Reading across Selznick's work, one appreciates the coherence of his fundamental preoccupations—with the social conditions for frustration and the vindication of values and ideas. Exploring Selznick's insights into the nature and quality of institutional, legal, and social life, the book also examines his particular ways of thinking, concerns, values, and sensibility. Martin Krygier brings to light the coherence of Selznick's fundamental preoccupations, allowing readers to fully engage with his unique insights and distinctive moral-intellectual sensibility.
Reading across Selznick's work, one appreciates the coherence of his fundamental preoccupations—with the social conditions for frustration and the vindication of values and ideas. Exploring Selznick's insights into the nature and quality of institutional, legal, and social life, the book also examines his particular ways of thinking, concerns, values, and sensibility. Martin Krygier brings to light the coherence of Selznick's fundamental preoccupations, allowing readers to fully engage with his unique insights and distinctive moral-intellectual sensibility.
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Overview
Reading across Selznick's work, one appreciates the coherence of his fundamental preoccupations—with the social conditions for frustration and the vindication of values and ideas. Exploring Selznick's insights into the nature and quality of institutional, legal, and social life, the book also examines his particular ways of thinking, concerns, values, and sensibility. Martin Krygier brings to light the coherence of Selznick's fundamental preoccupations, allowing readers to fully engage with his unique insights and distinctive moral-intellectual sensibility.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804744751 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/23/2012 |
| Series: | Jurists: Profiles in Legal Theory |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Philip Selznick
IDEALS IN THE WORLDBy Martin Krygier
Stanford University Press
Copyright © 2012 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-4475-1
Chapter One
The "Tragedy of Organization"
The coincidence of political engagement, intellectual formation, and academic novitiate in Selznick's early years was both temporal and geographic. In 1936, Selznick commenced at City College New York, "a university which at the time," as Kim Lane Scheppele has recently written, "had a student body that was brilliant, poor, and deeply political." The Great Depression of the 1930s and the threat of war, ideological passions and disputes, struggles over ends and means, all these were his subjects at City College. They emerged less from his classes, though, than from discussions in a student alcove—Alcove 1—adjoining the college cafeteria.
Of his classes, Selznick later recalled little with excitement. The philosopher Morris Cohen impressed him greatly, and some intensive reading of the culture and personality school in anthropology, for an honors program, also influenced him enduringly. Alcove 1, where students of the anti-Stalinist, prominently Trotskyist, Left met to "have discussions" was something else:
We used to use a phrase, "having a discussion." "Having a discussion" meant something rather special in those days. It meant a fairly passionate interchange, arguing about some factual matter or an interpretation or what have you and doing it at the top of your lungs! That was a discussion!
In Alcove 2 were the Stalinists, who were forbidden to speak with their foes in Alcove 1, though it appears they abused each other often enough. Other alcoves had been appropriated by other groups, but Alcove 1 housed a remarkable concentration of later prominent social scientists and intellectuals.
The engagements and disputes that began in the alcoves had an enormous impact on Selznick. It was not only a tumultuous but also an intellectually stimulating association, at the same time his political and intellectual awakening. His political activity continued after he enrolled at Columbia University in 1938 to begin graduate work in sociology. He joined the Trotskyist youth movement, the Young People's Socialist League (Fourth International), adopting Philip Sherman as his Party name. He was an active member and became organizer of its "Joe Hill Unit" in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan and, in 1938, a member of several executive committees, including the group's national executive. Though he remained a Party member for only three years, part of them as he later recalled getting in, and part getting out, he often referred to what began in Alcove 1 as the most intense intellectual experience of his life.
