American Socialism and

American Political Culture:

Irving Howe’s Conciliation
with (and Dissent from)
Individualism
GEOFFREY KURTZ

ABSTRACT
Few have written so astutely about the difficulty of being both socialist and American as
did Irving Howe. Seeking a “conciliation” between socialism’s solidaristic values and
America’s culture of self-reliant individualism, Howe warned that the American demo-
cratic Left could not survive unless it made its peace with America’s “Emersonian”
mood. Yet he found Emersonianism too “airy” and appreciated the “thicker” teachings
of Hawthorne and Melville and of European writers steeped in biblical stories. Al-
though his efforts to reach a conciliation with individualism were problematic, Howe
at times suggested a better way to reconcile socialism with American political culture:
a solidaristic ethic beyond liberal individualism, drawing on the marginal but persistent
fraternal themes in American political culture.

Henry James once said that being an American is a complex fate. We American
socialists could add: He didn’t know the half of it. (Howe 1985b, 144)

The dominant voice in American political culture has been that of liberal indi-
vidualism. American thinkers who speak for fellowship, fraternity, and solidarity

Geoffrey Kurtz is associate professor of political science at Borough of Manhattan Community College,
City University of New York, 199 Chambers Street, New York, NY 10007 (gkurtz@bmcc.cuny.edu).
I thank the APT editors and anonymous reviewers for their wise advise, BMCC-CUNY and the Pro-
fessional Staff Congress for the 2019–20 sabbatical during which I began this article, the Roselawn Writ-
ing Collective at Eastern Mennonite University (especially its convener, Kevin Seidel) for generosity in lis-
tening and helpful comments when I presented an early draft of this article to them while on sabbatical,
and Maxine Phillips and Mark Levinson, who each took time to speak with me about their recollections
of Irving Howe and the Dissent milieu in the 1980s.

American Political Thought: A Journal of Ideas, Institutions, and Culture, vol. 10 (Winter 2021).
2161-1580/2021/1001-0002$10.00. © 2021 by The Jack Miller Center. All rights reserved.
26 • American Political Thought • Winter 2021

face a puzzle. How can they criticize the American culture of individualism with-
out becoming isolated? How can they dissent without becoming hopeless?1
Democratic socialists have been among those American critics of individu-
alism. Few socialists have written so astutely about the tradition of American
thought or about the difficulty of being both socialist and American as did Ir-
ving Howe. The cofounder and longtime editor of the journal Dissent, a pro-
lific political essayist and literary critic, Howe was for half a century one of the
major intellectual figures of the American democratic Left. Thinking and writ-
ing about questions of modernity and tradition, freedom and community,
Howe arrived at what he might have called a “problematic” position: a “con-
ciliation” between socialism’s solidaristic values and America’s culture of self-
reliant individualism. This conciliation was a shaky affair, riddled with gaps,
conflating ideas that deserved to be distinguished and submerging crucial ques-
tions. Yet Howe’s writings contain the pieces of a better way to reconcile so-
cialism with America: an ethic of solidarity that defends individuality without
relying on individualism, an ethic rooted in moral and intellectual traditions at
odds with liberal political philosophy but hardly alien to American political
culture.2 Howe did not connect those pieces. My aim here is to recover and
assemble them.

1. THE EMERSONIAN MYTH

Howe’s reflections on the tradition of American thought culminated in two

works completed in 1985, the year he turned 65: an essay titled “Why Has So-
cialism Failed in America?,” written for inclusion in his book Socialism and
America (1985b),3 and his William E. Massey lectures at Harvard University,

1. In formulating the problem this way, I am indebted to Hartz (1955) and McWilliams
(1973).
2. That is to say, I will disagree here with what I take to be the standard account of so-
cialism, which defines socialism as an extension or radicalization of modernist liberal and
progressive thought. (For a forceful statement of that standard account from within Howe’s
own circle, see Hampshire 1956.) Where James P. Young calls for a synthesis of three major
strands of American political theory—Emersonian individualism, “Berkeley school” demo-
cratic radicalism, and Dissent-style social democracy (1996, 340)—I will propose that the
last of these three strands already contains unacknowledged affinities with the second, and
that to conciliate either of those two intellectual traditions with liberal individualism is a du-
bious project. And where Patrick J. Deneen sees a certain kind of conservatism as the proper
shape of a politics that prizes community and “democratic life” over a “depersonalized po-
litical and economic order,” I want to show the possibility of finding egalitarian—indeed, so-
cial democratic—implications in certain nonliberal influences that Deneen and I share (2018,
xv and xvii). On all these themes, of course, more will remain to be said.
3. See also the recent republication of this essay (Howe 1985/2014). In addition to this
essay, Socialism and America contained new versions of a 1977 essay and three 1981 lec-
tures, all revised or expanded, plus one other essay written specifically for the book.
 American Socialism and American Political Culture • 27

published the following year as The American Newness (1986a). (I will write
chiefly about those two works, with side trips to other writings when others
can illuminate them.) The mid-1980s were a dismal time for the American Left.
For two decades, democratic socialists had pursued a “realignment” strategy,
seeking to convene a majority electoral coalition with an alliance of labor, civil
rights, and middle-class liberal groups at its core and the Democratic Party as its
political home. With the reelection of Ronald Reagan, that strategy seemed to
have reached an impasse. Mass media had displaced face-to-face politics, Howe
noted, and membership organizations like labor unions were in danger of ca-
tastrophic decline. A public sphere with little room for meetings and member-
ships would have little room for the kind of political life that socialists had en-
visioned. The 1984 elections were not like ordinary partisan “oscillations,”
Howe wrote. Instead, they revealed a “degeneration of the democratic process”
in which “public life grows emptier and emptier,” presaging “grave trouble” for
the Left (Howe 1985a, 6–7).4
Amid socialism’s failure, Howe remained a socialist. “Sustained self-scrutiny”
and “hard self-criticism” might lead to “a partial self-renewal” for the demo-
cratic Left, he wrote in the preface to Socialism and America (Howe 1985b,
ix). American socialists had made many mistakes, he charged: they had too of-
ten succumbed to self-defeating strategies, strident moralizing, ideological in-
flexibility. Would that they had found a better balance between political savvy
and political principle, democratic engagement and moral center. Perhaps they
might still.
Certainly American socialists had faced objective barriers, Howe notes in
his essay on socialism’s failure. The prospect of social and geographic mobil-
ity, the complexities of a working class divided by ethnicity and race, and the
frustrations caused by unresponsive, incompletely democratic, political institu-
tions all seemed to conspire against them. But none of these factors explained
enough. After all, at least some Americans had become socialists or trade union-
ists, even union militants. The crucial question was how Americans interpreted
the economic and social context in which they found themselves. To understand
American socialism’s failure, Howe writes, we must “transfer our explanatory
stress . . . to the character of American culture.” There is a “distinctive American
ideology,” he proposes, that could be called, “very roughly, Emersonianism”
(Howe 1985b, 133). More consequential than material or institutional factors
because it shapes how Americans respond to those factors, this ideology is the
reef on which American advocates of solidarity and equality have foundered.

