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Reviews 197 to socialism. Brick explores in illuminating detail Bell's desperate attempt to believe that American participation in World War II would not result in the revitalization of the capitalist estabUshment. Like Hofstadter, BeU felt great pain at the loss of the future he had expected to unfold. But unlike Hofstadter, he did not convert to Parsons' affirmation of the normalcy and harmony of an American capitaUst society that would serve as a City on the HiU for the rest of the world. Instead, Bell went from a Marxist universalism to the universalism of Max Weber. This position provided him with the perspective on the disharmony of modern capitalism that informed his later book, TA* Cultural Contradictions ofCapitalism (1976). But although BeU did not join in the Parsonian celebration of capitaUsm, his indebtedness to Weber, according to Brick, made it impossible for him to see ways to challenge the estabüshed order. "The marginalization that radical intellectuals suffered, as events consistently frustrated rather than realized their purposes," Brick writes, "encouraged them to find a sanctuary for value in a special sphere apart from fact. The paradox of this critical disposition ," Brick concludes, "was its suspicion of strategies aiming to overcome the rationalization it assailed." Nathan Liebowitz, unlike Buxton and Brick, is not concerned with such strategies. He joins Baker in presenting himself as a neutral observer. This division between two scholars openly critical of the estabUshment and two who make no explicit judgment on their culture carries over into their intepretation of the 1940s. Liebowitz, in contrast to Brick, deemphasizes BeU's changes in that decade. Like Baker, he argues continuity from the 1930s to the 1950s. He does agree with Brick, however, that Bell is not an apologist for the status quo and that he stands apart from Parsons and Hofstadter in the 1950s, as well as from the current neo-conservatives . Liebowitz is primarily concerned with analyzing BeU's contradictory commitments to a universalism linked to the rationalism of the Enlightenment and to the particularism of his Jewish heritage reinforced by the Protestant theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, whose discussion of the inevitabiUty of limits was so influential in the 1940s and 1950s. BeU's adherence to these religious traditions leads him to criticize all human pretences to universaUsm. And yet Liebowitz describes Bell as attempting to reform the capitalism whose inner logic is the universality of the marketplace. We have to turn back to Brick to be reminded that since the 1940s Bell has not beUeved it possible to construct an alternative to the capitalist pretense to universaUsm on the basis of particular traditions. For forty years, Bell has engaged in a task that must fail: an appeal to capitalists to give up their essential cultural identity. Buxton and Brick think it is time to take the confrontation between capitalism and its alternatives more seriously. The beginning of this challenge, for them, is to demonstrate that the prophecy of capitalist universalims, which displaced the prophecy of sociaUst universaUsm for many radical Americans during the 1940s and 1950s, cannot explain the experience of pluralism at home and abroad. This pluraUsm, they conclude , must be the foundation of democratic efforts to overthrow capitalist hegemony. DAVID W. NOBLE Professing Literature: An Institutional History by Gerald Graff. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. pp. 315. $29.95 (cloth). Institution and Interpretation by Samuel Weber, afterword by Wlad Godzich. MinneapoUs: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.(Theory and History of Literature, vol. 31). pp. 182. $29.50 (cloth); $13.95 (paper). The cover story in the New York Times Magazine on June 5, 1988, was about the sort of people who are Ukely to be reading it — progressive Uterary critics in universities. Its title, "The Battle of the Books," refers to our poUtical battles over the canon, exclusions and inclusions , minorités, methodologies, counter-traditions, cultural studies, and so on. On the cover of the Magazine section. This is it, I said to myself. We've made it to the Big Time. 198 the minnesota review Should we be pleased? It is tempting to divide the two books under review, and perhaps academic leftists in general, into those who are more likely to...

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