Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (86 page)

In
The Human Condition
Arendt tried to offer some solutions for the problems she had identified in her earlier book.
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The essential difficulty with modern society, she felt, was that modern man felt alienated politically (as opposed to psychologically). The ordinary individual did not have access to the inside information that the political elite had, there was bureaucracy everywhere, one man, one vote didn’t mean that much, and such predicaments were all much more important now because, with the growth of huge corporations, individuals had less control over their work; there was less craftwork to offer satisfaction, and less control over income. Man was left alone but knew he couldn’t act, live, alone.
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Her solution, as Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, her biographer, has said, was ahead of its time; Arendt thought that society would evolve what she called the personalisation of politics – what we now call single-issue politics (the environment, feminism, genetically modified foods).
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In this way, she said, people could become as informed as the experts, they could attempt to control their own lives, and they could have an effect. Arendt was right about the personalisation of politics: later in the century it would become an important element in collective life.

Like Hannah Arendt, Erich Fromm was German and Jewish. A member of the Frankfurt School, he had emigrated with the other members of the school in 1934 and sailed for America, continuing as an affiliate of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, attached to Columbia University. Fromm’s family had been very religious; he himself had helped found an academy of Jewish thought (with Martin Buber), and this had translated, in Frankfurt, into a project to study the formation of class-consciousness, an exploration – one of the first of its kind – into the links between psychology and politics. On the basis of more than one thousand replies to a questionnaire he sent out, Fromm found that people could not be grouped, as he had expected, into ‘revolutionary’ workers and ‘nonrevolutionary’ bourgeois. Not only were some workers conservative,
and some bourgeois revolutionary, but very left-wing workers often confessed to ‘strikingly non-revolutionary, authoritarian attitudes’ in many areas normally regarded as nonpolitical, such as child-rearing and women’s fashion.
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It was this, as much as anything, that convinced Fromm and the others of the Frankfurt School that Marxism needed to be modified in the light of Freud.

Fromm’s 1920s work was not translated into English until the 1980s, so it never had the impact that perhaps it deserved. But it shows that he had the same sort of interests as Riesman, Adorno, and Arendt. He went considerably further, in fact, with his 1955 book,
The Sane Society.
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Instead of just looking at the shortcomings of mass society, he examined the much more extreme idea as to whether an entire society can be considered unhealthy. To many, Fromm’s central notion was so presumptuous as to be meaningless. But he tackled it head-on. He admitted to begin with that his book was an amalgam of Tawney’s
The Acquisitive Society
(which, he reminded readers, had originally been called
The Sickness of an Acquisitive Society)
and Freud’s
Civilisation and Its Discontents.
Fromm started with the by-now familiar statistics, that America and other Protestant countries, like Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, had higher rates of suicide, murder, violence, and drug and alcohol abuse than other areas of the world.
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So he thought that on any measure these societies were sicker than most. The rest of his argument was a mixture of psychoanalysis, economics, sociology, and politics. The central reality, he said, was that ‘whereas in the nineteenth century God was dead, in the twentieth century man is dead.’
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The problem with capitalism, for all its strengths, and itself the result of so many freedoms, was that it had terrible consequences for mankind. In a neat phrase he said that ‘work can be defined as the performance of acts which cannot yet be performed by machines.’ He was putting in modern garb a familiar argument that twentieth-century work, for most people, was dehumanising, boring, and meaningless, and provoked in them a wide array of problems. Words like
anomie
and
alienation
were resurrected, but the significance of Fromm’s critique lay in his claim that the constricting experience of modern work was directly related to mental health. Mass society, he wrote, turned man into a commodity; ‘his value as a person lies in his saleability, not his human qualities of love, reason, or his artistic capacities.’
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Near the end of his book Fromm stressed the role of love, which he regarded as an ‘art form,’ because, he said, one of the casualties of super-capitalism, as he called it, was ‘man’s relationship to his fellow men.’ Alienating work had consequences for friendship, fairness, and trust. Riesman had said that the young were more concerned about relationships and popularity, but Fromm worried that people were becoming indifferent to others; and if everyone was a commodity, they were no different from things.
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He made it clear that he had scoured the literature, Collecting accounts of how people’s lives were drying up, losing interest in the arts, say, as work became ad-engrossing. For Fromm, the aim was the recovery not so much of man’s sanity as his dignity, the theme of Arthur Miller’s 1949 play
Death of a Salesman,
to which he made pointed reference.
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Fromm, for all his psychoanalytic approach and his diagnosis of the postwar world as an insane
society, offered no psychological remedies. Instead, he faced frankly the fact that the character of work had to change, that the social arrangements of the factory, or office, and participation in management decision making, needed to be revamped if the harsh psychological damage that he saw all around him was to be removed.