4. Howe had expressed his early support for what he called “the ‘coalition’ approach sug-
gested by Bayard Rustin and Michael Harrington” (Howe 1965/1966, 16). Harrington
reached an assessment of the American Left’s mid-1980s political impasse similar to Howe’s
(see Harrington 1988, 116).
28 • American Political Thought • Winter 2021

Emersonianism begins with Emerson. Emerson’s philosophy “raised the I to

semidivine status,” providing a religious sanction for the American cult of indi-
vidualism” and encouraging Americans to see the individual person as “a self-
creating and self-sufficient being.” Emerson’s thinking, “a restatement of an old
Christian heresy,” marked a break with older religious and political teachings.
In what Howe calls the “traditional European view,” human beings are “de-
fined or described through social characteristics and conditions.” In Emerson’s
“new vision,” this older teaching “was, at least theoretically, discounted; the
new American, singing songs of himself, would create himself through sponta-
neous assertions, which might at best graze sublimity and at worst drop to ego-
tism. The American, generically considered, could make his fate through will
and intuition, a self-induced grace” (Howe 1985b, 135).
Howe is less interested in Emerson the writer than in the “elusive and pro-
tean” way of understanding self and other, the widely shared American vision,
for which Emerson spoke. Emerson becomes for Howe a synecdoche for the
dominant strains of American political culture. Emerson may have been a phi-
losopher, but Emersonianism is not a philosophy so much as a “complex of
myth and ideology, sentiment and prejudice” (Howe 1985b, 135–36). Writing
about “Emersonianism” rather than about Emerson (or, for that matter, about
liberal political philosophy) makes clear that Howe’s primary concern is with
myth and mood rather than concepts. It allows him to give the American myth
of self-reliance a point of origin: the dawn of the industrial era. It suggests a dis-
tinction between the restless, inward-looking individualism born in that era
and the outward-looking gentlemanly liberalism of the American founding.
And it might remind Howe’s readers of the disjuncture between American in-
dividualism and the “traditional” religious and political view of human nature.
“Emersonianism” names a mood with a history.

2. OT HER ST ORIES THAN EMERSON ’S

Howe had been thinking about Emerson and about his own uneasy relation-
ship to American culture for a long time. His 1977 essay “Strangers” recounted
what it was like for his generation of Jewish children of immigrants to encoun-
ter the American literary tradition. For “young would-be writers growing up in
a Jewish slum in New York or Chicago during the twenties and thirties,” he
writes, “the main figures of American literature . . . were not immediately avail-
able.” Transplanting a young person from “Jewish soil” to “American soil”
was not easy. The distinctive spirit of American literature had a name: for
American writers, “Emerson towered as an ancestor imposing and authori-
tative, sometimes crippling,” encountered not only in books “but through
 American Socialism and American Political Culture • 29

the very air, the encompassing atmosphere, of their culture” (Howe 1977/2014,
183). And for young Jews like Howe, this Emerson was an alien figure.

What could Emerson mean to a boy or girl on Rivington Street in 1929,

hungry for books, reading voraciously, hearing Yiddish at home, yet
learning to read, write, and think in English? . . . Besides, we immigrant
children did not come as empty vessels. We had other stories. We had
stories about legendary endurance in the Old World; stories about the
outwitting of cruel priests; stories about biblical figures still felt to be
contemporaries though by now largely ripped out of their religious set-
ting; stories about endless martyrs through the ages (while America
seemed to have only one martyr and he, in beard and shawl, had a de-
cidedly Jewish look).
These stories of ours were the very material out of which cultures are
made, and even as we learned to abandon them with hurried shame and
to feign respect for some frigid general who foolishly had never told a lie,
or to some philosopher of freedom who kept slaves, we felt a strong res-
idue of attachment to our own stories. We might be preparing to aban-
don them, but they would not abandon us. And what, after all, could
rival in beauty and cleverness the stories of Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob
and the angel, Joseph and his brothers? (183–84)

Howe recognizes that religious stories can constitute communities: “Raised to

a high inclusiveness, a story becomes a myth. It charts the possibilities and lim-
its for the experience of a people” (184). In this sense, he recalls, even Jewish
youths he knew who no longer believed in God remained deeply Jewish.
“Loose-fish” in relation to American culture, they retained traces of an Old
World rootedness (192). Absorbed in biblical stories, they found themselves
unmoved by the appeal of American liberalism: “For most of us, individualism
seemed a luxury or deception of the Gentile world. . . . Perhaps our exposure
to this warmed-over Emersonianism prompted us to become socialists, as if
thereby to make clear our distaste for these American delusions and to affirm,
instead, a heritage of communal affections and responsibilities” (186).
If the socialist commitment stems from “a heritage of communal affections
and responsibilities,” what chances could socialism have in a country where
the very “atmosphere” is one of ever-new individualism? Grasping for an an-
swer, Howe broaches a possibility that he will return to in his 1985 essay and
lectures. The problem, he writes, was that the young Jewish intellectuals did
not yet know “the real Emerson . . . the Emerson radiant with a sense of uni-
versal human possibility.” Considering the “real Emerson” means looking
also at Emerson’s context: “East European Jews had almost never encountered
30 • American Political Thought • Winter 2021

the kind of Christianity that flourished in America. . . . We knew little, for in-
stance, about the strand of Hebraism running through Puritan culture. . . . All
that was distinctive in Protestant culture . . . we really could not grasp for a long
time” (Howe 1977/2014, 185–86).
Howe writes here as if the “real Emerson” conveyed the “Puritan culture”
from which he had emerged. But in his essay on socialism’s failure he would
recognize Emerson’s thought as a “heresy,” a radical break from a doctrine
central to the theology of Emerson’s Puritan forebears—central, in fact, to
all biblical religion: that the human person, created by God, is anything but
self-sufficient. The “real Emerson,” it turns out, was a rebel against Puritanism
and its “Hebraism.” Whatever is “distinctive in [American] Protestant cul-
ture” would seem to have more in common with Howe’s “other stories” than
either has with Emersonianism. There seems to be a lesson in the peculiar fact
of America’s one martyr: self-reliance cannot account for self-sacrifice. The
anomaly of American reverence for Lincoln can only be explained by recogniz-
ing that American culture is not a univocal individualism.
The “other stories” had a certain power to stick with those who “might be
preparing to abandon them.” But Howe and others in his circumstances still
tried to get away. Their story, he writes, is one of “traditions ruptured, loyal-
ties disheveled” (1977/2014, 182). In “Strangers,” when Howe writes about
his own wariness toward individualism, he writes in the past tense. Alienation
from American alienation became for him something to outgrow.

3. SOCIALISM W IT HOUT MA SQUER ADES?

It was not that he had outgrown such alienation entirely, even when he wrote
about Emersonianism in 1985. Howe’s ambivalence about American political
culture is evident at every turn in “Why Has Socialism Failed in America?”
Emersonianism, he writes, “can be employed in behalf of a wide range of pur-
poses,” from “the authoritarian monomania of Captain Ahab” to “the easy fra-
ternity of Ishmael and Queequeg.” But even the best kinds of Emersonianism
preclude the best kinds of politics: left-leaning Emersonianism tends toward a
self-righteous “moralism” and a dislike of stable organizations (Howe 1985b,
135–36). For a democratic Left, a Left that appreciates compromise and patience
and fraternities that are not transient or easy, Emersonianism would seem to of-
fer little help.
Howe calls Emersonian individualism a “myth.” In “Strangers,” he had de-
scribed a myth as a story that “charts the possibilities and limits of a people.”
That seems to be part of his meaning here: Americans are a people constituted
by the myth of self-reliant individualism. But a myth can also mean an appeal-
ing falsehood, and Howe seems to mean that too. The “traditional” views, he
 American Socialism and American Political Culture • 31

