It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct.

-Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930

—Paul Goodman, Five Years, 1966

Lust strives to become intellectualized, the concrete operations of the flesh are blended with decorous abstractions, human loves tend toward the impossibilities of angelic embraces. Magic and pseudo-mysticism ... become so many spices which are used to give a new taste to the well-known feast of the senses.

—Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, 1933

The promise of sexual utopia

“Make love, not war.” The imperative now seems as antique as Timothy Leary’s “Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out.” And yet one of the most conspicuous features of the cultural revolution that swept through America and Western Europe in the 1960s was just such a demand for politically inspired “sexual liberation.” In some respects, of course, this demand was not new. The revolt against traditional sexual mores had been an important ingredient of “advanced” thinking at least since the 1920s. Freud was the most important intellectual authority underlying the new obsession with sex. The culture of psychoanalysis not only encouraged people to sexualize everything: it also encouraged them to talk about sex endlessly. The notorious Kinsey Report of 1948 also did an extraordinary amount to help popularize the possibilities of sexual utopianism. Its pretense to clinical exactitude—its effort, in Lionel Trilling’s words, “to make the anatomical and physiological description the ‘source’ of the emotional and then to consider it as the more real of the two”—did not so much demystify sex as transform it into a branch of erotic calisthenics.

Kinsey presented himself as a man of science, come to spread enlightenment and relieve us of the burden of superstition. In fact, as Joseph Epstein has observed, he was “a moral revolutionary in scientist’s clothing.”

The science was bad, even bogus; the man himself may now be forgotten; but the revolution came to stay, with a vengeance. Kinsey’s message—fornicate early, fornicate often, fornicate in every possible way—became the mantra of a sex-ridden age, our age, now desperate for a reformation of its own.

What was novel about Kinsey was not the message but the widespread acceptance of his missionary zeal about sex. The increasing penetration of Freudian ideas into the general culture made Kinsey possible; his expert deployment of social-scientific jargon made him palatable; what made him inevitable was the union of these elements with the atmosphere of liberation—sexual, social, political—that was becoming an ever more prominent part of American life. Kinsey was a Fifties phenomenon; but (like Hugh Hefner’s Playboy, which began publication in 1953) his gospel of sex did not really come into its own until the Sixties.

The idea of sexual Utopia can be traced back at least to the early nineteenth century and the Romantic cult of feeling and spontaneity. Even the union of sexual liberation and radical politics—a hallmark of the 1960s—had important antecedents going back to such disparate apostles of liberation as Rousseau, Fourier, Blake, Godwin, and Shelley. As Irving Kristol has noted,

“Sexual liberation” is always near the top of a countercultural agenda—though just what form the liberation takes can and does vary, sometimes quite wildly. Women’s liberation, likewise, is another consistent feature of all countercultural movements—liberation from husbands, liberation from children, liberation from family Indeed, the real object of these various sexual heterodoxies is to disestablish the family as the central institution of human society, the citadel of orthodoxy.

Nevertheless, whatever its antecedents, the Sixties introduced novel elements into this perennial countercultural dispensation. First of all, there was the matter of numbers. In the past, movements for sexual liberation had been sporadic and confined largely to a bohemian elite. In the 1960s sexual liberation suddenly became an everyday fact of middle-class life. This was due partly to the perfection of the birth control pill and other reliable forms of contraception, partly to greater affluence and mobility. What had been a fringe phenomenon became an established fashion; by the late Sixties, it had become a social norm.

David Allyn’s new book, Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History, provides a detailed overview of the progress of the sexual revolution in the 1960s and 1970s. Weaving together interviews and documentary history, Allyn provides a casebook of libertinage—a litany of excess—though his detached, almost clinical tone makes for an odd contrast between style and content. Born in 1969, Allyn is too young to have participated in the 1960s, something he clearly regrets. He begins his book by noting that he grew up “with the vague sense of having missed something magical and mysterious.”

For all its faults and limitations, the sexual revolution had contributed to an era of openness, self-examination, and questioning of the status quo. It was a time of popular inquiry into important philosophical questions. For twenty-some years, a significant segment of the population had publicly explored the possibility of a rational approach to personal behavior and social organization.... [I]t had been an era of devotion to the idea of freedom in all its forms. It had been an era of erotic possibility Now that era was over.

A sense of nostalgia informs Allyn’s entire discussion. It leads him to underestimate the tremendous moral damage that the sexual revolution inflicted. It also leads him to underestimate the manifold ways in which the sexual revolution continues to make itself felt today in the age of so-called “safe sex.” According to Allyn, the sexual revolution ended “in the late seventies, when opponents on both sides of the political spectrum waged a largely successful campaign against sexual permissiveness.” All it takes is a look at the highly eroticized advertisements festooning billboards, or the sorts of graphic sexual fare available even on network television today, to show how little any “campaign against permissiveness” has succeeded.

