect, the inclusion of the final chapter of the book, which focuses on the concept of the Other and the process of “othering” makes sense. Interestingly, Versluys chooses to frame his remarks using the concept of the Other proposed by Emmanuel Levinas, which “locates [signification] in responsibility for the Other”–meaning that “everyone is essentially and before anything else interpellated by the face of the Other” and “we are preordained to be touched by what happens to the Other, in particular the suffering Other” (149). Using this theoretical framework proves particularly illuminating in his reading of Martin Amis’s “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta” (2006) and John Updike’s Terrorist (2006), both of which have as their main character a terrorist. Though Versluys ultimately, falling in line with much of the critical response to these works, finds both Amis and Updike’s portrayals of the terrorist to be limited by their role as projections of the ideologies of the authors, he is also right in pointing out their success as exercises in coming “face to face with the Other” (182).

Overall, Versluys presents an important, engaging text that deals thoroughly and expertly with the role of trauma and post-9/11 fiction. It would interesting to see what, if anything, he does with further investigations into the trend toward a more indirect treatment of September 11 as its role changes in the “collective imagination,” especially considering the critical success of novels not touched on in the book, including Ken Kalfus’s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (2006) and Joseph O’Neil’s Netherland (2008).[2]

Notes

[1]DeLillo, Don. “In the Ruins of the Future.” The Guardian. 22 Dec. 2001. Web. 6 Mar. 2010.

[2]Versluys, Kristiaan. Interview by Mark Athitakis. “Q&A: Dr. Kristiaan Versluys, Out of the Blue.” Mark Athitakis’ American Fiction Notes. 29 Oct. 2009. Web. 14 Dec. 2010.

Gabriel Noah Brahm: In early 2009, when The Left at War had just come out, Barack Obama was inaugurated and George W. Bush was finally out of office.  Those were heady days.  The right seemed to be on the run, as you put it in the “Introduction” to your book, which you subtitled “On Time.”  Was the feeling that things were looking up for the left, after eight long years, part of why you there called your book “untimely”?  And if so, have times changed again already, so soon and so quickly?  The book seems very timely, with war still raging and the left still in disarray.[1]

Michael Berube: I will confess to a bit of optimism in early 2009 (more on this below, when I get to the question about disappointment), but first, I want to point out that the heady days of early 2009 take up all of two paragraphs of the introduction.  I wasn’t basing any of my book’s argument on the election of Obama.  OK, granted, those two paragraphs are the first two in the book.  But the larger premise was this:  if things are now looking up for the left, however temporarily, then who wants to bother with a book of political analysis that consists almost entirely of left self-criticism?  Isn’t it better, or at least more “timely,” to celebrate the end of the Bush-Cheney era?  That’s what a “timely” book on American politics would do:  it would tell the story of Bush’s post-Katrina plunge in public opinion, growing public disillusionment with the war in Iraq, the Democrats’ victories in Congress in 2006 and in the historic election of 2008.  It would sell a bunch of copies in 2009-10, and it would be out of print by 2011.  But this book is not about Obama, not about Democrats, not about elections.  That’s the sense in which it is “untimely.”

There’s a more obscure meaning there, as well.  All through 2002-03, I was told that “now is not the time” for my criticisms of the Manichean left.  I usually replied, “no, the time to complain that an antiwar movement is being led by a neo-Stalinoid fringe group is right now, when the antiwar movement is being led by a neo-Stalinoid fringe group.”  But I took the point nonetheless, in another sense: if one is opposing the war in Iraq, one should make clear that one opposes the war in Iraq more strongly and emphatically than one opposes the “leading” opponents of the war in Iraq.  Fine.  So, I decided, I will wait, do more research, fine-tune my arguments, and publish my critique of the Manichean left at a time when they cannot say, “but the real enemy is Bush/ Cheney/ Rove/ Rumsfeld!  Focus on them!”

I am glad to hear that you find the book very timely.  I would prefer to say that it might be valuable even though it does not speak immediately to recent developments.  About those recent developments:  have times changed again, so soon and so quickly?  Yes and no.

Gregory J. Lobo: After the gathering in Washington, D.C., orchestrated recently by Comedy Central, one of the participants was quoted as saying that in the U.S. politics is being contested by the talk-show hosts and comedians. Is there something important happening there in terms of what you call (following Gramsci and Stuart Hall) “hegemony,” in terms of the struggle over consent? Or is it merely the banalization and trivialization of politics?