writes, have been only “theoretically” discounted: disregarded within intellec-

tual life, they retain some palpable relevance. If the traditional ideas are right,
then Emerson is wrong. The community has a purpose beyond the goals of its
aggregated members; it makes them who they are, “defines or describes”
them, lifts (or can lift) them to completion.
Does Howe think that Emersonianism is a falsehood, that American polit-
ical culture is constituted by a misleading story? Although he argues that
Emersonianism is the major barrier to socialist politics in America, he declines
to refute or reject Emersonianism. His restraint is the lesson of lost battles. Un-
interested in futile posturing, he wants to be politic: “If you go through the
writings of American socialists you can find glimmerings and half-recognitions
that they have had to function in a culture ill-attuned to their fundamental out-
look. . . . If socialism is ever to become a major force in America it must either
enter deadly combat with and destroy the covenant myth or must look for
some way of making its vision of the good society seem a fulfillment of that
myth. Both are difficult propositions, but I need hardly say which is the less
so” (Howe 1985b, 138–39).5
Socialism, Howe writes, must somehow come to “seem” a fulfillment of the
American myth. Recognizing the power of that myth, socialists might choose a
policy of strategic dissembling. Howe worried about the consequences of such
a choice. In Socialism and America, the essay on socialism’s failure directly fol-
lows a chapter on what he calls the “brilliant masquerade” of Popular Front
Communism. The American Communist Party’s Popular Front policies were
“conceived in bad faith and executed in bad faith,” he writes. But the irony
of history is such that “if ever we are to see a resurgent democratic left in
America, it will have more to learn tactically from the Popular Front initiated
by the Stalinists than from those political ancestors whose integrity we admire.
The question then becomes, Can we separate what was authentic in the Pop-
ular Front approach from the gross deceit of those who developed it?” (Howe
1985b, 87–88).6 Responding to a shift in Soviet foreign policy, in 1935 the

5. The phrase “covenant myth” might seem to refer to something other than individual-
ism. But Howe means by it the belief that the unique opportunity shared by Americans as
a people is shared only in a trivial sense: it is the possibility of becoming a republic of
“self-creating and self-sufficient” individuals, living independently side by side. See Howe
(1985b, 134–35).
6. The admirable but less helpful political ancestors Howe has in mind here probably in-
clude the Socialist Party of the era of Eugene Debs. In the first chapter of Socialism and Amer-
ica, Howe writes affectionately of the Debsian socialists’ pluralistic, nonsectarian party and
earnest style, and he hints that they may have had more “ear for the native accent” than have
many American leftists. But the Debsian socialists were undone, Howe argues, by their in-
ability to “finesse” the need to both “speak their truth” and “protect their movement.” An
32 • American Political Thought • Winter 2021

Communist Party began to campaign for Democrats rather than running Com-
munist candidates and began to support the Congress of Industrial Organiza-
tions rather than operating separate party-aligned unions. This meant, Howe
writes, that it could “penetrate the institutions and organizations of the New
Deal,” especially “the Democratic Party and allied local political groups,” with
the aim of “steering the politics of the liberal ‘mass movement.’ ” Just as impor-
tant was the party’s shift in style: “Marxist jargon was replaced by the slogans
of liberalism and an appropriation—sometimes skillful, often absurd—of Jef-
fersonian rhetoric” (91–92).
Howe had imagined in an earlier chapter of Socialism and America what it
might have been like had the Socialist Party of that era made a comparable
shift in good faith. Democratic socialists, he writes, might have built “an asso-
ciation speaking for the values of socialism, offering a fundamental critique of
capitalism, and nevertheless allowing its supporters to participate in the surge
of Rooseveltian reform” (Howe 1985b, 85). To participate rather than to steer,
to act for the sake of one’s own values rather than under orders from outside, to
speak frankly of values rather than to appropriate slogans: Howe envisions a
sincerely American socialism. Still, an ambiguity nags. Recommending that a
socialist political organization operate as a distinctive element within a coali-
tion, as “realignment” socialists of his own generation had wanted to do, he
also wants socialist values to be reconciled with those of Emersonian liberalism.
Wondering how socialists could both remain distinct and blend in, he asks,
“How far could such a movement go without abandoning, in all but name,
its fundamental principles [and] deeper purposes?” (103–4). The danger in a
good-faith equivalent to the Popular Front is that socialists might end up un-
able to recognize themselves.

4. AN UNST ABLE C ONCILIATION

Whatever uncertainties Howe revealed, he was sure that the “self-renewal” of

American socialism depended on a new relationship with American political cul-
ture. Eight years earlier, a few months before publishing “Strangers,” Howe had
outlined such a relationship in a Dissent essay titled “Socialism and Liberalism:
Articles of Conciliation?” In Socialism and America, a slightly expanded version
of that essay becomes the chapter immediately following the essay on socialism’s
failure, so that it functions as an answer, albeit a complicated and indirect one, to
the question of how socialists might relate to Emersonian individualism.

all-too-American stance of “Emersonian” moral intransigence was, he proposes, no small part

of Debsian socialism’s tragic collapse during and just after the First World War. See Howe
(1985b, esp. 30–32 and 44–46).
 American Socialism and American Political Culture • 33

Given what we know about the Articles of Confederation, Howe’s subtitle

hints that a socialist “conciliation” with liberalism will sooner or later give
way to some more enduring arrangement. For the time being, though, concil-
iation: socialists have often criticized liberalism, he writes, but criticism is “by
no means the whole story” (Howe 1985b, 151). Howe does not defend liber-
alism so much as reduce the intensity and restrain the scope of socialists’ cri-
tiques. Socialists have been right to criticize classical liberal laissez-faire eco-
nomics, but liberalism has also come to mean a necessary defense of selfhood
and personal autonomy (150–54). Liberals have been wrong to think that even
though political power needs limitations, economic power does not, but despite
their exaggeration of the gulf between politics and society, they have been right
to insist that politics remains a distinct realm of activity. The independent sig-
nificance of political spaces and institutions is a “perennial” truth that the
Marxist tradition has largely missed and that left-wing critics of representative
democracy have failed to appreciate (154–61, 170–71).
When he writes about liberalism’s weaknesses and incomplete vision,
Howe’s tone is evenhanded and measured. Halfway through the essay, he
adopts a different voice: worried, even anguished, about the dangers of liberal
success. “There is a criticism of liberal politics and thought,” Howe writes,
“that runs through the whole of socialist literature but, by now, can also be
heard at many points to the right and left of liberalism: among ‘organicist’ con-
servatives, followers of the young Marx, Christian socialists, syndicalists, com-
munitarian New Leftists. This criticism is most often expressed as a defense of
the values of community—human fellowship, social grouping—against ego-
tism, competition, private property.” Such critics charge that “extreme individ-
ualism” is “an impoverishment of social possibility” and that “the kind of life
likely to emerge from a society devoted to such ideas” is “a terrible drop from
traditional humanist and Christian standards.” It may be that “thoughtful lib-
erals” (Howe mentions John Stuart Mill) have learned from such charges;
“socialist criticism” has “made a difference . . . in liberalism.” Despite this ac-
commodation, the communitarian critique of liberalism remains compelling.
“Who,” Howe asks, “does not feel the continued poignancy in the yearning
for community, which seems so widespread in our time? Who does not respond,
in our society, to the cry that life is poor in shared experiences, vital communi-
ties, free brother- and sister-hoods?” (1985b, 161–63).
Howe leaves no doubt that he, too, feels a “yearning for community.” Still,
a conciliation with liberalism remains his goal.

