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POLITICAL THEORY OF THE STUDENT MOVEMENT: A HISTORICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL
ANALYSIS
Author(s): BHIKHU PAREKH
Source: CrossCurrents , WINTER 1971, Vol. 21, No. 1, 20th ANNIVERSARY ISSUE
(WINTER 1971), pp. 53-86
Published by: Wiley
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/24457567
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BHIKHU PAREKH
POLITICAL THEORY
OF THE STUDENT MOVEMENT:
A HISTORICAL AND
PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS1
M ι y intention in this paper is to examine critically the views on society

and the university that have inspired the recent student movement. Like
all criticisms, the criticisms radical students have made of the university
and the wider society are made from a definite standpoint, without refer
ence to which they are not intelligible. And as this standpoint is the prod
uct of a fairly long evolution I shall trace very briefly some of the impor
tant stages through which the student movement has passed during the
last several hundred years. As my historical account is intended only to
elucidate many of the philosophical beliefs the movement picked up at
each stage, it is unavoidably selective. In the second section I evaluate
these beliefs and indicate the general direction in which the movement
needs to be reorientated.
It is important to realize that in many respects the recent student move

ment is unprecedented and unique. Students protests are, of course, not
new; nor is the student involvement in a larger political movement. But
the student movement as we know it today, a comprehensive and con
sciously organized wave of protest based on a systematic critique of the
university and society and aiming to change them both fundamentally, is
unique in western history. Let us see how.
Ever since the formal foundation of the modern university in the
twelfth century,2 students have been an important and vociferous part
of it. For quite some time after its foundation, the university belonged
to one of two types. It was either a student university in which interested
and inquisitive students got together in one place and hired famous
scholars to teach those who were interested in their particular branch of
Dr. Parekh teaches political science at the University of Hull, England. The
present essay, along with "Scholarship and Ideology" (Cross Currents,
Fall 1970), form part of a book-length manuscript that offers a balanced and
realistic appraisal of the problems and the responsibilities of university education
today.

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scholarship, or it was a faculty university in which scholars got together
and taught whoever was interested and able to pay. In either case stu
dents, as in the university of Bologna, and even the masters, as in the
university of Paris, were divided into groups called 'nations,' which began
as groups organized by foreign students to protect themselves against the
periodic physical assaults of the local residents, but which soon were ex
tended to cover other matters of common concern as well. Later, the lo
cal students also began to form their own nations for various common
purposes.
Nations performed two important functions. First, they were fraternal
bodies that looked after their members in time of need. Second, they were
the basic administrative units in the university.3 All students belonged to
one nation or another, and their conduct in the university was regulated
by the democratically elected officers of their nation. Students felt an in
tense sense of loyalty to the nation, but not the university, which was
seen as no more than a federation of nations. There were even cases
where the nations elected their own individual rectors and refused to
recognize the authority of the university. In general, however, the uni
versity was something like a federal body with nations as its basic units.
Thus, for example, at Bologna each nation elected a councillor, and they,
together with the annually elected decanus elected by the facilitas,4 con
stituted the 'university council,' the highest authority in the university.
The council elected a rector who, like our chancellor, was a titular head of
the university. In many universities in Southern Europe where a majority
of the students were mature and generally belonged to the professional
faculties, it was a student who for a long time acted as a rector.5 In the
North where the students were younger and generally studied arts, the
nations soon lost their authority and it was always the master who be
came a rector.
The organization of students and masters into nations, the

ness of the university to the town, and the relative absence o
expectation of behavior among the various groups meant th
considerable unrest and violence. Nations fought each other
regularity. Bologna itself had serious riots, and several casual
1301, 1306 and 1310.® At Paris, a violent quarrel broke out
tween the scholars of the English and the Picard nation.
masters got very angry and tore down the latter's houses, ki
their occupants and forced others to flee from Paris. There w
violent troubles in 1328 and 1356 and the university was pa
deep schisms. Masters, too, fought among themselves freely,
ing and killing each other. Cases of irate masters engage
battles with the townsmen and inflicting severe damage on
and property were not uncommon.
Student dissatisfaction with what and how their masters t
not uncommon either. The medieval practice of teaching wa
54 CROSS CURRENTS: WINTER 1971

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lecturing on set texts—like Peter Lombard's Sententia and Aquinas's
Summa Theologica in theology, Corpus Juris Civilis and the Decretum in
Law, in law, and Al-Shifa of Rhazes and the Canon of Avicenna in medi
cine. In order to enable students to copy the texts masters had to read
them—sometime too slowly, and sometimes too fast. Students often got
very angry and protested by 'shouting or whistling or raising a din or by
throwing stones.'7
Students often went from one university to another to attend lectures
by famous scholars, and this too became an occasion for violence. Thus,
for example, John of Salisbury went to Paris to attend Abelard's lectures
on logic; to Alberic for dialectics; to William de Conchia for grammar;
and then to Richard Bishop for the Quadrivium, and the Hardvin for a
renewed study of grammar. This was also true of others like St. Thomas
of Canterbury, St. Gilbert of Sempringham, Richard de Barry and Nicho
las Breakspeare. Teachers too went to other universities to teach; for
example, Alexander Hales and St. Edmund of Oxford often went to
Paris to teach. Students generally did not have the money to meet their
travel expenses, and therefore begged their way. These vagantes even
formed a mock guild, and were called goliardi.n Begging often led to
violence, and they beat up, or were beaten up, by angry townsmen. Their
riotous life became so notorious that the monarchs had to cut even their
traditional privileges, insisting that the university arrange for their

supervisors.
Thus student (and even faculty) violence was born twin with the
university. But medieval student violence did not arise from anything
more than student dissatisfaction with lectures, or disagreement with the
faculty and the townsmen. It was not part of a larger movement inspired
by a radical critique of the university or society and was totally apolitical.
This pattern of student protest, the impulsive and sporadic outburst
against some specific practice of the university or the town, continued
right down to the French Revolution, when students began to take a
different view of their social role. An idea began to grow that as intel
lectuals, as 'sons' and, sometimes, 'daughters' of their national commu
nity, they had an obligation to protect its interests both against outside
invaders and inside usurpers. Though there was some student involve
ment in the French Revolution, such a development occurred on a sig
nificant scale only later, particularly during the struggles for national
liberation that the revolution inspired. Nurtured in the nationalist sen
timent of the organic unity of the nation, and in the belief that the real
substance of the nation lay embedded in the mores and customs of the
ordinary people, students demanded that the 'people' should be the
center of all social and political thinking. The main slogan of the stu
dents in Russia9 was "V Narod," meaning 'to the people,' 'be the people.'
Students desired not only to help the people, as many did by using profes
sional knowledge to relieve their miseries, not only to restore all power
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to the people, as some of them did by later joining the Social Democratic
party, but also to become the people, to become one with them.10
What happened in Russia was also repeated in Germany and Austria.
Said Fichte to his class at the university of Berlin on Feb. 19, 1813: "This
course will be suspended until the close of the campaign when we will
resume it in a free fatherland or reconquer our liberty by death."11 The
young students stormed out of the classroom to join the German forces
fighting to get Napoleon out of Germany. On October 17, 1817, students
put on a memorable festival at the Wartburg. Four hundred students
from a dozen institutions staged a torchlight parade and a huge bonfire
in which they burned symbols of foreign domination and domestic re
pression—a corporal's cane, a wig, a copy of the Code Napoléon. In 1819
Kotzebue, a poet who wrote conservative plays and was thought to be an
agent of the Czar, was murdered by a student in the name of the people;
the student was idealized into a great hero. As the Duke of Wellington
remarked, it was "curious that all the mischief of Germany seems to have
its rise in the universities, while in England we look to them and to
the state of feeling there as one of our main sources of security."12
In Austria, armed students, organized in the famous Academic Legion,
took over the city of Vienna in 1848 and administered its affairs from
their headquarters in the university. Medical students set up a program
of medical care; students of law offered their help in labor arbitration
and other legal matters; and other students looked after the welfare serv
ices. They fraternized with workers who contributed to the maintenance
of the Legion from their meager earnings and acted as their bodyguards,
saying, "If one of our men falls, it is no matter, but for one of the fine
young student gentlemen, to whom we owe our freedom, it would be a
great pity."13 At the academic level students demanded an open admis
sions policy, greater democratization of the university government, and
better pay and working conditions for the junior faculty.14
In all these and other cases, the burning desire of the students was to
do something for the people, to become one with them. The mass of peo
ple, they felt, had for long been ignored, trampled upon, exploited, treat
ed as unreal, as matter to which the rulers could give any form. Their
"irresistible" love for the people inspired an incredibly intense hatred of
the anti-people, of those who exploited the innocent and gullible ordi
nary folk. Ignored and neglected by historians the people were now to
be at the center of history. Their exploitation was to end now, and the
nation was seen as standing on the threshold of a new birth, a radically
different life. And the group fitted to carry it forward to that glorious
day was the youth, pure and innocent, and full of vitality and creativity.
Being nearer to birth than their elders, they were believed to be nearer
to life, and were therefore seen as embodying the vitality and freshness
of life in a way their elders could not. The traditional belief that the
older one was, the more experienced and mature one was and therefore