MB: Let’s put it this way.  If not for Jon Stewart, the Zadroga Bill—the health care bill for 9/11 first responders—would have died in the Senate, yet another victim of the all-purpose Republican filibuster of everything.  In the words of Bill Ramoka of the Uniformed Firefighter’s Association of Greater New York:  “it’s a shame that it had to come from someone on a comedy channel to make this an issue.”  Yes, yes it is.

It’s not surprising that American politics would be contested by talk-show hosts and comedians.  Better them than a half-term governor from Alaska with a Twitter feed!  But for the left (by which I mean everyone to the left of Ben Nelson of Nebraska), it is a giddy and unfamiliar feeling.  We are used to having standard-bearers from the ranks of documentarians, journalists, activists, and scholars—Michael Moore, Naomi Klein, Cesar Chavez, Noam Chomsky.  The fact that the most audible voices of “left” opinion in the US in the 2000s were Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert is very unsettling, not least for serious left journalists/activists who found Stewart’s “Restore Sanity” speech an exercise in false equivalence.  Then again, the most prominent person criticizing Stewart’s speech on those grounds was libertarian/centrist comic Bill Maher, so go figure.

I’m not sure yet whether the presence of “the left” on Comedy Central/ MSNBC constitutes an important move in the war of position.  One is tempted to point out that The Onion, for all its snarky, satiric brilliance, has not changed the practices of mainstream journalism in the US.  On the other hand, victories like Stewart’s with the Zadroga Bill are real victories, legislative and public-advocacy initiatives that improve the lives of people who desperately need help.  So I’m not willing to call that banal or trivial.

GNB/GJL: How do you see the results of the mid-term elections and the subsequent work of the lame-duck Congress? Is the Tea Party an example, formally speaking, of the kind of hegemony-work you advocate (despite differences in terms of ideology/content, of course)?  Is the right just better at hegemony in this country, and if so why?

MB: The last of these questions is matter for a good dissertation or two.  For most of my adult life, I’ve been inclined to say yes:  the right’s slogan, since the ascendancy of the New Right in 1980, might as well be “hegemony—we just do it better.”  Liberal and Democratic strategists have been waiting for three decades now for the Reagan Coalition to fracture:  surely the white rural poor will realize they have no common interests with the Club for Growth, and the evangelical Christians will realize they have no common interests with the media moguls who befoul their airwaves, their Internets, and their children’s minds (the latter hope was one of the more poignant delusions of Tom Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?)  But Godot never shows up!  Amazing!  And then, when he fails to show up, liberals and Democrats resort to cynicism:  sure, they say, the Right manages to keep its ducks in order by throwing a little red meat to the base on cultural issues while keeping the tax cuts and wealth transfers flowing upwards.  We liberals and Democrats won’t play that shell game because we’re just too honest, too dedicated to the real common good.

I think this is an elaborate form of self-deception on the part of liberals and Democrats—the idea that they could conduct a war of position with cunning and savoir-faire, but are just too principled to do so.  The truth is that they don’t have the faintest idea of how to motivate people, and when the right does motivate people by way of lies and demagoguery—as they did to remarkable effect in 2009, taking a relatively tepid universal health-insurance bill and getting its would-be beneficiaries to denounce it for “socialism” and “death panels”—then liberals are confirmed (unfortunately) in their belief that motivating people is the job of knaves and mountebanks.  So yes, the Tea Party is an example of hegemony in action, and a powerful reminder that liberals and Democrats simply do not know how to play the game.

As for the left:  as I argue in the book, the mainstream U.S. left never took on Stuart Hall’s arguments about Thatcherism, and never took seriously the Gramscian project.  It is now a stale, too-often-reheated version of the New Left, devoted to precisely the kind of “countercultural” politics I criticize in The Left at War.

And as for the midterm elections:  the news is not good.  Obama attempted a very weak, multiply-watered-down expansion of the public sector.  He was met with charges of socialism and a 63-seat loss in the House of Representatives.  There will be no second attempt at a Keynesian solution to the financial crisis, and the budget shortfalls in the states will be severe.  The GOP has no answer at all—just more tax cuts.  And tax cuts there will be.

GNB: Some thoughtful critics, such as David Bromwich for example, have eloquently expressed a poignant sense of disappointment with President Obama.  Do you share that feeling?