Make Love, Not War is useful mostly as a pathologist’s scrapbook. Allyn has assembled a vivid collage of examples and anecdotes: he samples everything from Masters and Johnson’s books about human sexuality to memoirs extolling the pleasures of gay bathhouses in the years before AIDS. He cites academic experts who praise pornography for “defining new possibilities in arbitrary sexual relationships, breaking down the stereotypes as to what is male, what is female,” and describes various episodes of group sex and other efforts to “smash monogamy” (in the phrase of Bernadine Dohrn, a leader of the violent Weather Underground). Like many observers, Allyn exaggerates the depth of sexual ignorance and restrictiveness before the watershed decade of the 1960s. (One thinks of Philip Larkin’s observation that “Sexual intercourse began/ In nineteen sixty-three / ... Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ and the Beatles’ first LP”) He also grossly exaggerates the positive aspects of the sexual revolution itself. “For all its faults” he concludes, “the sexual revolution taught us how to speak about sex more directly, more clearly, and, most important, more authentically than we ever knew how to before.”

In fact, the sexual revolution merely encouraged everyone to speak more graphically- that is, more pornographically-about sex than ever before. That habit is not more “authentic” merely more brazen. What the critic Rochelle Gurstein (adopting a phrase from Agnes Repplier) called “the repeal of reticence” has led not to greater openness but to greater vulgarity. Gurstein notes that “the price of too frequently and too regularly crossing the ever-shifting border between desire and taboo, curiosity and injunction, is desensitization: what was once shocking becomes commonplace and trivial, what was once obscene becomes banal and dull.”

What began earlier in this century as a plea for greater candor about sexual matters resulted in the abolition of genuine intimacy. “The more people became obsessed with achieving ‘successful sex’ and talking openly and endlessly about it,” Gurstein observes, “the more intimacy was to be stripped of privacy and meaning.” Consider the mainstream “lifestyle” magazines available at every grocery store checkout counter and newsstand. Cover stories in the December 1999 issue of Complete Woman (available in the “Family” section of my local newsstand) promised “New Sex Positions : Rock His World In Ways He’s Only Dreamed About (’Til Now! );” “Would You Have Sex on the Very First Date? Readers Confess,” “Naughty Money: Fully-Clothed Ways These Women Earn $$$ From Sex!,” and so on. The December 1999 Redbook tells its readers about “The Hot New Sex Potion: Can It Change Your Life?;” while Marie Claire offers “Orgasm: Secrets You’re Entitled to Know” and Cosmopolitan leads off with the “Cosmo Sex School: Study Up On Seduction, Learn New Tricks with Your Lips, Now Go to the Head of His Class,” etc. (“Start by manually or orally tantalizing his member ...”). Magazines like Maxim provide identical quasi-pornographic pabulum for young middle-class men. These publications are nothing if not “direct.” They represent the triumph of the Kinsey view of sex filtered through the ethic of Playboy and recast in the consumerist idiom of magazines like Vanity Fair. They are also models of inauthenticity.¹⁴

Allyn is wrong: The sexual revolution is not over. It is still very much in progress, even if AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases have focused attention more on the proper use of condoms than on group sex, wife swapping, and one-night stands. What is different now from the Sixties and Seventies is the temperature of the rhetoric and the amount of philosophical baggage. Demands for sexual liberation were a regular, though not invariable, concomitant of revolutionary politics in the past (with the conspicuous exception of the Bolshevik revolution). But seldom had sexual emancipation been invested with a more forbidding panoply of political mystification and high-flown verbiage than it was in the 1960s and 1970s. Plenty of revolutionary movements have made sexual emancipation one of their political causes; rarely has sexual gratification so thoroughly defined the content of revolutionary politics. The Yippie leader Jerry Rubin, with his inimitable logic, epitomized the radical attitude: “How,” he asked, “can you separate politics from sex? It’s all the same thing.”

Puritanism leads us to Vietnam. Sexual insecurity results in a supermasculinity trip called imperialism. American foreign policy, especially in Vietnam, makes no sense except sexually....

The revolution declares war on Original Sin, the dictatorship of parents over their kids, Christian morality, capitalism and supermasculinity trips....

Our tactic is to send niggers and longhair scum invading white middle-class homes, fucking on the living room floor, crashing on the chandeliers, spewing sperm on the Jesus pictures, breaking the furniture and smashing Sunday school napalm-blood Amerika forever.

Today most people who remember Rubin (who died in 1994 at 56) think of him as having occupied the lunatic, histrionic fringe of the counterculture before retiring from street theater to Wall Street. But in fact, Rubin represented the epicenter of the Sixties’ counterculture. It is worth recalling that if Rubin’s attitudes, pronouncements, and behavior were indeed far out, he was nonetheless an emblematic figure of the times. And it is also worth recalling how many of the ideas and attitudes Rubin espoused have, in suitably repackaged form, survived into contemporary society.

