In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

232 Chapter 12 Irving Howe,“The First 35 Years Were the Hardest: Interview with Myself,”Dissent, Spring 1989. Introduction Howe is pensive in this interview with his toughest critic, an alter ego who homes in on his anxieties, albeit in a way that allows him to explain himself. The conversation is in the form of an “auto-critique,” the only such chapter in the book. It sums up the history of thirty-five years of work on a magazine to which Howe devoted at least two days per week throughout those decades. The interviewer here obviously has the keenest “insider knowledge” about his subject and the magazine in the entire book; accordingly, the topics he raises are most revealing. The interview occurs at a crucial transitional movement in the checkered history of Socialism: before the fall of the Berlin Wall, yet during the period when glasnost and perestroika are in full swing. Howe is evaluating Dissent against the backdrop of Gorbachev and in hopeful anticipation for the future (at least internationally, in contrast to Howe’s gloomy view of the Reagan years domestically). Howe opens with a discussion of Victor Navasky, the long-time editor and publisher of The Nation, a magazine that had harshly criticized Dissent for allegedly supporting U.S. capitalism because it advocated anti-Communism and a reformist policy agenda. This might appear a strange opening gambit for a selfinterview , but Howe wants to stress the delicate task of ideological navigation between the Right and the far Left that Dissent has steered. He assumes a defensive stance in order to parry criticisms that Dissent has been an apologist for the Establishment or for mainstream thinking and prevailing government policies, Interview with Himself, Spring 1989 233 aiming to show instead that it took tough—and carefully considered—policy stands on numerous issues at home and abroad. Howe distinguishes his magazine from the New Left Review, for example, which also emerged from events in the mid-1950s that coincided with the birth of Dissent, but which adopted a more Europeanized, Marxist orientation that fully supported the movement. Proud of Dissent, and a little amazed that it has lasted so long, Howe recounts the difficult line that the magazine walked. He defends its early anti-Stalinism as necessary to safeguard a decent Left vision and preserve some version of democratic Socialism : “It was the Gulag that helped discredit leftist ideas, not the handful of us on the Left who told the truth about the Gulag.” Dissent struggled to hold on to Socialism in an atmosphere of skepticism about a collectivist future, striving to oppose the domination of private property while seeking a pragmatic, gradualist course that effectively ruled out expropriation and bloody revolution. Dissent’s arduous path is evident in Howe’s critique of Marxism, which he believes has failed, at least “as a unified system,” an admission that must have been painful for someone who had once subscribed to Marxism as a full-scale Weltanschauung, a secular metaphysics equipped to explain virtually all questions. Early in Dissent ’s history, Howe explains, he had come to believe that “the working class was not the lever of revolutionary change.” It is unlikely, though, that anyone in the magazine’s formative years would have put the matter quite so starkly, as faith in the working class was central even to diverse factions subscribing to social democracy. Given that Dissent was born in reaction to the excesses of Stalinism, it is no surprise that the discussion moves to theories of totalitarianism, of which Stalinism and Nazism are the two prime examples. Hannah Arendt is the major figure here. Her exalted reputation at mid-century in American intellectual circles, her personal relationship to Howe, and her status as an occasional contributor to Dissent established her as a central presence in Howe’s thinking even though he regarded her ideas as extreme, particularly on the role of the Jewish people in their own destruction (e.g., in Eichmann in Jerusalem, 1963). When it came to grasping the American political scene, she was often out of her element, he believed.1 Still, “Arendt performed a real service,” concluded Howe, for she theorized totalitarianism as a brutal ideology of total domination, “a radical new ethos of blood and terror.” Although by the 1950s Howe had cast aside as obsolete his erstwhile Marxist belief that the Nazi regime represented a perverted outcome of capitalism and imperialism, theories of Communist totalitarianism had enabled a resurgent conservative reaction by the...

Share