Fantasies of the new class: Ideologies of Professionalism In Post

In the opening of Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), the elderly protagonist wakes up in his bedroom and reflects that he is surrounded by “the wrong books, the wrong papers.”¹ The scene encapsulates the novel’s central theme. The bedroom, like the novel itself, is cluttered with the tokens of the Western intellectual tradition. Artur Sammler’s books and papers are symptoms of the fact that “intellectual man has become an explaining creature. Fathers to children, wives to husbands, lecturers to listeners, experts to laymen, colleagues to colleagues, doctors to patients, man to his own soul, explained” (3). Sammler is also a member of this explaining class; he too has “a touch of the same—the disease of the single self explaining what was what and who was who” (280). These explanations, however, conflict with the “natural knowledge” (3) of the human soul—the soul’s innate understanding of its moral duty, given to it via an original contract with God. The soul, Sammler explains, sits “unhappily on superstructures of explanation, poor bird, not knowing which way to fly” (3). The metaphor evokes Hegel’s Owl of Minerva, which looks back on the history of Western thought from the vantage point of its completion. Here, however, this history has become an unfamiliar landscape, one in which the soul can no longer find its way. The history of Western thought has culminated in a cultural nihilism that, Sammler believes, finds expression in the social and political chaos of 1960s New York.

Sammler articulates a sociological perspective that influenced the work of many post–World War II writers: the idea that social reality is determined by ideas and values disseminated by intellectuals within the rapidly expanding new class. In the 1940s and 1950s, New York intellectuals such as Lionel Trilling found both peril and hope in this situation. The educated middle class, Trilling argued in The Liberal Imagination, was attracted to the “organizational impulse” that pervaded the New Deal welfare state. However, this class was also an ideal audience for the humanistic attunement to “complexity and difficulty” cultivated by literary intellectuals such as himself.² By the 1960s, however, many New York intellectuals had reformulated the dangers facing the new class in ways that were central to their gradual transformation from leftist Trotskyites to Reagan Republicans. According to Trilling, the corrosive attitude that he recommended in his early criticism had itself calcified into a new, institutionalized set of stock notions. Since the nineteenth century, he noted in Beyond Culture (1965), the dominant trend in Western literature and social thought has been antiestablishment and antibourgeois: “It is a belief still pre-eminently honored that a primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.” This capacity for liberation is essential when confined to a limited milieu of artists, philosophers, visionaries, and idealists. In the mid–twentieth century, however, he says, it has become the worldview of a growing faction of humanistic intellectuals comfortably established within the university: “Between the end of the first quarter of this century and the present time there has grown up a populous group whose members take for granted the adversary culture.” This group now disseminates this antinomian culture to a mass-educated public unprepared for the rigors of intellectual life, threatening to replace all established customs and traditions with a banalized version of bohemian dissent. The Arnoldian project of rehumanizing bourgeois society seems outmoded in “a society drenched with art and with newspaper gossip about the arts.”³

For the neoconservatives, the group of New York intellectuals associated with Commentary and The Public Interest, this adversarial culture was responsible for the cultural excesses of the 1960s.⁴ The neoconservatives referred to Trilling’s humanist intellectuals as the “liberal elite” or “new class.” As Barbara Ehrenreich notes, they did not use these terms with much sociological precision; the new class designated an arbitrary “slice of the professional middle class: in particular, a slice calculated to exclude people, such as corporate employees and professionals in private practice, who may indeed be likely, by virtue of their occupations, to be pro-business and anti-liberal.”⁵ In effect, the term new class referred to any professional who also happened to hold left-of-center political beliefs. This group, the neoconservatives argued, wielded enormous power due to its influence within cultural institutions, and it was bent on destroying bourgeois society. “In any naked contest with the ‘new class,’” Irving Kristol argued in the Wall Street Journal, “business is a certain loser.”⁶ In responding to this threat, the neoconservatives developed an updated version of new-class fantasy, an adaptation of the Arnoldian politics that the New York intellectuals originally espoused in militating against the progressive liberalism of the 1930s. Recognizing that they too were humanistic intellectuals, the neoconservatives recast themselves as new-class dissidents who would disseminate ideas and values more conducive to social order. “The modern world,” Kristol argued in 1973, “and the crisis of modernity we are now experiencing, was created by ideas and by the passions which these ideas unleashed. To surmount this crisis, without destroying the modern world itself, will require new ideas—or new versions of old ideas—that will regulate these passions and bring them into a more fruitful and harmonious relation with reality.”⁷ In this search for alternative ideas, the neoconservatives hoped to cultivate an alliance with America’s business elite, who supposedly embodied values of hard work and sexual continence threatened by the liberal elite. Corporations, Kristol noted, should “give support to those elements of the ‘new class’—and they exist, if not in large numbers—which do believe in the preservation of a strong private sector.”⁸ Beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the neoconservatives thus established the basic argument that would guide them through the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s.

In this chapter, I argue that Mr. Sammler’s Planet adumbrates this neoconservative cultural politics.⁹ The novel is committed to a social vision derived from conservative political philosophers such as Joseph Schumpeter in which capitalist society is destroyed by its “petted intellectuals” (34). This vision in turn derives from Bellow’s sense that “mental capital” (212) is more potent than economic capital, that the new class had displaced the old bourgeoisie as America’s dominant elite. In arguing this point, I highlight a series of class concerns in Bellow’s work often unnoticed by critics focused on the novel’s troubling racial and sexual politics—in particular, its crude parodies of second-wave feminism and the Black Power movement.¹⁰ However, rather than dismissing Mr. Sammler’s Planet as a reflection of late 1960s political reaction among Bellow’s generation of Jewish American intellectuals, I argue that the novel also explores many of the contradictions implicit in the neoconservatives’ emerging cultural vision. In particular, it examines the inherent conflict between their thoroughgoing cultural determinism and their efforts to imagine a political coalition between conservative intellectuals and business leaders. Bellow foregrounds this potential alliance through the novel’s central, homosocial relationship between Sammler and his dying nephew, Elya Gruner—a doctor turned real estate mogul whom Sammler holds up as an embodiment of this-worldly virtue. The entire text drives toward a reunion of these two characters, as Sammler struggles to return to Elya’s deathbed but is distracted by the antics of his nephew’s spoiled children, who have been corrupted by their new-class education. However, the novel also emphasizes the tensions inherent in this coalition; Sammler’s devotion to the knowledge of the soul, the novel suggests, is incompatible with Elya’s devotion to commerce. This revelation of the businessman’s complicity with the adversary culture complicates Bellow’s effort to depict intellectuals as the villains of the modern age. Furthermore, it points beyond his neoconservative cultural politics toward a more complex reading of U.S. class relations otherwise latent in his work.