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more fitted to rule, was rejected in favor of the view that not maturity
but innocence was the source of all authority. Images of inexhaustible
freshness, idealism, energy and innocence were conjured up in all refer
ences to youth, and expressions like the 'rising' generation, the 'flower'
of the nation, the 'eternal hope' of the nation became common. The new
nation was to 'rise' and 'awake' in its 'rising' generation.
The youth came to represent the principle of life, life being now equat
ed not with the monotonous and repetitive cycle of birth and death, as
the classical thinkers had done, but with newness, freshness, creativity.
In every society, it was argued, there were two generations, one consisting
of those who were 'full' of life and the other of the 'lifeless' and world
weary adults, and only the former was considered capable of representing
and leading the new nation about to be born. Drawing generational
boundaries and determining the age at which a man ceases to be young
therefore became a matter of a considerable political importance, just as
drawing class boundaries was later to become crucial for the Marxists.
Pyotr Tkachev drew the boundary line at 25 and advocated the execution
of all over that age; Mikhailovsky drew it at 35; Spanish students at 45.
In a significant sense, the post-French revolutionary student movement
reversed some of the assumptions of classical, particularly Roman, polit
ical theory. Romans believed that the older one grew, the nearer one
was to death, the nearer one was to one's ancestors, to the founders of
one's community, and the fountain of the community's civil existence.
And the nearer one was to the source of all political authority, the greater
was one's right to rule. The ideology of the youth now rested on the
opposite view: the younger one was, the nearer one was to life, and the
greater one's right to rule. This led to some fascinating tensions. The
classical emphasis on age meant that the older one grew, the more of life
one had seen, and therefore the greater was one's range of experiences,
and therefore the more qualified one was to give advice and guidance on
how life was to be lived. Thus, as a man grew older, he not only was
nearer to death, but he had also seen more of life. His authority thus was
ultimately rooted in the affirmative of both life and death.15 The ideology
of the youth, on the other hand, had a very different implication. In
emphasizing birth, it emphasized the beginning of life, and not the proc
ess of life, as classical political theory had done. The youth despised ex
perience as something that wore out initial freshness, something that bred
cynicism and toughness, and was therefore a source of corruption. It
was, as a consequence, involved in the tragic nightmare of always wanting
to go back to the beginning: the older it grew, the more degenerate it felt
it had become, and therefore the younger it needed to be! The young
were intensely afraid of getting old, since that meant loss of purity and
innocence, a moral and ontological death. This generated burning im
patience: feeling certain that when they grew older, their innocence and
idealism would die out, they felt that their enthusiasm for radical reforms
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was going to last only while their youth lasted. The world had to be
changed right now!
The post-French revolutionary phase of the student movement thus
introduced a number of new and remarkable beliefs in the self-image of
the youth, particularly of the student. It introduced the belief that society
was divisible into neat generational categories and that men's ideas, be
liefs, attitudes and emotions were ultimately determined by the genera
tion to which they belonged. It introduced the populist element into the
youth culture. It also generated the belief that the old and 'hypocritical'
society could be changed radically only by those who were innocent, fresh
and pure, and thus the youth came to be seen as the conscience and in
deed the only hope of the community. This vitalist philosophy spawned
an antinomian spirit that led the young to believe that their innocence
put them above all laws and social conventions and gave them a unique
and supreme authority to pronounce on moral and political issues.
A significant shift in the preoccupation and self-image of the student
occurred towards the beginning of the twentieth century, though it be
came conspicuous only after the first world war, and here the student
movement entered its second phase. The student claim to provide lead
ership for radical and progressive social forces was seriously questioned
by the communists on Marxist grounds. Lenin, who had hailed the Rus
sian student movement in 1903, later attacked it as "petty bourgeois" and
"academic." Trotsky hammered the last nail in the radical self-image of
the student when he bluntly remarked that students "were almost all hos
tile to the October revolution."16 What the students were asked to do
was to subordinate themselves to the communist party, now regarded
the only true spokesman of the people. As the proletariat summed up i
their own misery the misery of the people, they were the people; and th
communist party was their vanguard. Students were but one element i
the alliance of various progressive forces led by the communist party, an
had no other function than to carry out its instructions. Moreover, as th
party was mainly interested in political issues, the energies of the stu
dents were concentrated on them, and they were not encouraged or even
expected to fight for university reform. Universities were either accepte
as more or less what they ought to be, or they were treated as irrelevan
to the main political struggle. This meant that in the thirties there wa
no student movement as such but only a general political movement of
which students were a small part. As Edward Shils puts it, "They were
radicals or revolutionaries, not 'radical students' or 'revolutionary st
dents.' "17
In the thirties, therefore, some of the components of the student's self

image built up after the French Revolution came to be rejected; some
others were retained; and the rest transfigured and redefined. The idea
of the generational gap was rejected, as the class replaced the generation
as the basic social unit. The faith in the people was retained, but the

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term people now came to refer not to rustic peasants, or to the unorgan
ized and self-employed petty bourgeoisie, but to the industrial proletariat.
The belief in the radical innocence of the youth was replaced by the con
ception of a radically new man to be created by the socialist revolution.
And the almost religious zeal and enthusiasm of the nationalist youth
gave place to the cool and calculative tactical moves of the loyal comrade.
All in all, then, the self-image of the student was almost drastically trans
formed.
During the last few years, the student movement has entered a new,
third, phase. In a sense, to talk of a phase is misleading, as it imposes
an unwarranted degree of homogeneity and uniformity on a very hetero
geneous and diverse complex of protests. However, almost all these pro
tests rest on certain common assumptions that justify their being seen
as constituting a single phase.
The political interest of the thirties has no doubt continued, as is re
flected in the close association of the students with the Civil Rights
Movement in America and with socialist parties elsewhere. At first, how
ever, academic and political issues were kept more or less completely
separate. Thus, for example, the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in
1964, the first major student movement of recent years, almost totally
eschewed political issues except towards the end when the large ques
tions of poverty and civil rights were raised. Its leaders basically wished
for a university that was politically aloof and neutral. As Mario Savio
put it, "It is a distortion, and too bad, that the university does not stand
apart from the society as it is. It would be good to return to an almost
totally autonomous body of scholars and students. But what we have now
is that the Pentagon, the oil and aircraft companies, the farm interests
and their representatives in the Regents consider the university as a pub
lic utility, one of the sources they can look on as part of their business."18
As the student protests spread, as students began to probe deeper into
why the university was what it was, and as the ugly realities of the Viet
nam war began to unfold, they began to link the university and society
in a way they had never done before. This process started in America and
occurred in several stages. In the spring of 1966, General Lewis Hershey
announced that some students would have to be drafted, particularly
those whose class standing was poor or who did not reach a certain level
of performance on the Selective Service Qualification Test. The grade
system in the university then came to be attacked, as it provided easy
methods of identifying the possible draftees. This led to a lot of 'anti
ranking' sit-ins during 1966 and 1967—for example, at Chicago, Wiscon
sin, City College of New York, and Oberlin College. Another issue that
at once involved both the university and the government was defense re
search. Radicals argued that by undertaking confidential research for the
Defense Department, the university approved and aided the cause of war.
This inspired a number of protests, the greatest of which was at Colum
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bia in the spring of 1968. Another similar issue was the recruitment of
students on the campus by various private and government agencies like
the Dow Chemical Company, the Reserve Officer Training Corps and the
CIA. This too was an issue that involved both the university and the gov
ernment or business, and showed the university's "complicity" with the
Establishment.
Gradually, and in the course of various protests, students began to

feel that almost every aspect of the university had important political
implications. By what it taught, by the way it taught, by its admission
policy, by its research, even by its silence, the university seemed to them
very closely connected with the larger society and to promote many of
its nefarious interests. When it offered certain courses and not others—
for example, a course on nursing but not on the western revolutionary
tradition, or when it taught sociology or economics as if Marx had never
been born, or when it accepted research contracts without discrimina
tion, or when it accepted an industrialist, but not a trade union leader,
as one of its trustees, or when it silently watched its members being sum
moned to fight disreputable wars, or when it remained indifferent when
its very autonomy was seriously compromised—in all these cases, they
felt, it clearly betrayed political biases that were all the more obnoxious
and dangerous for parading in the name of academic detachment and
neutrality. Its connection with the contemporary bourgeois society seemed
to them so close that they felt the university could not simply pretend
to assert its autonomy and forget about or brush aside the invidious
pressures from industry and government. The university, in their view,
was too important an institution to be left alone by industry and gov
ernment, and too weak to resist their pressures. Therefore, the only way
the university could retain its integrity and freedom, they thought, was
by joining in the political struggle to overthrow the existing society.
This belief in the close interdependence between the university and
society meant that students had now become interested in the academic
and administrative structure and practice of tire university. They began
to examine in detail how these practices reinforced the status quo. Fur
ther, it became possible to show that the university was not the exclu
sively academic and apolitical body it claimed to be, but that it served,
consciously or unconsciously, some of the most suspicious forces in so
ciety. Conversely, it also became possible to show that society did not
really respect the autonomy of the university and that it was willing to
use and exploit it freely when that suited its interest. Thus a critique of
the university at once became a critique of society and vice versa. While
the youth leaders of the thirties had ignored the university, or in some
cases had cherished it as a somewhat neutral place, their successors have
drawn it into the vortex of politics by seeing it as no more than the
weakest link in the vast and complex chain of social and political in
stitutions.