Yet precisely the pertinence and power of this attack upon traditional
liberalism must leave one somewhat uneasy. For we live in a time when
the yearning for community has been misshaped into a gross denial of per-
sonal integrity, when the desire for the warmth of social bonds—marching
34 • American Political Thought • Winter 2021

together, living together, huddling together, complaining in concert—has

helped to betray a portion of the world into the shame of the total state.
Let us be a little more cautious, then, in pressing the kind of attack upon
liberalism that invokes an image of community—a little more cautious if
only because this attack is so easy to press. There is indeed an element
of the paltry in the more extreme versions of liberal individualism; but
the alienation that has so frequently, and rightly, been deplored in recent
decades may have its sources not just in the organization of society but
in the condition of mankind. Perhaps it is even to be argued that there is
something desirable in recognizing that, finally, nothing can fully protect
us from the loneliness of ourselves.
A social animal, yes; but a solitary creature too. Socialists and liberals
have some areas of common interest in balancing these two stresses, the
communal and the individual, the shared and the alone. It is a balance that
will tilt; men and women must be free to tilt it. (Howe 1985b, 163)

This is Howe’s conciliation: a balance between sociality and solitude, the com-
munal and the individual, that “men and women must be free to tilt.” His aim
here is surely nuance and complexity. It is a problem, then, that he elides dis-
tinctions he had already made and neglects ideas he had already introduced.
Howe’s conciliation between socialism and liberalism rests on an unstable
foundation.
The “gross denial of personal integrity” Howe refers to is unmistakable: he
means Communism, in particular, membership in the Communist parties of
the United States or other Western countries. His warning against the “yearn-
ing for community” is really a warning against the yearning for totality. A to-
tal commitment leaving no room for personal integrity, claiming to fully “pro-
tect us from the loneliness of ourselves,” has a dangerous appeal. But totality,
he recognizes, is a “misshaped” community. Rejecting misshaped community,
Howe seems to be depending on some unspoken standard of properly shaped
community, presumably a community fostering “personal integrity” and prem-
ised on human “loneliness.” Yet he declines to affirm such a standard. Invok-
ing the horror of totalitarianism, Howe may intend to shield liberalism against
its communitarian critics, but nothing he writes here precludes the possibility
of a nonliberal appreciation of individuality or a nontotalitarian mode of com-
munity. Whether intentionally or not, he leaves open the possibility of an inde-
pendent stance from which the great twentieth-century ideologies of liberalism
and totalitarianism could both be found wanting.7

7. This possibility is pursued in a footnote to the version of the essay included in Social-
ism and America (but not in the original Dissent version) consisting of a long quotation from
 American Socialism and American Political Culture • 35

Disregarding that possibility as soon as he has raised it, Howe concludes

the passage with a quintessentially liberal idea: “men and women must be
free” to tilt the balance between the communal and the individual. Tilt the bal-
ance how? The “traditional humanist and Christian” political thought which
he had invoked a few paragraphs earlier taught that the right use of such free-
dom depends on moral knowledge and thus on moral formation or political
acculturation. Here, Howe writes as if individual men and women will read
the demands of their yearnings in irreducibly individual ways. A “yearning
for community” is, after all, an individual feeling. It treats “community” as
one among the various goods that an individual might want. Howe’s case for
conciliation with liberalism depends not on a defense of liberal philosophy’s in-
dividualistic premises but on a warning against too strident a rejection of polit-
ical aims liberals have defended, and this warning depends in no small part on a
conflation of community and totality that Howe himself seems not to believe in.
It is odd, then, that in the end his vision of “balance” reflects the individualistic
premises he had declined to defend.
The remainder of the essay is haunted by questions of moral formation and
political culture. Responding to the Marxist charge that liberal rights will col-
lapse if liberal democratic institutions are ever used to seriously challenge the
power of capital, Howe suggests that political culture has a power of its own.
A country’s “attachment to democratic values” and “tradition of pacific social
life” might be sufficient to protect liberal rights during a crisis (Howe 1985b,
166–69). Responding to conservative critiques of liberalism as a “philosoph-
ical outlook,” he argues that in order to defend “the liberal style in politics”
one need not defend a liberal “world-view” (171–73).
Questions of “world-view” are not so easily dodged. In the essay’s last pages,
Howe writes,

The crisis of civilization that besets the twentieth century has to do, in
part, with a breakdown in the transmission and common acceptance
of values—which may also be a way of saying, with residual but power-
ful yearnings toward transcendence. . . . No matter how distant we may
be from the religious outlook, we must ask ourselves whether the trouble

Howe’s Dissent colleague and former student Michael Walzer, responding to Howe’s essay in
personal correspondence. There may be an “alternative to liberal individualism,” Walzer pro-
poses, that is not a totalizing vision of community but rather has “more to do with such old
socialist values as cooperation, mutuality, communal provision, public life, and so on.” Howe
comments only that Walzer’s remarks are “cogent.” See Howe (1985b, 163–64).
36 • American Political Thought • Winter 2021

of our time isn’t partly a consequence of that despairing emptiness which

has followed the breakup of traditional religious systems in the nine-
teenth century; whether the nihilism that sensitive people feel to be seep-
ing through their lives may not itself testify to a kind of inverted religious
aspiration; whether the sense of moral disorientation that often afflicts
us isn’t due to the difficulties of keeping alive a high civilization with-
out a sustaining structure of belief.
Perhaps, in honesty, there really is no choice but to live with the un-
comfortable aftereffects of the disintegration of religious belief. (1985b,
173–74)

A conciliation of socialism and liberalism, Howe admits here, could only be a

superficial amity, in which socialists and liberals seek some of the same public
policies and institutional arrangements while understanding those policies’
and arrangements’ significance differently. Even if doing so meant bearing with
a “despairing emptiness” and a “moral disorientation,” a conciliatory politics
would have to evade questions of “belief.” Howe’s proposal for conciliation be-
tween socialism and liberalism outlines a lacuna: in the space where there might
have been a worldview neither liberal nor totalitarian, or a vision of properly
shaped community, Howe places nothing at all. Cautioning his readers not to
recoil from this “uncomfortable” gap, Howe recommends a conciliation be-
tween socialism and liberalism that is based on a double negative, a dissent from
the socialist dissent from liberalism. Such a conciliation might prove temporary;
it would without doubt be unsteady, ungrounded, insubstantial.

5. EMERSONIAN MIST, WEIGHTY SOLIDARITIES

Insubstantiality was on Howe’s mind in the 1985 lectures that became The
American Newness. “To confront American culture,” Howe begins, “is to feel
oneself encircled by a thick but strong presence: a mist, a cloud, a climate. I call
it Emersonian, an imprecise term but one that directs us to a dominant spirit in
the national experience. Hoping to engage this spirit, I am not sure anyone can
even grasp it. How grasp the very air we breathe?” (1986a, v). To confront a
mist, to grasp at air: this is what it feels like, Howe suggests, to be a socialist
surrounded by a culture of individualism. Something else is at stake here too:
the impression, as he had noted years before in “Strangers,” that there is some-
thing airy or weightless about the culture of individualism. In his autobiogra-
phy, he had written that in breaking with the sectarian Left 30 years earlier,
he had sought “some nourishment in the common air” of American life (Howe
 American Socialism and American Political Culture • 37