Bellow’s fiction is everywhere marked by the fact that he imagined himself as a dissident new-class humanist. Like Ralph Ellison, he was one of the key 1940s and 1950s writers to negotiate the shift from literary naturalism to the novel of ideas called for by critics such as Lionel Trilling, William Phillips, and Philip Rahv. As in Ellison’s case, this shift did not so much entail a rejection of sociological fiction as a transition toward a new social scientific perspective: the sociology of the cultural center pioneered by Bellow’s colleague and mentor Edward Shils. Bellow’s verbose novels increasingly transformed the act of intellection itself into the central object of fictional representation, replacing conventional plot with long expositions of their protagonists’ ideas. They also increasingly focused on new-class subjects, leaving behind the lower-class autodidacts that populated early books such as The Adventures of Augie March. After Herzog (1964), almost all of Bellow’s protagonists were scholars, writers, or literary journalists, often associated with one or another university. In this, they imitate their author, who was similarly attached to universities throughout his career—most notably the University of Chicago, where he taught in the Committee on Social Thought from 1962 to 1993. However, Bellow’s protagonists also express a profound disgust for and desire to transcend the intellectual stratum to which they belong. They worry that intellectuals have done more harm than good to society; intellectuals, Sammler reflects, “are the people who set the terms, who make up the discourse, and then history follows their words. Think of the wars and revolutions we have been scribbled into” (213). They worry, furthermore, that intellectual work is devoid of moral seriousness, that it is a massive evasion of the soul’s natural knowledge. They struggle, therefore, to tear apart the edifice that they have built or inherited from other thinkers. This ambivalence reflects Bellow’s own attitude toward the university and the new class that it has fostered. In essays and interviews, he inveighed against American higher education, which he believed had become a home for trendy relativist theories and political extremism rather than an institution devoted to pursuing the truth. “By consenting to play an active or ‘positive,’ a participatory role in society,” Bellow complained in his preface to Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987), “the university has become inundated and saturated with the backflow of society’s ‘problems.’ Preoccupied with questions of Health, Sex, Race, War, academics make their reputations and their fortunes and the university has become society’s conceptual warehouse of often harmful influences.” By contrast, Bellow argues, he has always treated his vocation as a tenured teacher differently. “For me, the university has been the place of divestiture where I am able to find help in the laborious task of discarding bad thought.”¹¹ Bellow, in this account, was in but not of the university; he used it to free himself from its bad effects.¹²

Sammler thus embraced an ambitious version of social trustee professionalism, an ideology with which he became disenchanted by the subsequent events of World War II. Indeed, through Sammler, Bellow constructs an allegory of the decline of progressive liberalism of the kind popularized by cold war liberals in the 1940s and 1950s. In a return visit to Poland, Sammler and his wife were captured by invading Nazis and thrown into a mass grave; only he survived. This brush with death functions in the same way as John Laskell’s sickness in Trilling’s The Middle of the Journey; it renders Sammler skeptical of all future-oriented philosophies aimed at improving society. Sammler instead become a postideological sage; with his one remaining eye, he reads only the Bible and Meister Eckhart, which he regards as timeless sources of wisdom at odds with contemporary intellectual fashion.

In the novel’s present, Sammler lives in New York—which, in the neoconservative imagination, is a center of new-class degeneracy because of its generous welfare system and publishing industry. There, Sammler encounters what he believes are the long-term effects of his generation’s progressive liberalism. On the positive side, the rationalism implicit in Wells’s World State has led to ambitious technological projects such as the space program, which echoes Wells’s fantasies about moon travel; the events of the novel shortly precede the launch of Apollo 11. On the negative side, 1930s liberalism has culminated in the U.S. welfare state, which, if not as ambitious as Wells’s socialism, has nevertheless created a degree of affluence that allows everyone to live in relative comfort: “In the gutters, along curbs was much food, eaten, as he saw at three a.m., by night-emerging rats. Buns, chicken bones, which, once, he would have thanked God to have” (138). The problem with this state of affluence is that it has also liberated New York’s residents from the bourgeois work ethic, creating a city of criminals such as the black pickpocket whom Sammler sees at work on the city buses and indolent pleasure seekers such as the novel’s oversexed youth; “the labor of Puritanism now was ending,” Sammler reflects, “the dark satanic mills changing into light satanic mills. The reprobates converted into children of joy, the sexual ways of the seraglio and of the Congo bush adopted by the emancipated masses of New York, Amsterdam, London” (32).