Two significant, intertwined, contradictory yet also complementary, influences on his early thinking, Leon Trotsky and Robert Michels, shaped his early thought about politics and connected with his developing sociological concerns. To followers such as Selznick, Trotsky represented at once the incarnation and the failure of exalted ideals. He also identified a specific culprit for that failure: the Soviet bureaucracy. To an extent unprecedented and uncomfortable within orthodox Marxism, the concept and machinations of bureaucracy dominated the Trotskyist worldview by the time Selznick was initiated into it. The message from Michels, written well before Trotsky had even come near power let alone lost it, had a similar subject but broader implications. The propensity of bureaucracy to undermine cherished ideals was not, on his analysis, a conjunctural, tactical danger, a temporary backstep ultimately to be overcome. It was, as it were, ontological, written into the nature of political life and above all into the need for organization in politics. The juxtaposition of Trotsky and Michels, though it occurred somewhat fortuitously in Selznick's case, made a deep impression on him.
FROM TROTSKY TO MICHELS
Trotsky and Bureaucratic "Betrayal"
Leon Trotsky was a compelling figure, particularly for young idealists in the 1930s. He could easily, if not adequately, be portrayed as the personification of high ends, bloodied but unbowed by low means, at the same time the incarnation of the ideals of the Revolution (and pretty soon a martyr to them), and, in impotent and arguably therefore innocent exile, an explanation for why those ideals had become enmeshed in terror and worse. And that was roughly how he and his followers saw it. For a while Selznick was one of those followers. His immersion in the incessant intra-Party squabbles of that time was not merely a memorable moment in his life; it contributed deeply to the development of his thought.
In the context of economic depression at home, the threat of war against fascism looming, and the revolutionary alternative that the Soviet Union seemed to represent abroad, many young intellectuals throughout the world were drawn to communism in the 1930s. But after learning of the millions killed in the forced collectivization of agriculture in the early 1930s and the astonishing show trials and purges of the Party apparatus, the army, and the highest Party leadership itself from the mid-1930s, some were persuaded that, at least in its Stalinist phase, that experiment had become a catastrophe.
What options did that leave? One, which many of these young radicals including Selznick ultimately took, was to drop Marxism-Leninism, even to turn on it, altogether. But for many that did not happen at once. Instead, another option, which attracted a distinguished group for a time, was Trotsky. He had, after all, been second only to Lenin in making the Russian Revolution and had forged the Red Army that won the civil war. He was Stalin's most eminent Bolshevik rival (all the more after all other contenders had been broken and humiliated in the show trials and then liquidated). It also helped that he was a heroic larger-than-life figure, a charismatic orator, a brilliant writer, indisputably an idealist and an intellectual, but equally indisputably an activist, who had actually built and led revolutionary cadres, not merely talked about it. And as his power, and he, were relentlessly being destroyed by Stalin, he became more, not less, luminous in the eyes of the faithful.
He was squeezed out of power, first to internal exile, then expulsion from the Soviet Union, then to and from a series of countries pressed by Stalin to deport him. His final place of exile, from 1937 till his assassination on Stalin's orders in 1940, was Mexico City, relatively close at hand to the New York branch of the Socialist Workers' Party (SWP). He became much involved in the debates within that branch.
From the time he was forced from power by Stalin, and throughout his peripatetic exile from 1928 till his murder, Trotsky kept returning to one obsession: How had the ideals of Marxism, the mantle of Lenin, and control of the world's first "workers' state" been apparently eclipsed—and by Stalin, who, he was wrongly convinced, was not a worthy rival but a mediocre provincial of little significance?
Trotsky needed to explain, to his followers and to himself, his own defeat and what he took to be the betrayal of the movement to which he had given his life—quite literally, as it was to turn out. His mission became not merely to represent the failure of high Marxist ideals and prophecies but to account for it, in ways that both made theoretical sense within Marxism and allowed one to retain those ideals and not abandon the prophecies. His mode of analysis and his explanation, which quickly became compulsory orthodoxy among the faithful, deliberately denied primacy in Stalin's ascendancy to Stalin himself. That was probably a psychological necessity, and it was certainly a theoretical one. For apart from the terrible psychological challenge of defeat by such a "grey blur," Trotsky could not—as a Marxist—countenance an explanation that focused on individuals, rather than on underlying economically derived social forces.
