I like particular dead European writers for the raking light they are able to shed on the painted canvas of American illusions. (My metaphor will have meaning if the reader thinks of the grand allegory of George Washington's apotheosis in the Capitol dome or of an old Ringling Brothers circus poster.) Yet I've also had the privilege to meet and know living Europeans, ones born before World War II, who grew up in highly traditional societies and who possess firsthand experience of totalitarianism—intellectuals but not nihilists, inoculated against leftism by painful encounters with ideological regimes. They are not necessarily anti-American but they are critical of American naïveté, provincial narrowness, cultural shallowness, and self-absorption. They have a story to tell to the world's newest imperial power, a story that begins with America ruining Europe in the settlements to two great wars that were supposed to save it. Their story may also include a vision of a non-democratic order that is nonetheless free and just, based on truth as embodied in inherited culture rather than on skepticism and the self-cancelling of private interests pitted against each other and the unwinnable competition of fundamental beliefs where all opinions are assumed to be in the right.
Englishmen cannot provide such help; the British, who ran much of the world without ever gaining an understanding of Europe were engaged in the same work of European salvation-ruination, from the same liberal premises. Nor can leftist émigrés in the American universities be of any use; they are, in fact, the cultivated guardians of America's liberal cocoon. Driven out by Nazism, they brought the entire intellectual world of nihilism here, lock-stock-and-barrel. I say that these wiser Europeans of my preference were born before World War II, because later generations are as confused about themselves and the world as anyone else imprisoned in modern mentalities—and it can't simply be blamed on the infusion of American mass culture (the soap operas, MacDonald's, and Disneyland Paris). The fact remains that Europe did not recover spiritually from World War II. Soviet occupation devastated Eastern Europe even more, and Western Europe was a psychic hostage. (A movement towards spiritual restoration, however feeble, emerged among the Eastern European dissidents.) Two other specific factors in European decadence spring to mind: the post-war return of the leftist émigré professors to re-colonize the European universities, and the half-surrender or three-quarters surrender to modernity by the Catholic Church signified in the sacred phrase "Vatican Two." But the review below is not about Europe's problems.
In 1984 when I reviewed John Lukacs' silly book Outgrowing Democracy (republished in 2004 as A New Republic), it gave me a chance to discuss my views on American misunderstandings of social class, or at least to hint at them. America doesn't understand that it has no class system, that it only has tax brackets. Insofar as there is any stable essence to the middle class identity, or a "spirit of the middle class," America is completely a middle-class country—except that you can't have a middle class without an upper and a lower, just as you can't have a ham sandwich without two slices of bread.
And here is the point. The rulership of a ruling class is absolute, and the middle class was once excluded from rulership. The destitution of a class of poor people, who are in a sense not a class at all, but "classless," is absolute. The middle class has being only in relation to these two absolutes as a tertium quid, neither one thing nor the other, neither fish nor fowl. It comes into existence when people on the bottom want something better; the only model for anything better is the best. If you are in the middle but cannot go higher, you can either accept the upper class as your unattainable model and reverence it, or you can resent it and hope for a revolution that will abolish it. Just so, the French revolution in its original phase was a bourgeois revolution.
America does not have a class system because in this country classes are not legally defined and are not hereditary; any family can move from rags to riches to rags in three generations. There is a good deal more to class than money: ways of life, manners, historical identity or myth. But in America anything can be bought. Ah, but I must correct myself on one point: America does have a legally protected underclass, a hereditary criminal-welfare class, which contains members of all races. Were it not for its various legal protections (anti-discrimination law and welfare entitlements), one would have said that this grouping of the socially discarded or socially invisible was not a class at all, but "classless." In any event, America has no aristocracy, only financial and meritocratic and technocratic élites, and a few old families with more or less stable identities and traditions and who exert the power of snobbery—like some molten cheese atop an open-face sandwich, in which the rest of us are the ham. (Charles Murray's thesis that something like an American class system may only now be emerging merits discussion.)
One counts on older Europeans to be able to explain to Americans how a class system works. Alas, John Lukacs is too confused by his alienation—or his system of alienation—to do so. One of his problems is that he is a bourgeois triumphalist, albeit in a somewhat different way from the disciples of Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz. He believes that the bourgeoisie represents the pinnacle of civilization and the human spirit: it is as much triumph as we will ever get. He points out justly that all the great anti-bourgeois writers of the Romantic age were sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie; with less justice and wisdom he declares that the remaining aristocratic families of the world are only doing what's best for them when they give up their pretensions and permit themselves to sink into the new class as into a warm bath.