Echoing Trilling’s generational argument, Sammler claims that the chief symptom of this cultural degeneracy is the emergence of a new generation of would-be intellectuals who have embraced the utopianism inherent in his generation’s progressive liberalism but at the same time abandoned its rationality. This generation is made up of the various youths whom Sammler encounters throughout the novel—spoiled children of the upper middle class who read Bataille, Marcuse, and Norman O. Brown. They espouse a philosophy of untrammeled individualism, one that insists on “an elaborate and sometimes quite artistic manner of presenting oneself,” expressed “with hair, with clothes, with drugs and cosmetics, with genitalia, with round trips through evil, monstrosity, and orgy, with even God approached through obscenities” (229). This philosophy is Bellow’s version of the adversary culture—a romantic cult of radical self-expression opposed to all of the institutions and customs that might restrict it. It fundamentally entails a revolt against the bourgeoisie and its traditional values of self-control, family affiliation, religiosity, and sexual continence. One of the novel’s central conflicts thus pits Sammler’s dying nephew, Elya, against Elya’s two spoiled adult children, Wallace and Angela. Elya is the archetypal, self-made American man. Although born into poverty as an immigrant East European Jew, he established himself as a successful doctor and later became rich through real estate speculation. As Sammler reflects, Elya “was devoted to ideas of conduct which seemed discredited, which few people explicitly defended” (261). Elya’s two children, in contrast, illustrate the collapse of the bourgeois work ethic that Sammler believes to be typical of the late 1960s. The son, Wallace, cannot settle down to a single profession. His excuse is his refusal to betray his essential inclinations. “I have to have my own necessities,” he tells Sammler, “and I don’t see them anywhere” (245). Wallace thus embodies the paradox of radical “authenticity” that Trilling explores in Sincerity and Authenticity (1972):¹³ the impulse to be true to oneself, even when that self is conceived of as a bundle of incoherent, precivilized desires and emotions. Angela similarly embodies the collapse of her father’s family-oriented sexual morals. She is a typically spoiled member of the new class, with a “bad education” (11) in literature from Sarah Lawrence College and a penchant for every new intellectual fashion. Her problem is at the core the same as Wallace’s—a devotion to her authentic self that prevents her from respecting bourgeois sexual conventions. In the hospital, Sammler pleads with her to cave in to her father’s values before his death; he chastises her, in particular, for showing up at his deathbed wearing “a microskirt, a band of green across her thighs” (295). The point, for Sammler, is for Angela at least to conform outwardly to the forms of bourgeois social life in order to please her conservative father. For Angela, however, catering to her father’s values would be inauthentic, a form of playacting and a betrayal of the self. “As far as I can see,” she tells Sammler, “if there is anything at all in what you say, you want an old-time deathbed scene.… But how could I—It goes against everything. You’re talking to the wrong person” (306).

According to the novel’s logic, this individualist philosophy is at once opposed to the rationalism of progressive liberals such as Wells yet also a natural outgrowth from it. In an early scene, Bellow stages a confrontation between these two philosophies when Sammler gives a lecture on “the British scene in the 1930s” to an audience of university students. Lapsing into nostalgia, Sammler evokes the original promise of the Cosmopolis project until he is interrupted and driven off the stage by a bearded New Left radical: “Why do you listen to this effete old shit? What has he got to tell you? His balls are dry. He’s dead. He can’t come” (42). The young man’s rebut is typical, Sammler later reflects, of the ways in which the younger generation emphasizes the phallus over rational thought; unlike his own generation, this one “had no view of the nobility of being intellectuals and judges of the social order” (45). However, Bellow implies that the radical’s sexualized mode of intellectual engagement is the inevitable consequence of Wells’s utopianism. Wells, Sammler reflects, also wanted to liberate human sexuality from its Victorian constraints, believing that doing so would lead men and women toward a more rational and controlled enjoyment of sexuality; “utopian, he didn’t even imagine that the hoped-for future would bring excess, pornography, sexual abnormality” (72). Rationalism, in other words, had dissolved the customs and traditions that keep human irrationality in check, thus paving the way toward new, postenlightenment theories that assault rationality itself. Through Sammler, Bellow thus prefigures the neoconservative equation between the counterculture and the progressive liberalism that it rebelled against.¹⁴ Technocratic liberals created a permissive society that encouraged the sexual and political excesses of the counterculture and New Left.

What these two generations especially have in common, for Sammler, is a penchant for “explanations.” As we have seen, throughout the novel Sammler distinguishes between explanations and the natural knowledge of the soul. This distinction derives in part from his idiosyncratic reading of Schopenhauer, who distinguished between the Will and Platonic Ideas: “only Ideas are not overpowered by the Will—the cosmic force, the Will, which drives all things. A blinding power. The inner creative fury of the world. What we see are only its manifestations. Like Hindu philosophy—Maya, the veil of appearances that hangs over all human experience” (209). The Will is the origin of the explanations that underlie and threaten human society, and its seat, for Schopenhauer, is the sexual organs. It is an erotic and intellectual will to power, an urge to reinvent the world in one’s own image. Hence, Sammler looks on with particular dismay at the liberation of sexual energies that Wells had called for and that the younger generation in late-1960s New York actualized. This liberation goes hand in hand with an unchecked proliferation of explanations, which take the form of the sex philosophy advocated by the counterculture—sexualized theories breeding in turn more theories.

Sammler codes this liberation of sexuality and explanations in gender terms—as a release of feminine erotic energies normally kept in check by bourgeois conventions of courtship and marriage and by male moral seriousness. Women, in his view, are endlessly productive of sex and explanation—both of them detached from and destructive of the soul’s innate knowledge.¹⁵ This ostensibly feminine capacity for aimless explanation is exemplified by Margotte, Sammler’s apartment mate and his dead wife’s niece. Her former husband, who died in a plane crash, was a professor of political theory at a women’s college (filled with “charming, idiotic, nonsensical girls” [16]), and now Margotte has taken over his métier. Trapped with her inside their apartment, Sammler is tortured by her endless parroting of fashionable ideas, a habit that parallels her sloppy housekeeping and undisciplined generative powers: “She talked junk, she gathered waste and junk in the flat, she bred junk. Look, for instance, at these plants she was trying to raise. She planted avocado pits, lemon seeds, peas, potatoes. Was there anything ever so mangy, trashy, as these potted objects?” (21). What Margotte needs, in Sammler’s view, is a firm masculine presence to keep her in check, to direct her sexual energies, and to recall her explanations when they stray too far from the basic moral truths. This role used to be performed by her dead husband, who would interrupt her when her theorizing got out of control: “after she had gone on a while, he would say, ‘Enough, enough of this Weimar schmaltz. Cut it, Margotte!’ That big virile interruption would never be heard again in this cock-eyed living room” (17). In the novel, Margotte is particularly attracted to the ideas of Hannah Arendt—another unruly female intellectual detached from basic moral principles. Sammler objects in particular to Arendt’s thesis about the banality of evil—the idea that the executioners at the death camps “were just ordinary lower-class people, administrators, small bureaucrats, or Lumpenproletariat. A mass society does not produce great criminals” (16). For Sammler, this theory obscures the fact that “everybody (except for certain bluestockings) knows what murder is. That is very old human knowledge. The best and purest human beings, from the beginning of time, have understood that life is sacred” (18). The banality of evil is another explanation, used by the Nazis themselves as “the adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abolish conscience.” Arendt is thus complicit with the Nazis she describes; she, like them, is engaging in a cultural assault on “modern civilization itself” (18). Hence, Sammler sees in Margotte’s repetition of Arendt a particularly noxious example of one female pseudo-intellectual’s repetition of another, taking us farther and farther away from basic moral truths about the sanctity of life. Arendt’s alleged moral obtuseness is compounded by Margotte, who repeats her ideas in front of a Holocaust survivor.