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But why should the university and society be tied so closely and why
should the university play such a subordinate and subservient role? Since
radical students have frequently relied on the writings of Herbert Mar
cuse for answering these questions we shall concentrate on them, draw
ing on the remarks of students themselves whenever necessary.
Marcuse argues that modern society, based on the general belief that
man is basically a consuming being unceasingly engaged in the gratifi
cation of his ever-multiplying desires, is geared to the unlimited produc
tion of material goods. The larger, the more efficient and the more auto
mated the unit of production, the better it is able to produce cheaper
goods. The result therefore is the emergence of vast corporations, and
the supersession of the entrepreneurial and free enterprise capitalism of
the nineteenth century by corporate capitalism that has created a cap
tive market by exerting monopolistic or oligopolistic control in nearly
all the major sectors of the economy. As corporate capitalism is geared
to unlimited production, its survival depends on individuals remaining
passive consumers, which it ensures by constantly titillating and plant
ing new desires, and by creating affluence that enables individuals to sat
isfy them. The entire ethos of the society is thus one of keeping men
passive, quiet, uncritical. The only interest an individual has and is en
couraged to have in life is the satisfaction of his desires. And since that
depends on money, the only interest he has in life is the accumulation
of money. With the moral, intellectual and political dimensions of his
life atrophied, he has become one-dimensional.19 His consciousness has
become so thoroughly conditioned that he is incapable even of imagining
an alternative; as Marcuse puts it, an individual today has lost all ca
pacity for negative or Utopian thinking. He is concerned only with the
present, with the positive that exists and that he enjoys; he has become
basically a positivist20 in his attitude to life and society.
Society reinforces his positivist consciousness in a number of ways. Af
fluence, of course, is the most important. As long as men are able to sat
isfy their desires or to enjoy what everyone else enjoys, they cannot want
to question the social structure. When, for example, a Negro can own
a Cadillac, or when a typist and her boss can both visit the same res
taurant or wear the same dress or read the same newspapers, a very im
portant kind of social equality and homogeneity is created at the all-im
portant level of consumption that assimilates all members of a society
to a common type. The rhythm of production in an automatized or semi
automatized factory dulls the consciousness of the worker and further
reinforces his passivity. The media of communication make their own
contribution to the process. The way, for example, newspapers and T.V.
structure news, disperse news items, and report and comment on them
reflects the passivist and positivist ethos of the community. Indeed, the
very way in which a material product is structured, packaged and adver
tized, communicates and reinforces this ethos, so that to consume it, even
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to look at it, is to be subtly conditioned. Marcuse argues that even the
very language in which people think—its syntax, its vocabulary, its idioms
—is molded by social forces. Words for example, have come to be de
fined in terms of the way the corresponding institutions function. Thus
democracy is operationally defined in such a way that it always fits the
existing political system; and freedom is so defined that western societies
are by definition free. Sentences, which are really units of thought, are
replaced by clichés and slogans that hypnotize the individual conscious
ness by establishing images instead of giving information, and by de
stroying that separateness between the individual and his thought that
language basically exists to create and protect. To clichés are added the
army of hyphenated expressions like "clean bomb" and "harmless fall
out" that conceal basic contradictions, confuse and mislead the individ
ual, and blur his responses. The result is that the individual has simply
no vocabulary in terms of which to criticize his society. What is worse,
his unconscious impulses and responses are so controlled by the subtly
manipulative social agencies that he lacks that inner space in which to
withdraw for autonomous reflection, and from which to construct a cri
tique of his society. What the corporate-capitalist society has thus done
is to produce an utterly artificial man, a cheerful robot, an inhuman
automaton, "a thing"21 whose desires, beliefs, opinions, needs and im
pulses are all planted from outside.
The university in such a society obviously can do no more than sus
tain the status quo by producing the necessary technical manpower. It
treats its students as no more than raw brain power to be fashioned into
suitable packages. It cannot be "an educational center, but a highly effi
cient industry: it produces bombs, other war machines, a few token
'peaceful' machines, and enormous numbers of safe, highly skilled, and
respectable automatons to meet the immediate needs of business and gov
ernment."22
A pamphlet distributed by the FSM on Jan. 4, 1965 sums up this

view very well:
The best way to identify the parts of our multiversity machinery is

simply to observe it "stripped down" to the bare essentials. In the
context of a dazzling circus of "bait," which obscures our vision
of the machinery, we get a four-year-long series of sharp staccatos:
eight semesters, forty courses, one hundred and twenty or more
"units," ten to fifteen impersonal lectures per week, one to three
oversized discussion meetings per week, led by poorly paid grad
uate student "teachers." Over a period of four years the student
cog receives close to forty bibliographies; evaluating amounts to lit
tle more than pushing the test button, which results in over one
hundred regurgitations in four years; and the writing of twenty to
thirty-five "papers" in four years. The course-grade-unit system
structure . . . produces knowledge for the student-cog . . . which is
force-fed by the coercion of grades.
Human nerves and flesh are transmuted under the pressure and

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stress of the university routine. It is as though we have become raw
material in the strictly inorganic sense.23
When the very springs of human consciousness are deeply conditioned
and controlled by the manipulative society, academic disciplines them
selves could hardly remain uncorrupted. The positivist ethos of the
wider society, says Marcuse, has permeated the world of scholarship and
produced a manner of thinking that has come to be known as behavior
alism or instrumentalism or operationalism. Behavioralism has taken
over the social sciences, philosophy, aesthetics, the study of literature,
and even the natural sciences. Thus, for example, history is seen as only
a detailed and exhaustive description of the past from which no lessons
can be learned, and not as a story of man's struggle to make his world
a better place to live in. In the name of objectivity, the human being is
bracketed out of his own past. Philosophy, too, has abdicated its task of
criticizing the social order, and has bowed to the authority of the ma
nipulated and conditioned consciousness of the ordinary man by taking
its basic task to be no more than that of collecting the various ways he
ordinarily uses a word. Similar changes have occurred in psychology, so
ciology, economics, politics, anthropology and others. The corruption,
says Marcuse, has occurred not only in academic disciplines but also in
the very standards and models of scholarship, as can be seen, for exam
ple, in the way the notions of objectivity and impartiality are defined.
Objectivity and impartiality are taken to imply that an academic should
remain indifferent between what promotes human well-being and what
harms it. They are taken to mean, further, that he should let facts speak
for themselves; but since facts are facts only within a theoretical frame
work which provides criteria for selecting and judging them, the pursuit
of objectivity becomes a cover for smuggling in unconsciously the con
ventional prejudices of the wider society. Indeed, when the critical di
mension of the individual consciousness is blotted out and when the very
language in which he thinks is subtly molded, it is simply impossible
to expect that he can be genuinely impartial and objective. When two
theoretical alternatives are presented to an academic, for example, he
may think he is considering them impartially, but in fact his judgment
has already been predetermined by the social order—by what it accepts
as possible and what it discards as Utopian, by the way it "repels" non
conformist elements from the structure of speech, by the way it paralyzes
imagination by ridiculing any attempt to transcend the truncated and
naturalistic world of facts. An academic does, of course, observe utmost
impartiality in his consideration of evidence, but as he remains confined
to the positivist universe of discourse and as this universe is grotesquely
partial and one-sided, his so-called impartiality is a form of partiality
when judged from a higher standpoint.24
If, therefore, the university is to be a genuinely academic body that
pursues truth in a truly critical spirit, the entire society must be dras
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tically changed. It is no use tinkering with this or that aspect of it. It
is no use, for example, asking for a few more students on the senate or
on the governing bodies, or for greater faculty-student contact, or foi
more courses on this or that subject. The corruption has gone too deep
—into the very structure of the university and the academic disciplines—
for this sort of tokenism to be effective. Reforms only sustain the prev
alent academic structure by enabling it to co-opt and emasculate the
spirit of dissent.
The basic question is how the "totalitarian" liberal society is to be
changed since, though they are dehumanized and one-dimensionalized,
the "masses" are clearly very happy to continue the status quo. To this
situation students have reacted in one of four ways.
Some have felt that society is so incorrigibly corrupt that the only
"honest" thing they can do is to reject it altogether, either by adopt
ing the rituals and practices of another society (for example, India) or
by going beyond the human world altogether with the help of drugs
and mystical rites. Some others, who reject both the dark pessimism of
the first group and its paradoxical concern to create a society of asocial
men and a counter-culture that denies the very objectivity and interper
sonality that culture requires, have felt that society can be radically
transformed only if the individual transforms himself first by eradicating
his own egoistic and aggressive impulses. They have, therefore, turned
to religion and moralistic soul-searching.
Thirdly, there are others who share the basic individualistic premise
of the second group but reject its moralism in the name of science. Re
ligion, they believe, is an organized institution, another source of cor
ruption and co-optation. As for morality, it is only a set of norms devel
oped and reinforced by the corporate capitalist society to emasculate its
members and render them easy to manipulate by repressing their healthy
and natural desires and planting acute and paranoiac feelings of guilt and
anxiety. As morality itself is thus seen as a source of evil, moral self
transformation is naturally regarded as only another ingenious way of
trapping oneself into the social coil. The radicals of this persuasion there
fore urge the rejection of "repressive"conventional morality in favor of
the "value free" and non-ideological "truths" of psychoanalysis. Thus,
for example, they urge that instead of first feeling aggressive and then
curbing it in the name of morality, we should examine the very roots
of our aggression—which many of them take to be sexual in nature—and
try to become persons psychologically and even physiologically incapa
ble of harboring an aggressive impulse. No doubt, such a radical trans
formation of the species is a long drawn-out psychoanalytic process, but
in the end it is believed to represent the only hope.
How much a psychoanalytic program is to be carried out is a ques
tion on which opinion is divided. Some maintain that since a repressed
individual is hardly in a position to spot all his repressions or to know
«4 CROSS CURRENTS: WINTER 1971

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how to deal with them, a prolonged psychoanalytic treatment at expert
hands is indispensable. Some others, seeing in the political supremacy of
psychoanalysts a new and extremely dangerous despotism that would
even rule out disagreement by turning it into a disease, and feeling that
it is logically inconsistent to try to liberate an individual from conven
tional authority by making him dependent on a new authority, leave
it to each individual to achieve his own liberation. Some others reject
both the elitistic and the autarchic method of psychoanalysis and em
phasize the need for other sympathetic and similarly motivated individ
uals, and conjure up the vision of a society divided into thousands of small
and democratic groups whos members are engaged in exploring each oth
er's repressions.
But many radicals have felt that whether one rejects society or with
draws from it or transcends it as the first three approaches respectively
suggest, one's approach to the problem of social change remains basically
non-political, and therefore ultimately ineffective. The first group is
clearly co-opted by a society that has so familiarly turned its members into
objects of amusement and curiosity. The second and the third group meet
more or less the same fate, since psychoanalysis and moral change ulti
mately end up by "socializing" their members into the mores and ethos
of the prevailing society. And even if they did change individuals for the
better, these changes could hardly endure in an environment whose basic
ethos remains totally different. What is needed, argue the fourth group
of students, is to concentrate on society rather than on the individual,
and to aim at changing it fundamentally by revolutionary action.
The direction in which society is to be changed is fairly familiar and
is best summed up in the following representative quote.
We should replace power rooted in possession, privilege, or cir

