Between Apostles and Technicians: Mind-Blowing and Problem-Solving

In the 1970s two ways of examining society, neither of them very satisfactory, will probably continue to vie for intellectual favor. One is the New Left rebellion against the organizational rationalism of a complex technological polity. The second is the style comfortable to the social scientists and bureaucrats who administer such societies, a style ostentatiously prosaic, empirical, and nonideological, lineal descendant to Benthamite felicific calculation and the Fabianism of the Webbs. In extreme versions it manifests itself in essay like Edward Banfield’s The Unheavenly City, said to be widely admired in the White House. A home for more moderate expression of the problem-solving non-ideology is The Public Interest, a journal about which more will be said later.

The younger radicals cherish one-to-one relationships, diffusion of power, and immediacy of sensual gratification. They suspect technology and organizational hierarchies. Until they took to criticizing their acolytes’ excesses, Herbert Marcuse and Paul Goodman were popular New Left gurus. Their successor appears to be Charles Reich whose The Greening of America, an impassioned celebration of youthful virtue, amounts to a prophecy of revolu...