OSTROGORSKI'S GENERAL INTENTIONS AND PARTICULAR CONCLUSIONS HAVE BEEN MISUNDERSTOOD. HE WAS NOT A BEHAVIORAL POLITICAL SCIENTIST, NOR DID HE BELIEVE THAT THE PARTY IN THE LEGISLATIVE WAS DOMINATED BY THE PARTY IN THE COUNTRY. HIS FUNDAMENTAL BELIEF WAS IN THE IMPORTANCE OF IDEAS AND CHOICE IN POLITICS, AND HE ARGUED THAT DEMOCRACY MUST SECURE LEADERS OF POLITICAL AND MORAL WORTH.
MOST STUDENTS OF SAINT-SIMON HAVE BEEN ESPECIALLY CONCERNED WITH HIS RELATIONS WITH THE DIFFERENT 19TH-CENTURY IDEOLOGICAL MOVEMENTS; HENCE FEW HAVE APPROACHED HIS WORK FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE INCOMPATIBILITY BETWEEN HIS ATTITUDES & THOSE OF THE JACOBINS. YET SUCH AN APPROACH RESITUATES HIS INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY IN ITS PROPER CONTEXT--& INDEED PROTECTS HIS WORK FROM THE ANACHRONISTIC INTERPRETATIONS WHICH HAVE PLAGUED IT IN THE HISTORY OF IDEAS. MOREOVER, IT ILLUMINATES EVEN MORE REWARDINGLY HIS PRESENT RELEVANCE. HIS CLASH WITH JACOBINISM MIGHT BE TAKEN AS THE STARTING POINT OF THE OPPOSITION BETWEEN JACOBINISM & INDUSTRIALISM, BETWEEN THE MODERN INDUSTRIAL SOCIETIES & THE 'POLITICS OF POWER' OF THE OLD CENTRALIZED NATION STATES. FROM THIS THEN DERIVES HIS THEORY OF THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE POLITICS OF POWER & THE POLITICS OF ABILITIES. THE IMPORTANCE OF THIS THEORY, ESPECIALLY FOR POLITICAL SCIENCE, HAS NOT BEEN SUFFICIENTLY STRESSED IN THE CLASSIC STUDIES ON SAINT-SIMON'S WORK. MOSTLY SOCIOLOGICAL, THESE STUDIES ARE DIVIDED AMONGST THEMSELVES ON WHETHER HIS WORK MUST BE SEEN AS SOCIALISM, UTOPIAN OR OTHERWISE, OR AS ELITISM, TECHNOCRATIC OR OTHERWISE. YET IT IS THIS THEORY WHICH PROVIDES THE LOGICAL LINK BETWEEN THESE 2 SEEMINGLY CONTRADICTORY INTERPRETATIONS. POWER IS CONCENTRATED IN THE RAREFIED SPHERES OF AVAILABILITY OF KNOWLEDGE, AMONGST THE LEADERS OF THE GROUPS & THEIR NECESSARY COUNCILS FOR COORDINATION & PLANNING, CONSULTATION & INTERDEPENDENCE. THIS IS WHERE IN SAINT-SIMON'S CONCEPTION & TERMINOLOGY GOVERNMENT, IN THE OLD SENSE, ENDS & ADMINISTRATION, IN THE NEW SENSE, BEGINS. THE THEORY NOW COMES FULLY INTO ITS OWN. "IN THE PAST THE MAIN POLITICAL SKILL CONSISTED IN KNOWING HOW TO GOVERN, THAT IS TO SAY HOW TO MAKE ONESELF FEARED & OBEYED; THE SCIENCE OF ADMINISTRATION WAS STILL IN ITS INFANCY & HAD ONLY A SECONDARY IMPORTANCE. IT IS AN ENTIRELY NEW DOCTRINE WHICH WE MUST ORGANIZE...#THE OLD DOCTRINE HAD ENTRUSTED THE GOVERNORS WITH THE TASK OF COMMANDING; THE NEW DOCTRINE MUST CONFER ON THEM, AS THEIR PRINCIPAL FUNCTION, TO ADMINISTER WELL." THIS IS WHERE SAINT-SIMON, SOMEWHAT UNEXPECTEDLY, LINKS UP ACROSS THE 19TH CENTURY WITH MAX WEBER & HIS RATIONALITAT & HIS INTERESSENKONSTELLATION, & WITH BENTLEY & HIS GROUPS & PROCESSES OF GOVERNMENT, TO GIVE A NEW RELEVANCE TO THE CONCEPT OF INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY. 1 TABLE. AA.