cumstance by power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness,
reason and creativity. As a social system we seek the establishment
of a democracy of individual participation, governed by two cen
tral aims: that the individual share in those social decisions deter
mining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organ
ized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for
their common participation. . . .
The economic sphere would have as its basis the principles: that
work should involve incentives worthier than money or survival.
It should be educative, not stultifying; creative, not mechanical;
self-directed, not manipulated, encouraging independence, a respect
for others, a sense of dignity and a willingness to accept social re
sponsibility, since it is this experience that has crucial influence on
habits, perceptions and individual ethics;
that the economic experience is so personally decisive that the in
dividual must share in its full determination;
that the economy itself is of such social importance that its major
resources and means of production should be open to democratic
participation and subject to democratic social regulation.25
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The bureaucratic evils of the nationalized economy are clearly recog
nized, but they are countered by requiring that workers, not the state,
should democratically run the places of work. Indeed, communists are
criticized for giving socialism a bad name by nationalizing the economy
but not taking the next step of socializing the state itself.
Though all these four groups of students are generally described as
the New Left, the first two are clearly neither new nor left. The third
group is new but not left, as it is not interested in the large-scale re
structuring of society on socialist lines. Only the fourth group can prop
erly be described as the New Left, not only because it is logically odd
to describe a group as new left that has no left-wing ideas at all but also
for historical reasons. The term New Left came into vogue in Britain
during 1957 when several distinguished communists, prominent among
them John Saville and Edward Thompson, shocked and bewildered by
Khrushchev's revelations and the Russian invasion of Hungary, left the
communist party and began to explore new and non-communist ideo
logical and institutional forms through which the Left could work. Their
concerns were expressed in the newly launched New Reasoner. This ex
communist Left was later joined by the non-communist Left, that is, by
those members of the Labor party who, led by Raymond Williams and
others, were feeling uneasy about its reduction of socialism to "welfare
ism," and its almost total lack of interest in exploring authentic cultural
expressions of the socialist consciousness. Their main forum was the Uni
versities a7id Left Review. The merger of these two left-wing but non
communist groups, that were like-minded in some respects but by no
means in all, was reflected in the merger of their respective journals to
form The New Left Review. If the New Left Review was the ideological
forum of the New Left, the marches of the Campaign for Nuclear Dis
armament and the direct action of the Committee of 100 represented its
attempts to evolve a new style of political action that avoided both the
conspiratorial politics of the communists and the gradualistic "cretin
ism" and what Ralph Miliband called the "parliamentarism" of the
Laborites. Historically speaking, the New Left thus represented an at
tempt both to reject the Russian, and even the communist, proprietory
claim over Marxism (and the consequent ideological equation of com
munism and the Left that was so powerful a legacy of the thirties), and
to revise and enrich Marxist ideas in the light of the radical possibilities
opened up by the technological revolution. For historical and other rea
sons we should, therefore, restrict the term New Left only to a group
that is new qua left—that is innovative in sexual or cultural or any other
area—but still remains committed to the socialist reconstruction of society.
Though the ideals of the New Left are fairly similar to those of the
Old Left in many respects, they are several important differences, nearly
all of which spring from the personalism and moral individualism of the
New Left. The New Left rejects the Old Left dichotomy between per

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sonal and political morality and insists on integrating the two. As op
posed to the Old Left, which preached socialism but was not averse to
accumulating property or to dodging its dues to the party or its taxes to
the state, the New Left insists that the life of the revolutionary must be
transparent and all of one piece; he must practice in his own life the
ideals of socialist brotherhood that he preaches at the political level. Be
cause of this concern for personal integrity and sincerity, the New Left
rejects the tough-minded historicist morality of the Old Left. Remember
ing how the Old Left justified the worst crimes of Stalin in the name of
socialism, the New Left insists that a revolution that requires such crimes
and demands the suppression of tender personal emotions of compassion
and love in the name of political realism is not worthy to be called a
revolution. The fear of Stalinism, the nightmare of the Old Left, has
struck such deep roots in the minds of the New Left that many of them
tend to reject every moral theory that emphasizes impersonal values and
calls for the slightest subordination of the individual conscience. As a
Sorbonne inscription in May 1968 read, "A revolution that expects you
to sacrifice yourself for it is one of daddy's revolutions."
It is the central place the New Left assigns to the human person that
gives its politics an interesting and valuable dimension. As politics is
seen to be concerned with concrete persons—indeed, is seen to begin and
end with persons, it is argued that the sanctity of the moral individual
must be enshrined in the very heart of the political process. It should
become an experience that an individual finds fulfilling, not merely a
method to reach a goal. The New Left urges that fighting for a common
objective should itself become an experience of shared intimacy, of broth
erhood and friendship, of love and concern. In its view, the good society
is not something to be achieved only at the end of a struggle, but is to
be experienced and enjoyed in the very course of it. The Old Left's crude
and un-Marxian distinction between subordination and hierarchy now
and freedom and democracy later is rejected outright on the ground that
the party that begins by subordinating the individual is bound to end
up by strengthening his chains. The New Left wants the politics of per
sonal experience instead of the politics of institutional authority; of com
mitment instead of power; of joy instead of cynical seriousness; of par
ticipation instead of subordination.
The New Left radicals reject what they take to be the Old Left's at
titude to the proletariat.
As Gabriel and Daniel Cohn-Bendit put it, the communists, the Trot
skyists, the Maoists and the rest look upon the proletariat as a mass to
be exploited, to be manipulated, to be directed from above, with the re
sult that "democracy degenerates into the ratification at the bottom of
decisions taken at the top, and the class struggle is forgotten while the
leaders jockey for power within the political hierarchy."26 Radicals of
the New Left believe that far from having to teach the masses, the revo
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lutionary's job is to try to understand and express their common aspira
tions, to act as their "agent" and not as "leader," to act "with" and not
"for" them:27 "How can anyone represent anyone? All we can do is to
involve them To bring real politics into everyday life is to get rid
of the politicians."28 If a revolutionary movement is to succeed in creat
ing a genuine socialist democracy (instead of a bureaucratic authoritar
ianism, as in most communist countries) it must do no more than "sup
port, encourage and clarify" the "spontaneous" struggle of the working
class, and leave it alone to "evolve its own forms and structure,"29 un
encumbered by the usual chains of command.20 A genuinely revolution
ary movement needs neither "a vanguard or a rearguard," nor an "or
ganization with a capital O," but only a host of "insurrectionary cells."
The question, however, is whether the masses are willing to under
take a revolutionary struggle, and if there is any specific group among
them that could play a decisive revolutionary role. For the Old Left, the
working class was—and with some exceptions still is—the historical agency
of radical social change. The New Left takes a different view. C. Wright
Mills, one of its patron saints, fired the first shot less than a decade ago:
. . . what I do not quite understand about some new-left writers is

why they cling so mightily to "the working class" of the advanced
capitalist societies as the historic agency, or even as the most im
portant agency, in the face of the really impressive historical evi
dence that now stands against this expectation.
Such a labor metaphysic, I think, is a legacy from Victorian Marx
ism that is now quite unrealistic.31
Who is it that is getting disgusted with what Marx called "all the
old crap?" Who is it that is thinking and acting in radical ways?
All over the world—in the bloc, outside the bloc and in between—
the answer is the same: it is the young intelligentsia.32
Though Mills pinned his hopes on the intellectuals, he did not write
off the working class completely. Some student radicals go beyond Mills
and contemptuously dismiss workers as too apathetic and bourgeoisified
to be interested in the supra-economic problems of individual freedom
and dignity. Others continue to feel that its support is crucial, though
they are not agreed as to how crucial it is and at what stage. In either
case, the problem is what new class or group is to take its place.
Some students believe that as they have little stake in the society, and
as the continuance of the society ultimately depends on their skill and
expertise, they can by themselves precipitate and execute a revolution.
But they are clearly a tiny minority. Others believe they can constantly
provoke, and thereby expose, the repressive nature of the bourgeois so
ciety and eventually create a revolutionary consciousness among the work
ing class. Some others feel that they can make a political impact only by
joining hands with intellectuals, academics, journalists and other leaders
of public opinion. There are others who believe that intellectuals can
at best play an auxiliary role and can never really become the vehicle

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of revolutionary change. They therefore turn to the new technocratic
class, and/or to the poor, the unemployed, the Blacks, outcasts, and/ot
to the Third World, whose members, they believe, can overthrow for
eign economic domination and provoke grave crises in the metropolitan
economies. Marcuse, for example, looks for groups whose "opposition is
revolutionary even if their consciousness is not,"33 and finds them in the
outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races
and other colours, the unemployed and the unemployable. They
exist outside the democratic process; their life is the most immedi
ate and the most real need for ending intolerable conditions and
institutions. Their opposition hits the system from without and is
therefore not deflected by the system; it is an elementary force
which violates the rules of the game, and, in doing so, reveals it
as a rigged game.
Later he modified his view and included students and excluded the
Third World. Still later, he added technocrats and intellectuals to the
list.84
To sum up our examination of the theoretical assumptions of the con

temporary student movement, it is made up of different groups with dif
ferent ideologies. Though the pathetic escapists, the admirable but in
effective moralists, and the misguided adherents of psychoanalysis have
been quite vocal and noisy, it is the politically motivated radicals who
have launched and carried through the movement as we know it today,
and who are therefore the historical heirs of the radical student tradi
tion. As we observed earlier, two of their various beliefs—that society
and university are integrally connected, and that students have an i
replaceable revolutionary role to play—are historically unique, and make
their struggle a student movement proper. It is a student movement be
cause it is initiated by students as a separate group independently of the
support of any other group. And it is a movement because, given its po
litico-academic objectives, its protests can no longer be sporadic and oc
casional but have to become an integral part of a larger strategy, an
have to go on in a planned and systematic way until its political obje
tives are realized. Its other beliefs remain an uneasy mixture of those
held by its predecessors in the first and the second phase: its uncompro
mising moral earnestness; its commitment to participatory democracy;
its populism; its thoroughgoing suspicion of the institution and indeed
of everything impersonal; its emphasis on continual and committed per
sonal action; its total Cartesian distrust of all authority; and its deep
rooted feeling that experience, long extolled as the mother of wisdom and
maturity, is really only a school of cynicism.
II
As was only to be expected, the novel critique of the university and