For Marxists of Trotsky's vintage, certain fundamental "laws" were plain: It was not individuals who made history but social classes, rooted in the processes of economic production. In precommunist history, classes that owned the forces of production dominated, until the mode of production in which they ruled was exhausted; they would then (but only then) be replaced by classes hitherto excluded from ownership but connected with developing and ultimately more productive forces. Individuals were creatures of such processes, not their creators.
So, if Trotsky was to account for what threatened to be a world-historical calamity, he needed to find big battalions at work. However, in Russia, after the Revolution destroyed the aristocracy, peasantry, and nascent bourgeoisie, and after the workers had been "betrayed" by whatever Stalin represented, there were not many battalions left, least of all in power. By default, Trotsky found a culprit for his defeat: the Soviet bureaucracy.
And so "bureaucracy" came to attain a significance among Trotskyists that it very rarely, if ever, has had among Marxists. Indeed, Trotsky became distinctive among Marxists, particularly during his life in exile, in making of bureaucracy a concept with a social theory built into it. "Class" was such a concept for Marx, but—and therefore—"bureaucracy" was not. It was almost always treated as a secondary phenomenon, overshadowed by the property-owning classes it was thought to serve, or the propertyless laboring classes it was taken to oppress.
Trotsky, by contrast, fulminated against bureaucracy for all the years of his exile with an intensity unmatched in Marxist writings, and his own writings were echoed by followers and even non- or ex-followers. For there was a logic involved, not merely a slogan. Anyone who flirted with Trotskyism in the 1930s had to master an esoteric discourse crafted to explain the vile doings of the bureaucratic "caste" or "clique" that had usurped power in the "degenerated workers' state" (that Trotsky had done so much to create).
Throughout the 1930s Trotsky insisted that the October Revolution had been "betrayed" by a stratum of self-seeking bureaucrats who had succeeded in destroying the true "proletarian vanguard," the Bolshevik Party. Important though he claimed the bureaucracy was, however, Trotsky at the same time and for the same reasons insisted that its significance must not be exaggerated. In particular, he never stopped repeating that Soviet bureaucrats did not and could not constitute a new ruling class, for they did not "own" the nationalized Soviet state. The bureaucracy was a sort of classlike mutation, a venal "caste" or "clique" or "stratum"; like a class in many respects but fundamentally no class. And so, despite all, the Soviet Union was still fundamentally a workers' state, "degenerated" and "betrayed," to be sure, but not yet destroyed or replaced by a new ruling class.
These somewhat tortuous classificatory lessons had a sharp point, and Trotsky insisted on it with increasing desperation. Had the bureaucracy been a newly risen ruling class, the workers would be condemned to wait until the mode of production that gave it power was spent; time usually counted in centuries. Because it was only a "caste," a kind of parasite on the workers' state, however, the Revolution, though "betrayed," was not yet lost. There was still a chance that the workers—the true if somewhat bloodied ruling class—could snatch power back and thus redeem "their" revolution. And that possibility dictated how Marxists throughout the world should respond. Socialists must support the workers' state, even in war and, as happened, even if it joined the "imperialist" Nazis in such a war against the other imperialists. This caused trouble in New York.
Simmering disquiet over Trotsky's position came to a head with the outbreak of war and the revelation of the alliance between Soviet socialism and National Socialism. When the workers' state was revealed to be in cahoots with the fascists, a major faction fight developed within the SWP with a sizeable faction siding with James Burnham and Max Shachtman, the editors of the New International, the Party magazine, who rejected the official line. The dispute that erupted between this faction and the orthodox followers of James P. Cannon in turn led to another question about bureaucracy, altogether closer to home. This had local and practical significance, and it turned attention from social categorization of Soviet bureaucrats to internal bureaucratic tendencies. As one historian of the movement writes:
Although the Russian question triggered the quarrel, when the Cannon clique closed ranks with Trotsky, shutting discussion out of the public press (the Militant) and declaring the matter closed, a new question surfaced, that of organization. Burnham and Shachtman, furious at the cloture of debate on this issue so central to Trotskyism, charged "bureaucratic conservatism," ossification in the party leadership structure, and leader-cultism against Cannon ...