Wilhelm Reich and the function of the orgasm

Of course, Rubin did not emerge from nowhere. His ideas about the inseparability of sex and politics have a long lineage. A large part of the credit for the sexual revolution and its mixture of hedonism and politics must go to Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), the Austrian-born psychiatrist, demobbed Communist, renegade Freudian, militant atheist, and all-around celebrant of sexual orgasm. As the journalist Hal Cohen noted in a recent article on Reich in Lingua Franca, “his work seems to be a hidden thread running through the proto-counterculture of the 1950s.”

At the center of Reich’s teachings were two convictions: that “the sexual question must be politicized;” as he put it in The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), and that establishing ”a satisfactory genital sex life” was the key not only to individual but also to societal liberation and happiness, as he put it in The Function of the Orgasm (1942) and in practically everything else he wrote. As one critic acknowledged, ”Reich, in truth, did feel that sex was everything.”

Reich was always obsessed with sex. As Hal Cohen reports, at the age of twelve “he watched his tutor seduce his mother.”

He was also twelve when he revealed this fact to his father

-a jealous and brutish man who regularly referred to his wife as “whore” anyway-resulting soon after in his mother’s suicide. A year later, young Wilhelm bedded a household servant. In his university days, he was an insatiable womanizer; by most accounts, he never gave up the habit. Nor was it separated from his work: He met his first wife, Annie, ... when she came to him for therapy; he was known to have seduced several of his other patients; and he had an affair with the wife of his assistant Myron Sharaf.

G. K. Chesterton once observed that when someone abandons belief in God, what he will then believe is not nothing but anything. Reich was one of many modern figures who would seem to confirm this observation. In 1939, after shuttling around Europe for several years-Reich attracted official opprobrium wherever he went-he got a faculty appointment at New York’s New School for Social Research. It was around this time that he began publishing his theories about “cosmic orgone energy” and “orgastic potency.” Orgone (which Reich named after the sexual orgasm) is supposedly the animating energy of the universe. “Its color,” Reich said, “is blue.” It is omnipresent (“orgone radiation is indeed present everywhere”) and of inestimable therapeutic value: “it charges living tissue and brings about an expansion of the plasmatic system.” (Reich was very fond of italics.) He built “Orgone Energy Accumulators” —empty wood and metal boxes to the rest of us—which he sold to patients so that they might mobilize their “plasmatic currents” and thereby overcome sexual repression and, incidentally, ameliorate if not cure everything from cancer to schizophrenia.

Our orgone therapy experiments with cancer patients consist in having them sit in an orgone accumulator. The orgone energy “accumulated” in the interior of this enclosure penetrates the naked body and, moreover, is breathed in.... The effect of the orgone energy radiation is vagatonic. In other words, it acts as a counter-force resisting the general sympatheticotonic shrinking of the organism.... This “plasmatic expansion” is accompanied by a reduction of the typical cancer pain.

It is perhaps worth noting that orgone accumulators come in a variety of shapes and sizes. “Boxes ranged from full-body models about the size of a phone booth to smaller models designed to accommodate specific body parts in need of treatment. Sometimes they included attachments that intensified and sprayed orgone like a removable showerhead. There were also orgone blankets that could be folded up for easy traveling”¹⁵ The Beat writer William Burroughs showed how versatile these devices could be. Having built his own mini-orgone accumulator out of a gas can, Burroughs explained to a correspondent, “one day I got into the big accumulator and held the little one over my joint and came right off.”

It is difficult to convey the distinctive loopiness of Reich’s theories, a combination of pseudoscientific argot and sexual exhortation. Reich’s “experiments” with orgone went far beyond therapy. They also included such things as “cosmic orgone engineering,” in which Reich gives instructions on “DOR removal and cloud-busting” (“DOR” is Reich’s acronym for “deadly orgone”) : “It has become possible,” Reich noted in the Orgone Energy Bulletin in 1952, “to apply the principle of the orgonomic potential to the dissolution and formation of clouds.” Poor Reich believed that masses of negative energy had been accumulating over his research laboratory in Organon (Reich’s name for Rangeley), Maine. He provides little sketches showing how long, hollow pipes can be constructed to draw off the bad kind of orgone energy from clouds and redirect it “not into the ground but into water, preferably into the flowing water of brooks, lakes, and rivers.” It was all nonsense, of course, and fraudulent nonsense at that. Reich spent the last years of his life in a Federal penitentiary, courtesy of the Food and Drug Administration, for transporting orgone accumulators across state lines.