One of the main entities responsible for the condition Fromm was describing was the vast corporation, or ‘organisation,’ and this was a matter taken up specifically in W. H. Whyte’s
Organisation Man,
published the following year. This was a much sharper, more provocative book than Fromm’s, though the overlap in subject matter was considerable.
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Whyte’s book was better written (he was a journalist on
Fortune)
and more pointed, and what he provided was a telling and not overly sympathetic account of the life and culture of ‘other-directed’ people in postwar America. Whyte considered that vast organisations both attracted and bred a certain type of individual, that there was a certain kind of psychology most suited to corporate or organisational life. First and foremost, he saw in the organisation a decline of the Protestant ethic, in the sense that there was a marked drop in individualism and adventurousness.
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People knew that the way to get on in an organisation was to be part of a group, to be popular, to avoid ‘rocking the boat.’ Organisation man, Whyte says, is a conservative (with a small ‘c’), and above all works for somebody else, not himself.
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Whyte saw this as a significant crossover point in American history. The main motives inside corporations, he said, were ‘belongingness’ and ‘togetherness.’ Whyte’s subsidiary points were no less revealing. There had recently been an historic change in the U.S. educational system, and he produced a chart of education courses that described those changes clearly. Between 1939–46 and 1954–5, whereas enrolments in fundamental courses (the humanities, the physical sciences) had declined, subscriptions to practical courses (engineering, education, agriculture) had increased.
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He thought this was regrettable because it represented a narrowing factor in life; people not only knew less, they would only mix with fellow students with the same interests, and therefore go on knowing less, leading a narrower life.
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Whyte went on to attack the personnel industry and the concept of ‘personality’ and personality testing, which, he felt, further promoted the conforming and conservative types. What he most objected to were the psychoanalytic interpretations of personality tests, which he thought were little better than astrology. He saved his final attack for an assault on suburbia, which he saw as ‘the branch office’ of the organisation and a complete extension of its group psychology. With little maps of suburban developments, he showed how social life was extremely constricted, being neighborhood-based (a rash of bridge parties, fish picnics, Valentine costume parties), and underlined his central argument that Organisation Man led his life in a regime he characterised as a ‘benign tyranny.’
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Under this tyranny, people must be ‘outgoing,’ by far the most important quality. They sacrifice their privacy and their idiosyncrasies and replace them with an enjoyable but unreflective lifestyle that moves from group activity to group activity and goes nowhere because one in three of such families will in any case move within a year, most likely to a similar community hundreds of
miles away. Whyte recognised that, as Riesman had said of other-directed people, Organisation Man was tolerant, without avarice, and not entirely unaware that there
are
other forms of existence. His cage was gilded, but it was still a cage.