SCHIFFRIN'S BOOK is also a polemic against the corrosive influence of international conglomerates on U.S. publishing. To understand his enmity, one must appreciate his biography. Schiffrin's father, Jacques, a Russian Jew living in France, founded his own publishing house, Editions de La Pleiade, with help from his friend Andre Gide, who translated a number of Russian classics into French. Pleiade, whose mission was to make affordable editions of the classics, was so successful that Gallimard (where Jacques Schiffrin had worked until he was drafted into the French army) bought it in 1936. Shortly after the French defeat in 1940, Jacques Schiffrin was fired. His dear Pleiade remained in the hands of Gallimard, which, according to his son, obeyed the imperative of Aryanization over loyalty to its employees. In 1942, Jacques Schiffrin, his wife, and son Andre, emigrated to New York, and Jacques resumed his work as a publisher, issuing French editions of resistance writing for the small exile community. Soon, he sold foreign licenses for these editions, and the business, which he established with capital raised from friends, joined forces with Kurt Wolff's Pantheon Books. Schiffrin's short tenure at the NAL was his first and last foray into traditional publishing. He joined Pantheon shortly after it had been acquired by Random House (and shortly after his father's death). Understanding, perhaps from his father's example, the need to maintain control over his contributions to a larger corporate entity, Schiffrin quickly set out to establish his independence within the company. Schiffrin's description of his years at the helm of Pantheon, before Random's acquisition by RCA, are somewhat idyllic. Pantheon remained profitable, if not wildly so, through a combination of shrewd academic publishing, much of it by way of Europe, and new best-sellers from Pantheon's backlist authors--a formula that afforded Schiffrin the luxury of satisfying profit expectations without sacrificing editorial freedom. In spite of this, Schiffrin wears as a badge of honor his distinct disinterest in the bottom line. This idyll of quality publishing, in Schiffrin's estimation, ended as soon as the merciless searchlight of corporate avarice trained itself on his peaceable kingdom. In 1965, RCA-owned Random House decided to no longer credit Pantheon with the proceeds from its own backlist. In effect, Schiffrin lost his birthright: the Pantheon history that was his proudest accomplishment. A series of punishing cost-saving measures were ordered, all of them amounting to a kind of tithing for Pantheon's place in the Random House firmament. The environment for Pantheon grew more hostile with S. I. Newhouse's acquisition of Random House in the 1980s. After a proposed corporate restructuring that would have severely restricted Pantheon's output, Schiffrin and his staff quit en masse. Shortly thereafter, Schiffrin established the New Press, which, with its slim undergirding of financial support from various foundations, stands immune from its founder's industry-wide indictment.
Thus it came as a surprise to me, after reading the small selection of essays in his 'street' book, that so little of Kracauer's early work seems to have reached the other side of the Atlantic. Neither of his two novels, Ginster (1928) and Georg (1934), has been translated into English; the original English rendition of his social biography of composer Jacques Offenbach, Offenbach and the Paris of his Time (1937), written during Kracauer's Parisian exile, is long out of print, not to mention incomplete and flawed. And it is only in the past several years that English editions of his writing from the Weimar period have appeared, most notably his anthology of essays The Mass Ornament, put out by Harvard University Press in 1995, and the recent Verso translation of Die Angestellten, published as The Salaried Masses (1998). The English-speaking world is missing an important side of Kracauer. We know the Kracauer who fatuously unveiled the portents of National Socialism in such classic Weimar films as Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and, to a lesser extent, the Kracauer who reflected on the aesthetics of cinema in his other major American publication, Theory of Film (1960). But we have little insight into Kracauer's writings from the Weimar period and from his first years of exile. AS A MEANS of bridging the gap between the pre-war German works and their postwar American counterparts, Gertrud Koch's brief critical overview of Kraucauer's entire oeuvre, Siegfried Kracauer: An Introduction (first published in Germany in 1996 and translated here by Jeremy Gaines), offers a key addition to the still evolving secondary literature. Combining biographical sources and close textual analysis, Koch surveys the development of Kracauer's thought from his first sociological and journalistic writings in the 1910s and 1920s up to his final work, History: The Last Things Before the Last, published in 1969, three years after his death. At the outset of her study, Koch notes the profound difficulty critics have faced when trying to make sense of Kracauer's diverse, and sometimes competing, works and their reception. 'Kracauer exists,' she asserts, 'either as a film theorist or as a distant relative of the Frankfurt School, either as a journalist or as a philosopher, either as an essay-writer or as a novelist.' (Kracauer himself showed a certain awareness of this problem, suggesting late in life that he should not be viewed merely as 'a film man,' but as a 'philosopher of culture, or also a sociologist, and as a poet.') Yet, without attempting to attribute an artificial consistency to Kracauer's trajectory of thought, Koch examines, in seven crisp chapters, its development within a broad set of historical and theoretical contexts. BORN IN 1889 into an established Frankfurt-based Jewish family, Kracauer was raised amid a variety of cultural currents. His uncle Isidor Kracauer, who played a critical role in his upbringing, was an authority on the history of the city's Jewish community. After completing his studies in architecture, philosophy, and sociology, Kracauer himself participated to some degree in Frankfurt Jewish life, joining a small circle (which also included Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Leo Lowenthal) gathered around the charismatic Rabbi Nehemiah Nobel. (He would eventually break with Rosenzweig and Buber, publishing a vociferous critique of their Bible translation in 1926.) It was also around this time, however, that Kracauer's relationship to the far more secular Adorno, with whom he met regularly on Saturdays to read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, began to blossom, as did his work on Georg Simmel, Max Weber, and Edmund Husserl. If anything, the first years of Kracauer's professional life reveal, as Koch suggests, deep commitment to a number of enterprises, from architecture to philosophy, from journalism to cultural criticism, without ever gaining a sense of permanence in any one single place. Indeed, in a 1923 letter addressed to Lowenthal and Adorno, Kracauer sardonically adopted a phrase from Georg Lukacs, giving his location as 'the headquarters of the transcendental homeless.'.