MB: Yes and no.  On the one hand, I want to say that I was so prepared to be disappointed in Obama—not only because of long experience with elected Democrats but also because of my wariness about his record in the Senate—that the first two years of the Obama Administration have thrown the very idea of “disappointment” into epistemic crisis.  What does it mean, after all, to say, “aha, I am disappointed in precisely the way I expected to be?”   Or to say, as Tariq Ali’s most recent book seems to say, “I am so pleased with myself that I predicted precisely this degree of disappointment”?  And then there are the leftists who are actively looking for reasons to be disappointed—the ones who believed that Obama would withdraw from Afghanistan even though he campaigned on intensifying US military operations in Afghanistan, and who now feel betrayed that Obama has broken secret campaign promises that only they could hear.

So let me be more specific.  I never expected much from Obama on the economic front.  I expected neoliberalism, more or less, and I got more:  a bailout of the financial industry, but no jobs program, no WPA, no restoration of the tax code status quo ante Bush, no “cramdown” on personal bankruptcies following from the home-mortgage meltdown.  But I am genuinely surprised, and therefore genuinely disappointed, by Obama’s record on civil liberties.  I knew he would escalate in Afghanistan, but I believed him when he said he would close Guantanamo.

That said, I should add that when UN special rapporteur on torture Manfred Nowak said, this past October, that “there is a major difference between the Bush and the Obama administration,” and that Obama had stopped the Bush-era practices of torture, the response on the keen-to-be-disappointed left was underwhelming.  The U.S. is still nowhere near the ideals of international law—witness our punitive detention of accused Wikileaker (a.k.a. patriotic whistleblower) Bradley Manning—but I cannot let severe disappointment devolve into despair.

And speaking of matters of hope and despair:  who, on the left, did not feel some small measure of optimism, however guarded, in early 2009?   Who did not entertain the thought, “perhaps now things might get a bit better for ordinary people?” Two groups, so far as I can tell:  one consisted of people who were patiently waiting to enjoy their own faux-disappointment when things went sour, and the other consisted of the remnants of the heighten-the-contradictions crew, who sincerely did not want things to get better for the average person.  Perhaps some people in both groups now congratulate themselves for their “realism”:  they were not fooled, by gum!  But I am not talking about expectations, I am talking about hope.  It was reasonable to expect that Obama would not combine the Presidential cojones of FDR and LBJ with the vision of Eugene Debs and Emma Goldman.  But what did it mean not to wish for better?  What does it mean now, should someone say, “as for me, I never gave in to hope—I never wanted things to be better than they are?”

GNB: Ted McAllister argues, in his response to your book, that the left in the U.S. can’t rule because it hasn’t got a narrative palatable to citizens: “Because the left cannot tell a story of America, they cannot govern,” he asserts.  “Howard Zinn,” for example, “has nothing to offer Americans,” he claims.  Does he have a point?  Richard Rorty used to also complain about what he called “the unpatriotic left,” insisting in his own way that a left without a good story wasn’t going anywhere—but then he also tried himself to offer one.  Is there one?

MB: The funny thing is that in a way, Howard Zinn has much to offer:  that’s why A People’s History, for all its faults, has sold almost two million copies.  The dissemination of Zinn’s work has helped, I hope, to make some Americans less self-congratulatory, more aware of the intellectual careers of Frederick Douglass and Helen Keller, and more willing to look at the unpleasant features of the historical record.  The problem, as Michael Kazin pointed out some years ago (and McAllister would probably agree with Kazin on this), is that Zinn’s narrative is a story of defeat after defeat; and even on the rare occasions when The People, United, Manage Not To Be Defeated, Zinn insists that their apparent victories are ultimately Pyrrhic insofar as they allow the system to perpetuate itself—the system that prevents 99 percent of Americans from realizing that they have common interests and a common enemy. A People’s History thus becomes, as Kazin puts it, “a painful narrative about ordinary folks who keep struggling to achieve equality, democracy, and a tolerant society, yet somehow are always defeated by a tiny band of rulers whose wiles match their greed.”

