Dwight Macdonald and the politics Circle:
The Challenge of Cosmopolitan Democracy
By Gregory D. Sumner
Cornell University Press, 272 pages, $32.50
Early in 1944, Dwight Macdonald published the first issue of a monthly “little magazine” titled politics. A prominent and founding member of what would later become known as the New York Intellectuals, Macdonald was at the time an independent radical in the midst of shedding the remnants of his ’30s-style revolutionary socialist commitments for an as-yet vaguely defined alternative. Over the next five years, Macdonald’s magazine was the vehicle that he and a small but influential group of like-minded intellectuals from both sides of the Atlantic used to explore the terra incognito of post-Marxist radicalism.
Macdonald’s journal won a devoted readership, but its circulation never climbed much above a few thousand. If things keep up the way they are going, Macdonald will soon have more historians writing about him than politics had readers. In recent years he has been the subject of one full-blown biography, several critical studies, a couple of doctoral dissertations and any number of historical articles. What makes Gregory Sumner, a historian at the University of Detroit at Mercy, think that Macdonald and his little magazine deserve or require another volume?
“It is my view,” Sumner writes in the preface to his book–a scholarly, informed and impassioned meditation on the potential contribution of Macdonald’s political vision for our own times–“that politics offered a communitarian alternative to both Marxian socialism and cold war liberalism that deserves much more careful consideration than it has received to date.” Macdonald’s “circle” (he was, at heart, too much of an anarchist to pull together anything as formal as a political group, or, for that matter, even an editorial board) included such noteworthy figures as C. Wright Mills, Paul Goodman, Lewis Coser, George Orwell, Albert Camus and lesser-known but significant European intellectuals such as Nicola Chiaromonte and Andrea Caffi. Together, as Sumner argues, they developed an admirable if somewhat inchoate set of ideas in the later 1940s. The magazine’s credo was, by intent, more of a sensibility than an ideology, distinguished above all else by a “commitment to rescuing the individual from the collective abstractions and messianic ideologies . . . by which the excesses of the age were justified.”
The politics circle was anti-Nazi and anti-communist–not an unusual combination of sentiments in the aftermath of World War II. But what set its members apart from many other intellectuals of the era was their fear that similar dangerous impulses toward the mass regimentation of ideas and emotions were at work within self-styled liberal democracies.
An acute awareness of the human costs of modern warfare was at the heart of politics’ disquiet. Macdonald, unlike the vast majority of Americans, was appalled by the Allied decision to launch strategic bombing campaigns against German and Japanese cities during World War II. For the politics circle, the problem was not simply one of a malevolent political and military Establishment. Rather, its members believed that the entire culture of the modern nation-state had perfected the capacity of its citizens to rationalize the use of extreme violence and to overlook its human consequences, especially when those affected were people far away and officially deemed “enemies.” As Macdonald wrote in politics in spring 1944, a full year before the fire-bombing of Dresden and 18 months before the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Americans “have grown calloused to massacre, and the concept of guilt has spread to include whole populations. Our hearts are hardened, our nerves steady, our imaginations under control as we read the morning newspaper.”
Out of the rubble of the war grew a determination among the politics circle and their counterparts in Europe to develop a new kind of political movement, one founded on the principle enunciated by the French resistant and novelist Albert Camus–to be “neither victim, nor executioner.” “After the war,” Sumner writes, “the politics intellectuals called for a renewed appreciation of the limits of knowledge and the contingency of human existence,” and for the creation of a “decentered, pluralistic order founded on the dignity and moral autonomy of individuals linked by personal, rather than abstract, relations.”
Many authors have noted how Macdonald’s magazine anticipated by nearly two decades some of the themes defining the politics of the American New Left in the early 1960s: the suspicion of Old Left dogma and technocratic liberalism, the commitment to creating a “participatory democracy,” the determination to reinsert “values” into contemporary political debate. Sumner carries this analysis a step forward by arguing that the magazine’s style of politics has a continued relevance today.
“Decades after the demise of politics,” Sumner writes, “we have historical examples of how grassroots activism `outside politics’ can have profound political consequences in a repressive social environment. The American civil rights and peace movements of the 1950s and 1960s teach this lesson, as do dissident groups active in the former Soviet bloc. Just before his death, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. looked to `that international coalition of socially aware forces, operating outside governmental frameworks’ as the key to his efforts to `planetize’ the movement for racial and economic justice. And, like Macdonald in the 1940s, Czech writer Vaclav Havel has devoted much of his attention in recent years to the dehumanizing `self-momentum’ of modern systems of power, `blind, unconscious, irresponslble.’ ” Sumner calls for recreating a politics-style “thinking outside politics,” and in particular the development of “informal, transnational lines of dialogue and friendship `outside’ traditional structures of authority.”
As we wearily make our collective way toward the end of the 20th Century–which included two world wars, hundreds of smaller but no-less viciously fought conflicts, the rise and fall of two totalitarian empires, the Holocaust, the excesses of our own national-security state, and innumerable civil disorders fueled by racial and religious intolerance–it is not surprising that a figure like Macdonald and a publication like politics should enjoy renewed scrutiny and popularity among politically minded intellectuals. Macdonald’s magazine stood for truth-telllng, for behaving decently toward other human beings, for reaching out to people from other continents and cultures–all principles worth embracing. But are they sufficient?
Something to remember–and Sumner does, though he doesn’t stress it sufficiently–is that politics was a failure. The journal collapsed after a half decade of publication, and left behind no tangible, practical results–not a single law passed, not a single workplace organized, not a single congressman elected. By the end of the 1940s a burned-out Macdonald had abandoned his pacifism and most of his political commitments (though he would return to the fray in the 1960s, in opposition to the Vietnam War).
One of the regular features of politics was a series of articles titled “ancestors”–profiles of past political thinkers of all stripes, from anarchists like Proudhon to conservatives like De Tocqueville, whom Macdonald believed had something of relevance to say to his own generation of politically disenchanted intellectuals. As Sumner establishes in this book, if anyone were of a mind to draw up a comparable list today, Macdonald would certainly deserve inclusion. But he would not be first on my list.
Martin Luther King and Vaclav Havel (and, I would add to Sumner’s list, Nelson Mandela) were visionaries who also understood political power in a way that the politics circle never did. Great moments of social transformation and liberation are the products of a complicated interaction between the real and the ideal.
King gave a lot of thought to organizational questions and strategies. He needed and courted newspapers, unions, student groups, religious assemblies, elected politicians and organized constituencies of all kinds to help break the back of the Jim Crow system in the South. And somehow, he never lost sight of the transcendent moral vision that guided his practical political activity.
It’s no criticism of Dwight Macdonald to say he wasn’t Martin Luther King. But were I looking for a circle to join in the 1990s, and a set of political principles to guide me, I would prefer one offering an updated version of King’s pragmatic utopianism. “Thinking outside politics” has much to recommend it–just don’t overlook the practical necessity of getting your fellow thinkers to the polls come Election Day.