Although by the end he was almost certainly mad, Reich was also immensely influential. Norman Mailer professed a great admiration for Reich. (“If I were ever to look for a therapist;” he wrote, “I would be inclined to get me to a Reichian.”) So did William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. So even did more sober figures like Irving Howe and Saul Bellow, who under the influence of Isaac Rosenfeld subjected himself to Reichian therapy. In ”The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich,” a hostile article about Reich published in The New Republic in 1947, Mildred Edie Brady noted that Reich’s theories had received enthusiastic praise in Leftist magazines from Politics and The Nation to Science and Society. One scientific journal characterized his writings as “a surrealistic creation,” but many others accorded Reich and his theories great respect. He was duly listed in American Men of Science and, Brady observed, his books “have been assigned in university seminars for serious consideration.” (Characteristically, Reich responded to Brady’s article with the contention that “Brady believes that I am the only man who could help her achieve an orgasm, which she so desperately needs.”) Even today there are plenty of Reichian analysts. There is even a Journal of Orgonomy, staffed by Reich’s latter-day disciples, who are eager to tell you all about the dangers of “character armor” (another of Reich’s fantasies) and about the orgasm as “the ultimate regulator of the individual’s energy economy”

Early on in his career, Reich declared himself a “Freudo-Marxist.” He helped to pioneer that strange amalgam of radical politics and emancipatory sex that fueled the sexual revolution of the 1960s. And while Reich later abandoned Marxism - he declared Stalin to be “anti-sex” and Russia itself to be “sex-reactionary-he preserved the radical utopianism. Today, the familiarity of this union between Freud and Marx tends to obscure its oddness. Harvey Mansfield pointed out that the sexual revolution depended on ”an illicit, forced union between Freud and Marx in which Mr. Marx was compelled to yield his principle that economics, not sex, is the focus of liberation, and Mr. Freud was required to forsake his insistence that liberation from human nature is impossible.”

As is so often the case, contradiction proved no bar to credulity. For Reich and his disciples and spiritual heirs, sex was the primary focus of political activism, and human nature was a harsh but dispensable fiction. Reich came too soon and was too much of a quack to see his ideas triumph in their original form. But by the early 1960s, variations on his core theories about sex and politics were everywhere. Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro” (1957), for example, with its adolescent radicalism and hymns to the “apocalyptic orgasm,” is Reichian boilerplate refitted with Mailerean bombast.

Mailer had a part to play in popularizing Reich. But the three men who really popularized the Reichian gospel were the anarchist poet-psychologist Paul Goodman, the classicist turned neo-Freudian guru Norman O. Brown, and the Frankfurt School Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse. None would have described himself as a follower of Reich, but all read and commented on his work and drew upon his theories. Whatever their particular disagreements with Reich or with one another, all absorbed the essential Reichian tenets about politicizing sex and investing it with a kind of redemptive significance. As Richard King noted in The Party of Eros : Radical Social Thought and the Realm of Freedom, all three “sought to combine a concern for instinctual and erotic liberation with political and social radicalism, cultural with political concerns.”

It would be difficult to overestimate their influence. The critic Morris Dickstein was quite right to insist, in Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (1977), that Goodman, Brown, and Marcuse were prime catalysts in “the rise of a new sensibility,” the thinkers “whose work had the greatest impact on the new culture of the sixties.” At the same time, it is worth stressing that the importance of Goodman, Brown, and Marcuse was not so much intellectual as emotional and affective. Despite the elaborate scholarly machinery they employed in their books, their chief appeal was not to people’s minds but to their hearts-and to other, lower, organs. They came bearing arguments, but, as the Sixties wore on, they were increasingly acclaimed as prophets. Their ideas were embraced less as reasoned proposals than as talismans of personal and political transformation. As Dickstein put it, the trio of Goodman, Brown, and Marcuse spoke with such urgency to his generation because “we knew that at bottom their gospel was a sexual one, that sex was their wedge for reorienting all human relations.”

Paul Goodman and tbegonad theory of life

Of the three, Paul Goodman (1911-1972) is the one whose reputation has faded most completely Having graduated from City College in 1931 with a degree in philosophy, Goodman early on determined to be a writer. Today, most people familiar with Goodman’s work would probably describe him as a kind of social psychologist. But in fact his literary interests—like his sexual interests, as it turned out —were extremely promiscuous. He contributed to all manner of left-wing publications, including Partisan Review, Politics, Commentary, Dissent, and The New York Review of Books. He wrote literary criticism (and even took a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Chicago) as well as poems, short stories, and novels; in 1951, he collaborated on a book about Gestalt psychology. He wrote essays on everything from city planning and decentralization to education, youth work camps, pornography (he was for it), Wilhelm Reich, and making antiwar films.

During World War II, Goodman’s draft-dodging and anarchist views made him persona non grata at some of his usual outlets, and he receded somewhat from the scene. But in 1960 his big break came. Norman Podhoretz had just taken over the editorship of Commentary. As a declaration of editorial intention, he decided to publish three large segments of Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd, the manuscript of which had just been turned down by over a dozen publishers. In his memoir Making It, Podhoretz recalled that Growing Up Absurd represented “the very incarnation of the new spirit” that he wanted both for Commentary and for the world at large.

