The Agony and Romance of the American Left

Abstract

AT THE END OF THE 1940s, Daniel Bell sat down to write first scholarly history of Marxian Left in United States. Socialism was an unbounded dream, began young sociologist and labor editor of Fortune, evoking millenarian faith that, over previous century, had moved countless people on both sides of Atlantic to imagine a future of social equality amid economic abundance and to dedicate their lives to realizing it.' Then he turned critical. In United States, Marxists had utterly failed to build a large or stable movement. Bell summarized what were, at time, most popular reasons for that failure-from Werner Sombart's evocation, in 1906, of reefs of roast beef and apple pie supposedly available to American workers to Selig Perlman's stress, in a 1928 work, on free gift of ballot to men without property (whose European counterparts had won suffrage only after threatening or waging revolution).2 But none of these provided a sufficient explanation for what Bell called the melancholy question. There was, after all, a good deal of industrial strife in American past and several deep depressions-all of which, by Marxist lights, should have awakened class consciousness of wage-earning masses. To understand why socialist movement had been unable to adapt to such intermittent flashes of opportunity, one had to appreciate crippling effect of Left's own world view. Wrote Bell: The socialist movement, by its very statement of goal and in its rejection of capitalist order as a whole, could not relate itself to specific problems of social action in here-and-now, give-and-take political world. It was trapped by unhappy problem of living 'in