society considered earlier was first developed in America. In a society
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where nineteenth century free enterprise has been superseded by cor
porate capitalism, there is hardly an area of life that has escaped the
deadening clutches of this change. The entire society is almost in a Hob
besian state of war, and every group is determined to get its way. As in
a war, a group has a chance of success only if it is capable of determined
and ruthless action, and therefore only if it is prepared to concentrate
authority in one or few hands who give and enforce orders through a
clearly established hierarchical arrangement. An isolated individual has
simply no chance of success in this tense battle of corporate giants. His
only hope is to organize and get incorporated into a larger body. And
such a body has a chance of survival only if it is prepared to jettison the
luxury of debate and democracy in the conduct of its affairs. Inevitably
social life is seen as a war of all against all and every major social insti
tution comes to be organized like an army. The militarist foreign pol
icy of America is simply an extension and a spill-over of the militarism
inherent in every aspect of her life. Indeed the individual consciousness
in America is so permeated by the idea of war of each against each that
it is difficult for an individual to consider another person except as an
ally or an enemy.
In this situation the university has no choice but to become an aca
demic corporation. It has to fight with other universities for students, for
teachers, for resources, for prestige. It must therefore organize itself rigid
ly and bureaucratically, as otherwise it loses in the educational race, or
gets a bad image as a body that is inefficient and incapable of keeping
its house in good order. This means, for example, that it must insist on
the utmost secrecy in the conduct of its affairs, lest its rivals should steal
its plans and tap its resources. It means, further, that as it is competing
for scarce resources, it must avoid displeasing its actual or possible bene
factors, and must therefore generally accept their pressures without de
mur. It means, again, that the education it offers tends to be geared to
serving the technological needs of the society, to producing technical
manpower. While it feels it should as an academic institution impart
habits of criticism to its students, it does not want to make them too
critical, and accepts the obligation to instil in them a sense of loyalty to
the American way of life—that is, to the corporate capitalist semi-de
mocracy. The result is an academic corporation that produces knowledge
in a way that a factory produces goods—by dividing labor and by con
fining each laborer to a small and specialized piece of work—and that
has no sense of mission, little commitment to academic values, and lit
tle courage to resist and fight degrading pressures.
This trend, which exists in every industrialized society, is further re
inforced in America by her unique historical tradition. Unlike European
universities that were founded either by an autonomous group of schol
ars or by the government, American universities have generally been
founded and funded by local communities, largely with the initiative

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and assistance of businessmen. This has led them to believe that they
exist only to serve the surrounding community by introducing courses
and undertaking research that the community needs or presses for. The
result is an academic menu that is simply amazing in its inclusion of fad
dish, dubious and even ridiculous subjects. As the university believes
that it exists to serve society, and therefore to defend it, it has tended to
accept its values almost uncritically. This highly restrictive academic self
image, and the questionable notion of social service that it has gener
ated, have meant that the university has often willingly allowed itself
to be chartered in the defense of the status quo. The radical critique of
the American university is therefore substantially correct.
When this critique, however, is applied to European universities whose
traditions are different, it needs to be modified in many important re
spects. European universities have always insisted on and enjoyed rela
tive detachment and isolation from the larger community. If anything,
they have gone to the opposite extreme of emphasizing their unsocial, in
deed monastic, character. Further, unlike their American counterparts,
European universities traditionally have received protection from the
government against local pressures. Historically speaking the monarch
needed their support badly in his fight against feudal lords or papal
pressure, so much so that scholars had only to threaten to leave the
country and he came begging them to stay. Over the course of cen
turies the tradition not only of governmental non-interference but also
of governmental protection against local pressure began to crystallize.
When later the government was itself democratized and its role was de
fined on the basis of the minimalist theory of government as in Britain,
the tradition of university autonomy and independence received added
support. In France and Germany, where a different conception of the
relationship between the government and university prevailed, the univer
sity did remain formally subject to the powerful state control, but as the
government needed and valued the support of universities, it general
ly left them alone. The peculiar history of the European universities has
meant that they generally feel confident, in a way their American
counterparts do not, that they will not be pressurized by local
groups, and that if they are, they can always draw on the good sense
of the wider community and even of the government to support and de
fend them. The radical critique of the university therefore is not entire
ly applicable to the universities in Europe, particularly in Britain.
Not only European universities but also European societies differ sig
nificantly from their American counterpart. Historically speaking, the
bourgeoisie in Europe never quite succeeded in eliminating the older
aristocratic class and its values, so that the aristocratic tradition still re
mains powerful. In some cases the aristocracy incorporated the bour
geoisie and imbued them with its own values of honor, public service,
personal independence, and a tender if patronizing concern for the peo
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pie. In some other cases, again, the members of the aristocracy refused
to absorb or be absorbed by the bourgeoisie, and remained contemptuous
of bourgeois civilization. All this has had interesting and largely benefi
cial consequences. The European bourgeoisie have acquired attitudes and
characteristics that are significantly different from those of their Amer
ican counterpart, though whether these differences will remain for long
under the pressure of the increasing American domination of Europe
remains a controversial question. It is remarkable how European aris
tocracy, and even the European bourgeoisie, admire American efficiency,
but remain contemptuous of her cultural and social institutions. Though
America is seen as an example to emulate in some cases, particularly in
the business side of life, she is also seen as an example of what to avoid,
mainly in cultural, moral and political matters. Radical students have
therefore evoked an ambivalent attitude in the European establishment.
They have been seen, on the one hand, as fighting the American trend
of commercializing and bureaucratizing the university and society, and
have therefore been welcomed. But the very fact that they should fight
at all, and show discourtesy to their elders by coming out on the streets,
has itself been seen as an American trend that needs to be resisted. To
put it differently: while their fundamental concerns are generally ad
mired, their ways of expressing and realizing them are generally co
demned.
This has meant that radical students in Europe have been supported
by some sections of the wider community in a way that would be un
imaginable in America. They enjoy a protection and dignity they do not
have in America. As there is already available a long and cherished rev
olutionary tradition, the radical rhetoric and action are more easily com
prehended. As a result a dialogue is possible in Europe in a way it is not
in America, where even after nearly ten years of constant radical agita
tion there is still almost a total incomprehension of the intents and pur
poses, and even of the language, of the radical movement. While radical
ism is acknowledged in Europe as an integral part of her historical iden
tity so that its rejection is seen as a rejection of a part of her very be
ing, in America it is still an exotic creed that has to struggle not only
to realize its objectives but also to secure recognition of its very existence
and identity. Inevitably, therefore, American radicalism has tended to
become impatient, arrogant, self-righteous, aggressive and almost religious
in its zeal and dedication, while its European counterpart is generally re
laxed, good-humored,35 moderate and essentially political.
The point I am making is that the radical critique of the university
and society developed in America cannot be universalized and mechani
cally transplanted to the European scene where it has only a limited ap
plication. It is worth noting that where it was suitably modified to take
account of the peculiar academic and political traditions and experiences
of the society in question, as was done by the French students in May,

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1968, it evoked a great deal of general sympathy. Where, on the other
hand, it has simply been repeated without any appreciation of its irrel
evance, as in Britain, it has not been very successful. When radicals talk
of the university's unholy alliance with business, or of its conspiratorial
silence on the government's adventurist foreign policy, many students and
ordinary citizens in Britain, and even in Europe, are simply puzzled.
They cannot see what the precise complaint is; though there are big cor
porations, the economy remains largely fragmented. Apart from the re
cent case of the university of Warwick in England there is no real evi
dence of big business domination. And the universities have been vocal
every time the government has blundered into a stupid foreign policy de
cision. When, on the other hand, radicals attack the class-basis of British
education, or the vast inequality in the status and prestige of different
universities, or the absence of an educationally innovative spirit, and
when they attack the wider society for its economic inequality, for its
narrow nationalism, for its habits of deference, and for its atomistic
petty-bourgeois social consciousness, they are generally accepted as mak
ing points that have direct relevance.
As for the radical critique of the society as a whole, while I sympathize
with it, it must be admitted that in many respects it is simpliste and,
paradoxically, conservative. Much of the radical attack has been directed
at technology as the chief source of all that is wrong with the contem
porary society. There is little attempt to inquire how it has come to ac
quire this dominance, and if its evils are inherent in it or whether they
spring, as seems more correct, largely from the uses to which it has been
put in the corporate-capitalist structure. Even Marcuse concentrates al
most exclusively on technology, and indeed at several points36 he argues
that the bourgeoisie are as much controlled by its imperatives as the pro
letariat, in which case there is no one to blame except the poor machine!
Not only does this lead to the revival of the ideology of the Luddites, but
it also makes the language of exploitation and manipulation utterly in
appropriate, since machines—natural and social—can neither exploit nor
manipulate. Marcuse and many others in the New Left are seriously con
fused about what precisely their target is and how it is to be attacked.
Sometimes it is technology or administration that is blamed. Sometimes
it is domination, the surplus repression of natural desires, that is singled
out for attack. And sometimes it is exploitation by the bourgeoisie.37
Each view raises different philosophical and political problems. How
ever, since the theory of technological determinism is widely accepted by
the radicals in the New Left, we shall concentrate on it.
Now if human consciousness is as rigorously determined by society as
this theory makes out, Marcuse and his radical followers are an inexplica
ble phenomenon; if individual consciousness is so thoroughly condi
tioned, how could they themselves escape the conditioning? And in the
absence of any clear interpersonal criteria, how are we to know that
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they have really escaped it? Indeed, the statement that man is thorough
ly conditioned is like the "liar's paradox," since if it was true the in
dividual concerned would have no means of knowing that he is condi
tioned. In order to know that one is conditioned, one must know what
it is not to be conditioned, and that means that one is not completely con
ditioned. Apart from its logical untenability, Marcuse's view that mod
ern society is an administered society and that its members are condi
tioned and manipulated is empirically not entirely correct. There is, for
example, evidence to show that advertising, which Marcuse dislikes so
much and which he would like to see banned if only to "plunge the in
dividual into a traumatic void where he would have the chance to won
der and to think, to know himself and his society,"38 often leads the con
sumer to avoid the advertised product. A recent survey showed that seven
out of ten people were "not even aware of having seen the advertising
at all."39 Instead of coordinating the human psyche, advertising is often
a waste, and that is the ground on which it should be attacked. Again
attempts to manipulate the unconscious symbolisms of the individual
psyche often backfire. The Detroit car industry lost millions by acting
on the advice of the motivational researchers that cars had to be phallic
monsters with huge tail-fins. People preferred instead to buy small cars.40
Again, Britain has no major socialist newspaper and yet the Labor party
has been elected to power several times. People are not as naive as Mar
cuse naively imagines them, and can see through things far more than
he gives them credit for.
Besides, even if it is admitted for the sake of argument that some like
Marcuse are able to escape social conditioning, we would still have to
reject his contrast between "false" and "manipulated" consciousness on
the one hand and "pure" and "autonomous" consciousness on the other
as too sharp. He does not provide criteria by which to distinguish one
from the other. To say that in one case an individual makes up his own
mind or determines his own needs by withdrawing into an "inner pri
vate space," and that in the other case his mind is made up for him by
manipulative society does not take us very far, since the distinction ul
timately is very much like Mill's41 distinction between the self-regarding
and the other-regarding action and is open to the same objections. To
put the point in Marcusean language, it ultimately rests on a non-dia
lectical contrast between the self and the other. Marcuse's problem is
the same as that of Mill (and indeed of every elitist moral thinker) :
they cannot help us decide who an elite, truly liberated man is, except
with the criteria the elite itself provides; therefore the argument is cir
cular and has to be rejected.
Marcuse's basic weakness is that he is not rigorously dialectical in the
way that Marx was, and constantly conjures up the nightmare of a closed
society or university, or a closed world of academic scholarship, from
where, like the famous fly in the fly bottle, he cannot see his way out.

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Thus, for example, he does not see that advertising ultimately reaches a
saturation point and begins to generate a desire for a simple and straight
forward statement of the worth and value of a product. Similarly he does
not see at the theoretical level that behavioralism in the social sciences
begins to raise problems whose solution requires its practitioners to go
beyond it, as the recent trend in behavioralism itself shows, or that lin
guistic philosophers find themselves forced to raise questions about the
nature of language itself (and even about the form of life of its practi
tioners), as the remarks of Wittgenstein and the works of Winch and
Hampshire show. Marcuse fails to see that beliefs and ideals do not de
scend from heaven but grow out of one another, and that the only way
a better method of practicing a discipline can be evolved is not by re
jecting it outright, or by confronting it with an allegedly better Utopian
alternative, but by criticizing it, showing where it goes wrong, pointing
out relevant and meaningful questions it is unable to answer, and show
ing by example that a better method of answering them is possible. While
Marcuse's criticisms of some of the academic disciplines are well taken,
his suggestions to remedy their shortcomings are utterly inadequate.42
The failure to grasp the dialectic has unfortunate consequences at the
political level as well. The trouble with a "totalist" view of society is that
it calls for a "totalist" response. If a society is totally vicious, and if its
members are totally corrupted, we need a total transformation. This
means not only that society has to be changed from outside by totally
new men, but also that nothing in it can be valuable and worth preserv
ing. As a total war is declared on the habits, beliefs and practices of its
members, the possibility of a dialogue between the revolutionary and
his constituents is necessarily foreclosed. Each speaks a language the other
does not understand. As the revolutionary is aiming at a totally new life
with totally different interests and sensitivities, he brushes aside the cur
rent preoccupations of the 'foolish masses' as trivial and irrational. He
makes no attempt to argue with them, or to understand life and society
as they see it, or to identify the real sources of their frustration and un
happiness, or gradually to persuade them of a vision of life that ensures
much that they value and more beside, or to show them in the course of
struggle how a successful fight can be waged for a better society. He sim
ply bamboozles and even blackmails them into accepting a vision whose
relevance to their interests and anxieties they cannot see, and indeed
which starts by attacking or ignoring the very things they value most—se
curity, comfort, privacy. Morally, the revolutionary's attitude is utterly
unjustified, treating the masses as objects of manipulation, the very vice
of which he accuses the present society. Politically, it creates an unbridge
able chasm between the radical and his constituents. Marcuse and many
in the New Left lack some of the basic moral and political sensitivity of
a revolutionary—something Marx considered crucial—and their social
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analysis, lacking a dialectical dimension, has so far failed to evolve a
well-considered and realistic theory of political education and change.
There is a further difficulty. If the majority is stupid and corrupt (as
Marcuse argues in language that could have been borrowed from that
greatest of anti-democratic thinkers, Plato), it can only be driven by a
determined and ruthless elite. No doubt, this is to be done in the in
terest of the majority itself, and in order eventually to create a new man.
But this is a dangerous and slippery road. While it is true that Marcuse
can show that his ideals are worth pursuing and that they are realizable
in practice, their realization depends exclusively on the action of a small
minority which, because it cannot count on popular support, must ulti
mately rely on terroristic violence. As the corrupt majority, on Marcuse's
own account, would throw its weight on the side of the status quo, the
amount of violence required is clearly enormous. Apart from the inevita
ble danger that in the bloodshed that followed ideals would become less
important and attractive even to their present adherents, Marcuse's anal
ysis ultimately amounts to a counsel of despair, since the violence of a
few, as Marcuse himself recognizes, has no chance of success against the
ruthless and heavily armed guardians of the status quo. The tragedy of
his revolutionary rhetoric is that it ends up in a quietist despondence o!
a "great refusal." A hope that is given to us "only for the sake of those
without hope" is no different from bleak despair.43
What is more, according to Marcuse's own analysis, violence is incapa
ble of making any impact. Violence can yield results when it is directed
against an identifiable opponent who is responsible for the iniquities
against which one is complaining. This is what has happened in all past
revolutions and this is how, historically, revolutionaries have used and
justified violence. The French revolutionaries were fighting Louis XVI,
just as the Bolsheviks were fighting the Czar. Now if the contemporary
society is essentially impersonal and bureaucratic, there is no single indi
vidual or group who runs it and who can be singled out for attack. It is
therefore not clear against whom violence is to be directed, and how
threatening a judge or killing a policeman or splashing paint on the
president's car or threatening a university professor is going to redeem
us from the clutches of corporate liberalism. Marcuse does not realize that
he is trying to graft the classical theory of revolutionary violence on an
analysis of society that is anything but classical in its attempt to lay the
blame for the evils of the society at the doors of impersonal forces like
technology or sexual repression that, alas, do not understand the lan
guage either of reason or of violence. What he needs is a theory of vio
lence that matches his theory of society, and this he does not have.
The radicals of the New Left are also confused in their analysis of who
is to be the historic agent of social transformation. As the entire society
is corrupt, the agents of change would have to be new men, men with new
sensibility and awareness and with a new physiological make-up and new

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organic impulses.44 But such men by definition do not exist. As we ob
served earlier, Marcuse finds a way out of this impasse by suggesting that
we should look for those groups that are totally outside the society and
that can therefore hit it hard without being deflected.
Apart from the fact that many of these groups—for example, the Third
World and the outcasts—are too diffused to be capable of organized ac
tion, they have very little in common. Each has different problems, and
makes demands on the system that are not always compatible with those
made by others. The poor hope for economic security and comfort, while
the technocrats aim at a rational society governed by experts; neither is
motivated by the revolutionary ideals that interest Marcuse. Marcuse's
view that the opposition of the poor and the outcasts is revolutionary
because it hits the system from outside, and cannot therefore be deflected
by it is clearly untenable. The increasingly bourgeois attitude of the
working class and the rise of the black bourgeoisie show just the op
posite. In any case, it is a mistake to suggest that only the outsiders can
really change a society. As Marx had argued, only that group is ultimately
capable of changing the society that has both revolutionary consciousness
and revolutionary power, that is both everything and nothing in the so
ciety, that is indispensable to the system and therefore capable of paralyz
ing it, and is yet treated degradingly as an object of exploitation. The
system therefore can be subverted only from within by those who know
it intimately and who have both the power and the willingness to do so.
One sometimes gets a feeling reading Marcuse that he is concerned not
so much with a better and more human life for the poor and the miser
able as with using them as a vehicle for the realization of his "disinterest
ed" vision, as the carrier of his moral burden.
It is the totalistic conception of society, and the monistic theory of
social causation it entails, that misleads the radical students into a false
view of the university. Believing that if one institution is corrupt, another
must be corrupt too, and that if a particular principle is applicable to
one institution, it must be equally applicable to other institutions as well,
they tend to assimilate all institutions to a single model. Thus, for ex
ample, since participation is rightly considered a value in the political
society, it is indiscriminately extended to the factory, the university, the
school and the family. Now while it is true that participation does have
a valuable place in each of these institutions, it cannot take the same
form or be secured in the same degree, as each institution has a different
logic and their purposes cannot all be realized in the same way. Thus,
for example, the university is not like a polity in that its two basic con
stituents—students and faculty—are not fully equal in all relevant re
spects in a way that all citizens are in the state. Therefore, while it is
vital to give one man one vote in a political society, this cannot be the
constitutive principle of the university, where some account will have to
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be taken of the need for direction, discipline and guidance if the student
is to benefit from his education.
It is this failure to perceive the individuality of institutions that leads
radical students to exaggerate the linkage between the university and
society. They fail to realize that although every institution is ultimately
conditioned and limited by the wider society, it has also its own inde
pendent character. Indeed, if this were not so, it would be impossible to
explain social change. Whether or not pluralism is a tenable moral and
political theory, its basic insight that society consists of a number of dif
ferent institutions, each of which has a different tradition and ethos and
generates a different pattern of behavior, is basically correct. The history
of a social institution is not always closely tied to the history of the wider
society. Thus, even when the larger society did not enjoy the freedom of
speech, the university did (as in imperial Germany) ; and, conversely, the
academic did not enjoy much freedom of speech even when the larger
society did (as in America for a time in the nineteenth century). Or,
again, even when society as a whole was degenerate, the church and the
university managed to preserve their high standards of moral and per
sonal integrity. Even today it has not been impossible for the university
to resist outside pressure and introduce several significant changes on its
own. It can and does, for example, expose its students to radical ideologies
and educates them to be critical and reflective, qualities that are not
highly prized in the society at large. Again, it can and does abolish exam
inations and grades, admit its students on the highest decision-making
bodies in the university, and allow educational experiments. Marcuse him
self recently remarked that he regarded the university as an oasis of
independent and autonomous thinking in the otherwise corrupt and
conditioned society.
If this is so, it would seem to follow that the university, like the church
and every other major social institution, enjoys a large degree of im
munity from the evils of the larger society. No doubt, the general social
structure imposes serious limits on what it can do, but within these
limits it can do a great deal. And these limits are often capable of being
pushed further if only the university has the courage and skill to do so.
The pressures that are exerted on it are generally diffused and informal
and lack physical sanction, and can therefore be skilfully circumvented,
resisted, and even brought into the open and exposed. It is, of course,
true that students had to fight hard for the meager reforms that they have
so far secured. But they have been able to achieve even this much only
because they localized their fight, isolated the issues, identified their tar
gets, and persuaded other sections of the academic community, mainly
the faculty, that their cause deserved support.
It is not, therefore, entirely correct to say that society must first be
radically changed before the quality of university education can be im
proved. The belief in the monistic theory of social causation prevents

