Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge After Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust

Originally intended by Goya for the frontispiece of his Los caprichos, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters is the most famous image in this series of etchings. “In sleep, the body is dark,” Walter Benjamin explained to Gershom Scholem, “a spectral medium, in the middle of which life and death are located.”¹ Goya portrays how, in sleep, demons can haunt reason. This is a book about reason and four decades of its sleep, with cruel and hideous monsters on the loose. It also is an injunctive book about history, social science, and liberal guardianship I offer in critical homage to the generation of my teachers who, in a climate of anxiety, sought to rouse reason and secure its wakefulness.

I wrote Desolation and Enlightenment before the shattering of lives and cityscapes on September 11, 2001. Some friends have urged me to rewrite sections to underscore its additional pertinence, counseling that the intellectual efforts I discuss by postwar scholars to map the origins of dark times and discern the character of the modern state resonate with themes familiar today. I have decided otherwise. Rather than rework the book to force this ‘relevance,’ I prefer to leave any such discovery to its readers.

I begin my acknowledgments with a statement of debt to George Steiner’s In Bluebeard’s Castle and to Lionel Trilling’s essay, “Elements that are Wanted,” concerned with the politics of T.S. Eliot. I read Steiner shortly after I had been invited to offer Columbia University’s 1997–98 Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures, the basis for this book. Steiner’s fierce volume provided my initial impetus. I defined my subject–political knowledge after total war, totalitarianism, the holocaust—in part as an effort to determine why I had been disappointed by his customarily brilliant effort to understand the impact on the West’s tradition of Enlightenment on what he called Europe’s 1914–1945 “season in hell.” Later, I came across Trilling’s piece as I set out on my last round of revision. His writing reminded me that the boundaries between liberal and illiberal thought are not nearly as crisp as we might like and that the endowments of the liberal tradition depend on its capacity to engage with values and beliefs that are not easily compatible with its own temperament.

Bluebeard’s Castle is based on the T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures Steiner delivered at the University of Kent at Canterbury in March 1971. The subtitle he selected, Some Notes Toward the Redefinition of Culture, refers to Notes Toward the Definition of Culture, a powerful collection of essays Eliot had written mainly in 1945 and 1946. That volume, Steiner reproached, is “not an attractive book. One that is gray with the shock of recent barbarism, but a barbarism whose actual sources and forms the argument leaves fastidiously vague.”² Confronting Eliot’s refusal to visit the darkest places of twentieth-century European history, Steiner wrote that³

Eliot’s Notes had argued the West’s cultural frailty and deterioration had been advanced not by fascism or war but by democracy, equality, secularization, the corrosion of aristocracy, and the erosion of piety, all of which he identified primarily with the Enlightenment. A preacher of ethical regeneration, Eliot also hearkened to the familiar trope of the Jew as the antithesis of an authentic Christian Europe, though only with a lone specific mention and without direct reference to the prior decades of European spoliation. Advancing the claim that the closer it comes to being a thoroughly homogeneous “really Christian society,” the more the “culture of Europe” can warrant its status as “the highest culture the world has ever known,” he asserted that cultural and demographic pluralism constitute a profound danger to advanced culture; hence he judged the United States to be a country unfortunately “swollen [by] that stream of mixed immigration.”⁵ In the footnote to which Steiner referred, Eliot avowed the status of Europe’s Jews as permanent outsiders, asserting their (indirect) responsibility for the West’s cultural decay while affirming their status as the Enlightenment incarnate.⁶

Not just Steiner’s fiery rejoinder but his quite metaphysical explanation for the European crisis helped direct my attention to an alternative pathway mapped by a group of postwar thinkers in the United States who had turned to the social sciences and history in an effort to deepen and guard the tradition of Enlightenment. Seeking to come to terms with Europe’s recent catastrophe and comprehend the character and capacities of the modern state at just the moment Eliot was composing his Notes, they provided a more appealing set of possibilities. I found myself drawn toward their work just as I was grappling with why I had been disappointed by Steiner’s compound of Freudianism and literary critique.

