BOOK REVIEW
Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent, Gerald Sorin, New York University Press, New York, 2002
The last time we heard the name of the subject of this biography, Irving Howe, in this space it was as a (well paid) cameo 'talking head' performer and resident literary expert in Woody Allen’s comedic send up of mass culture, Zelig. If Woody Allen is regarded as the consummate New Yorker, then Irving Howe, for better or worst and I think for the worst, represented the consummate post- World War II New York intellectual. Furthermore, as detailed here Howe came to see himself, as reflected in various shifts in his literary work and his politics, as a New York Jewish intellectual. (The Jewish intellectual aspect of this biography is a little beyond the scope of what I want to review here but should be mentioned as it is a central theme of Professor Sorin’s work).
Moreover, as a perusal of this sympathetic, sometimes overly sympathetic, biography will reveal, as if too add insult to injury, this long time and well known editor of the social democratic journal Dissent fancied himself a New York socialist intellectual, as well. And that is the rub. As I will argue below Howe and his ‘greatest generation’ cohort of public intellectuals did more than their fair share of muddying the political waters as people of my generation, the generation of ’68, tried to make political sense of the world. And tried to change it for the better, despite the best efforts of Howe and his crowd to make peace, for the nth time, with bourgeois society.
I have mentioned in a review of Socialist Workers Party (SWP) leader James P. Cannon’s The Struggle for the Proletarian Party, a book about the faction fight over defense of the Soviet Union and the organizational norms of a Bolshevik party in 1939-40, found elsewhere in this space that I have long questioned the wisdom of the entry tactic into the American Socialist Party by those forces who followed Leon Trotsky in the 1930’s. Irving Howe is an individual case study that points out, in bold relief, the impetus behind that questioning.
Howe, born of poor New York Jewish immigrant parents in 1920, came of political age in the 1930’s as he gravitated toward the leftward moving Socialist Party in high school and later at that hotbed of 1930's radicalism, City College of New York. As a result of the Trotskyist entry (as an organization then called the Workers Party) into the Socialist party they were able to pull out a significant portion of the Socialist Party’s youth group, including Howe, when they were expelled from that party in 1938. This cohort of, mainly, young New York socialists thereafter formed a key component of the anti-Soviet defensist opposition led by Max Shachtman that split from the main body of Trotskyism, the SWP, in 1940. From there on, especially in the post World War II period with the onrush of the Cold War, these ‘third camp’ socialists made their peace, quietly or by warm embrace, with American imperialism.
The bulk of Howe’s intellectual career, as a niche magazine editor and professor at various top-notch universities, thus was spent explaining the ways of god to man, oops, American imperialism to newly minted graduate students. So, not only does Professor Howe serve here as a whipping boy for the errors of the 1930’s Trotskyists but also as a prima facie case of what happens when one’s theoretical baggage breaks away from a hard materialist conception of history. Therefore, by the time that my generation was ready to ‘storm heaven’ in the 1960’s we dismissed Howe and his intellectuals in retreat out of hand.
Professor Sorin does a very good and thorough job of describing the tensions between Howe’s branch of the Old Left and the various components of the New Left as each group squared off against the other in the Sixties. Sorin gives, as to be expected from his sympathetic portrayal, his protagonist Howe much the best of it. For our part, we of the New Left may have made every political mistake in the book due to more than our share of naiveté and overzealousness but we had a better sense than Howe and his ilk of how irrational the forces that we opposed (and still oppose) really were. But read the biography and make your own decision on that. I will have more to comment on this question in future entries.
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