Lukacs is a retired professor of history who is less a historical scholar than a litterateur offering opinions about history. He is a charming fellow who presents himself as a great cosmopolitan because that kind of figure represents his human ideal. And indeed, as a half-Jewish Hungarian sent away to a Catholic boys' school in England he is the perfect Middle-European international mystery man. The most valuable part of his work may be the direct personal witness recorded in his memoirs. He observed firsthand the things that Americans cannot learn from the ideologized versions of European history which are the American cultural standard. For example, he understands the differences between Hitler's Nazism and Mussolini's fascism; he read about those movements in newspapers of the time in a neighbor country succumbing to its own ideological strife. He faced racist anti-semitism as a baptized half-Jew, and thus knows something about the decadence of the European Right. He knows something about living in a country run by German totalitarians and their stooges one minute, and by Russian totalitarians and their stooges the next minute. He experienced life as a forced laborer and fugitive. The validity of his witness cannot be denied; he knows what he saw.
What he thinks and feels is another matter. The idealisms and paranoias that color his thinking and feeling muddle his analysis, and he is badly served by his own glibness and by his reaching for analytical concepts. I had the privilege of conversing with him over a weekend three decades ago, but it is very difficult to become the friend of someone in whom you arouse paranoia. He is afraid of conservatism and conservatives. And as I got to know him better from his writing, I found the experience without the wisdom.
Lukacs could be compared somewhat to his fellow Hungarian Catholic intellectual, the late Thomas Molnar. Both suffered under Nazi rule; while Lukacs worked as a conscript laborer for the Nazis, Molnar was imprisoned in Dachau. They were traumatized men. And both were exiles, but of a special kind. Whatever patriotism they felt, Hungary was only a province to them; idealistically they believed in some cultural center to the west where they might be more at home away from home. Lukacs was an Anglophile and Molnar a Francophile. Both found America to be a serviceable home away from home, but were never at ease with the modern way of life that makes America an ideal to the middle classes and middle-class aspirants of the whole world, with its mass entertainment culture, its consumer culture, and its culture of business and finance. Both subscribed to the Catholic distributist critique of capitalism. Both were glad to receive attention and subsidy from American intellectual conservative organizations, and both were highly critical of their patrons, privately if not publicly.
As for their differences, Molnar sympathized with the decadent European Right which Lukacs had learned to fear for its varying degrees of tolerance, sympathy, cynical support or outright complicity with Hitler. When Molnar idealized France, it was the France of an anti-democratic movement condemned by the Church, the Action Française, whose anti-semitic conspiracy theories evidently failed to repel him utterly; when Lukacs idealized England, it was for nineteenth-century bourgeois liberalism, the love of fair play, and the spirit of a gentleman as one might find it displayed in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (although this is a movie Lukacs' hero Churchill hated). Both abominated the laissez-faire capitalist conservative order of the U.S., although Lukacs had already grown deep roots and enjoyed the comforts of suburban life, while it is Molnar who returned to Hungary after the fall of the Iron Curtain on a cultural mission, as if he were Solzhenitsyn returning to post-Soviet Russia, for which one must give him some credit.
An alienated man is ultimately at home nowhere in the world, and often not even in his own skin. If he is a political speculator, or what I will call a political hypercritic, then he may find peace in himself as long as he can find fault outside himself. An alienated man uses flimsy conceptual (rather than real) distinctions in order to rationalize his conflicting sentiments, and in Lukacs' case one can cite his self-identification as a reactionary, which he uses to save himself from being categorized as a conservative. Everyone can agree on the problematic nature of the term conservative; it's a simple concept only for liberals who use it as the name of a demon, a "devil term." Lukacs wants to distinguish himself as a non-leftist who loves a "bourgeois republic" with an élite class but no hereditary aristocracy, with economic prosperity but a less complex financial system, and with a democratic constitutional system where an intellectual élite discreetly manages the opinions of the people and their governors. He believes that this preference for an ideal world marks him as superior to the American intellectual conservative who trusts free markets and technological innovation and is insufficiently alarmed by the erosion of taste and meaningful discourse. Innovation is the opposite of conservation. And so, as someone who really wishes that things could be the way they used to be (at least some selected things, like hotel lobbies), who rebels at modern taste, Lukacs is a reactionary. And insofar as American conservatives are hungry for the conquest of the future, and jealously protective of their country's interests and security, they are men of bestial instincts, greedy power-worshippers, and potential Nazis.
