News:

Politics and the Intellectual: The Legacy of Irving Howe

By John Rodden

 

 

Irving Howe published his intellectual autobiography, A Margin of Hope (1982), just as the Reagan era was dawning, and the timing of the memoir’s release highlighted what most of his friends and enemies already knew: despite Howe’s success as an author, editor, literary critic, public intellectual, and radical activist, his political life as a socialist tribune was marked by a series of failures that reflected the declining prospects of American socialism itself. Howe’s enemies mocked him as a hopeless utopian; his accurate critique of Communism never endeared him to most conservatives. Meanwhile, the Far Left attacked him as a wavering, lukewarm liberal. Howe’s brand of moderate democratic socialism seemed all but forgotten.

As a result, Howe’s margin of hope for radical political transformation had receded drastically by the time he wrote this book, a volume in which he admits that “the years of my life coincided with the years of socialist defeat.” Yet A Margin of Hope is not Howe’s final word. Before his death in 1993, in a series of interviews granted during his last two decades, he further reflects on the main intellectual currents that sustained him: literature, Jewish culture, and radical politics. And these public conversations come the closest to an autobiographical record of his thought at the time of his greatest prominence and success—the late 1970s and 1980s—which witnessed the publication of his best-selling World of Our Fathers, his reception of a MacArthur Foundation “genius award,” and his much-discussed essays on topics ranging from the politics of multiculturalism to the literature of the Holocaust. By the mid-1970s—after the deaths of Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, and other New York intellectual elders—he was widely regarded as both the leading liberal-radical voice and the foremost literary intellectual in America.

Howe lived through, and meditated intently on, the major political, social, and cultural events that dominated the American, and indeed the international, scene in the last half of the twentieth century. Yet if in his later years he was far more temperate and wise than the precocious young polemicist of the 1940s who banged the drum loudly for Leon Trotsky, he nevertheless refused to abandon the radical vision of transformation that enflamed his socialist youth. Rather, he modified his utopian vision. Acknowledging a form of “American exceptionalism,” Howe ultimately came to prize the complexity of America—that creative, impetuous, individualistic, conservative, radical, capitalist riddle that had long baffled him, partly due to his European-oriented intellectual inclinations—as well as its distinctiveness, an appreciation that extended to a mature admiration for Ralph Waldo Emerson.

 

Howe’s conservative adversaries saw him as struggling naïvely to maintain the viability of a radical alternative in a world that had passed it by. These included his colleagues among the New York Intellectuals, that largely Jewish group that came to prominence beginning in the 1930s around little magazines such as Partisan Review and Commentary. Some of these colleagues, several of whom formed the nucleus of the neoconservative movement, have expressed withering ridicule of Howe’s so-called utopianism. Yet Howe also received vicious criticism not only from the New Left of the 1960s but also in later years from Marxists, many of whom considered him to have compromised the purity of their movement. Alexander Cockburn, for instance, wrote a memorial of Howe in The Nation blasting him as compromised and reactionary. Some observers regard it as one of Howe’s achievements, however, that he was maligned by both the Far Left and the neoconservatives. They admire the moderate Howe of the later years, who was able to weather the ideological storms of his final decade with composure, even serenity.

In 1969 Irving Kristol criticized Howe’s stubborn “utopian faith,” a jibe that prefigured later attacks by prominent neoconservative intellectuals such as Midge Decter and Joseph Epstein, all of whom argued that Howe lacked the insight and courage to revise his views in light of socialism’s failures. Yet the differences between Howe and the neoconservatives always had practical consequences, both political and economic. Responding in 1969 to Kristol’s critique, Howe identified the burgeoning gulf between himself and the emerging neoconservatives: “I really want to see the major segments of the American economy socially-controlled and democratically operated, and I really want a major redistribution of power and wealth.”

This reply sums up Howe’s core beliefs, which date back to his Bronx youth. His pained Depression-era memories of his parents’ long working hours and low wages never dimmed, nor did his gratitude for the benefits brought by the unionization of his mother’s job: “We could now have meat more often, my parents started to squirrel away a few dollars, and once my birthday came around, my mother bought me a few grown-up shirts.” Socialism would become, for Howe, an emotional archetype. In the words of Edward Alexander, Howe’s unlikely biographer with a rightward slant, Howe emotionally and intellectually transformed socialism “into a myth of considerable power as an ethical instrument of social and political criticism.” Amid a radically changing landscape, the core ideal remained. Gerald Sorin, Howe’s other biographer, defends his continuing commitment to radicalism more forcefully: