Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (review)

reviews 165 conditions of emergence" of the literary, analyzing in terms of class and ideology— terms that Shakespeare did not understand anymore than he understood the terms of the literary—the strategy and effectivity of Shakespearean language. (149) The best section of the essay consists of a double-edged history lesson. On the one hand, Kavanagh relates specific factors bearing on Shakespeare's writings: "the patronage system, the market/audience, the technical possibilities of the theatre, the political constraints and social ideologies in place, [and] even exigencies of his own personal formation" (148). But Shakespeare also remains for Kavanagh a principal agent whose language is not only a significant ideological gesture within a peculiar classconflicted conjuncture that anticipates the "conditions of emergence" of a new, "literary," discursive practice. It also becomes one of the primary ideological conditions of a more systematic literary ideological practice. . . (149) How precisely the fine Une between the "conditions of emergence" and the affective powers of Shakespeare's works can be drawn—if it can be drawn at all—Kavanagh does not say, but the existence ofboth conditions is persuasively argued in his essay. Specifically, the discussions ofA Midsummer Night's Dream and King Lear convincingly demonstrate the pecuUar suitability of Shakespeare's language to help constitute what we call "literature"; it is capable of producing opposite and potentially radical ideologies that express social contradiction, but it is also capable of (tenuously) unifying them within the existing social order. Lear's "reason not the need" speech (2.4.266), for example, displays a language. to which everyone can assent, but which has a different meaning for each. An adequate notion of human needs must go beyond the requirements of subsistence: everyone "needs" more than she/he needs. The "basest beggar's" "need" for more than bread becomes an image of, and thus a discursive "production" of, Lear's "need" to retain his royal perquisites. (158) As noted earlier apropos of Sinfield, the ultimate political effect of these two books will necessarily be limited. Literary criticism, even when its subject is the central pillar in the cultural edifice, is unlikely to shake the foundations of capitalist society. Yet to the degree that both Political Shakespeare and Alternative Shakespeares open the critical field of Shakespeare studies to the winds of ideological and historical debate, their effect within the profession of literary values can only be salutary. While it may seem in the present conjuncture that such gestures are scarcely more efficacious than Richard II's summoning of toads and spiders to defeat Bolingbroke, the historic tide may prove ultimately to have been turned at just such an imperceptible point. Epochal shifts in the dominant paradigm are often difficult to perceive when one is effectively in the eye of the storm. IVO KAMPS Culture as History: The Transformation ofAmerican Society in the Twentieth Century by Warren I. Susman. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. xxx + 321 pp. $12.95 (paper); $22.95 (cloth). Warren Susman was for many years a professor of history at Rutgers University. He was a magnificent undergraduate lecturer, and also a superb graduate teacher who provided invaluable guidance not only to his own advisees but to those students from other institutions who asked him for advice about their dissertations. His generosity and inspiration were extended to young faculty members from around the country who came to him for help in developing the theoretical structures oftheir first books. He played, in short, an unusual 166 the minnesota review role of constructive critic for an entire generation of young scholars in American intellectual history. Culture as History is a collection of his often brilliant essays written over the last quarter century and published just before his death, at age fifty-eight. Trained in what was called intellectual history in the 1940s and 1950s, he wished to remake the field, to change it from intellectual to cultural history. The field he encountered in his academic training had tended to focus on the ideas of exceptional individuals and assumed that the rest of the population, those who participated in popular culture, either had no ideas or that theirs were so inferior they were not worth studying. Susman countered, "What I...