Like Eliot, Steiner underscored the outsider status of Europe’s Jews. Their religion’s “summons to perfection,” in the forms of Old Testament monotheism, primitive Christianity, and messianic Socialism, he argued, had been imposed “on the current and currency of Western life.” This pressure had “built up in the social subconscious murderous resentments.”⁷ He thus understood⁸

Revulsion against Jewish perfectionism, he claimed, combined with the elimination of religious markers had culminated in the death camps. “Hell [was] made immanent” as it was transferred “from below the earth to its surface.”⁹ Steiner implicated the Enlightenment in this outcome for having erased Christian doctrines of damnation, thus conducing a “loss of Hell.” By sponsoring this divestiture, he claimed, the Enlightenment had “opened a vortex which the modern totalitarian state filled. To have neither Heaven nor Hell is to be intolerably deprived and alone in a world gone flat. Of the two,” he concluded, “Hell proved easier to re-create.”¹⁰

This account confronted Eliot’s train of thought on his chosen anti-rational, romantic terrain, thus implicitly conceding far more than Steiner ever could have intended. His combination of psychoanalysis and theology offered a narrative of the Enlightenment summoning the demise of its own preferred values, as if ideas lacking agents can produce their own negation. More an instance of quixotic metaphor than persuasive analysis, this poetic chronicle had the unintended effect of wearing down the ground on which decent possibilities must stand in the face of experienced desolation.

Searching to secure such a foundation at a time the Enlightenment has come under renewed attack but has been defended in too-simple a way, I set out to explore the rational but not ingenuous strand of analytical history and social science written by scholars who had been my instructors either directly, as in the cases of Richard Hofstadter and David Truman, or at one remove. I soon decided to devote my lectures to this group, some refugee and some native, who had advanced a perspective during and following the Second World War sufficiently distinctive to be joined under the umbrella of the ‘political studies enlightenment.’ Refusing to stand in the space occupied both by Eliot and Steiner as interlocutors, these individuals had sought instead to renew and protect the Enlightenment’s heritage by appropriating and transforming social science, history, and the study of public policy.

As I revised my text for the last time, I gathered sustenance from Lionel Trilling’s elegant essay about T.S. Eliot’s politics. Here, Trilling is characteristically more muted and more sympathetic to Eliot’s traditionalist Anglo-Catholic impulses than Steiner’s more censorious evaluation. Locating Eliot’s 1939 lectures on The Idea of a Christian Society¹¹ in the nineteenth-century lineage of Coleridge, Newman, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Arnold, “the men who in the days of Reform, stood out, on something better than reasons of interest, against the philosophical assumptions of materialistic Liberalism,” Trilling could not endorse Eliot’s ideas but did “recommend to the attention of readers probably hostile to religion Mr. Eliot’s religious politics.”¹² What was so striking to Trilling was Eliot’s inability to find deeply contrary bases to the undergirding philosophy of the period’s liberal democracies and totalitarian regimes. To be sure, Eliot knew they were not the same, but he thought that the deep paganism underneath totalitarianism could not be opposed effectively by the liberalism of the 1930s, which he judged too thin and too exclusively negative for the task; hence he turned for positive sustenance to the Christian tradition.

Expressing deep skepticism about Eliot’s triad of the Christian state, the Christian Community, and the Community of Christians, Trilling noted that prior Christian societies had not been insulated from the very doctrines Christianity now was said to be better-equipped to oppose than liberalism. Nonetheless, Trilling spoke of Eliot’s writing “with respect because it suggests elements which a rational and naturalistic philosophy, to be adequate, must encompass.” For if Eliot’s supernaturalism provided no answers, neither, Trilling implied, did a liberalism lacking in “tragic presuppositions” or “the sense of complication and possibility, of surprise, intensification, variety, unfoldment, worth.”¹³