That narrative is clearly very attractive to people who need a good strong dose of demystification; that’s why Zinn’s readers, like Chomsky’s, speak as if the scales have fallen from their eyes.  My guess is that those readers tend not to focus on the defeat-upon-defeat, and are moved instead by the accounts of ordinary folks who keep struggling to achieve equality, democracy, and a tolerant society; it’s a version of what Gregory Lobo meant when he credited Chomsky with having a vague kind of “people-based hope.”  But it’s not a guide to good governance, to be sure.  Rorty, by contrast, asked us—by way of Whitman and Dewey—to see the United States as an unfinished project, a great poem that we are still writing.  I take Achieving Our Country to task in my book, but I have no doubt that Rorty had the big picture well in view:  an American left that trades primarily in cynicism and demystification will be precisely the kind of left I critique in my book, a left that appeals to two or three percent of the public.  Zinn has only one way to explain why ordinary Americans kept trying to achieve their country:  they were duped by the elites.  Rorty, by contrast, had something like Ralph Ellison’s agenda:  affirm the ideals while exposing the traducers.  Or, as Alan Ryan put it in his review of Achieving Our Country, “the point of invoking James Baldwin … is that he was entirely unforgiving of his country’s sins and still looked forward with hope to a better future. A left that fights for the political and economic changes that will ‘achieve our country’ is the left that the United States once possessed and needs as much as ever, but is hardly to be seen.”

The story to be told, then, is probably something like the story Thurgood Marshall told in his speech commemorating the bicentennial of the Constitution—a story of how an idealistic but flawed nation and its idealistic but flawed founding principles were transformed over the centuries by “momentous events” and the creation of “new constitutional principles.”  “The progress has been dramatic,” Marshall insisted, “and it will continue.”  Imagine that—faith in progress.

Part II/Islamophobia, Neoliberalism, & the Hitch

GNB: In your essay, “The Left at Bay,” you express a frightening sense of urgency about the ostensibly growing threat of Islamophobia. You write that, unlike Europe, “We don’t have many outspoken supporters of Islamism in the U.S. . . . [but] we are beginning to cultivate a culture of Islamophobic demagoguery that may yet match that of the European far right.”  You worry about “absurd degrees of Islamophobia” in the world today and marvel at “Islamophobic nuttiness.”  But is there such a thing as Islamophobia, or are we talking about people—human beings, after all, who find themselves under threat of attack and may even be prone to feeling a little nutty as such—coping with what British author Martin Amis once called “Islamismophobia,” or wariness of Islamism, as distinct from Islam the religion, a violent totalitarian political movement associated with it?  What do you say to those who assert that there is no deep-seated animus toward the Islamic faith in the U.S. that would warrant a reifying label comparable to terms designating well-documented maladies of longstanding, such as homophobia, anti-Semitism of the European/Muslim variety, or anti-Black racism?  Granted that we as a nation must protect everyone’s safety, civil rights, and freedom of religion, and given that ethnic or religious prejudice is always a bad thing (an evil the U.S. among other places has long had to cope with), what do you say to those who regard the effect of the neologism “Islamophobe” as that of a propagandistic brickbat deployed to intimidate and censor critics of Islamist reactionary politics?  By which—just to be clear—we mean of course a politics that is avowedly theocratic, not only avails itself of terrorism but celebrates it, and includes virulent anti-Semitism, misogyny, and homophobia in its discourse; a bid for “hegemony” that is generally illiberal/fascistic in form, content, means, and ends.  There were more hate-crimes reported against Jews last year than Muslims in America, but there’s no widespread discourse about an efflorescence of anti-Semitism in this country.  Nothing on the cover of Time.  Maybe they call it “terrorism” for a reason—because it terrifies.

MB: A most complicated question!  Every term in this lexicon, of course, is a potentially propagandistic brickbat.  But to take your last suggestion first, the fact that Time has not devoted a cover to anti-Semitism in the U.S. does not seem to me to be compelling evidence that Islamist terrorism has terrorized the American media.

Let me be clear about what I consider “nuttiness,” because I realize that this is a technical term.  Banning minarets, in a country with precisely four minarets, is (to put it mildly) silly.  The construction of minarets does not impinge on anyone’s human rights or anyone’s quality of life.  Likewise, demonstrating against the Park51 project—a project once praised by conservative culture warrior Laura Ingraham, of all people—does nothing whatsoever about Islamist reactionary politics.  The people organizing those demonstrations are not protesting against radical Islamism.  They are provoking needless and potentially dangerous public outrage about an Islamic cultural center, the political equivalent of an Islamic YMCA.