This critique of Arendt sets up what becomes Sammler’s harshest condemnation of late 1960s New York—that it is repeating the same intellectual and cultural trends found in Weimar Germany before the rise of the Nazis; “like many people who had seen the world collapse once, Mr. Sammler entertained the possibility that it might collapse twice” (33). As we have seen, Sammler characterizes contemporary U.S. culture in terms of the prevalence of two philosophies—a technocratic rationalism that has culminated in the space program and the Great Society, on the one hand, and a radical individualism that has culminated in the counterculture, on the other. Both philosophies originated in the new class and its will to power and loosely delineate the class’s division between the technical intelligentsia and humanistic intellectuals. Reflecting on this intraclass conflict, Sammler predicts that “an oligarchy of technicians, engineers, the men who ran the grand machines… would come to govern vast slums filled with bohemian adolescents, narcotized, beflowered, and ‘whole’” (182). This same division, Sammler believes, also characterized Weimar Germany and contributed to the Nazi takeover. On the one hand, the Germans were masters of “Method,” of industrial and social planning. On the other hand, “to relax from rationality and calculation, machinery, planning, technics, they had romance, mythomania, peculiar aesthetic fanaticism” (19). The result was that the technical intelligentsia pursued ever more soulless technologies for manipulating human beings and nature, and the humanistic intellectuals spun out radical ideologies that undermined the people’s faith in the nation’s traditions and institutions. The U.S. welfare state and adversary culture, Sammler believes, might therefore be the harbingers of a future totalitarian regime. The irony of this parallel is that it repeats the same “Weimar schmaltz” that Sammler criticizes in Arendt. Arendt’s “banality of evil” thesis, like much of her work, suggests that many of the excesses of totalitarianism are latent within democratic states such as the United States—within the mentality of pencil-pushing bureaucrats who can just as easily orchestrate genocide as plan out a new housing project. Bellow’s novel develops a parallel argument through its critique of the new class—that the same social impulses that culminated in Nazism are more generally present in Western civilization’s educated elite.

Sammler thus struggles to distance himself from the intellectual tendencies that have led to this impasse, to reconstruct himself as a different, more serious kind of intellectual. One of the novel’s ironies is that in spite of Sammler’s repudiation of explanations, he himself is an endless explainer. The difference for him is that he, unlike women such as Margotte, tries to maintain a constant moral control over his theorizing, to police diligently the feminine tendency toward irresponsible talk. Sammler’s model for intellectual discussion is his long dinner table talk with Dr. Govinda Lal—a Hindu scientist who has written a manuscript on moon colonization that figures prominently in the novel. The women—Margotte and Sammler’s daughter, Shula—are shunted off to the kitchen to prepare the food and later sit silently at the table while Sammler holds forth on the irresponsibility of the younger generation and the need “to have some order within oneself” (228). It is a talk guided by Sammler’s hard-won connections with essential moral truths—in particular, his “impressions of eternity,” his “God adumbrations in the many daily forms” (237). Even then, he is afterward dissatisfied with his conversation, worried that he has become too much like the intellectuals he despises. His talk, he realizes, evaded the central moral truth of the situation—the impending death of his friend Elya, in whose house they were staying and whose food they enjoyed. “He had explained,” he reflects, “he had taken positions, he had said things he hadn’t meant, meant things he hadn’t said. Indoors, there were activities, discussions, explanations, arrangements, rearrangements. In the house of a dying man” (247). The ideal intellectual, for Sammler, is the silent one who converses with his own soul and leaves idle talk to others.

Mr. Sammler’s Planet thus echoes or prefigures many common themes of late 1960s–early 1970s neoconservatism: the too rapid expansion of the welfare state, the cultural effects of feminism and sexual liberation, the spread of campus radicalism, the antibourgeois ethos perpetuated by humanistic intellectuals within the new class. However, the novel also dramatizes some of the central contradictions of neoconservative thought—especially about the possibility of conservative counterintellectuals and the desirability of an alliance between them and the U.S. business elite. The neoconservatives devoted themselves to defending existing institutions—the free-market system, bourgeois values, liberal education, the nuclear family, organized religion, and so forth—on the Burkean principle that the institutions that have shown their worth over a long period of time are better than new ones invented by utopian intellectuals. The potential problem with this Burkean conservatism is that it often seemed as if the neoconservatives defended existing institutions only because they were established, not because the values they were based on were inherently good. As Kristol put it, the responsible conservative should give only “two cheers” for capitalism; it was the best possible social system, far better than any socialist alternative, but it was still deeply flawed. Conservatives should defend capitalism against its detractors because the system works, not because of any utopian promise inherent within it; “a capitalist society does not want more than two cheers for itself. Indeed, it regards the impulse to give three cheers for any social, economic, or political system as expressing a dangerous—because it is misplaced—enthusiasm.”¹⁶ At the same time, Kristol and other neoconservatives affirmed the need for capitalism to be rooted in a supportive value system, especially in religious beliefs that reinforce rather than undermine the bourgeois order. This desire to root capitalism in religion was not a problem for all neoconservatives, some of whom, like the Catholic Michael Novak, saw little distinction between politics and theology; in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (1982), Novak argued that capitalism was the social system most congruent with Christian ethics.¹⁷ However, it was a problem for others, such as Kristol, who were essentially secular Jews. In the well-known essay “Christianity, Judaism, and Socialism” (1978), Kristol distinguished between “gnostic” and “orthodox” religions. The former rebel against the world; “the gnostic tends to say that the proper and truly authentic human response to a world of multiplicity, division, conflict, suffering and death is some kind of indignant metaphysical rebellion, a rebellion that will liberate us from the prison of this world.” The latter urge us to live in the world as it is; “the function of orthodoxy in all religions is to sanctify daily life and to urge us to achieve our fullest human potential through virtuous practice in our daily life, whether it be the fulfillment of the law in Judaism or Islam or imitatio Christi in Christianity.”¹⁸ Kristol, needless to say, was in favor of orthodoxy; every stable society must have an established religion to guide its citizens and provide them with stable values. However, it did not matter much to Kristol which orthodoxy was in power. For this reason, he urged his fellow neoconservatives, many of them Jewish, to make alliances with fundamentalist Christians in the Republican Party.¹⁹ He referred to himself as a “neo-orthodox Jew”: “That is, I am nonpracticing—or nonobservant as we say—but in principle, very sympathetic to the spirit of orthodoxy.”²⁰ Paleoconservatives such as William F. Buckley Jr. and Pat Buchanan therefore complained that Kristol’s defense of religion often veered into instrumentalism.²¹ The question raised by Kristol’s writing on religion and capitalism was, “How do conservative counterintellectuals defend an orthodoxy that they do not believe is absolute?”