Whyte didn’t like the changes he saw happening, but he was candid about them rather than angry. The same could not be said for C. Wright Mills. Mills liked to describe himself as ‘an academic outlaw.’
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As a native Texan, he fitted this image easily, aided by the huge motorcycle that he rode, but Mills wasn’t joking, or not much. Trained as a sociologist, who had taught in Washington during the war and been exposed to the new social survey techniques that had come into being in the late 1930s and matured in wartime, Mills had recognised from these surveys that American society (and, to an extent, that of other Western countries) was changing – and he hated that fact. Unlike David Riesman or Whyte, however, he was not content merely to describe sociological change; he saw himself as a combatant in a new fight, where it was his job to point out the dangers overtaking America. This forced him up against many of his academic colleagues, who thought he had overstepped the mark. It was in this sense that he was an outlaw.

Born in 1916, Wright had taught at the University of Maryland in wartime, and it was while he was in Washington that he had been drawn into the work carried out by Paul Lazersfeld at Columbia University’s Bureau of Applied Social Research, which did a lot of surveys for the government. Lazersfeld’s essentially statistical approach to evidence had grown rapidly as war-related interest in practical social research was reflected in government spending.
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This wartime experience had two consequences for Mills. It gave him greater awareness of the changes overtaking American society, and he had acquired a long-lasting belief that sociology should be practical, that it should strive not just to understand the way societies worked but to provide the common man with the basis for informed decisions. This was essentially the same idea that Karl Mannheim was having in London at much the same time. After the war Mills moved to New York, where he mixed with a group of other intellectuals who included Philip Rahv, Dwight Macdonald, and Irving Howe, who were connected to the
Partisan Review,
and Daniel Bell, editor of the
New Leader.
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At Columbia he got to know Robert Lynd, famous for his study
Middletown,
though Lynd’s star was then on the wane. Between 1948 and 1959 Mills wrote a clutch of books that hung together with a rare intellectual consistency. The late 1940s and early 1950s, thanks to the GI bill, saw a flood of students into higher education. This raised standards in general and in turn produced a new kind of society with more jobs, more interesting kinds of job, and more specialities being professionalised. Mills saw it as his role to describe these new situations and to offer a critique.

Mills’s books were published in the following order:
The New Men of Power
(1948),
White Collar
(1951),
The Power Elite
(1956), and The
Sociological Imagination
(1959). All reflected his view that, in essence, labor had ceased to be the great question in society: ‘The end of the labor question in domestic
politics was accompanied by the transformation of Russia from ally to enemy and the rise of the Communist threat. The end of utopia was also the end of ideology as the labor movement shifted from social movement to interest group. The defining political issue became totalitarianism versus freedom, rather than capitalism versus socialism.’ He felt that the automobile had made suburban living possible, with the housewife as the centerpiece, ‘a specialist in consumption and in nurturing a spirit of togetherness in the family.’
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The home, and the private sphere, rather than the workplace and the union hall, had become the center of attention. He believed the 1930s, with so much government intervention because of the depression, was the crossover point. He was also the first to consider ‘celebrities’ as a group.
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The result of all this, he said, was that the formerly ‘ruggedly individualist’ American citizens had become ‘the masses,’ ‘conformist creatures of habit rather than free-thinking activists.’
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Whereas in
Organisation Man
Whyte had found his interest in the middle orders of corporations, in
The New Men of Power
Mills concentrated on the leaders, arguing that there had appeared a new type of labor leader – he was now the head of a large bureaucratic organisation, part of a new power elite, part of the mainstream. In
White Collar,
his theme was the transformation of the American middle class, which he characterised as ‘rootless and amorphous, a group whose status and power did not rest on anything tangible … truly a class in the middle, uncertain of itself,’ essentially anomic and prone to take the tranquillisers then coming into existence.
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‘The white collar people slipped quietly into modern society. Whatever history they have is a history without events; whatever common interests they have do not lead to unity; whatever future they have will not be of their own making.’
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‘The idea born in the nineteenth century and nurtured throughout the 1930s, that the working class would be the bearers of a new, more progressive society,’ was laid to rest, Mills concluded. In a section on mentalities, he introduced the subversive idea that the white-collar classes were in fact not so much the new middle classes as the new working classes.
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