To repeat my original point:  on the left, there is no one in American political life who is the equivalent of George Galloway, and there is no American political party that has adopted the “we are all Hezbollah now” slogans of the SWP.  We simply do not have the level of Islamist apologism to which people like Nick Cohen and Martin Amis are responding, partly because we do not have (and for obvious reasons will not have) the British far left’s level of resentment and bile directed at the U.S.  Instead, we have widespread outrage (and a suspicious fire) at an Islamic center in Murfreesboro, Tennessee; we have Debbie Almontaser being forced to resign as the principal of the Khalil Gibran International Academy in Brooklyn; we have Martin Peretz, the former editor-in-chief of a major newsweekly, writing that he wonders whether he needs to “pretend” that American Muslims “are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment.” (Though the fact that Peretz has faced such a firestorm of criticism over his “Muslim lives are cheap” blog post indicates that they will not, after all, be tolerated in public discourse, any more than would the remarks of someone who said, “gay lives are cheap, most notably to gays.”) So no, it is not “Islamophobic” to oppose murderous groups like the Hofstad Network (to take but one example).  But it does make sense to use the term, I believe, when dealing with people whose fear and loathing of Muslims is based not on anything certain Muslims have done or said but on the very fact that they are Muslim.

GNB: I agree with you that bigoted remarks ought not be tolerated in public discourse.  And that they are not, in fact, in America, seems well attested, as you suggest, by the sorts of brief but intense “firestorms” of righteous indignation that routinely ignite to engulf anyone in the media who makes an untoward comment, whether out of awkwardness and insensitivity or genuinely racist sentiments—from beloved actors/comedians like Michael Richards, to talk-show hosts, sportscasters, candidates for office…and now gruff liberal magazine editors.  But is the “gay” analogy really fair/accurate in Peretz’s case?  After all, there is no gay-on-gay factional violence, no “Queerist” terrorism, no blowing up each others’ holy places, and no predominantly gay countries that poll anti-Semitism upwards of 90% spewing the most hateful and disgusting anti-Jewish propaganda every day.  That most victims of Islamist violence/terrorism are Muslims is a fact, and one that should concern all of those who do not think Muslim life is any less precious than anyone else’s.  So, without at all defending the way he said it–for which he deserved criticism—wasn’t something like that the real import of his statement?  And isn’t that something that should concern us at least as much as labeling a longstanding supporter of liberal causes a “racist rat” (as a protester at Harvard had it on a sign)?  If this is an example of “Islamophobia,” in other words, then it’s the kind of bigotry that does not prevent somebody from marching regularly, at the age of 70-something, in protests in East Jerusalem on the side of the Palestinians, in solidarity with Muslims seeking to block Jewish expansion there (as Peretz does).  Forgive me if this seems like a lengthy quibble over one unpleasant recent incident (leading to Peretz’s stepping aside after decades as editor-in-chief of The New Republic), but it seems to me there’s more at stake here.  It’s true we don’t have George Galloway or the SWP.  But we have ANSWER.  We have the likes of Imam Abdul Malik, giving talks on college campuses all the time, and an accompanying atmosphere of intimidation (at some of the UCs in particular) that has led to serious investigation of a growing problem of anti-Semitism in higher education in this country.  In another league, granted, we have the shocking phenomenon of ongoing suicide attacks–the Shoe Bomber, the Underpants Bomber, the Times Square Bomber, and who knows what–by Islamists.  Islamism is not Islam, but it overlaps with it, and people who ought to be concerned about the former might not always know where the line is drawn.

MB: You’re right, the gay analogy isn’t a good one.  I should have said “black lives are cheap, most notably to blacks“—because racists say this all the time about black-on-black crime.  They have to use code words these days, of course, but still.  The point remains that if Peretz had been a bit more careful, or a bit more thoughtful, he would never have written the line about Muslims not being worthy of the First Amendment, and he would have said “Muslim lives are cheap to Islamists, who hold all life cheap.”  The fact that he conflated violent Islamist extremists with Muslims in general—that was precisely the problem.  Nor was it an isolated instance of intolerance and imprudence; it was part of a pattern that marked Peretz’s blog.  That said, I was stunned (pleasantly) to read in that New York profile that Peretz participates in the vigils and protests in Sheikh Jarrah.  Good on him for that!