Sammler faces this problem throughout Bellow’s novel. One of Sammler’s basic complaints about the counterculture is that it rejects the established forms of life as inauthentic. The counterculture refuses to accept any form of orthodoxy and instead embraces a secular gnosticism that would sweep away all existing traditions and institutions, leaving nothing in their place. Wallace Gruner, for instance, exemplifies this disdain for tradition in his attitude toward the house that he grew up in. In the midst of Dr. Lal and Sammler’s long discussion about space travel and individualism, Wallace breaks into some pipes in his father’s attic, searching for money he thinks his father has hidden there. Later, standing outside the flooded house, he explains that roots mean nothing to him: “Roots? Roots are not modern. That’s a peasant conception, soil and roots. Peasantry is going to disappear. That’s the real meaning of the modern revolution, to prepare world peasantry for a new state of existence” (245–46). This same rootlessness, the novel suggests, is also characteristic of the technical intelligentsia who have inherited the rationalism of the Western tradition. Dr. Lal, the Hindu scientist, literally wants to disconnect humankind from its ancestral home—by propelling the species into outer space. This, he believes, will resolve much of the cultural chaos that he, like Sammler, observes in contemporary New York. Humankind will now have a new frontier into which it can direct its boundless destructive energies: “Not to accept the opportunity would make this earth seem more and more a prison. If we could soar out and did not, we would condemn ourselves” (219). Like Wallace, Dr. Lal depicts this project as a personal revolt against an established, traditional culture—in his case, the close-knit Hindu household of his childhood. “As a child,” Lal reflects, “I could not bear to be separated from Mother. Nor, for that matter, father.… I see now that I had set myself a task of distance from objects of closest attachment. In which, Mr. Sammler, outer space is an opposite—personally, an emotional pole” (221–22).

However, Sammler himself lacks roots. As we have seen, he has developed a personal belief system based on his rejection of his earlier utopian progressivism. He now believes that the soul has an essential understanding of its moral obligations, based on an original contract with God. Hence, his final prayer over Elya’s body praises Elya for being “aware that he must meet, and he did meet—through all the confusion and degrading clowning of this life through which we are speeding—he did meet the terms of his contract. The terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows” (313). Alan Berger argues in his discussion of the novel’s Jewish influences that this prayer is a kaddish and that Sammler’s notion of the contract is a modified version of the Jewish covenant.²² However, Sammler seems distant from any existing version of Judaism; he was raised in a secular home, was named after an anti-Semitic philosopher, and today lives in exile in New York. He mocks his daughter’s obsession with attending rabbinical lectures, and there is no evidence that he practices Jewish dietary restrictions; his dinner with Dr. Lal includes a very nonkosher lobster salad. Instead, he too has embraced a gnostic faith—albeit one that seeks to flee from the world without actually changing it. In his old age, he has embraced the mysticism of Meister Eckhart, which holds that true contact with God comes only after we have stripped ourselves of all this-worldly distractions. “‘See to it that you are stripped of all creatures, of all consolation from creatures,’” Sammler quotes. “‘For certainly as long as creatures comfort and are able to comfort you, you will never find true comfort. But if nothing can comfort you save God, truly God will console you’” (253). Sammler, like Lal, fantasizes about leaving this world behind. Indeed, his chief objection to Lal’s technological proposal is that it does not go far enough. “This is not the way to get out of spatial–temporal prison,” he reflects. “Distant is still finite. Finite is still feeling through the veil, examining the naked inner reality with a gloved hand” (53).

Sammler, like Kristol, thus seems torn between a personal, skeptical gnosticism and a belief that the rest of the world needs some sort of orthodoxy. This opposition between a freethinking elite and an orthodox populace runs throughout much neoconservative thought. It was central to the work of Leo Strauss, the Jewish émigré political philosopher who taught in Bellow’s department at the University of Chicago from 1949 to 1968. In Kristol’s terms, Strauss was “an intellectual aristocrat who thought that the truth could make some minds free, but he was convinced that there was an inherent conflict between philosophic truth and the political order, and that the popularization and vulgarization of these truths might import unease, turmoil, and the release of popular passions hitherto held in check by tradition and religion.”²³ Hence, the cornerstone of political thought, Strauss believed, should be Plato’s Republic, which imagines a philosophical elite disseminating to the nonphilosophical populace useful myths that are conducive to social order. This kind of elitism had its attractions for Bellow, as it did for the rest of the neoconservatives. Bellow’s most unalloyed presentation of it was his portrait of Allan Bloom, Strauss’s most famous disciple, as Ravelstein in the novel of the same name published in 2000. Many neoconservatives read this novel as a betrayal of their creed, in particular for its focus on Bloom’s homosexuality. However, the novel was in fact the apotheosis of Bellow’s interest in the possibility of creating a conservative counterelite. On the one hand, Ravelstein is a gay man dying of AIDS who disregards the lifestyle restrictions of the Moral Majority in order to devote himself to a life of philosophical inquiry and hedonistic pleasure. On the other hand, he excoriates the moral laxness of the society he lives in and has trained a generation of neoconservative disciples who work in the Reagan and elder Bush administrations.²⁴ The novel’s point is not that Ravelstein is a hypocrite; rather, it is that he belongs to the worthy few who can embody the adversary culture in a spirit of philosophical free play. In the novel’s opening scene, Chick (the Bellovian double) and Ravelstein are breakfasting in a penthouse of Paris’s most expensive hotel, relishing the money earned from Ravelstein’s best-selling book (Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind). Meanwhile, Michael Jackson (whom Ravelstein dismisses as a “glamour monkey”²⁵) and his retinue occupy the entire floor below them. The novel juxtaposes the deserving intellectual elite (the Nobel Prize–winning novelist, the learned philosopher) with the undeserving, black popular entertainer. Ravelstein’s lifestyle, like Bellow’s, is licensed by his Platonic search for the True and the Good; Jackson’s lifestyle supposedly exemplifies the culture of immorality disseminated through his music.