This thickening of modern liberalism defined the project that animated the scholarship of the historians and social scientists whose writing I examine in this book. Like Trilling and Steiner, they were concerned to understand the requisite conditions for fashioning and sustaining a humane culture, especially a decent liberal democratic political culture, but their sanctioned apparatus was different. Putting faith in systematic social inquiry as an instrument of discernment and defense, these writers confronted the sources and character of their cheerless age. Aware of human depredation and haunted by recent catastrophes, the political studies enlightenment refused to abandon the liberal, secular, and pluralist values Eliot had renounced so definitively. Instead, by developing a characteristic history and social science, they fortified these purposes by opting for a particular kind of Enlightenment. Appreciative of analytical modernism’s endowments and motivated by an understanding that how we come to know may, under some circumstances, explain how we can come to live, they produced a multifaceted program for epistemological and normative reconstruction.

In my lectures and now in this book, I have endeavored to critically appreciate this undertaking. Writing as a practicing social scientist concerned for the character and possibilities of my craft and as a historian interested in the lineage of ideas and the production of social knowledge, I have revisited the scholarship members of the political studies enlightenment produced after the Second World War when the irreparable legacies of three decades of barbarism on an immense scale still were raw and the shock of disappointment in the West’s high civilization was at its peak. In so doing, I have been determined to understand not just the achievements but the limits of their vision and to consider the bearing of the body of work they produced a half-century ago on today’s fervent but thin controversies about social inquiry and the status of Enlightenment.

As it turns out, the three universities at which I have been employed—the University of Chicago, the New School for Social Research, and Columbia University—provided fortifying quarters for most of the scholars whose work I consider. Each institution, in its own way, has handed on its legacy in a living state. Thus I was especially pleased to have had the chance to deliver the Schoff Lectures under the patrimony of Columbia’s University Seminars, an institution that has enriched the intellectual life of metropolitan New York and the wider culture for more than a half-century. Dean Aaron Warner, recently deceased at the start of his tenth decade, and his colleagues Jessie Strader and Anissa Bouziane, provided thoughtful counsel, administrative support, and unstinting encouragement as I worked to take advantage of the opportunity provided by Kenneth Jackson, Robert Belknap, and their colleagues on the Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures Advisory Committee. I particularly appreciate Professor Jackson’s encouragement. He urged me to accept the Committee’s invitation and helped me think about the structure of my talks. I also wish to warmly thank Andreas Huyssen, Fritz Stern, and Lisa Anderson for their graceful introductions to the three public lectures.

For tough-minded comments and fertile suggestions, I am indebted to Tom Bernstein, Lewis Edinger, Andreas Huyssen, Andreas Kalyvas, Deborah Socolow Katznelson, Zachary Katznelson (“eliminate the big words,” he counseled), Mark Kesselman (who convened a seminar to discuss the lectures), David Kettler, Kenneth Mischel, Andrew Nathan, Sayres Rudy, Rosalie Siegel, Michael Stanislawski, Mehmet Tabak, Kian Tajbakhsh, Nadia Urbinati, Mark von Hagen, and Harriet Zuckerman; and for his special generosity, to Robert K. Merton, whose attendance and approbation meant so much to me. Uri Ram and Oren Yiftachel at Ben Gurion University and Shlomo Avineri at the Hebrew University kindly proffered invitations that permitted me to test my ideas once again in public forums in May 2001 where, in a charged climate, I was pushed hard to clarify key aspects of my intellectual history. I am grateful, too, to my editors at Columbia University Press, co-sponsor of the Schoff Lectures. Kate Wittenberg provided intellectual partnership and steady patience while waiting too long for this short manuscript to leave my desk. Peter Dimock inherited the portfolio, shared in my passion for this project, and generously oversaw the production phase. Leslie Bialler’s excellent copyediting clarified and elevated the book’s prose. During the last phase of revision, Benjamin Fishman offered valuable research assistance.