As for ANSWER and the campuses:  about the former, I really do think we’re talking about the fringe of the fringe, a small handful of people who ordinarily couldn’t fill a seminar room’s worth of followers even if they offered free food and an open bar.  How in the world they got to be the organizer of the antiwar demonstrations remains a mystery.  Was every other left organization in the US asleep at the switch?  And yes, we have people like Ramsey Clark and Lynne Stewart.  My point is that they’re nowhere near the levers of state power or public influence.  About the latter, it is a matter of real concern to me that the supporters of boycotts against Israel appear to be drawn chiefly from the ranks of the academic left.  This is yet another argument the left needs to have out in the open, with plenty of light and air—because otherwise, I think you’ll find some degree (minimal, I hope, but I fear worse) of eliminationism masquerading as humanitarian concern for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.  I take some comfort, though, in the fact that even as the British AUT and UCU have passed resolutions in favor of various boycotts of Israeli academics and universities, the AAUP has firmly opposed all academic boycotts.  As do I.

GNB/GJL: At the end of “The Left at Bay,” you bring up the fact that among the responses to the book we gathered there was no representative of what, in The Left at War, you call the “Manichean Left,” and that you would have liked to reply to one.  But is not your whole book a response to that position?  Though this might be a bit of deck stacking, perhaps you could respond briefly here to what you, who have spent so much time immersed in Manichean Left thought, would imagine to be an ML critique of you.  What would be an interesting challenge by an ML reader, and how would you respond?  You write, for instance, that it would have been nice had we included, “Someone who could properly take me to task for not having an adequate response to neoliberalism or a compelling account of how a Walzerian defense of the social welfare state can avoid the pitfalls of nationalism.”

MB: You’re right, the Manichean Left is well represented in my book, sometimes in long block quotes.  So in some sense it has already spoken.  But I would like to hear a further response from the Manichean Left precisely because it is the object of my criticism.  I want to hear their best critique, as opposed to the effusions of people like Louis Proyect.  I would like to hear something that’s not boilerplate about U.S. imperialism in Kosovo and silent genocide in Afghanistan—something that takes seriously the question of how to think about failed states, mass murders, and terrorist networks.  I hesitate to ventriloquize a Manichean Left reader here, for fear of getting the hypothetical argument wrong and being accused of dealing in strawmen.  I mean, I can churn out the usual Ed Herman-quality stuff about my being a dupe of American empire, an apologist for U.S./NATO militarism, and (worst of all) a “liberal,” but I’d rather see someone get down to cases.  For instance, I can imagine someone to my left suggesting that my faith in internationalism is misplaced, and that the International Criminal Court will be worthy of the name on the day someone of Kissinger’s stature is hauled before it.  All I could say in return is that it makes more sense to build structures that might eventually bring people like Kissinger to some form of justice than to tear them down at the outset on the grounds that they have not yet done so.

As for neoliberalism and the Walzerian welfare state, these are much more complicated questions.  Someone suggested to me, in the course of an email exchange, that I gave the Eustonians a pass on the question of neoliberalism; it may not have seemed pressing at the time, but now that deregulation and austerity policies have done so much catastrophic damage to the world economy—and to ordinary working people—it should be much higher on the agenda.  The question of how to imagine a social welfare state without nationalism is probably above my pay grade.  There was a time when I hoped that the European Union would point the way; now I do not know where to turn.  But I have to say how sharply I was struck, upon rereading The Hard Road to Renewal, by the way Stuart Hall acknowledged and tried to grapple with the contradictions of the welfare state.  At the risk of repeating myself again and again and again, I don’t think he has received anything like the recognition he deserves in the U.S., on this count and on many others.

GNB: Your book is very much a carefully reasoned, patiently, painstakingly, admirably balanced, well-informed and even good-natured examination of the often fractious arguments for and against the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and of the problem of how progressives in particular should think about terrorism post-9/11.  So where’s Christopher Hitchens?  As you acknowledge in the book, he was responsible for an amazing barrage of “searing critiques of the Manichean left.” Yet he receives no sustained attention.  Why is that—given his prominence as the most visible and controversial pubic intellectual engaged with “the left at war” while you were conceiving and writing the book?  Can you say anything more about how you regard his significance?  As you know, he makes some comrades on the left apoplectic. . . .  Do you share their feelings of betrayal?