Something similar is at work in the case of Artur Sammler’s search for the soul’s essential knowledge. The novel’s young intellectuals, women, and ethnic minorities lack the moral fortitude necessary for this search. They need the useful myths, and their lives need to be constrained in ways appropriate to them. However, these myths, if they are to maintain the social order, must in some way conform to the soul’s knowledge—just as in Plato’s Republic the myth of the three classes of human beings conforms to the philosopher’s notion of justice. Hence, throughout the novel Sammler searches for an individual or institution that might be a this-wordly translation of the soul’s truth, a model for how order might be restored in America. This embodiment, as we have seen, is not present in any of the novel’s other intellectuals and scientists. Nor does it inhere in the nation of Israel, which Sammler visits during the Six Day War and writes about for a Polish newspaper. Israel, at first glance, seems like an ideal example of a society that combines religious orthodoxy (in Kristol’s sense) with secular statehood; Israel is a self-conscious effort to rediscover Jewish roots, to re-create a lost homeland. For this reason, it occupies a special place in neoconservative thought. Sammler, however, like his creator, is ambivalent about Zionism.²⁶ On the one hand, he cares for Israel’s survival and visits it fearing that “for the second time in twenty-five years the same people were threatened by extermination” (142). On the other hand, Israel’s attempt to embody Jewish tradition is exemplified by Eisen, Shula’s abusive and estranged husband, who migrated to Israel after World War II. Eisen is in some ways Sammler’s double; he too survived the Holocaust and was partially crippled by it, losing his toes to frostbite. However, as Sander Gilman puts it, he is someone who, “like Israel, has strengthened himself, has become a ‘muscle Jew.’” ²⁷ An ironworker by trade, Eisen forges artistic medallions that try to reinvent a more violent, triumphant Judaism. One of them is shaped like a Sherman tank; another’s inscription reads “Hazak,” or “strengthen thyself,” the order that God gives to Joshua before the battle of Jericho (170). In a grotesque image of interethnic conflict, during a visit to New York Eisen uses a bag full of these medallions to brain the black pickpocket who had been troubling Sammler, leaving him unconscious and bleeding on the pavement. This scene evokes Sammler’s memory of the dead and dying Arabs from the Six Day War, killed by napalm contravened by international law (250). The implication is that Zionism is a deformed version of Judaism, one that translates the desire to protect one’s tradition into a violent intolerance toward others. It is a case of orthodoxy transformed into ideological extremism.

Instead, Sammler believes that his desired synthesis of tradition and this-worldly virtue might be found in his successful nephew, Elya. For him, Elya is the model of a good man, one who has fulfilled his contract with God; as Sammler explains to Angela, “your father has had his assignments. Husband, medical man—he was a good doctor—family man, success, American, wealthy retirement with a Rolls Royce. We have our assignments. Feeling, outgoingness, expressiveness, kindness, heart—all these fine human things which by a peculiar turn of opinion strike people now as shady activities” (303). Elya embodies Kristol’s ideal of orthodoxy; he has channeled his energies into material success, never rebelling against the status quo. As a former gynecologist, a specialist in the “female generative slime” (82), he is a figure for masculine control over female energies. He is akin to Margotte’s deceased husband, with his “virile interruption” (17) of her unruly explanations. As a real estate mogul, he exemplifies the bourgeoisie’s supposed investment in stability and roots—the aspects of social life dismissed by his adversarial son and daughter. Sammler’s implication is that if more Americans were like Elya, the country would escape from its current cultural chaos; “if the earth deserves to be abandoned,” Sammler silently addresses his nephew, “if we are now to be driven streaming into other worlds, starting with the moon, it is not because of the likes of you” (86). Most especially, Elya has a facility with interpersonal relations that Sammler lacks. Elya, Sammler reflects, “courted everyone, tried to make contact with people, winning their hearts, engaging their interest, getting personal even with waitresses, lab technicians, manicurists” (302). Sammler, in contrast, cannot even express affection for his neurotic daughter, a fellow Holocaust survivor. Hence, the novel’s entire impulse is to reunite Sammler and Elya, to bring together the conservative humanist with the hard-working doctor and businessman. This union is mutually beneficial. For Sammler, Elya’s largesse provides him with the material means to pursue his life as an independent humanist. Elya is Sammler’s patron; he has freed him from the need to associate himself with the academy or to publish his ideas on the mass market. For Elya, Sammler’s “knowledge of the soul” is essential in helping him prepare for death. Throughout his last days, Elya has been on the telephone with his lawyer, making final business arrangements, buying and selling stock and settling his will. However, “at the very end business would not do for Elya. Some, many, would go on with business to the last breath, but Elya was not like that, not so limited” (260). Sammler believes that if he can only return to Elya’s deathbed, they will have a final conversation about “essentials”: “Any degree of frankness might have been possible. In the going phase, a moment of truth” (260).