Another flimsy conceptual arrangement important for his politico-social idealism and his critique of modern America is one between "public opinion" and "popular will." "Public opinion" is evidently a body of correct opinion generated not by but for the public, by what liberals call "public intellectuals." "Popular will" is a pool of sentiment not yet groomed and bridled by the public intellectuals, gushing from the hearts of the unwashed masses. A system whereby public men discriminate righteous from unrighteous policies and bring demagogues to heel requires a criterion for judgment that can only arise from cultural tradition and from a sense of duty in the public men as well as a respectful docility bred into the masses who are supposed to accept the discipline imposed on them. What a noble, classical ideal, with a kind of clergy of the mind (which Coleridge called "the clerisy") so closely bound to a citizen congregation so deeply schooled in the civic religion. I could not see from Outgrowing Democracy that Lukacs had any sense of where the cultural traditions and sense of civic duty needed for this system would arise and how it would be sustained. The fact that he is able to conceive such an ideal, he thinks, entitles him to launch a Frankfurt School-style conceptual analysis of the degradations of Reagan Republicanism, the demagogues promoting it and the electorate uncritically buying the goods.
His concept of a social class he calls bourgeois is appealing but problematic because of his idealization of it. The term middle class only signifies neither upper nor lower. The bourgeois are residents of a bourg (German Burg), and their capacity for urbanity and cultivation as city dwellers—whether as shopkeepers or bureaucrats—begins to lend positive content to the concept middle class. The haute bourgeoisie (to which Proust and his narrator/character "Marcel" belonged) is an upper rung of the bourgeoisie, one that begins to resemble a hereditary class because it has attained a way of life that can be protected by seemingly inexhaustible wealth and that can be perpetuated across generations with a self-conscious and self-willed family identity. The middle-class discipline of delayed gratification, solvency, thrift and commercial reputation-building then turns to a discipline of social self-maintenance, image-control, avoidance of publicity that could arouse envy, and cultivation of an ethos of civic responsibility which may involve public patronage of the arts rather than just a private indulgence in connoisseurship and acquisitiveness.
There are bourgeois echelons or rungs of the social ladder well below the haute bourgeoisie, for which the haute bourgeoisie represents a model and an ideal, just as the aristocracy serves as the model for the haute bourgeoisie. The independence of these less exalted orders is less secure; they may pass down ways of life to their children along with a successful shop or a small factory, and live in a good city flat with servants, and they may have what today we call "discretionary income." (Lukacs says his Jewish grandfather could have afforded a car with a chauffeur but didn't.) The part of the story that Lukacs does not tell is the part about social imitation and aspiration—how the the bourgeois vision of a life above the tillers of the soil comes to be conceived.
A big-city or imperial-capital bourgeoisie is Lukacs' idealized alternative to the "puritanical" middle-class and its narrow canon of "respectability" and cultural narrowness as found in Mark Twain's "Hadleyburg" or Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg" or any other caricature of Protestant, midwestern-American, small-town provincialism as depicted by middle-class literary refugees from that small-town world. For Lukacs, America is that small-town world, and conservatism is its ideology. I hasten to point out, however, that just as Lukacs has no notion of what would foster or sustain a democracy managed by virtuous intellectuals, so he has no notion of what fosters or sustains the haut bourgeois's self-willed identity. Insofar as he despises American conservatism (both the intellectual and political kinds) he holds in contempt the forces that keep the middle class in America afloat. (And for Lukacs the ultimate condemnation is to say that somebody "likes Reagan.")