MB: Last question first, no.  I was surprised by his support of the Iraq War, even more surprised by his support of Bush, but I did not feel betrayed.  I did not take it personally.  I mentioned Hitchens favorably in my first post-9/11 essay, because I thought his initial responses to the Manichean left were smart and necessary—though, as I remarked even then, I could not share his sense of “exhilaration” at the conflict.  Likewise, when I covered his debate with Tariq Ali in April 2002, I remained sympathetic to many of his arguments, but was beginning to get the sense that he was going to ride them much further than I was willing to go.  So the reason I now mention his crack at the Dixie Chicks in The Left at War is not that I regard that regrettable remark as symptomatic of his thought; rather, I am trying to indicate that by 2003, he had become radioactive.  In many ways he gave the Manicheans exactly what they wanted:  see, they could say, the people who criticize Chomsky wind up leaving The Nation and voting for Bush; the people who supported war in Afghanistan are now leading the pundits’ charge into Iraq.

There’s a tactical question at stake here as well.  A lot of what passed for “debate” in those days—and now I’m talking about face-to-face stuff, not books and essays and blogs—now looks to me like the workings of our lizard brains.  It was not a question of assessing arguments so much as lining up friends and foes:  if X said it, it must be wrong, and if Y said it, its total and complete rightness could not be questioned.  I had one colleague back then who practically spat on the ground every time Todd Gitlin’s name was mentioned.  It didn’t matter what the context was.  If Todd Gitlin came out against gum disease, my friend would promptly march under the banner “we are all gingivitis now.”  I was trying to forestall that response as much as possible, even though I know I’ll get it anyway.  So I don’t deal with Hitchens at great length, precisely because Hitchens himself made it so difficult to deal with his work with the degree of care I wanted to bring to this book.

You’re right that Hitchens was and is the most visible and controversial pubic intellectual engaged with “the left at war.”  And he remains, at his best, a compelling and fascinating writer.  But he’s not the only person whose absence from the book has drawn questions.  One reader asked me why I didn’t say more about Edward Said; another wanted to see some treatment of David Rieff (who would most surely remind me that Kissinger will never appear in The Hague); still another wanted a discussion of Michael Ignatieff and Samantha Power.  Each of these figures would merit a chapter of his or her own, no question.  I just want somebody else to write those chapters.

Part III/Propaganda, Ideology, & Hegemony

GJL: You talk about the necessity to study how the American public, or a good portion of it, has been “won over” rather than deceived or manipulated.  While you have dealt with this distinction at length in your book, is it possible to say a few words about it here, for readers perhaps not wholly familiar with the details of your argument?  And could you also say something about this idea in terms of understanding international or global political dynamics?

MB: My point isn’t that people are never duped or deceived; on the contrary, it happens every day.  My point is simply that when you start from the premise that popular consent is always “manufactured” rather than won, you wind up with one version or another of “false consciousness.”  And when that happens, you conclude that the masses (which, as Raymond Williams said, are always other people) have been hornswoggled by the elites, by ideology, by the mass media—whereas you and those fortunate few of like mind have managed to escape The System unharmed.  As I suggest in my book, The Matrix is the most popular and accessible version of this theory:  we have been fed an elaborate delusion that keeps us from realizing the truth, and we can see reality for what it is only if we take the right pill.

Now, there is indeed such a thing as hegemony, but it doesn’t work quite so simply as this.  Let me turn things over to Raymond Williams—this from the essay “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory”:

“The processes of education; the processes of a much wider social training within institutions like the family; the practical definitions and organization of work; the selective tradition at an intellectual and theoretical level: all these forces are involved in a continual making and remaking of an effective dominant culture, and on them, as experienced, as built into our living, its reality depends.  If what we learn there were merely an imposed ideology, or if it were only the isolable meanings and practices of the ruling class, or of a section of the ruling class, which gets imposed on others, occupying merely the top of our minds, it would be—and one would be glad—a very much easier thing to overthrow.”

As I admit in the book, it’s not easy to apply this idea to international or global political dynamics.  And as I point out in my reply to McAllister, when Stuart Hall tried to grapple with the popularity of the Falklands War, he more or less tossed out his Gramsci and reverted to the language of false consciousness; he was therefore uncharacteristically unconvincing when it came down to devising antiwar arguments that wouldn’t send the man in the pub (and his family) marching off into the sunset.  But what I’m trying to ask—and this is as ambitious and as utopian as I get—is how we can take the lessons of Gramsci, how we can start from the premise that consent is won rather than coerced, and build support for supranational structures that can check the system of perpetual war and eventual despoliation of the planet.  Suggestions are welcome.