This desire for a union between conservative intellectuals and respectable businessmen was typical of neoconservative thought; the neoconservatives believed that civilization could be saved through a spirited defense of the business elite from its liberal detractors. The problem with capitalism is that the adversary culture has unmoored it from its ideological justification—the Protestant work ethic. Hence, Kristol looked back with nostalgia to the days when Horatio Alger was a popular writer. In Alger’s work, he argues, “one finds a moral conception of business as an honorable vocation for honorable men.”²⁸ The Alger hero combines worldly success with moral probity. This myth, however, has been undermined by decades of attacks on business civilization by the liberal-dominated mediacracy; humanistic intellectuals demonize the business executive as a selfish villain, guided by the profit motive and indifferent to society’s well-being. This hatred of business, Kristol claims, has spread throughout society so that even the children of the business elite look on their parents’ accomplishments with disdain. The solution is for the capitalists of today to fund conservative intellectuals who will reinvent the bourgeois myths. Kristol thus exhorts the business elite to take better care of their ideological interests—to direct their philanthropy, for instance, away from liberal universities toward conservative think tanks.

However, this proposed marriage of capital and ideological savvy is a problematic one. The problem—as neoconservatives of the 1960s and 1970s, including Kristol, well knew—is that capitalism is no longer what it was in the days of Ragged Dick. The entrepreneurial business class that Horatio Alger extolled no longer exists. Instead, corporations are administered by managers and executives who are themselves defined by their educationally acquired cultural capital rather than by their ownership of the means of production. By appealing to the business elite, neoconservatives were in fact appealing to one segment of the new class against another. These corporate managers themselves frequently lack the respect for tradition and existing institutions that, according to Kristol, should justify their existence; in Alvin Gouldner’s terms, they too are dependent on the culture of critical discourse that erodes traditional forms of authority. Hence, Kristol often called attention to unscrupulous behavior on the part of corporations and exhorted his business readers to become conscious of their public image and ethical duty to the community; “in a liberal democracy, everyone’s self-interest is best served if each of us is capable, when required, of temporarily rising above self-interest. That is the social responsibility of a corporation: to behave like a citizen when circumstances seem to require it, and regardless of whether or not the law demands it.”²⁹ The corporate elite, in other words, should forestall the antibourgeois complaints of humanistic intellectuals by morally policing itself. Indeed, one of the reasons why the counterculture thrives and disseminates antibourgeois values is that so many corporations fund it; “how many businessmen refuse, as a matter of honor and of principle, to advertise in a publication such as The Rolling Stone [sic] or even Playboy, publications which make a mockery of their industry, their integrity, their fidelity, the very quality of their lives? The question answers itself.”³⁰ At times, neoconservatives such as Kristol thus claimed to be opposed to corporate interests—especially when corporations disseminated products, such as pornography, that corroded public virtue.

Hence, Kristol’s work uneasily combined two strands of neoconservative thought—a strand that blamed all of the alleged deprivations of late capitalist society on the cultural influence of left-wing humanistic intellectuals and a strand that saw these deprivations as effects of corporate capitalism itself. This later, more pessimistic reading of capitalism originated in the work of the economist and sociologist Joseph Schumpeter, another key influence for many neoconservatives. In Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1940), Schumpeter prefigured both Trilling’s account of the adversary culture and the neoconservative assault on the new class by arguing that capitalism would be undone by its petted intellectuals. However, Schumpeter’s more basic points are that capitalism itself gives rise to a rationalist demystification of all traditions and values and that this demystification at once makes possible the expansion of the intellectual stratum and generates the social discontent to which intellectuals give voice. “Unlike any other type of society,” he argues, “capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.” The problem with capitalism, according to Schumpeter’s analysis, is that it undermines all of the traditions, institutions, and values of the traditional societies out of which it emerged. However, it cannot generate any enthusiasm or collective belief to replace them and thus undermines the cultural conditions necessary for its own survival; “capitalism creates a critical frame of mind which, after having destroyed the moral authority of so many other institutions, in the end turns against its own; the bourgeois finds to his amazement that the rationalist attitude does not stop at the credentials of kings and popes but goes on to attack private property and the whole scheme of bourgeois values.”³¹ Indeed, according to Schumpeter, capitalism even erodes enthusiasm for itself on the part of its ruling business elite. With the transition from entrepreneurial capitalism to corporate capitalism, the system is increasingly run by individuals with no stake in its survival; stockholders have no emotional investment in a particular company or its products apart from the dividends it pays them, and the executives who make managerial decisions are merely salaried functionaries.

This pessimistic strand of neoconservative thought culminated in the work of sociologist Daniel Bell, who was approvingly cited by most of the neoconservatives but who maintained his distance from the movement. Like many neoconservatives, Bell echoed Trilling’s critique of the adversary culture as an antinomian trend that would tear apart U.S. society. However, unlike Kristol, he did not imagine that liberal intellectuals created this culture. The neoconservative notion of the new class, he argues in a 1979 essay, is “a linguistic and sociological muddle. It mixes together two concepts: the emergence of a new social stratum [the professional-managerial class] and the stridency of a cultural attitude.”³² The former is a variegated array of professions with little ideological consistency. The latter is a product of changes that have occurred within capitalism itself. He describes these changes in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976): “mass production on an assembly line, which made a cheap automobile possible; the development of marketing, which rationalized the art of identifying different kinds of buying groups and whetting consumer appetites; and the spread of installment buying, which, more than any other social device, broke down the old Protestant fear of debt.”³³ Echoing Max Weber’s analysis of the later stages of the Puritan ethic, Bell argues that capitalism gives rise to a hedonistic culture that is required by the demands of consumer capitalism but that also threatens to destroy it.