1982, 110). To breathe that common air turned out to bring its own unsatisfied
hungers.
Howe knows Emerson’s appeal. Emerson “speaks for a permanent revolu-
tion of the spirit,” giving voice to the era of “the newness,” a moment “when
people start to feel socially invigorated and come to think they can act to
determine their fate” (which must have been “the opposite of what it is like
to live” in America in the mid-1980s, Howe remarks). Emerson aimed to
“bring to fruition in the sphere of the spirit, and therefore in the life of the cul-
ture,” the political revolution achieved by the American founders (Howe 1986a,
20, 17, 22).
But Howe has, he admits, a “non-Emersonian angle of vision.” Although
Emerson has a certain “glory,” it is nevertheless “hard to suppose that anyone
could now take him as a sufficient moral or philosophical guide” (Howe 1986a,
15, 26, 14). His concept of “self-reliance” suggests “a tragic sundering between
democratic sentiment and individualist aggrandizement,” and so his ideas are
“unlikely to satisfy those of us who live, or would live, in the public realm.”
Howe hardly sounds conciliatory toward liberalism when he writes, “To exalt
[the abstract individual] is to suppress life’s complexities, possibilities, dangers,
and, most of all, necessary entanglements” (41–43).
That Emerson’s “impoverishing” individualism is the “dominant spirit” of
American experience was not for Howe a new thought. Now, he notices some-
thing else too. On Emerson’s “luminous” and “weightless” ideas, a “shadow”
is cast. He has a “polar opposite” among his contemporaries, a writer with
“radically different” teachings: Nathaniel Hawthorne. The two writers shared
a “historic matrix,” inheriting the same “problems of faith” and “cultural dif-
ficulties” (Howe 1986a, 3). But they confronted their common era differently,
in no small part because they had different relationships with the past.
Howe’s first quotation from Emerson in these lectures is telling. Emerson
wrote that he and his contemporaries lived in a time “when all the antique He-
braisms and customs are going to pieces.” Howe comments, “Neither Emer-
son nor Hawthorne could take Puritanism as the sufficient truth it had been
for their ancestors, yet they retained some jagged portions of the Puritan world
view—jagged because freed from the obligations of coherence. Hawthorne
knew this better than Emerson, sensing how strongly all of us, even spiritual
rebels like the young Emerson, remain in the grip of the past” (1986a, 3). Em-
erson is wrong to imagine that the weakening grip of the past means a chance
at self-creation; Hawthorne knows that the past’s grip, even weakened, still
matters.
For Howe, Emerson’s reference to “antique Hebraisms” is hardly incidental.
What purchase do the “other stories” of Howe’s childhood retain in Emerson’s
38 • American Political Thought • Winter 2021

America, or for that matter in Howe’s? Howe had been surprised, he related in
“Strangers,” to learn that the Puritans had conveyed to American culture the
weightiness of biblical commandment and the “historical entanglements” of
communal membership (1977/2014, 186–87). Here, he notices Emerson’s
unconcern about the decline of those legacies and senses Hawthorne’s greater
attachment, or awareness of attachment, to them. Hawthorne becomes, now,
the emblem of a possibility Howe’s previous writings scarcely dared to hope
for: an American tradition of “weight” and “gravity” alongside Emersonian
airiness (Howe 1986a, 4). If there is a way to be fully American while rejecting
Emersonian individualism, a writer like Hawthorne might be a witness to it.
Despite Howe’s disavowal of an “Emersonian angle of vision,” his critique
of Emerson remains understated. “Is there not something unsatisfying in that
view of human experience which proposes an all-but-absolute self-sufficiency
of each individual and makes ‘self-reliance’ the primary value? Something
deeply impoverishing in the linked view that contents itself with individualism
as ideology?” (Howe 1986a, 41–42). Since Howe’s answers to these questions
are scarcely in doubt, it is striking that he frames his critiques as questions. His
terms—unsatisfying, impoverishing—are themselves unsatisfying, more aes-
thetic than philosophical. A reader is left knowing that Howe feels discontent
with Emerson’s teachings but not knowing whether he thinks those teachings
are, at bottom, true or false.
As in his essay on conciliation between socialism and liberalism, Howe as-
serts a critique of liberalism and then offers a caveat. The “individual as a type,
and individualism as an idea or ideology,” he argues, “are historical develop-
ments, social constructs,” not fixed truths about human nature or human
needs. “Yet,” he warns, “if the Emersonian anthropology can be shaken by
historical criticism, so can the criticism itself. We have, toward the end of
the twentieth century, good reason to hesitate. The experience of our century
both underscores the inadequacies of an absolutist individualism and the dan-
gers of too sweeping an attack upon it,” and so “two apparently irreconcilable
visions of life seem locked in opposition. . . . If we are at a standstill, a standstill
is precisely where we should be” (Howe 1986a, 43–44).
Howe may be on solid ground when he describes both his critique of
Emersonian individualism and his warning about the critique as species of
“historical criticism.” Not so when he implies that the two critiques are equiv-
alent. The first uncovers the contingency of an ostensibly noncontingent claim,
undermining its credibility; the second is a prudential observation, an expres-
sion of hard-learned caution. The first is not compatible with a strong defense
of the characteristic forms of liberal political philosophy. The second is com-
patible with a strong objection to liberal political philosophy, so long as some
better defense against totalitarian temptations can be found.
 American Socialism and American Political Culture • 39

When Howe writes that two “visions of life,” the social and the individ-
ualistic, are “locked in opposition,” he seems resigned to their evenhanded
conciliation. Then, he invites a possibility beyond their standstill: “How are
we to make the ‘two’ of experience melt into the ‘one’ for which thought hun-
gers? All we can do is to initiate an act of desire, and I propose to do that, not
with argument, but in a perhaps more powerful way: anecdote” (Howe
1986a, 44).
“Anecdote” as a way to “initiate an act of desire,” a way to further the
hope that the “two”—the communal and the individual, socialism and Amer-
ica—can be “one”: these words are for Howe a sort of condensed creed. “The
anecdote,” he wrote elsewhere around the same time that he gave his Emerson
lectures, “ties things together, not by ‘raising’ them to generality but by hold-
ing them close to the earth” (Howe 1986b, x). Generalities are not earthy. Like
Emersonianism, they resemble “a mist, a cloud, a climate.” Airy and weight-
less, they threaten to envelope and penetrate, allowing no escape.
“Desire,” like “anecdote,” is a term that Howe associates with earthy en-
tanglements. One of his most memorable essays, written with his friend and
fellow Dissent founder Lewis Coser in 1954, had begun with a meditation
on that word:

“God,” said Tolstoy, “is the name of my desire.” This remarkable sen-
tence could haunt one a lifetime, it reverberates in so many directions. . . .
He must have meant that precisely because his holiest desires met in the
vision of God he was enabled to cope with the quite unholy realities of
human existence. . . . We should like to twist Tolstoy’s remark to our
own ends: socialism is the name of our desire. And not merely in the
sense that it is a vision which, for many people throughout the world,
provides moral sustenance, but also in the sense that it is a vision which
objectifies and gives urgency to their criticism of the human condition in
our time. It is the name of our desire because the desire arises from a con-
flict with, and an extension from, the world that is; nor could the desire
survive in any meaningful way were it not for this complex relationship
to the world that is. (Howe and Coser 1954, 122)

To desire is to reach beyond while remaining “close to” the earth. Desire is
not, as Emerson would have it, “the work of consciousness alone.” It is, Howe
and Coser assert, a matter of symbolic vision, of an intimation that begins with
but aims outside “the world that is.” Invoking this notion of desire in the
earthy form of anecdote, Howe seems for the moment to be ranging himself
with Hawthorne against Emerson, with the “antique Hebraisms” against the
doctrine of the self-creating, self-reliant individual.
40 • American Political Thought • Winter 2021

