THE REBELLING YOUNG SCHOLARS
In: Commentary, Band 30, Heft 5, S. 404-442
ISSN: 0010-2601
Over the last several yrs our larger graduate Sch's have contained within their precincts a cold war, the outcome of which will influence US higher educ. The combatants are a new generation of graduate S's who are substantially to the left of the men at whose feet they have chosen to sit. They are impatient with both the enlightened conservatism & the mild liberalism of their professors. New University Thought, (U of Chicago), Point Sixty (Philadelphia), & Studies on the Left (U of Wisconsin; are some of the publications expressing the shared views of S's, The themes they discuss can be summarized as nuclear war, civil rights, mass culture & the need for personal involvement. The philosophy of the Studies on the Left is that there is room in scholarship for the application of reason to the reconstruction of society as well as to legalistic interpretation & reform; the vehicle chosen for the new departure is Marxism. These S's have no illusions about Soviet Communism; the Marxism which draws them antedates the Russian Revolution. James Madison & Alexander Hamilton have been called pre-Marxian Marxists. Studies on the Left is primarily a journal of historians who emphasize the econ history of this country. If Marx saw undisputed power in the property-owners' class, the S's now see it concentrated in a corporate elite. Graduage S's are not revolutionaries & their hope is educ - knowledge will change society. Studies on the Left is contrasted with the New Left Review of Oxford. The latter is a thorough-going Socialist journal. The young Englishmen of the left want to do away with capitalism, believe that the working man who committed treason failed to live up to the cultural expectations set for him by those who assisted him in his earlier struggles, that the US & the USSR can make nuclear fools of themselves, but GB should sit the next one out, that white settlers in Africa should accept majority rule or return to England. British Socialists have a fairly distinct image of the country & world they would like to see. The Americans of the radical persuasion cannot apply their minds to imagining the outlines of a new soc order for their country. Workers in the US do not regard themselves as being exploited; if there is no class-conscious proletariat, the intellectual cannot play a part. In England a vast majority of the British workers retain their loyalty to the Labor Party. Yet despite all these obstacles to utopian thinking, the intellectual awakening symbolized by Studies on the Left is beginning to be felt throughout our graduate Sch's. V. D. Sanua.