The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy. - book review

The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy by Russell Jacoby Basic Books. 236 pages. $26.00.

American history is a struggle to shape the nation's inherent revolutionary and utopian impulses. Yet lately the contest has become decidedly one-sided. The Disney corporation and its "imagineers" now seek to represent our utopian vanguard. What has happened to the left's imagination and vision?

Russell Jacoby poses this question in The End of Utopia. He observes that politics have become boring, though not benign, and that our future has been reduced to a choice between "the status quo or something worse." He agonizes that a "utopian spirit--a sense that the future could transcend the present--has vanished." And he holds his comrades on the left accountable: "Radicals have lost their bite, liberals their backbone."

He says that the left has either accepted the priorities of the powers that be or subscribed to causes that, however admirable, represent little more than tinkering with the present system. Too many leftists, he says, have pretended that "every step backward or sideways marks ten steps forward."

He denounces the reduction of progressivism to multiculturalism and the transformation of democratic cultural criticism into pop cultural studies. Writing with broad strokes, he indicts the institutionalization of intellectual life, the abandonment of universalism in favor of particularism, and the neutering of utopianism.

Jacoby asserts that multiculturalism simply reppackages pluralism, though admittedly with an ethnic twist. He reminds us that Cold Warriors in the fifties posed American pluralism against foreign "totalitarianism," and continually used the latter concept, originally crafted to refer to both fascism and communism, to broadly damn the politics of the left.

Still, Jacoby appreciates multiculturalism's humanism and the need for ethnic and gender representation in offices and texts. However, he maintains that "no vision drives multiculturalism" other than, perhaps, "inclusiveness," and that implies conformity. Pluralism and multiculturalism, he charges, are the "opium of disillusioned intellectuals."

Jacoby proceeds to deconstruct academic cultural studies. For all their radical posturing, he says, cultural studies scholars end up merely celebrating the status quo. Not only does their postmodern rhetoric alienate them from the very people they say they are concerned about, but their populist desires lead them to uncritically embrace mass culture and, thus, to overlook the difference between that and real democracy.

Postulating that the fate of the utopian vision is tied to the fate of leftist intellectuals, Jacoby explains why we're in serious trouble. Intellectuals "have migrated into institutions to become specialists and professionals," he writes. "At the same time, they have turned suspicious of universal categories as unscientific or oppressive." Here, he cannot resist mocking various figures of the intellectual-academic elite for bemoaning their supposedly marginal status even as they pursue lives of privilege and renown.

Most troubling, Jacoby states, intellectuals have abandoned universal values in favor of the local and the particular. Denying the possibility of objectivity and truth, they aestheticize reality, repudiate the liberating promise of Enlightenment philosophy, and seem incapable of making firm moral judgments. In essence, they take cultural relativism to the extreme and never get to the fundamental political issue: "What is, and what should be?"

Does this beating up of the intellectual left seem familiar? It should. Jacoby has taken on the same group for the third time in a dozen years. In The Last Intellectuals (Basic Books, 1987), he recounted how the radicals of the 1960s had turned into the professors of the 1980s, conquering academe but, at the same time, enclosing themselves within its walls and abdicating politics and public life to the right. And, in Dogmatic Wisdom (Doubleday, 1994), even as he revealed the culture wars as essentially a sham campaign by the right to deflect attention from the critical issues confronting Americans, he accused leftist academics of failing to engage their fellow citizens on those issues.

I praised those books. Though Jacoby grossly underestimated the right's capacity to contain the left within higher education, essentially conflated postmodernists with the left as a whole, and virtually ignored other progressive currents, he diagnosed spreading afflictions, like inane writing, excessive theorizing, and self-promotion.

Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed The End of Utopia. Jacoby's arguments, especially regarding multiculturalism and cultural studies, bear repeating. And he continues to demonstrate his brilliance as an intellectual historian. Nevertheless, his denunciations do grow wearisome and are, quite frankly, no longer so original. Among others, Todd Gitlin has written on the postmodern left's foolish abandonment of universalism (The Twilight of Common Dreams, Metropolitan Books, 1995), and Richard Rorty has echoed Jacoby's own frustrations about the academic left's failure to serve as a class of public intellectuals (Achieving Our Country, Harvard University Press, 1998).

Jacoby closes his new book by asking, "What is to be done?" Yet, oddly enough, after writing of utopian thinking, he offers no more hope than to wait and see what history brings. After all his attacks, he owes us more. His crankiness and his sense of estrangement from the left seem to get in his way.

Jacoby might have considered America's radical tradition and utopian impulse, and how we might yet redeem and renew them. He, at least, should have attended to the work of his comrades who have not drowned themselves in postmodernism. He ignores too many of us and thus remains oblivious to potentially significant, progressive developments and possibilities.

Marx and Engels criticized utopian socialists for assuming that praiseworthy beliefs and ideas alone are sufficient to transform society. Ideas, they knew, must engage movement and struggle. Jacoby has written smart criticism and good history, but he has yet to radically connect.

Harvey J. Kaye is professor of social change and development at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and the author of the forthcoming young people's biography "Thomas Paine: Firebrand of the Revolution" (Oxford University Press).

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