In Europe, the image energizing haut bourgeois aspirations was the image of aristocracy: of a hereditary noble class whose power and security in the pre-revolutionary age were absolute, a class that continued to maintain its image after the rise of democracy by selective involvement (e.g., military service) and by withdrawal into a private society like a court in exile, one that excluded the haute bourgeoisie except for financial marriages, a last-resort solution to bankruptcy resisted for as many generations as possible until "everybody was doing it." This was the social opening for the Americans, for whom the English landed-gentry model of the citizen-planter founding fathers was of fading relevance, and for whom the London citizen-merchant model as replicated in Puritan Boston held no glamor. When the Vanderbilts and Astors had risen in America as far as they could go, Europe was the only field left for the play of their ambitions. So, during the four-decade period which Lukacs defines as America's golden age of embourgeoisment, between the Columbian Exposition of 1893 and the Depression, the gilt-edged, cosmopolitan social status of the American haute bourgeoisie was certified by the fact that as many as a thousand American women in the nineteenth century had already married titled nobles. In this way they had at last become aristocrats, heirs of castles and chivalric family legends.
Perhaps it was a frivolous aspiration, exposing the middle class's social and psychic insecurity; yet it may be the frivolous side of something that also has a serious side. Insofar as the new haute bourgeoisie wanted to become an aristocracy, it sometimes wanted to take up the responsibility of governing, and not necessarily just to gain power to protect its wealth. Only a Marxist would refuse to give the bourgeois credit for anything higher. Usually, however, the intense self-involvement and privacy of this class militated against seeking political office; it was as demeaning for the polished grandson of millionaires to compete in the bear-pit of electioneering and machine politics as it would be for a full-blooded prince.
My case against Lukacs, then, is this: he wants the bourgeoisie to be the social pinnacle of an ideal republic, as though it ever were or could be a self-subsistent thing. I say that it is the presence of aristocracy, as the unattainable model, which brings out the best in the bourgeois. Aristocracy is still the upper without which there can be no middle, the absolute which gives meaning to the relative. To put it bluntly, you cannot have aristocracy without knights and chivalry, or chivalry without crusades, or titles without a royal court. How would the bourgeois ever imagine anything better without it? Otherwise there would only be Calvin's Geneva, unsmiling men in black suits, convening in councils to punish adulterers and pass death sentences against witches.
Lukacs admires his idealized bourgeoisie for its discretion, privacy and "interiority"—his suggestive word for a mood of domestic closure. True, the bourgeoisie is very self-protective and self-involved. It has no court to define its essence, so the family becomes the court. Insofar as image and continuance are threatened by the bad behavior of one's progeny, there is only the family to discipline them, not a royal court. In pre-revolutionary times the bourgeoisie learned to be discreet about its wealth as a shield generally against envy and particularly against taxation. In the post-revolutionary period, it feared expropriation by ideologically manipulated mobs, just as the aristocracy did. And it's not good for people to know too much about their bankers; one's name should never appear in the newspapers except for a christening, a wedding, or a funeral. But doesn't this privacy and private interest forbid civic involvement and responsibility in government? "Interiority" suggests withdrawal and disengagement, and whether it really is part of a proper bourgeois ideal or not, it appeals to Lukacs's taste.
"Interiority" or self-concentration or self-absorption is also the consequence of not being able to rise higher, especially evident in the Jewish bourgeoisie, for which, because of actual legal disability or merely prejudice, any rise higher was absolutely blocked. It is said that the Rothschilds only married cousins in order not to disperse their wealth, but the case might be that there were usually no other Jews socially important enough to marry, and they could not or would not marry Gentiles. This "interiority," verging on the incestuous, like the silent echo between the mirrored parlor walls of an afflicted conscience, like the mood of Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga, seems to inspire in Lukacs a snobbish fascination. I do not know what Lukacs' cult of "hypocrisy" really means, although it bears relation to his pessimism about human nature and his cult of original sin as the final explanation for the twentieth century's evils. I suspect, though, that he savors the bourgeois' scruples of conscience. As the scion of merchants advances in self-indulgence, he dispenses himself from inherited "puritan" codes but must still keep up an appearance of propriety. The worldly, patronizing voice of the old European quip comes to mind about how Americans believe in lifelong marriage with hardly any mistresses. (When I met Lukacs, he twitted me for puritan impulses.) But as a reactionary he apparently prefers hypocrisy to the open poly-perversity of the sexual revolution.