Looking back from the mid-1970s, Morris Dickstein described the book as a “masterwork in social criticism ... that did much to inform the whole frame of mind of thinking people in the sixties.” By the mid-1960s, Goodman had achieved enormous celebrity. He was an invariable participant at rallies, sit-ins, protest marches, and other events sure to attract large numbers of young men. “Like Allen Ginsberg,” Dickstein noted, “Goodman was more than a writer in the sixties: he was a pervasive and inescapable presence ... the most tireless and incandescent Socratic figure of the age.”

Today, it is hard to understand the excitement. For one thing, Goodman’s prose is atrocious. “Encountering Goodman’s style,” Norman Mailer once observed, “was not unrelated to the journeys one undertook in the company of a laundry bag.” The critic Kingsley Widmer in Paul Goodman, a monograph designed to outline Goodman’s achievement, regularly comments on his subject’s deficiencies as a writer. Of his literary works generally Widmer observes that, “pathetically, they are often quite literally incompetent-marked by trite and mangled language, bumblingly inconsistent manners and tones, garbled syntax and forms, embarrassing pretentiousness and self-lugubriousness, and pervasive awkward writing.”

In a curious way, however, some of Goodman’s failings as a stylist actually contributed to his effectiveness. Goodman had a knack for reformulating current anxieties and clichés in the astringent language of the social sciences. This had the double advantage of imbuing his sociological writings with an aura of authority while reinforcing his readers’ settled prejudices—a tactic sure to inspire gratitude. He managed the neat trick of balancing pathos and jargon in such a way that—for those susceptible to his spell—the underlying banality of his thinking momentarily disappeared.

By the time that Growing Up Absurd was published, Goodman’s main point was wearisomely familiar: postwar America was said to be a conformist wasteland that stifled anything beginning with the letter S—spirit, spontaneity, self-expression, and of course sexuality. Goodman said virtually nothing new in Growing Up Absurd. But somehow, his method of recycling received opinions about the problems of youth culture in what he liked to call the “Organized System” struck a chord. His success was due partly to the way he combined the radical clichés of the moment with a traditional language of virtue. “My purpose is a simple one,” Goodman wrote in his first chapter: “to show how it is desperately hard these days for an average child to grow up to be a man, for our present organized system of society does not want men.” (Girls and women do not figure much in Goodman’s scheme of things.)

In other words, Goodman cannily blended rhetoric appropriate to a Marine recruitment poster with portentous fantasies about America being an “unnatural system” that warps young souls. Given current conditions in America, Goodman wonders, “Is it possible, being a human being, to exist? Is it possible, having a human nature, to grow up?” But the pertinent question is whether it really was “desperately hard” for the average child to grow up in the United States in the 1950s—an era, it is worth remembering, of tremendous prosperity, excellent public education, and potent national self-confidence. Was it true, as Goodman insisted, that “the young men who conform to the dominant society become for the most part apathetic, disappointed, cynical, and wasted”?

Part of Goodman’s purpose was to sympathize with and exonerate those elements of youth culture that had chosen not to conform to “the dominant society”—the Beats and other fringe groups who believed that “a man is a fool to work to pay installments on a useless refrigerator for his wife.” (Not so useless if one wishes to keep food from spoiling, of course, but Goodman never acknowledges that side of things.) He praises the Beats for being “pacific, artistic, and rather easy-going sexually” Indeed, as one reads through Growing Up Absurd, it becomes increasingly clear that being “easy-going” when it comes to sex is one of his chief criteria of psychological health. “My impression is,” he writes in one gnomic passage, “that—leaving out their artists, who have the kind of sex that artists have—Beat sexuality in general is pretty good, unlike delinquent sexuality, which seems, on the evidence, to be wretched.”

Richard King observed that Goodman’s works “reveal a man obsessed with two things—sex and general ideas.” Although he had two common-law wives and fathered three children, Goodman was aggressively bisexual, which meant —as his diary, Five Years (1966), makes clear—predominantly homosexual. His sexual behavior was so flagrant that he managed to get himself dismissed from teaching positions at a progressive boarding school and even at that bohemian outpost of the South, Black Mountain College. He seems to have been obtuse as well as importunate. “I distrust women clothed;” he wrote in his diary. “Naked, they are attractive to me like any other animal. Male dress passes —but I have to reach for their penises, to make sure. This has damaged my reputation.” Imagine that! Five Years records a steady stream of one-night stands, rough trade, and hasty pick-ups in bars. “There have been few days going back to my 11th year,” Goodman noted, “when I have not had an orgasm one way or another.”