GJL: Chomsky and Herman and like-minded thinkers will argue that their positions are supported by evidence; you, of course, make the same claim.  How does one decide?  Is it a question of better evidence?  Is it a matter of ethics and pragmatics—in other words, is it question of how we should conduct ourselves with others and how we actually can conduct ourselves with others, given the “nature” of this world?  Without expecting a complete answer: To what degree are we talking about reason and evidence, and to what degree are we talking about emotion, affect, or identification?

Allow me, if you will, to combine this question with the next, and answer them as one.

GNB: You (justly, many would say) criticize Slavoj Zizek for his Stalinoid politics, at the start of your book, making him into a poster-child for a Manichean Left that’s all total critique and no pragmatic vision.  Is that your whole view of him, though, or do you find anything valid, of use, or of genuine interest in his method of interpreting culture and human behavior?  For example, his notion of jouissance as a political factor, maybe?  Can we understand politics (or anything else) without taking into account the unconscious ways people “enjoy” their own “symptoms”?  Moreover, doesn’t such consideration in fact allow Zizek to present a sophisticated “ideology” model that is really very sophisticated (i.e., not a matter of false consciousness but of fantasy), as well as very far from Chomskian rationalism?

MB: Zizek has this part right, I think, so my answer to the final question here is simply yes.  Less simply:  no, it’s not just a matter of evidence.  People believe what they believe for all kinds of reasons, including reasons that are not properly “reasons” at all.  That’s why I’m not willing to throw out the enjoy-your-symptom baby with the Stalinoid bathwater, so to speak, and why I am willing to insist that Zizek can be a thrilling, illuminating, useful writer despite the whole totalitarianism thing.

I feel the same way about Foucault and Heidegger:  the fact that they had terrible political judgment does not invalidate Foucault’s work on the history of madness or of sexuality, or Heidegger’s readings of Plato, Sophocles, or Holderlin.  “I’m not going to take Foucault seriously on anything, because he was so foolish as to support Islamists in Iran during the revolution” is just a more sophisticated form of lizard-brain activity.  Surely it’s possible to acknowledge that someone is an interesting thinker even if s/he has poor political judgment.

GJL: Apart from Ellen Willis and Stuart Hall, whom you lionize as avatars of the “democratic left,” are there other thinkers out there who seem to be really grappling with reality and relations of power in the sorts of ways you find useful and necessary?  If there are, can you point to some of them and say a few words about what you find valuable in their thinking?

MB: Here’s an idiosyncratic list for you:  I liked John Brenkman’s The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy very much, and I always learn from the work of Bruce Robbins and John McGowan, because their work is always so careful and thoughtful.  Ramesh Thakur’s The United Nations, Peace and Security is a terrific book on the UN.  I’ve admired Michelle Goldberg’s journalism for some time, and can recommend The Means of Reproduction; I’m hoping that she’ll become the Ellen Willis of her generation.  And I’ll read pretty much anything Ian Williams or Laura Rozen write on international affairs; they’re always smart and unhoodwinkable.  Lastly, though he went further on Israel than I would, Tony Judt will be sorely missed by everyone who cares about the fate of social democracy.

Part IV/The Left @ Politicsandculture.org

GNB/GJL: What surprised you about participating in this special issue of Politics & Culture devoted to evaluating your book?  What did you learn or were you moved to rethink?

MB: I was surprised that this was not an exchange confined to paid-up, card-carrying leftists.  (I was a little surprised that it was all guys, but c’est la vie et c’est la gauche à la guerre.)  So I had to spend some time trying to figure out how to address people who don’t share my basic political assumptions; as I say in “The Left at Bay,” I was mildly amused that conservative readers noted that the book isn’t about them, but they were right to suggest that I pitched the book explicitly as an in-house debate.  Notably, I found myself having to take inventory of my beliefs about Israel, since I was no longer dealing exclusively with critiques from my left; and I had to put the question of Islamism (and Islamist apologism) front and center in a way that my book does not.  Very useful exercises, all.

Part V/At it Again

GNB/GJL: What is your next project?

MB: Narrative and Disability, about the implications of cognitive disability for understanding narrative theory and experimental fiction—and about the undertheorization of intellectual disability in disability studies.  Should be fun: I’m looking forward to writing it at some point in the next couple of years.  It will be something of a relief to write about literature again.

Note

[1]Interview conducted December 27-29, 2010.