Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University and author, most recently, of The Intellectuals and the Flag, spoke on a cell phone from a noisy café in New York about his latest book.
What prompted you to collect these essays and publish this book now?
I started out to write a book which was simply a tribute to intellectuals who have been important to me, and I had written about three of the sections when September 11 hit. And that exploded a lot of things, and among other things it exploded the original book, because there was now an urgency, for me, to rethink the left. So for a while I was writing off to the side of the original project, a variety of pieces, and I realized at a certain point these pieces were still pointing toward a conclusion that did have to do with the left, and maybe two conclusions. One was the need for intellectual comprehensiveness, and the second thing that these pieces were pointing to was some attempt to take America seriously--as not only a field of action but a field of intellectual care. So it was somewhere in there that I realized that the arguments I had been putting forward about patriotism were actually apropos the place where I had started.
The first three essays are about three intellectuals, David Riesman, C. Wright Mills, and Irving Howe, who have influenced your thinking, and whom you see as examples for the left to emulate now. Why did you write about them?
Initially, I sort of had the paragons of comprehensiveness. But they also were interesting writers, and that endeared them to me. And all three of them intersect in some way or other with the possibilities and the unfulfilled promise of the '60s. All of them were important to me, two of them I knew personally. I mean, I thought they were all not only intellectually exciting in a way that people still recognize after a half century but they were all inspiring and so I wanted, and I still want to record my debt to them. After the fact, what I seem to understand about them is that they had several features in common--they had an aspiration to affect the course of events. They enriched the big ideas.
So their comprehensiveness is one of the characteristics that make them stand out and be relevant today?
They're clear, they're pointed, they're trenchant, I mean, they have big questions that come out of the experience of the 20th century but they're also very much living in the here-and-now of American society. They're not ivory-tower types. At the same time they aspire to rigor and intellectual seriousness, they're not hacks.
How do you see the essay on postmodernism relating to the larger theme of the book?
In the introduction I call it the move from great refusal to the great retreat, and the retreat that breast-beats as left-wing but I think actually is disengagement from political possibilities and is a way of having your cake and eating it, you know, it's a way of not engaging the political possibilities. Even at best I think it's a kind of hammering from the margin from way out in left field there.
So you think intellectuals need to return to a kind of grassroots activism instead?
Well, grassroots activism, yes, certainly, but informed by kind of an intellectual seriousness. [For example] we have this immense outpouring of sentiment about the demerits of globalization, but very little, I think, comparatively sharp thinking about what globalization actually is, what's genuinely abominable in it, what is actually promising in it. And the same thing goes for class.
Do you think it's even possible to discuss class in America without being accused of being a socialist or a Marxist?
Well, you know, insofar as class is a dynamic you have to talk about it whether or not people dislike it or not. How to frame these discussions is a different question, but intellectual honesty requires that you face, for example, the dynamic of class. For example, if we talk about the diminishing middle class, is it a rear guard or have classes fragmented to the point where there is no collective dynamic? It's partly a matter of theoretical interest, but it's a question of strategy too. I think that both intellectually and practically it makes sense to do more than bumper-sticker.
Moving onto a more literal question, what are some beneficial consequences of the war in Iraq?
Saddam's gone.
That's it?
That's great. Um, I can't think of any others. Well, Saddam is gone, and the Kurds have a degree of protection somewhat in advance of what they had in the era of the no-fly zone. There were two benefits. When I say Saddam is gone, that's not a trivial thing. Through all the urgent distress that the war generated these are genuine achievements. I don't think they come close to justifying the war, but I think it's foolish not to acknowledge some things are true even when George Bush says so.
Julia Gronnevet was a Fall 2005 Prospect intern.