C. Wright Mills and P J. Salter described one of Goodman’s articles from the 1940s as putting forward “the gonad theory of revolution.” In truth, Goodman propounded the gonad theory of life. Joseph Epstein summed it up aptly in 1978: “the good society, for Goodman, started at the groin.” Responding to Epstein’s criticism, a Goodman enthusiast quoted from a letter that Goodman had written some years before: ”My own view ... is that no sexual practices whatever, unless they are malicious or extremely guilt-ridden, do any harm to anybody, including children“—a statement that not only epitomizes Goodman’s philosophy, but also helps to explain why he became such an idolized figure for the counterculture of the 1960s.

Norman O. Brown and the Dionysian ego

To move from the work of Paul Goodman to the work of Norman O. Brown is to move from the grubby and prosaic to the cerebral and fantastic. Born in 1913, Brown was educated at Oxford, the University of Chicago, and the University of Wisconsin. A classicist by training, he labored in obscurity at Wesleyan University through the 1950s. His discovery of Freud was (to use a term he might like) a metanoia: a conversion experience that changed his life. In 1959, he published Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History, a dense, learned academic tract that blends Freud, Marx, idealist philosophy, and mysticism, East and West, in a preposterous but intoxicating brew. Brown’s premise, in Life Against Death and in his other main book, an aphoristic mélange called Love’s Body (1966), is that there is an “intrinsic connection between social organization and neurosis.” His goal is to break that connection by abolishing “repression,” thus curing “the disease called man.” This, you see, is the way to affirm the “life instinct,” which “demands a union with others and the world around us based not on anxiety and aggression but on narcissism and erotic exuberance.”

Naturally, this sort of thing was a tremendous hit on American campuses, where the homeless radicalism of irresponsible affluence made all manner of utopian schemes seem attractive. Morris Dickstein doubtless spoke for many when he wrote, in Gates of Eden, that “I can recall no public event more inspiring and electrifying at that time than Brown’s vatic, impassioned Phi Beta Kappa oration at Columbia in 1960” Vatic, indeed. That oration, called “Apocalypse: The Place of Mystery in the Life of the Mind,” published the following year in Harper’s, is a piece of obscurantist nonsense. But what seductive nonsense it was! Brown began by declaring a state of emergency: the mind was “at the end of its tether,” just as H. G. Wells had said it was. Civilization, ruined by rationality, had to be “renewed by the discovery of new mysteries” and “magic.” What was needed, Brown told the newly elected key-holders, was “the blessed madness of the maenad and the bacchant.” He himself came seeking “supernatural powers.”

Brown’s great gift was infusing mystic pronouncements with a radical, antibourgeois animus and a febrile erotic charge. How nice to learn, for example, that time was simply the product of “neurosis.” Or that “all sublimations are desexualizations.” Or that the roots of “alienated consciousness lay in “the compulsion to work” and that this compulsion was exacerbated by “capitalism,” which “has made us so stupid and one-sided that objects exist for us only if we can possess them or if they have utility.” How exciting to discover that “all thinking is nothing but a detour” and that the chief task now facing the spiritual vanguard was “the construction of a Dionysian ego” that would free us from the tyranny of “genital organization.” “The work of constructing a Dionysian ego is immense,” Brown acknowledges, as if he were talking about building the Hoover Dam, “but there are signs that it is already under way.”

Paradise now

Brown offered his readers a little of everything: the rhetoric of Christian eschatology and neo-Marxist radicalism and polymorphous sexuality. Was his vision of “body mysticism” littered with contradictions? No problem! Faced with evidence of contradiction one could always resort to Walt Whitman: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes).” Or one could quote Brown himself: “We may therefore entertain the hypothesis that formal logic and the law of contradiction are the rules whereby the mind submits to operate under general conditions of repression.” In other words, genuine liberation for Brown entails liberation from rationality, i.e., from sanity.

Brown claimed to be plumbing “the psychoanalytic meaning of history.” But, as he more or less admits, he adopts Freudian rhetoric while totally inverting Freud’s fundamental understanding of civilization and human nature. (The one thing that Brown took from Freud without distortion was Freud’s extraordinary overestimation of sex as the most important thing—almost the only important thing—in human life.) The writer John Passmore, in “Paradise Now,” a long article about Brown published in Encounter in 1970, summed it up well: “Freud presented a dilemma: either civilization, which rests on repression, or unrepressed enjoyment. When it came to the point he preferred civilization, if with some misgivings. Brown, in typical mystical fashion, chooses the other horn of the dilemma.” In fact, the choice is not even between civilization and “unrepressed enjoyment” but rather between the ordered enjoyments that civilization makes possible and the carnage and savagery of Dionysian—i.e., barbaric—chaos.