Howe offers two anecdotes, both richer and more interesting than brief sum-
maries can convey. The first is from Rashi’s commentary on Genesis 18:1
(“And the Lord appeared to [Abraham] by the terebinths of Memre, as he sat
in the tent door in the heat of the day”).8 Rashi writes, “Why was Abraham sit-
ting at the tent door? To see if there were any travelers whom he could invite
into his home. . . . God saw that Abraham was grieved at the absence of visitors,
so He sent him the angels in the guise of men.” The second is from an autobi-
ographical sketch by Ignazio Silone, an Italian Christian socialist who had be-
come a major figure in Howe’s personal canon. As a boy, Silone writes, he once
laughed at the sight of a “little man” being dragged down the street by two po-
licemen. Silone’s father became angry and dragged him inside their house. Silone
asked what he had done wrong. His father replied, “‘Never make fun of a man
who’s been arrested. Never!’ Silone asked, ‘Why not?’ His father answered: ‘Be-
cause he can’t defend himself. And because he may be innocent. In any case, be-
cause he’s unhappy’” (Howe 1986a, 44–45).9
These stories, Howe writes, “evo[ke] such values as sociability and solidar-
ity.” As stories, they do not present a general principle of the human need for
human connection. Instead, they give us particular people having or seeking or
failing to have connections with particular others. Sociality and individuality
are both preserved here, not as in a balance between opposites but as facets of
a single experience. The anecdotes convey what it is like to value individuality
by treating “sociability and solidarity” as a basis for understanding personhood
and politics. They do this, Howe writes, by emphasizing the “sharing of travail
that Melville would call the ‘universal thump’” (1986a, 45).
Despite his remark about being at a standstill, with these anecdotes Howe
invokes a decidedly non-Emersonian way of thinking. Or, at least, the ele-
ments of such a way of thinking are present: an ethic of solidarity that begins
with particular entanglements, a sense of sociable personhood rooted in the
weaknesses or vulnerabilities that human persons share. A way of thinking
stemming from such premises might fill the gap Howe’s essay on conciliation
had left, making it possible to articulate a vision of properly shaped commu-
nity, providing a way of standing against totalitarianism without relying on
liberal individualism.

8. This is the verse as printed in The American Newness. “Memre” is a typographical er-
ror; the standard spelling is “Mamre.” Howe appears to be quoting from The Koren Jerusa-
lem Bible, translated by Harold Fisch.
9. The anecdote from Silone seems to have been a favorite of Howe’s. Four years earlier,
speaking at a meeting of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, he had told the
same story, remarking that it “yields a moral perspective that sustains a politics of socialism”
(Howe 1981, 491). Given the biblical commentary Howe pairs with Silone’s anecdote, it is
worth noting the biblical—in this case, the New Testament—resonances of the story from
which the anecdote comes: its title is “Visit to a Prisoner” (Silone 1965/1968).
 American Socialism and American Political Culture • 41

But to put those pieces of thought together would seem to yield what Howe,
in that essay, had called a “world-view,” something to which he was averse.
And so perhaps it is not surprising that after relating the two anecdotes, Howe
seems to pull back from what he has done. Commenting on the anecdotes, he
ignores important parts of what they say, constraining their meanings in a
way that avoids a sharp break with Emersonianism. Although he rightly notes
that Emerson’s “cult of self-reliance is ill-equipped to grasp” the teachings of
these stories, he is at pains to remain deferential toward Emerson himself: “It
would be unjust to think that Emerson would not have been touched by these
stories, or the ideas behind them, quite as much as we are” (Howe 1986a,
45). More importantly, Howe reads the anecdotes in a way that makes it too
easy to conciliate their perspectives with the Emersonian mood. Consider
Silone’s story. Howe writes that Emersonianism may not be “equipped to
grasp” its moral teachings, but the story has less to do with what one can grasp
than with what it is like to be grasped. Like the prisoner, the young Silone is
dragged somewhere by someone larger. After being taken indoors by his father,
he receives a commandment, a thou-shalt-not. The story is not, in fact, about a
hunger for sociability so much as an obligation, Silone’s obligation and his read-
ers’, to solidarity with the unhappy. This is an obligation, Silone’s story teaches,
that is not dependent on our consent or even on our “yearning,” but rather one
that grabs us and drags us where we did not expect to go. It is what we might call
a generative or formative obligation. Sociability per se is not a principle impos-
sible to conciliate with liberal political philosophy, even with Emerson’s self-
reliant individualism. A generative obligation to solidarity, however, is inimical
to an individualism like Emerson’s.
It is not that Howe was ignorant of this tension. In “Strangers,” he had
written that the biblical stories “linked man and God” by way of “the com-
mandment,” which “lay heavily” on even those, like himself, who as they
grew up “no longer cared to make such a linkage.” Those stories of covenant
and commandment, he recalls, were not easy to “reconcile . . . with American
stories,” the weightless stories that counseled individualism. The two kinds of
stories “would coexist in our minds, awkwardly but fruitfully, and we would
give to the one our deep if fading credence and to the other our willed if unsure
allegiance” (Howe 1977/2014, 187, 184). To hold, or be held by, teachings
that are incompatible with one another is uncomfortable but hardly impossi-
ble—and, Howe suggests, might even be “fruitful.”
Again and again in The American Newness, Howe gestures toward a sol-
idaristic ethic; again and again, he mutes his critique of Emersonian individu-
alism, seemingly in search of that fruitful awkwardness. The passage that fol-
lows the anecdotes from Rashi and Silone contains what may be Howe’s most
intricate intertwining of dissent from and conciliation with Emersonianism.
42 • American Political Thought • Winter 2021

“Perceptions” regarding the moral limits of Emerson’s thought, he writes,

“control the fiction of Hawthorne and Melville” (Howe 1986a, 46). Where
Emerson speaks for the individualism that dominates American thought and
culture, Hawthorne and Melville would seem to speak in the voice of Howe’s
“other stories.” Hawthorne, Howe had noted earlier in his lectures, did not
forget the gravity of the Puritan heritage; Melville, he had written in “Strang-
ers,” was a “thicker” writer than the “airy” Emerson, one to whom young
Jewish intellectuals could relate “comrade to comrade,” because he was, like
them, a “stranger” in relation to the Emersonian atmosphere of America
1977/2014, 190–91). If Howe were looking for comrades to stand with him
against Emerson, he might have found them here.
Melville’s Moby-Dick, for Howe, “dramatizes, with a classical exactness,
the split between democratic fraternity and aggrandizing individualism. Shar-
ing some of the premises and much of the aspiration of the Emersonian ethos,
it ends with a profound, yet not quite dissociative, criticism” (1986a, 47–48).
Knowing, with Melville, the depth of the “split” between fraternity and indi-
vidualism, Howe still seeks a way to criticize individualism without dissociat-
ing from it.
The crucial question about Moby-Dick is how Melville’s readers see Ahab.
Howe remarks that Ahab’s “warped grandeur” gives us “almost no choice but
to admire and fear him,” and then he writes one page later that Melville wants
his readers “to admire the grandeur of Ahab’s obsession, yet to back away
from its excesses” (1986a, 48, 49). Why this admiration, and why elide “fear”
into a mere avoidance of “excesses”? The reaction Howe expects Melville’s
readers to have toward Ahab resembles his own reaction to Emerson. For Em-
erson, as Howe wrote earlier in his lectures, insisting on “an immediate appre-
hension of the divine” meant that “all experience could now be transfigured as
consciousness; all consciousness lifted free from the alloys of circumstance”
(1986a, 11). This is the root of Emerson’s individualism: the individual con-
sciousness, shedding the entanglements of history and of social conformity,
is freed for self-reliance. “There are moments when [Emerson] seems intent
upon making consciousness the beginning and end of existence, a vast enclo-
sure in which the self roams about, monarch of its substance, swallowing the
very world in its pride and yielding readily to sublime dissolution” (42, 40).
“Emerson’s project,” Howe decides, was wrongly founded and overreaching:
it “failed . . . because he did not adequately reckon with the circumstances of
his moment” and because “all such projects fail.” Excessive, it remained admi-
rable: its “fatality form[s] the very ground of [Emerson’s] glory.” Whatever
wisdom Emerson’s critics may have had, their perspectives are best seen not
as alternatives but as correctives: the “flaws in [Emerson’s] vision . . . would
become the themes of Hawthorne and Melville” (26).
 American Socialism and American Political Culture • 43