This account of the cultural contradictions of capitalism is a nagging undercurrent in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, threatening to unravel Sammler’s critique of intellectuals’ corrosive impact on society. In particular, this strand comes to the fore in Bellow’s depiction of Elya Gruner. It is telling that Bellow can only imagine an individual who conforms to the Horatio Alger myth by making him a doctor. As a poor immigrant, Elya can establish the economic capital necessary for his transformation into a real estate mogul only through the meritocratic route of professional accomplishment. In addition, he exemplifies all of the problems that would haunt Kristol’s efforts to idealize the U.S. business elite. Like Kristol’s executives, Elya is not above profiting from the counterculture; “youth is a big business,” he explains to Sammler. “Schoolchildren spend fantastic amounts. If enough kids get radical, that’s a new mass market, then it’s a big operation” (80). He is more directly responsible for his children’s lack of professional and sexual constancy; he has spoiled them and put them on a comfortable monthly stipend. As Sammler points out to Angela, “he’s not stupid and giving a young woman like you a capital of half a million dollars to live in New York City, he would have to be very dumb to think you were not amusing yourself” (163). This corrosion of his children’s values can be directly tied to his own entrepreneurial accomplishments. As Sammler discovers at the end of the novel, Elya, in his first career as a gynecologist, performed abortions for the mafia and hid the cash in his country estate. The moral uncertainty that plagues Elya’s children thus originates in their conventional father. Sammler’s concluding invocation of Elya’s contract with God is as much a hopeful prayer as anything else; the myth of the virtuous bourgeois can be invoked only in that figure’s absence.

Instead, the novel offers another, more cynical account of what a synthesis of humanistic learning and business sense might look like. This synthesis is embodied in Lionel Feffer, the graduate student in diplomatic history who arranges for Sammler’s disastrous lecture on Wells’s Cosmopolis project. On the one hand, Feffer is a typical, dissolute member of the new class as envisaged by the neoconservatives; he’s up to date with the newest theoretical ideas and an avid seducer of young wives. His academic specialization exemplifies his new-class desire to refashion the world according to intellectual ideas; he belongs to a society called the Foreign Ministers’ Club, whose members “took up a question like the Crimean War or the Boxer Rebellion and did it all again, writing one another letters as the foreign minister of France, England, Germany, Russia. They obtained very different results” (39). On the other hand, he is a budding entrepreneur, with money on the stock market and a controlling interest in a Guatemalan insurance company. He is a recurring figure in Bellow’s fiction—the small-time, capitalist con artist who besets Bellow’s humanist protagonist and tries to involve him in shady moneymaking schemes. This figure is at once repellant and attractive. He is repellant in that he accelerates the breakdown in traditions and values that Bellow laments. However, he also embodies a primal acquisitive energy that Bellow sees as fundamental to American society: “Sammler appreciated the degree of life in young Feffer, the marvelous rich color of his cheeks, the passion-sounds he made” (110). He functions, to a certain degree, as a figure for the artist himself. As Andrew Hoberek argues, one of the ways in which Bellow distanced himself from the university and other new-class institutions was by insisting on his dual success as a literary entrepreneur and an uncompromising artist; for him, Hoberek suggests, “the market of public taste comes to seem like not only a comparative refuge but indeed the very place where intellectual virtues per se can be realized.”³⁴ Feffer is thus the character in Mr. Sammler’s Planet who most approximates Bellow’s own economic and institutional position. However, his market connections, which liberate him from the university, in fact exacerbate his new-class disregard for morals and traditions. Through Feffer, Mr. Sammler’s Planet blames the corruption of American values on the entrepreneurial spirit itself; the Horatio Alger hero is just as oblivious to the soul’s essential knowledge as the university-bred members of the adversary culture.

This pessimistic assessment of capitalism’s cultural contradictions troubles Bellow’s insistence, throughout his work, that societies are made and unmade by their ruling ideas. As I argued in the introduction, Bellow first established this theme in The Adventures of Augie March, which envisaged humanity as a horde of reality inventors making and remaking the world. This theme determined many of the formal innovations of Bellow’s subsequent oeuvre; his loosely structured, verbose novels dramatize the dialectical conflict of ideas that Trilling and other New York intellectuals argued should be central to the novel in an era of new-class hegemony. In a world literally constructed out of ideas, the novelist’s task is to play these ideas against each other in order to arrive at the basic certainties that they conceal. However, Bellow’s suggestion in Mr. Sammler’s Planet that the culture of late-1960s New York is a necessary product of capitalism’s historical development hints at a more complicated account of the relation between ideas and social reality otherwise obscured in his work. It hints that the intellectuals that Bellow writes about in his fiction are not inventors of reality but rather figures giving voice to changes they did not create and cannot master. As Daniel Bell complains about the neoconservative notion of the new class, “in seeking to map the course of social change, one should not mistake the froth for the deeper currents that carry it along.”³⁵ In adumbrating the cultural politics of the neoconservative movement, Mr. Sammler’s Planet also traces out the consequences of this mistake.

Moreover, the novel at once prefigures the right-wing coalition that would emerge in the 1970s and highlights potential fissures within it. This coalition was one that would bring together new-class dissidents with the business elite, who together would appeal to a populist constituency of conservative-value voters. It was a coalition that culminated in the Reagan Revolution and later in Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America.” However, it was also one that Bellow never felt entirely comfortable with. In novels after Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Bellow increasingly represented the moneyed elite as a corrupting influence on his intellectual heroes. For instance, More Die of Heartbreak (1987), written at the height of the Reagan era, revisits many of the themes and relationships of Mr. Sammler’s Planet. Like the earlier novel, it exemplifies the moneyed elite through a gynecologist, Dr. Layamon, who also dabbles in real estate. And like Mr. Sammler’s Planet, it revolves around a failed relationship between Dr. Layamon and a conservative scholar—Benn Crader, a botanist who marries Layamon’s socialite daughter.³⁶ This time, however, it is the moneyed elite who consume a dissolute popular culture; conversations at Layamon family dinners typically focus on recent Hollywood horror films. And it is the moneyed elite who disregard tradition and family affections; Dr. Layamon pressures Benn into suing his elderly uncle—an action that precipitates the uncle’s death. The intellectual, in this rewriting of the Sammler/Gruner relationship, finally flees from the bourgeois’ embrace; at the end of the novel, Benn abandons his wife and her family in order to study arctic lichens. Benn in the arctic wilderness exemplifies Bellow’s new sense of the incompatibility between intellect and established wealth. The moneyed elite, in Bellow’s later account, has been thoroughly corrupted by the adversary culture. Conservative intellectuals, concerned with the pursuit of the True and the Good, stand alone in a society hostile toward them.