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some radicals from recognizing the relative autonomy of every social
institution, and from realizing that not all institutions must be changed
at once in order to effect changes in any one of them. A society as a whole
is often changed by singling out specific institutions and continually
pushing for significant changes in them as far as the general social struc
ture permits. These changes produce further changes in other institu
tions, and cumulatively bring about a significant transformation in the
society as a whole. There is an interdependence between the social struc
ture as a whole and its specific institutions, and if conservative social
theory makes the mistake of concentrating on making changes only in
the latter, radicals often make the opposite mistake of insisting on revolu
tionary changes in the entire social structure and dismissing the real
possibility of making significant gains in individual institutions.
When society is seen as a technological Juggernaut, a huge and im
personal machine, there is a strong temptation to emphasize an anarcho
romantic conception of life. There is a powerful romantic streak in Mar
cuse that is most clearly reflected in his conception of a new man with a
totally different psychological and even physiological make-up than he
has today. But since he regards Utopian thinking as an integral part oi
rationality, his romanticism is deliberate and self-conscious and, with
some exceptions, is not allowed to vitiate and distort his political radical
ism. This is not however true of many others on the New Left who con
stantly contrast the soul-less machine with instinctive and authentic per
sonal life. The real battle in their view is between machine and man,
between rationality and instinct, between depersonalization and personal
assertion, between death and life. The basic difficulty with this formula
tion of the problem is that the crucial question of changing the society
is eclipsed by an abstract and almost metaphysical question of changing
man and the human condition as a whole. Once such a large question is
posed, we have no guide-lines and no longer have a sense of priority, since
how are we to know what precisely the new man is like, whether or not
we are making any progress in creating him, or how we are to go about
our task? A political problem is always a specific problem of changing a
specific society by specific men in a specific direction, and it therefore
presupposes reasonably specific objectives that can provide criteria with
whose help priorities can be determined, the path to the goal clearly
charted, and the value of specific steps assessed. When goals and objec
tives are replaced by an Utopian vision, politics disappears, and while
the individuals inspired by the vision may succeed in firing some people's
imagination, the prosaic task of changing the social structure with all its
intricate details is left undone. Thus, fired by the vision of freedom and
spontaneity, many in the New Left have become so contemptuous of or
ganization and frightened of bureaucracy that they are not willing to co
ordinate their energies in a durable and effective way, with the result that
their isolated and spontaneous outbursts of action produce no more than
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a feeble ripple on the placid and deep waters of society. The social struc
ture remains intact and indeed comes to harness the creative energies oi
the radicals for its own purposes. We have only to consider the simple
issue of environmental pollution. Since everyone likes to live (at any
rate, he likes to believe that he likes to live), a creative and unmechan
ized life, the large corporation as well as the government join with the
radicals in fighting the common enemy, the machine, and the way it
fouls our environment and depersonalizes our lives. By ingeniously shift
ing the target of attack and making common cause with the radicals, they
have brilliantly warded off attacks against the fundamental fact of capital
ist exploitation.
We saw earlier how the theory of technological determinism has led
many radicals to posit the ideal of romantic personalism. Feeling that
the impersonal social machine reduces men to human automata and
threatens their subjectivity and interiority, they have emphasized the need
to be oneself, to preserve and assert one's unique and unassimilable iden
tity. Now, of course, there is nothing unfamiliar or eccentric in the de
sire to be "truly oneself." Expressions like "be yourself," "know thyself,"
go at least as far back as Socrates. But what distinguishes many of the
radicals is the way they understand the self. For Socrates, the self to be
realized was the authentic voice of the polis; for Augustine, it was the
image of God; for Mill it was the idea of moral perfection; for Hegel, it
was an expression of the Absolute Mind and, at a different level, of the ob
jective mind; and for Marx, the individual was ultimately a species-being.
In each case the self was rooted in something outside and larger than it
self, whether it was the community, the species, the cosmos or God; and
it was this larger principle that molded and shaped the natural and raw
individual self.
Many of today's students, however, take their own subjectivity as the

sole point of reference, the sole measure of all institutions and principles.
Unable to transcend the naturalistic liberalism that they criticize so
much, they equate the self with the natural self, and take individuality
to mean being one's own natural self, feeling one's own feelings, think
ing one's own thoughts, valuing one's own values. This bastardized ver
sion of the existentialist concept of authenticity leads them to reject
everything they personally do not like or value. It leads them, further,
to condemn anyone who conforms to conventional values as "straight,"
insincere, hypocritical, lacking individuality, as so many units of social
deadweight; in a word, as unreal, as a non-person.
In educational terms this means that a student has tended to develop
an attitude that he should learn only what he likes and is interested in,
otherwise he is not really developing his individuality; and that unless
he is able to say something, however stupid, in a seminar or a discussion
he feels he is not really being free. He demands, rightly, that the courses
he studies should be relevant. But sometimes he understands the notion of

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relevance simply as what interests him or what is of immediate value to
whatever he happens to be doing at a given moment. But relevance is a
very tricky concept. Nothing can be relevant in itself, since relevance is
not the property of an object but a relationship, and requires that the
object in question be seen in the context of something outside itself. X
can be described as relevant or otherwise only in relation to Y and Z.
And, further, it may be relevant in relation to Y or Ζ but not in relation
to Ρ or L. When we therefore inquire whether a particular university
course is relevant, we have first to inquire into the larger purposes of
university education and then ask if it serves them. The only relevance
that we can properly talk about in a university context is academic rele
vance. Since we cannot undertake here the wider inquiry into the pur
poses of university education, we can minimally agree that the criteria by
which we should judge the relevance of university courses is whether they
expand the educand's self-consciousness, whether they enable him to
understand himself and his environment, whether they enable him to
think better. To be educated is to be initiated into the human heritage,
to learn to appropriate and assimilate the human world, to expand
oneself until, ideally, nothing human remains alien to oneself.
In the subjectivist view of education that inspires some radical stu
dents, the opposite happens. The educand, with his narrow partialities
and uncultivated urges, becomes the center of the entire educational
process, and the total human heritage comes to be judged almost solely
by the demands of his raw nature. In an important sense, this is an atti
tude of profound egoism that takes one's subjectivity as the measure of
everything, and refuses to admit the claims of anything external and ob
jective. It leads to the demand that the university must center around
the passing interests and fleeting and illiterate inclinations of the stu
dent, and should ultimately become an object to be consumed by the
student as his taste dictates. In this view that rests on uninhibited peda
gogical self-indulgence, on the cult of the sovereignty of the academic
consumer, on what Paul Goodman calls the ethos of "voluntary igno
rance," the student remains within the confines of his "natural" and nar
row interests and partialities, and never acquires a vantage point from
which to perceive new academic vistas that others are anxious to show
him if only he has the humility to trust and follow.
The romantic and subjectivist element in the radical movement finds
an expression not only in its academic theory but also in its theory of
political participation and gives it a curious twist. The attack on repre
sentative government is not new and goes at least as far back as Rousseau,
who dismissed it as a periodically elected slavery. Marx, too, had dis
missed it as a bourgeois device to keep the people apathetic by depriving
them of real power and involvement. He was impressed by the Paris
Commune of 1870 and was inclined to regard it as a political model for
the organization of the future classless society. Lenin had aspired to or
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ganize Russia as a soviet union, a union of self-governing soviets. When
he later abandoned the ideal and converted the soviets into the regi
mented organs of the communist party, he came under heavy criticisms
from loyal Marxists like Rosa Luxemburg, who in a brilliant pamphlet
entitled Leninism Versus Marxism contrasted Leninist control from
above with the Marxist ideal of participatory democracy. Modern
dent radicals like Cohn-Bendit, Dutschke, Mark Rudd, Mario Savio and
Tariq Ali are thus carrying on the old and familiar battle against libe
and communist centralists.
It is disappointing, however, to see that their discussion of participa

tion does not advance beyond where Marx and Rosa Luxemburg left
off. There is very little awareness of the recent literature that shows tha
as ordinary citizens tend to be apathetic, a participatory democracy often
ends up in a control by a small oligarchy, whether of Right or Left. Again
there is little awareness of the fact that in many cases ordinary citizen
tend to be far more conservative and even reactionary than their leaders
in political, economic, social, cultural, racial and other matters. It is not
unimaginable, for example, that a fully participatory democracy in Amer
ica might subject the Blacks to still harsher iniquities, or that in Britain
it might lead to a more difficult life for the "coloured." On Marcuse's
own analysis, the masses would only want the continuation of the statu
quo. This means that radical social and economic objectives are not
necessarily achieved by a participatory democracy, and that highly valua
ble as it is, participation is not the only or even the highest value, a
any rate at present, and needs to be balanced against others.
Indeed, there are some respects in which the radical students' concep
tion of participation represents a retrograde step from the traditional
Marxist analysis. Unlike Marx, they see participation as the only worth
while activity. It makes no sense to say, as one FSM leader declared, tha
the moment another person acts on my behalf I have ceased to be free.
It is one thing to say that everyone should be interested in the affairs of
the state; but it is a totally different thing to say that he is morally defe
tive or depraved if he is not. As long as there are no crucial issues of prin
ciple involved, one may prefer not to waste one's limited time and energy
in endless and trivial debate. While liberal political theory makes th
mistake of ignoring the political responsibility of the citizen, radical the
ory makes the opposite mistake of suggesting that man is nothing but a
political being. It has grasped the value of politics, but not its limits.
In some radical circles in America the idea of participation is anchored
in a nervous romanticism that cannot brook anything objective and im
personal or that creates a space between and separates one individua
from another. As we noticed earlier, there is a deep suspicion and distrust
of institutions, and nothing is ever allowed to establish and institution
alize itself for fear that it would create a bureaucracy or a tradition and
thereby destroy one's subjectivity or freedom. There is an intense desire