At the April 1940 convention, both sides participated fully. Votes on the resolutions reaffirmed the Cannonite majority and thus suspended the Burnham-Shachtman minority. No one even mentioned the Russian question, which had set off the quarrel in the first place; the organizational question had eclipsed it altogether.
Selznick left the SWP with the Shachtmanites, but he quickly began agitating for reform there, proclaiming "a major heresy, namely, the rejection of Bolshevism and of Leninism. He argued that Stalinism was rooted in Leninism." He also proposed that Marxism no longer be taught as the party's official doctrine. A formal debate occurred between him and the still orthodox Irving Howe. At the meeting he met a slightly younger supporter from the floor, Irving Kristol. Not long afterwards, Selznick, Kristol, and a bevy of other talented young intellectuals set up their own fraction of the Shachtmanite faction of the Trotskyists. They were known as the Shermanites, led by "Philip Sherman."
The group was small but smart. It comprised a remarkable concentration of people later prominent both in American intellectual life, as academics and journalists, and in public life. They included Selznick's first wife, Gertrude Jaeger, whom he had met in 1938 and married in 1939; historian and polemicist Gertrude Himmelfarb and her husband, future neoconservative Irving Kristol (Party name, William Ferry); the sociologist Peter Rossi; political scientists Martin Diamond and Herbert Garfinkel; historian Marvin Meyers; and founder of the Free Press, Jeremiah Kaplan. Outside but friends with the group were Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer, and other later luminaries of American academic life and public culture.
The Shermanites described themselves as "revolutionary anti-Bolshevik," and Selznick and Kristol drafted a letter of resignation from the Workers' Party. In the ensuing fracas, they issued a statement, "Defining a Tendency," in which they accused the Shachtmanite leadership of employing "the same bureaucratic organizational methods as Cannon." In 1941 they left the Workers' Party and joined the youth movement of Norman Thomas's Socialist Party, the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL). Though they had already resigned, the Shachtmanites proceeded to expel them with the special delicacy typical of such movements.
That was the end of Selznick's flirtation with Trotskyism, but the time had not been wasted. The "organizational question" can plausibly be said to have dominated the next ten to fifteen years of his life; the larger questions of the relations between ends and means remained with him to the end.
Michels and the "Iron Law of Oligarchy"
It was during this period of incessant debate about the "organizational question" that Selznick got hold of a copy of Michels's Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, first published in 1911. The English translation Selznick read was long out of print. It was republished only in 1949, by former Shermanite Jeremiah Kaplan's Basic Books. Political Parties spoke directly to many of the issues being debated in the Trotskyist movement in the 1930s and 1940s, for it was in origin and in effect "part of the academic critique of the Marxist belief that administrative and political problems of large-scale organization would be easily manageable under socialism." Its primary focus was on European socialist parties, especially the German Social Democratic Party, at the beginning of the twentieth century the largest in the world. Michels had been a member until 1907.
Michels relentlessly piled up evidence and argument to show that no such party could avoid what he called the "iron law of oligarchy." In doing so, he challenged the Marxist insistence on the primacy of a logic of economically derived historical development, with another and independent logic, that of the bureaucratizing and oligarchic tendencies immanent in the very fact, and necessity, of organization. He also challenged the ultimate Marxist salvific fantasy, according to which nothing that today stood in the way of "truly human emancipation" would do so after the Revolution. For Michels insisted that oligarchic tendencies were not merely present but here to stay.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Philip Selznick by Martin Krygier Copyright © 2012 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Part I First Thoughts
1 The "Tragedy of Organization" 15
2 The Ideal and the Real 29
Part II Organizations and Institutions
3 Organizations and Ideals 45
4 Institutional Leadership 66
5 Pathos and Politics 92
Part III Law
6 Jurisprudential Sociology 105
7 The Rule of Law: Expansion 129
8 The Rule of Law: Transformation 163
9 Values, Conflict, Development 197
Part IV Social Philosophy
10 Morality and Modernity 213
11 Communitarian Liberalism 248
Conclusion: Missing What Matters 275
Notes 285
Index 321