Emerson’s glory is like Ahab’s. Ahab’s “obsession” has “grandeur,” Howe

writes; his madness is “brilliant,” his “demonism” “charismatic.” By “break[ing]
his men into submission,” he offers them “the thrill of purpose” (Howe 1986a,
49). We are drawn magnetically to these prideful and self-reliant selves, Howe
finds. Ahab’s domination of his crew for the sake of his quest, like Melville’s
readers’ admiration of Ahab, resembles the way Americans respond to the Emer-
sonian spirit.10 Wondering why the Pequod’s crew submits to Ahab, Howe
muses, “A little Ahabism in the men Ahab conquers might be a sufficient obsta-
cle to Ahab” (49).
This offhand remark is the key to the political teaching of The American
Newness. Howe made the point explicit the following year in a published re-
sponse to a review of The American Newness by his fellow literary critic Leo
Marx: “The tradition of critical protest and serious nay-saying we associate
with the Emerson of the 1830s and part of the 1840s is a tradition that nur-
tures self-confidence in American intellectuals. It enables them to speak out,
no matter how few or isolated they may be, and it offers the potent assurance
that eventually a truth declared by a solitary person will take root in the cul-
ture as well. Indirectly, this tradition has inspired segments of Debsian social-
ism, great figures like Norman Thomas and Roger Baldwin, and the Catholic-
born Michael Harrington” (Howe 1987). Without a little Ahabism, without
an Emersonian nonconformity, Howe fears, the capacity for dissent, even dis-
sent from Emersonianism, withers.
Still, Howe worries about the costs of the Emersonian style of politics:

Yet once we turn from cultural radicalism to radical politics, something

goes askew. . . . I was somewhat involved in antiwar movements of the
1960s and found that while I admired certain “Thoreauvians” for their
courage, I also disliked their rigidity of posture and their occasional read-
iness to place declamations of rectitude above any shared need for the al-
liances, compromises, and even retreats which a democratic politics en-
tails. Social movements need stiff-necked protestors who provide moral
backbone, but if such people take over they tend to stiffen movements
into fixed stances. An inflexible individualism may thereby become an im-
pediment to the very democratic politics to which it has committed itself,
as if to make personal testimony into an absolute value. (1987)

Howe makes his peace with Emersonianism by treating the problems

it raises as unavoidable and unsolvable. Democratic movements need

10. There is also a curious similarity between Howe’s depiction of Ahab’s charisma and
his depiction a few years earlier of the hero of his youth, Leon Trotsky. See Howe (1978).
44 • American Political Thought • Winter 2021

“stiff-necked protestors” and can also be undone by them—so what, he seems

to ask, can you do? The Emersonian spirit may distort “radical politics,” Howe
warns. After all, as he had noted in his lectures, Emerson himself had failed
to see that in the “new industrial world” the “path to individual definition often
lay through collective action” (Howe 1986a, 88, 51–52). But Emersonianism
compensates for this political shallowness by underwriting “cultural radical-
ism,” and this for Howe is reason enough to claim an affinity with the mood
that envelopes American life. Troubled by Emersonianism, Howe is nevertheless
unwilling to directly oppose its cultural power and seems willing, at times, to
borrow from it. Yet by arguing that Emersonian culture has blocked the possi-
bility of socialist politics in America, he has already denied that culture is inno-
cent of political consequences. Howe’s attempt to conciliate socialism with
Emersonianism comes with so many feints and caveats that Howe’s description
of the author of Moby-Dick rings true of himself: “If Melville is a semi-disciple
of Emerson, he is the kind who plunges a knife into the master’s weakest spot”
(1986a, 49). Knowing Emerson’s weakest spots, Howe nevertheless wants to
declare himself an Emersonian of sorts. “Simple Emersonians we can no longer
be. We are descendants, through mixed blood, who have left home after friendly
quarrels. Yet the patriarch’s voice still rings clear: . . . ‘Never mind the ridicule . . .
there is victory yet for all justice’” (89).

6. S O C I A L I S M AN D T HE S E C O N D V O I C E

Howe teaches conciliation, never quite endorsing individualist teachings yet

asserting membership in an individualist political culture. This conciliation
fails, it seems to me, for two reasons.
The first is that Howe ignores the force of his own critique. His objections
to Emersonianism—to its unreliable anthropology, its mood of weightless-
ness, its pose of innocence regarding human entanglements and responsibili-
ties, its way of driving even its most politically astute adherents toward a rigid
moralism—are so sharp and so far-reaching that a reader moved by his writ-
ings is left with little to like about the American culture of individualism. Howe
defends liberalism not by justifying individualism as a political philosophy but
by noting that liberal politics has been an alternative to totalitarianism. But
since he also suggests the possibility of a nonliberal alternative to totalitarian-
ism, his circumstantial and prudential appreciation of liberalism seems moot.
Howe never says plainly that the Emersonian myth is a deception, liberal individ-
ualism a false doctrine. But his readers may draw those conclusions even where
his writings remain artfully inconclusive.
 American Socialism and American Political Culture • 45

The second reason Howe’s conciliation with individualism fails is that in de-
clining to make a “dissociative” critique of individualist values, Howe renders
himself less capable of speaking for socialist values. Whether writing about
“liberalism” in 1977 or “Emersonianism” in 1985, Howe limits himself to
naming shared aims, rarely asking why those aims might be worth pursuing
or how they might best be pursued. When questions like those are asked, dif-
ferences emerge on which conciliation is not so easy to reach. Like Emerson,
Howe wants there to be social critics who stand against the majority; unlike
Emerson, he wants those critics to be or at least to comport themselves like
democratic organizers, which means they will need a receptivity, a capacity
to relax the boundaries of self, that Emersonian self-reliance discourages. Like
many liberals, he insists on the need for mediating institutions like representa-
tive bodies and formal organizations; he wants to defend the autonomy of pol-
itics and to preserve spaces for solitude. But Howe bases his own commitment
to these stances on a sense of solidarity and mutuality that has little in common
with Emerson’s worldview. The little Howe does say about his underlying val-
ues, then, is constrained by the demands of conciliation. It is not that Howe’s
democratic and socialist commitments are ever in doubt. The issue is that the
moral grounding of those commitments remains obscure. A reader is left won-
dering whether, in pursuing conciliation with individualism, Howe has hidden
his “fundamental principles [and] deeper purposes” from himself. This is a se-
rious problem. Howe famously referred to socialist politics as “steady work”
(1966). Those engaged in steady work need to know their own reasons for
sticking with it.
Perhaps despite himself, Howe suggested another way to pursue the project
that his conciliation with individualism was intended to serve. Scattered
through his writings are the pieces not only of a non-Emersonian ethic but also
of a less conciliatory way for socialists to seek a rapprochement with American
political culture. I want to propose that these hints and openings add up to
something. Howe sensed that American life is “encircled” by Emersonianism;
he also noticed the traces of something like a loyal opposition to the American
culture of individualism. He seems both to have recognized and to have been
uneasy about his affinity for that countervailing American mood. The Puri-
tans; Hawthorne and Melville; immigrant communities steeped in religious
traditions and sensitive to their own “historical entanglements,” like the one
in which Howe was raised: groups and writers like these have championed the
claims of what Howe called “communal affections and responsibilities.” They
have cultivated an American analog of the “traditional humanist and Christian”
currents on which a European writer like Silone could draw. Not for nothing,
Howe’s bemused discovery of American Protestant “Hebraism”: the grip of
46 • American Political Thought • Winter 2021