Brown everywhere talks about “abolishing” repression. In Love’s Body, for example he waxes prophetic about it: “The unconscious to be made conscious; a secret disclosed; a veil to be rent, a seal to be broke open; the seal which Freud called repression.” You might have thought that art in its best sense is a sign and ornament of civilization. He tells us on the contrary that art, if it is to fulfill its redemptive function, must be “subversive of civilization.” In other words, like all Romantics, Brown pretends that the alternative to civilization, with its tedious checks and balances, is paradise; in fact, as every real breakdown of civilization in history reminds us, the alternative to civilization is much closer to hell on earth.

What would a nonmorbid science look like? It would presumably be erotic rather than (anal) sadistic in aim. Its aim would not be mastery over but union with nature. And its means would not be economizing but erotic exuberance. And finally, it would be based on the whole body and not just a part; that is to say, it would be based on the polymorphously perverse body.

That is to say, it would be based on a groundless fantasy about what constituted knowledge, a grotesque misunderstanding of nature, and a narcissistic worship of the body. Brown pretended that the alternative to rational thought (“formal logic,” “the law of contradiction”) was a “higher” knowledge. In fact, it was a lower form of ignorance : a word-besotted mysticism incapable of distinguishing verbal legerdemain from the claims of reality. It is easy to dismiss Brown as a “gnostic curiosity,” as one critic did. The problem is that his gnostic fantasies seduced some of the most influential and articulate thinkers of the 1960s, and, through them, the hearts and minds of an entire generation. Take, for example, Susan Sontag’s famous conclusion to “Against Interpretation: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” This bit of avant-garde word play is totally nonsensical; but it is exactly the sort of nonsense that is inconceivable without the example of Brown’s polysyllabic eroticism.

Herbert Marcuse and the abolition of repression

With the work of Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), we descend a little closer to earth, but not much. Born in Berlin and educated at the University of Berlin and the University of Freiburg, Marcuse began his academic career as a radical interpreter of Hegel. He was later associated with the so-called “Frankfurt School” of Marxist intellectuals. When the Nazis came to power, Marcuse fled first to Geneva, where he taught for a year, and then to the United States, where he remained for the rest of his life, teaching at Columbia, Harvard, Brandeis, and the University of California at San Diego. Marcuse’s two most influential books, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1955) and One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (1964), lay out a position that, in essentials, anticipates and parallels Brown’s. Like Brown, Marcuse blends Marx and Freud to produce an emancipatory vision based on polymorphous, narcissistic sexuality, antibourgeois animus, and quasi-mystical theories about art, redemption, and the abolition of repression.

The chief difference between Brown and Marcuse is one of tone. Brown poses as a visionary: William Blake with a Ph.D. and an extensive bibliography. For him, the revolution is primarily a cataclysm in consciousness. Marcuse makes more of an effort to keep his Marxist credentials in good order. Where Brown might quote the mystic Jacob Boehme, Marcuse will add a “Political Preface” to the second edition of Eros and Civilization in order to announce “the gradual undermining of capitalistic enterprise in the course of automation.” Where Brown described himself frankly as a seeker after “magic” and “supernatural powers,” Marcuse became the mentor of the radical Communist black-power spokeswoman Angela Davis, whom he extolled as the best student he ever taught.¹⁶ In 1972, in Counter-Revolution and Revolt, Marcuse accused the “Western world” (i.e., the United States) of practicing “the horrors of the Nazi regime” and looked forward to “the fall of the capitalist superpower,” an event that he believed would allow the Chinese and Cuban revolutions “to go their own ways—freed from the suffocating blockade and the equally suffocating necessity of maintaining an ever more costly defensive machine.” Brown might agree, but one can hardly imagine him acknowledging the existence of Cuba without first quoting Paracelsus. In other words, both men were political utopians, but Marcuse was more likely to insist on the real-world implications of his thought.

In a famous review of Love’s Body published in Commentary in February 1967, Marcuse accused Brown of systematically “mystifying” love, politics, and human nature. He was quite right, but the charge applies equally to Marcuse. Both men were fantasists. Their world view proceeds from the assumption that human nature can be repealed. In Eros and Civilization—a book that became a bible of the counterculture-Marcuse spins a fairy tale about the fate of man in industrial society. Like Brown, he conjures up the image of a “non-repressive reality principle” in which “the body in its entirety would become ... an instrument of pleasure.” What this really amounts to is a form of infantilization. Marcuse speaks glowingly of “a resurgence of pregenital polymorphous sexuality” that “protests against the repressive order of procreative sexuality.” He recommends returning to a state of “primary narcissism” in which one will find “the redemption of pleasure, the halt of time, the absorption of death; silence, sleep, night, paradise—the Nirvana principle not as death but as life.” In other words, he looks forward to a community of solipsists.