Desolation and Enlightenment carries a dedication to my daughter Emma. In the age hierarchy of our family, it is her turn. So she will have to forgive me when I recall an event that took place some eighteen years ago, when she was just three years old. I stood before an audience at the University of Chicago, where I then taught, to deliver the kind of lecture one composes in advance, word by word. I turned to the penultimate page and confronted a blank sheet of paper. I improvised, then concluded. Arriving home, I asked my four children if any had seen a sheet from my talk. “Yes,” Emma proudly beamed. “It made a great rocket ship.” Quickly recognizing my consternation, she hastily added, “but I did put another piece back.” So, dear Emma, these pages are for you.

1. Cited in Jeremy Adler, “In the Absence of God: Isolation, Zionism and the Anguish of Gershom Scholem,” Times Literary Supplement, January 4, 2002, p. 4. Adler draws on Scholem’s diary report of conversations with Walter Benjamin in Switzerland late in the First World War after Scholem had successfully feigned insanity to avoid service in the German military.

2. George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Re-definition of Culture (London: Faber, 1971), p. 13.

3. Steiner, Castle, p. 34.

4. More than this silence offended Steiner. Just a month after delivering the Eliot Lectures, Steiner addressed a letter about “Eliot’s anti-semitism” to the BBC weekly, The Listener:

The obstinate puzzle is that Eliot’s uglier touches tend to occur at the heart of very good poetry (which is not the case of Pound). One thinks of the notorious ‘the Jew squats on the window-sill …. Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp’ in ‘Gerontion’; of

The rats are underneath the piles.

The Jew is underneath the lot.

in ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’ of

Rachel née Raabinovitch

Tears at the grapes with murderous paws

in ‘Sweeny among the Nightingales’.

The Listener, 29 April 1971; quoted in Christopher Ricks, T.S. Eliot and Prejudice (London: Faber and Faber, 1988, p. 29). Ricks finds Eliot’s prose to be more ambiguous than Steiner avers.

5. Eliot, Culture, pp. 32, 44.

6. “Since the diaspora, and the scattering of Jews amongst peoples holding the Christian Faith,” Eliot wrote, “it may have been unfortunate both for these peoples and for the Jews themselves, that the culture-contact between them has had to be within those neutral zones of culture in which religion could be ignored; and the effect may have been to strengthen the illusion that there can be culture without religion.” Eliot, Culture, p. 70. On that page, he invoked the authority of “the Old Testament” to argue that “In certain historical conditions, a fierce exclusiveness may be a necessary condition for the preservation of a culture.” Earlier, he had noted that “the actual religion of no European people has ever been purely Christian, or purely anything else. There are always bits and traces of more primitive faiths, more or less absorbed”; later, he observed, “If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes.” pp.30, 126.

7. Steiner, Castle, pp. 40, 41

8. Steiner, Castle, p. 42.

9. Steiner, Castle, p. 47. Steiner reprised the theme of the affront to the Christian world of Jewish perfectionism, which he associates with Moses, Jesus, and Marx, in a recent autobiographical work. Of this pressure on the imperfect existence of humankind, he wrote, “is loathing bred. From its smoulders and bursts into flame the impulse of relegation—the Jew must be banished, his voice gagged—and then of annihilation. … I confess to finding no better explanation for the persistence of anti-Semitism more or less world-wide and after the Holocaust.” George Steiner, Errata: An Examined Life. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1997, p. 61.

10. Steiner, Castle, p. 48.

11. T. S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society. London: Faber and Faber, 1939. There were the Boutwood Lectures delivered at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in March 1939.

12. Lionel Trilling, “Elements that are Wanted,” Partisan Review, September-October 1940; reprinted as “T. S. Eliot’s Politics” in Lionel Trilling, The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent: Selected Essays [edited with an Introduction by Leon Wieseltier] (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2000), p. 22.

13. Trilling, “Eliot’s Politics,” pp. 32, 29–30. This formulation heralded themes he later was to take up in The Liberal Imaginations effort “to recall liberalism to its first essential imagination of variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty.” Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979 [1950]), p. xii.