the “other stories” that had taught him to be skeptical toward individualism is
not, after all, an experience peculiar to the children of East European Jewish
immigrants in the Bronx in the 1930s. That marginal but persistent “idea of
fraternity” has been called the “second voice” of American political culture
(McWilliams 1973, 1984/2011). If one understands Howe’s doubts about
Emersonianism to be intimations of that second voice, one can imagine an
American socialism that unambiguously rejects the individualist myth: a solida-
ristic and egalitarian politics more reliant on premodern moral traditions and
less enamored with ideologies of progress and innovation than left politics has
often been. One can imagine a “democratic radical” like Howe coming to see
himself as a grafted-on member of the tradition of Hawthorne and Melville,
resisting the Emersonian mood while still finding “nourishment in the common
air.”11
That American idea of fraternity might have provided for Howe a unify-
ing political language, both a public rhetoric to make his politics compre-
hensible to his fellow Americans and a private vocabulary to name his own
“deeper purposes.” And Howe might have contributed something impor-
tant to the “second voice” tradition itself, insisting on the socialist implica-
tions of the fraternal ethic, implications that not all communitarian thinkers
have been quick to notice. Attuned as he was to Melville’s “universal thump,”
Howe might have pointed out that in a society with feeble protections against
the whirlwind of the market economy a “yearning for community” must in-
volve a yearning for equality and an urgent sense of the need to alleviate mate-
rial wrongs.
Yet Howe did not connect the pieces of his political thought in this way.
Although he wrote about several thinkers who shared objections to individu-
alism, he declined to treat those thinkers as a tradition; he did not assemble
their insights into an argument or see them as signs of a way to be American
without being Emersonian. Prizing dissent from objectionable things over the
affirmation of a philosophy of his own, he treated his own objections to indi-
vidualism as correctives, not as the groundwork of a different viewpoint.

11. Howe’s wary opening toward the “second voice” tradition marks a departure from
the assertive modernism of some of his earlier works. Reviewing a 1967 anthology of articles
from Dissent edited by Howe, Wilson Carey McWilliams described the views of Howe and
his circle, with considerable justification, as “liberalism run more or less wild.” (The anthol-
ogy included Hampshire 1956, cited above.) I hope I have shown that the same was not true
of Howe’s thought 20 years later. It is interesting to note that in his review McWilliams rec-
ommended to the Dissent socialists that they find a new “point of departure” in the thought
of a writer within their orbit who would, in fact, become increasingly important to Howe:
Ignazio Silone. See McWilliams (1967/2005, 182).
 American Socialism and American Political Culture • 47

I want to argue that this was not a failure of vision on Howe’s part, but a
sober political choice reflecting the lessons he took from socialist history. The
excessive certainty of Marxist-Leninist movements—and the self-isolation that
followed from that certainty—had taught him to mistrust certainties and
worldviews, to see discomfort as a sign of wisdom: “If the ideal of socialism
is now to be seen as problematic, the problem of socialism remains an abiding
ideal. I would say that it is the best problem to which a political intellectual can
attach himself” (Howe 1966, xiii). All “serious thought” in the twentieth cen-
tury, he wrote, had come to be marked by “the taste for the anxious and the
problematic” (Howe 1978, 159). Of his own “life in a sect,” Howe recalls,
“The movement gave me something I would never find again and have since
come to regard with deep suspicion, almost as a sign of moral derangement:
it gave my life a ‘complete meaning,’ a ‘whole purpose.’ I learned to walk the
hedgehog’s rigid tracks, vain in their straightness” (1982, 42). The “natural in-
clination of small groups to huddle self-protectively in their loneliness,” he sug-
gested (Howe 1985b, 143), tends to make political sects into what Coser called
“greedy institutions” (1974), claiming the total loyalty of their members and de-
nying the validity of outside roles and memberships. For Howe, to claim an af-
finity with Emersonianism, however awkwardly, meant both to look beyond
the huddled circle of a minority movement toward the wider culture and to ac-
quire that touch of “Ahabism” that protects one against being swallowed by
any group. Against the whole polity and against the greedy sect, Howe wanted
to assert the “banner of critical independence” (1954/2014, 25). Emerson was
the moral ancestor who promised to support him in this assertion.
The lessons of experience should not be ignored. Howe’s insistence on the
problematic is a warning to his fellow socialists and any other Americans who
might want to stand against the culture of liberal individualism. A communi-
tarian or an “‘organicist’ conservative” would seem to be in no less danger
than a socialist of succumbing to the fatal comforts of the sectarian style. Yet
Howe’s writing contains warnings, too, for anyone who would, like him,
choose an ambivalent Emersonianism. In his exchange with Leo Marx, Howe
echoed an idea from his essay on socialism’s failure, but with a revealing adden-
dum: “Some of us on the democratic left have learned that simply to dismiss, as
Marxists once did, the whole tradition and symbolic resonance of American in-
dividualism is self-defeating. To do so would be to put the left in a kultur kampf
it hasn’t the slightest chance of winning, and not much chance of surviving. We
have come to realize that there are elements of Emersonian individualism it is
good to draw upon, not just as a tactical device but seriously, in good faith”
(1987). Howe is surely right that a socialist (or a communitarian) culture war
against American individualism would be foolhardy. Yet one is apt to raise
an eyebrow when hearing someone say, “We cannot avoid this, and we happen
48 • American Political Thought • Winter 2021

to want it.” Howe had little patience for those of his contemporaries who made
much of their return to religion, accusing them of a “willing of faith in behalf of
alleged social-moral benefits” (1985b, 174). Asserting both that it is futile to
oppose Emersonian culture and that he can appreciate that culture “in good
faith,” Howe seems to be making a similar choice. However good his faith in
Emersonianism may have been, its willfulness is unmistakable. His loyalty to
“the problematic” was born of an admirable prudence. But there would have
been wisdom, too, in drawing a clearer map of his own commitments. Conclud-
ing that he had no choice but to “draw upon” Emersonian culture made that
mapping more difficult than it needed to be. It also barred the way to intellectual
allies, both historical and contemporary, whose comradeship he might well
have appreciated. After all, learning to speak the language of America’s second
voice raises its own problems, even if the labors it entails are more subtle than a
kultur kampf. In part because of the subtlety and patience they require, those
labors cannot be sustained by the isolated; they require intellectual and political
friendship, and plenty of it.
Perhaps Howe teaches more than he intends about what it would be like to
affirm values outside the scope of Emersonianism while dodging the huddling
tendencies and “antipolitical impulses” of “righteous moral witness” to which
minority movements in America often succumb (1985b, 143, 136–37). How
could a movement that stands apart from the whole take shape as something
other than a sect? Howe sometimes seems to despair of answering that question.
But at the conclusion of his essay on conciliation between socialism and liber-
alism, facing a related problem, Howe offers what he calls a “somewhat . . .
hopeful note.” Writing about the surprising appearance of dissident voices in
Communist Eastern Europe, he declares, “Beneath the snow, the seed has lived”
(Howe 1985b, 175). Readers of Dissent in those days might have known the
reference: it is to Silone’s novel The Seed beneath the Snow. There, a former
Communist Party organizer in fascist Italy, long on the run from the authorities,
roams the countryside of his native region, looking up old acquaintances not to
enlist them in a movement but with a “simple message of friendliness,” visiting
them “only to stay with them a while.” As he travels, he finds himself “walking
almost as if he were dancing, borne on long atrophied wings” (Silone 1942,
320–21). A politics worth pursuing, Silone teaches, needs roots outside political
life, and it may not always take the shape we expect politics to take.
One happy consequence of Howe’s devotion to the problematic is that he
displays his uncertainties frankly. In his doubts about individualism may lie
the better part of his wisdom. Howe’s wrestling with the place of socialism
in American life reveals, with admirable honesty, the troubles that beset any
politics of fellowship in the midst of a culture of individualism. If his attempt
at the conciliation of socialism and liberal individualism is not in the end
 American Socialism and American Political Culture • 49

compelling, his reflections on the “steady work” of socialist politics may still
give his readers reason to suspect that “democratic fraternity” can make a
home within the American polity.

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