Lukacs' preference for the bourgeoisie is clearly a preference against the aristocracy, much like the bourgeois triumphalism of the neoconservatives (whom Lukacs despises.) This is the reverse side of snobbery, in which one takes the side of the haute bourgeoisie against their betters in a hypocritical embrace of democracy, over which they still expect to preside as a social élite. It brings to mind Dr Johnson's old saying, " your levellers wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves..." Lukacs' general snobbery also appears in his inelegantly expressed distaste for arrivistes in diplomatic circles (Kissinger) and his preference for Boston brahmins and descendants of Hudson Valley patroons. (I suspect that he likes Southern planters.) And, like Kennan and Huntington, he does not relish a future in which America is flooded with non-Anglo immigrant citizens. Lukacs knows that, among people he despises, the intellectuals—the academic rabble who suffer from a fundamentally "false relation to life" in his pseudo-Frankfurt analysis, and who are also his fellow critics of small-town America—are the sons and daughters of the middle class but have become its alienated academic refugees; after all, everyone in America is middle-class, and the grandchildren of the immigrants tend to become teachers and professors. But he does not see these refugees from their own class as a manifestaton of insecurity and self-loathing within the class itself, lurking behind its discreet charm. He cannot see that they are acting out the bourgeoisie's internal contradictions.
Irving Kristol was very good at explaining how the middle class raises itself from the lower orders through discipline, how its virtues are fundamental to the growth and prosperity of modern societies. He understood how academics and artistic types come to express their contempt for the society from which they originate. He was a political and social theorist. Lukacs expresses admiration for José Ortega y Gassett, the early 20th-century Spanish philosopher with 19th-century liberal views, a pro-republican anti-statist who believed in a natural élite that would sustain democracy and who castigated the emerging "mass man" of his time who experienced freedom as an unwanted burden. But Lukacs is not a theorist and cannot apply Ortega to the middle-class problem. All he has to offer is his taste, his aesthetic preference for a lost world of taste.
It would be too demeaning simply to call Lukacs a snob and a victim of trauma. When he talks about his own life in his memoirs (Confessions of an Original Sinner and Last Rites), he records impressions and experiences that are instructive; he shows what it is like to be a man of ambiguous status who has emerged from a highly stratified society and is thrown into a largely formless society where social identity is "the art of the possible." His insecurities sharpen his perception. Alas, as one who has been patronized many times, he also knows how to patronize, and his endless patronizing of American conservatives wears on one's patience. If he were younger, he would probably be a perpetual guest on MSNBC. Perhaps it's evidence of the magnanimity of intellectual conservatives that they tried to include him—and with Russell Kirk, a friend was a friend. A Kirkian would sympathize with Lukacs' "reactionary" mood. But where does his peculiar blend of idealism and cynicism lead? If you cannot trust conservatives, and instead are relying on creeping socialism and democratic muddle to keep them and their laissez-faire and internationalist policies at bay, then you would seem to have an affection for mediocrity.
I recall an indignant young man, a Kirk protégé, who rose to Lukacs' defense—not by analyzing anything I had written, but by questioning my competence to write any review and the competence of the magazine in assigning reviews. He considered Lukacs one of his patrons in a complicated career path he had designed for himself that would someday turn him into a new William F. Buckley. This project failed, if only because there could only be one Buckley, if only because the historic opening into national consciousness for a media-cultivated persona like Buckley's was already passing away in his own lifetime, which is to say that he somewhat outlived his own importance. The young man was ambitious, and ambition is often irritating because of its cynicism, which says, "most of the high offices go to mediocrities, so why shouldn't I be one of them?" Ambition is so bourgeois.
I imagine that the neoconservatives, the principal school of bourgeois triumphalists, were angry with Lukacs for not loving the bourgeoisie in precisely their way; but they already despised him for his views on the Soviet Union as a harmless, post-ideological teddy bear leaking its stuffing, unjustly antagonized by western nationalists. Other conservative reviewers of his book, some of them neocons, were unable to make heads or tails of my theoretization of classes, and one surly fellow even asked, "What the hell was that about?" Another neoconservative political aspirant with an interest in this review had been Lukacs' unwitting patron: the drugstore magnate who set up a foundation to sponsor scholarly right-wing authors, but lost control, so that all the grants ended up going to liberals. The magnate could have been disappointed that I didn't slam Lukacs harder.
A critique of Lukacs' critique of Reagan's Soviet policy would simply be an analysis of George Kennan's. I leave that to others. Lukacs' critique of America has not mattered to very many readers and in future will matter to none. I am only glad that Outgrowing Democracy gave me an opportunity to ruminate on the perpetual middle-class identity crisis.