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to be deeply and profoundly involved with the being of another, to be a
part of him, to destroy the mediating influence of rules and even of the
physical body, as some of the remarks of Norman Brown suggest. The sus
picion of the institution has a further consequence. Lacking the reas
surance that one's works and achievements would be preserved, or that
one could depend on others to carry on one's task within an institutional
framework, and lacking further the inspiring and restraining power of
institutions, an individual comes to believe that he carries on his shoul
ders the burden of all humanity. In the state of acute anxiety and loneli
ness that this attitude produces, he comes to seek the reassurance and
proof of his morality and authenticity in political action. Nervous and
febrile political acts come to replace genuine and sustained political ac
tion, and political participation comes to be inspired not by the indi
vidual's recognition of his public responsibility but by his need to as
suage his conscience that he is "living and dying," every moment of his
existence, for other people. Since participation implies sharing a public
world and cooperating with others for a commonly agreed objective in
an atmosphere of trust within the framework of an institution, such an
individual paradoxically does not really participate in political life but
only uses it to fill his inner loneliness.
It is this subjectivist conception of participation that has led many
radicals to be contemptuous of bureaucracy. It is obvious that bureauc
racy has several drawbacks. It insists on rules and routine and destroys
novelty and creativity. It imposes uniformity and frustrates individuality
and uniqueness. It tends to siphon off power from the people to the few
at the top. It tends to appropriate the right to deal with the larger issues
of the organization by confining its impoverished members to their nar
row and limited tasks. However, bureaucracy has advantages which it
would be wrong to deny. It saves time and energy and allows experience
and expertize to accumulate. As a body concerned to apply rules, it guar
antees objectivity and generality, and avoids the oppressive intimacy of
close interpersonal dependence. There are areas of life where on balance
the inconvenience of rigidly applied rules is preferable to the contingent
and unpredictable outcome of the tenuous "love" of one's fellow men. In
any case, the dangers of bureaucracy can be eliminated or reduced—for
example, by making it accountable, by getting individual members to
take a greater interest in the affairs of their organization, and by greater
devolution of power. Except on the belief that an individual is not free
unless he decides and executes everything himself, there is no reason why
bureaucracy cannot be chartered in the service of democracy and why it
should be seen as an alternative to participation. Indeed, by attending to
the routine matters of the organization it releases its members for a
greater degree of participation.
Our general assessment of the political theory of the radical students is
that their targets are too muddled, and need to be made clearer; their
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constituency is too narrow and needs to be broadened. Their methods oi
action are too extreme and simpliste and need to be replaced by a more
broad-based theory of political change and education. Their approach to
people, for whose well-being their concern is undoubtedly genuine, is far
too angry and arrogant, and they need to develop sympathy and humility.
Their analysis of the social structure is too restrictive and needs to show
a greater appreciation of the plurality and complexity of the modern
liberal society. Finally, while their emphasis on personal commitment and
integrity is a welcome contrast to the old-style radicals, who more or less
neatly divided their personal life and their political values, their moral
purism exposes them to the opposite danger of losing sight of political
values and virtues altogether. In a sentence, the New Left needs to go
back to Marx to regain a sense of direction that it is in danger of losing.
FOOTNOTES
1. I am most grateful to professors Jean-Louis DeLinnoy, Martin

Stockholder for helping me to formulate many of the ideas discussed in
to Prof. A. H. Birch who kindly commented on an earlier draft of it.
2. The universities of Bologna and Paris received their charters in
respectively.
3. The nations persisted in the universities of Leipzig and Vienna
teenth century; and in the University of Aberdeen, they were function
units for the choice of the rector until as late as 1936.
4. Initially facultas meant a special department of knowledge, like law and medicine.
Later it came to refer to the group of masters who taught it.
5. Many leading jurists and professors of law objected to students having so much
power on the ground that they were "merely pupils", but the Pope upheld their power
and encouraged them to stand up for their rights. See Kibre Pearl, The Nations in the
Medieval Universities (Medieval Academy of America, 1948), p. 7.
6. Ibid., p. 35f.
7. Ellwood P. Cubberley, The History of Education (Riverside Press, Cambridge,
1920), p. 229.
8. Like our Hippies, they produced some amazing literature glorifying their love of
the reckless and unregulated life.
9. For a very informative account of the Russian student movement, see Lewis Feuer,
The Conflict of Generations. (Basic Books, 1968)
10. It is interesting to recollect in this connection the way the Panslavists and the
Narodniki idealized the mir.
11. Quoted by Priscilla Robertson, "Students on the Barricades: Germany and Aus
tria, 1848," Political Science Quarterly, June, 1969, p. 367.
12. I bid., p. 370.
13. Ibid., p. 377.
14. Indeed, they were the first to demand that the national government should pay
the lecturers' salaries rather than let them subsist on the meager attendance fees for
their lectures.
15. The concept of birth did not play any important role in the classical political
thought, except as a source, as a beginning, of life. It became crucial only with the
rise of Christianity.
16. The History of the Russian Revolution (New York, 1933), III, p. 191.

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17. Edward Shils, "Plentitude and Scarcity," Encounter, May, 1969, p. 40. Italics
added.
18. S. M. Lipset and Sheldon Wolin, ed., The Berkeley Student Revolts (Doubled
Anchor Books, 1965), p. 425. This is a classic for anyone interested in the contemporary
student movement.
19. Consider the following amazing remark of Adam Ferguson in An Essay on the
History of Civil Society: "Many mechanical arts succeed best under total suppression
sentiment and reason; and ignorance is the mother of industry as well as superstitio
. . . Manufacturers accordingly prosper most when the mind is least consulted, a
where the workshop may without any great effort be considered as an engine, the part
of which are men. . . . Thinking itself in this age of separations may become a parti
lar craft." Cf. Goethe in Dichtung und Wahrheit: "All that a man undertakes, wheth
it be by deed or word or anything else, must spring from the totality of his unifie
powers; everything isolated is harmful." I am grateful to Mr. Raymond Plant fo
drawing my attention to these quotations.
20. Marcuse uses the term positivism far more widely than is common in phi
sophical circles. He uses it to describe not merely a theory of knowledge as do most
philosophers, or a methodology as do most social scientists, but a Weltanschauung,
modality of consciousness, that centers exclusively around the present and the positive,
having lost all sense of the negative (i.e. critical faculty) and of the higher positi
(that is the capacity for Utopian thinking). See his One-Dimensional Man, Introductio
ch. 4, and Conclusion.
21. One-Dimensional Man, op. cit., p. 41.
22. The New Radicals, ed. Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau (Vintage Books, 1966), p.
91ff.
23. Ibid., p. 21 If.

24. For an interesting radical statement on the concepts of objectivity and impartial
ity by a group of graduates at Wisconsin, see The New Radicals, p. 91 ff.
25. The New Radicals, p. 155/6.
26. Obsolete Communism, The Left-wing Alternative, loc. cit., p. 249.
27. Ibid., p. 250.
28. Ibid., pp. 253, 256.
29. "Every group must find its own form, take its own action and speak its own
language." Ibid., p. 253. One of the leaders of the FSM movement said to choose "other
men to act on one's behalf would have been to surrender the life of the movement.''
The New Radicals, p. 214f.

30. Obsolete Communism, op. cit., p. 251.
31. The New Radicals, p. llOf.
32. Ibid., p. 112.
33. One-Dimensional Man, op. cit., p. 200.
34. The Dialectic of Liberation, Penguin, 1968, p. 187f.
35. It is worth noting that the brilliant and humorous inscriptions on the Sorbon
wall in 1968 have no parallel in the American student movement. Conversely, man
the religious or obscene epigrams of the American students have no parallel in
European movement.
36. One-Dimensional Man, p. 42. He refers to totalitarian administrations as "
cious circle which encloses both the Master and the Servant." Elsewhere he argues
domination has been "transfigured into administration," and the "capitalist bosses
owners . . . are assuming the function of bureaucrats in a corporate machine," p.
37. Broadly speaking, in his Reason and Revolution and Soviet Marxism, Marc
remains an orthodox Marxist; in his One-Dimensional Man, he tends to empha
technology rather than exploitation, and in his Eros and Civilisation, which is basic
Β. PAREKH 85

14.139.236.246 on Mon, 09 Jan 2023 07:48:39 UTC
a Freudian rather than a Marxian work, it is libidinal repression that is considered
responsible for the "Fall" of man.
38. One-Dimensional Man, p. 192.
39. Rosser Reeve, Reality in Advertising, London, 1961.
40. Ibid.
41. It is not generally recognized that ideologically Marcuse is much closer to Mill
than to Marx, and that many of his theoretical problems are basically the same as those
that worried Mill. In Repressive Tolerance Mill's name appears nearly a dozen times,
whereas Marx's does not appear even once.
42. Marcuse's analysis of the natural sciences is the weakest part of his writings, just
as it has been the achilles heel of every Marxist thinker. See the excellent article on
Marcuse by Peter Sedgwick in Socialist Register, ed. R. Miliband and J. Saville, London,
1966.
43. Op. cit., p. 201.

44. Praxis, 1969, p. 24.

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POLITICAL THEORY OF THE STUDENT MOVEMENT: A HISTORICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/24457567

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M ι y intention in this paper is to examine critically the views on society

It is important to realize that in many respects the recent student move

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The organization of students and masters into nations, the

54 CROSS CURRENTS: WINTER 1971

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traditional privileges, insisting that the university arrange for their

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In the thirties, therefore, some of the components of the student's self

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Gradually, and in the course of various protests, students began to

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A pamphlet distributed by the FSM on Jan. 4, 1965 sums up this

The best way to identify the parts of our multiversity machinery is

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«4 CROSS CURRENTS: WINTER 1971

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We should replace power rooted in possession, privilege, or cir

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. . . what I do not quite understand about some new-left writers is

68 CROSS CURRENTS: WINTER 1971

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To sum up our examination of the theoretical assumptions of the con

As was only to be expected, the novel critique of the university and

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Many of today's students, however, take their own subjectivity as the

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It is disappointing, however, to see that their discussion of participa

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