Marcuse is much more explicit than Brown about the social implications of his experiment in narcissism. “This change in the value and scope of libidinal relations” he writes, “would lead to a disintegration of the institutions in which the private interpersonal relations have been organized, particularly the monogamic and patriarchal family” That is to say, ultimate liberation is indistinguishable from ultimate self-absorption. Of course, there are one or two impediments to fulfilling this dream. Mortality, for example. “The brute fact of death,” Marcuse admits, “denies once and for all the reality of a non-repressive existence.” But not to worry. A couple of pages after acknowledging the inconvenient reality of death, Marcuse assures us that the emancipation of eros means that “the instinctual value of death would have changed.” He goes on to explain that

the necessity of death does not refute the possibility of final liberation. Like other necessities, it can be made rational—painless. Men can die without anxiety if they know that what they love is protected from misery and oblivion. After a fulfilled life, they may take it upon themselves to die—at a moment of their own choosing.

It is sad, really, that a man so extensively educated should be so naive.

The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once observed that no one should read Hegel before the age of forty: the dangers of intellectual corruption were just too great. Marcuse is a case in point. He was so intoxicated by Hegel’s dialectic that he could no longer register the most commonplace realities. His Marxist view of the world mandated that capitalism led to oppression, ergo capitalist societies were monuments of misery and unfreedom: Q.E.D. Never mind that the United States has developed into the most tolerant and prosperous society in history: the theory says that it can’t happen, therefore what looks like freedom and prosperity must be an illusion. Marcuse’s boldness in this direction is breathtaking. The fundamental point of One-Dimensional Man is that the better things appear to get, the worse they really are. “Under the rule of a repressive whole,” he writes, “liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination.” And again, “a rising standard of living is the almost unavoidable by-product of the politically manipulated society.”

Repressive tolerance

Marcuse came up with several names for the idea that freedom is a form of tyranny. The most famous was “repressive tolerance,” which was also the title of an essay he wrote on the subject in 1965. He even offered a simple formula for distinguishing between, on the one hand, the “repressive tolerance” that expresses itself in such phenomena as freedom of assembly and free speech and, on the other, the “liberating tolerance” he recommends. “Liberating tolerance.” he wrote, “would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.” In other words, “liberating tolerance” means acceptance of the ideas you agree with and rejection of those you disagree with. The usual name for this sort of attitude, of course, is intolerance, but no doubt it would be terribly intolerant to insist on such a repressive if elementary point.

What Marcuse wanted is “not ‘equal’ but more representation of the Left,” and he blithely sanctioned “extralegal means if the legal ones have proved to be inadequate.” Marcuse admitted that “extreme suspension of the right of free speech and free assembly is indeed justified only if the whole of society is in extreme danger,” but he went on to note that “I maintain that our society is in such an emergency situation.”

Different opinions and “philosophies” can no longer compete peacefully for adherence and persuasion on rational grounds: the “marketplace of ideas” is organized and delimited by those who determine the national and the individual interest. In this society, for which the ideologists have proclaimed the “end of ideology,” the false consciousness has become the general consciousness—from the government down to its last objects.

No wonder Leszek Kolakowski concluded that Marcuse’s philosophy advocated “Marxism as a Totalitarian Utopia.” In the end, Kolakowski points out, Marcuse’s entire system “depends on replacing the tyranny of logic by a police tyranny. ... The Marcusian union of Eros and Logos can only be realized in the form of a totalitarian state, established and governed by force; the freedom he advocates is non-freedom.”

The ideas put forward by people like Paul Goodman, Norman O. Brown, and Herbert Marcuse—to say nothing of Wilhelm Reich—are so extravagant that one is tempted to dismiss them as ridiculous figments of a diseased understanding. The problem is that these figments, deceptive though they undoubtedly are, have been extolled as liberating wisdom by an entire generation. If they are no longer declared with the same proselytizing fervor that they were in the 1960s, that is because they have become part of the established intellectual and moral climate we live with. We are no longer pioneers in the sexual revolution but settled inhabitants of the territory it claimed. Missionary zeal is pointless when practically everyone is already a tithe-paying member of the congregation.

The unlikely marriage of Marx and Freud is, as Harvey Mansfield has pointed out, based on a basic misreading of both authors. It is a marriage contracted out of fantasy and consummated in contradiction. It joins the revolutionary fervor of Marxism with Freud’s apotheosis of sex but ignores Marx’s premise that economics determines culture even as it neglects Freud’s insistence that civilization requires the repression of instinct. Among other things, this unlikely union shows that it is a great mistake to believe that ideas, because untrue or even preposterous, cannot therefore do great harm. As Irving Kristol observed in “Utopianism, Ancient and Modern,” “the truth is that ideas are all-important. The massive and seemingly solid institutions of any society ... are always at the mercy of the ideas in the heads of the people who populate these institutions.” Goodman, Brown, and Marcuse promised boundless liberation. What they delivered was mystification and immorality. Their ideas seduced a generation, sowing emotional sterility and shamelessness: what Roger Scruton rightly described as “the dissipation of the self in loveless fantasy”