Knowledge And Decisions

Although there were despotic governments in the nineteenth century, it was not until twentieth-century totalitarianism that anything like the Committee of Public Safety emerged again. Once more, it was intellectuals who created it — Lenin, Trotsky, and their successors and offshoots carrying out a vision descended from Marx, and Hitler carrying out his own vision from Mein Kampf. Whether or not any of these political leaders were intellectuals in the qualitatively cognitive sense, all owed their power precisely to their transmission of ideas, rather than to other political routes to power from dynastic succession, economic achievements, hierarchical progression, or technical expertise. The characteristics of these modern totalitarian governments have already been noted. The support, apologetics, and glorification of foreign totalitarianism among intellectuals in the democratic nations must also be noted, however. The glorification of the Stalin regime by democratic Fabian socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb is perhaps the classic example,¹⁷⁴ but they are part of a long line of intellectuals including Jean-Paul Sartre,¹⁷⁵ George Bernard Shaw,¹⁷⁶ and G. D. H. Cole,¹⁷⁷ who extolled the virtues of Stalinist Russia, joined by the Nation, The New Republic, and (in England) The New Statesman.¹⁷⁸ The supporters of an American Communist for President of the United States in 1932 included John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, Edmund Wilson, and Granville Hicks.¹⁷⁹ Fascism also did not lack for apologists and romanticizers, including Irving Babbitt, Charles Beard, George Santayana, and Ezra Pound.¹⁸⁰

Most American intellectuals of the 1930s were, however, content to support a vast expansion of governmental power in more conventional terms under the New Deal. Disillusionment with Stalin and the Soviet Union eventually led many intellectuals to return to the liberal-left. It has not prevented a similar cycle of romantic glorification of Mao, Castro, and other totalitarians.

THE INTELLECTUAL VISION

Virtually everyone has political opinions, but not everyone has a political vision — a central set of premises from which particular positions can be deduced as corollaries. These premises may be religious, tribal, or ideological. What makes them a coherent vision is the high degree of correlation among the particular conclusions reached on highly disparate subjects. To a racist, for example, the color of an individual’s skin may determine a whole host of intellectual, moral, aesthetic, political, and even etiquette questions pertaining to that individual.

An ideological vision is more than belief in a principle. It is a belief that that principle is crucial or overriding, so that other principles or even empirical facts must give way when in conflict with it. The Inquisition had to reject Galileo’s astronomical findings in the interests of a higher vision, as the Nazis had to reject Einstein in spite of any evidence about his theories or his individual abilities.

An ideology has been defined as a “systematic and self-contained set of ideas supposedly dealing with the nature of reality (usually social reality), or some segment of reality, and of man’s relation (attitude, conduct) toward it; and calling for a commitment independent of specific experience or events.”¹⁸¹ The intellectual process might seem to be a counterforce against generalized, ideological visions, since its canons imply following the particular consequences of its cognitive procedures wherever those consequences (truth) lead in specific instances. Insofar as intellectuals as a social class are motivated by the intellectual process, their positions might be expected to be as diverse as the different readings possible on the complexities of political issues. In short, intellectuals as a social class might be expected to show less of a “herd instinct” pattern as regards group conformity, and at the individual level to dissect issues on their respective specific merits, leading to less correlation among their various political positions than among people who “vote the straight ticket” in either a partisan or an ideological sense. Actual studies of opinions among academics, however, show “exceptionally high correlations among opinions across a broad array of issues,”¹⁸² even when the specifics involve such disparate matters as foreign policy, marijuana, and race. These cohesive beliefs among intellectuals have been politically to the left of the general public for as long as such surveys have been taken.¹⁸³ This is true not only in the United States, but internationally.¹⁸⁴ What is important at this point, however, is not so much where the intellectuals are politically, but how cohesively the various positions fit together as principles deduced from an underlying vision.