Toward an Overlapping Dissensus

Founding Principles: Anti-Stalinism and Anti-McCarthyism

Although I want to argue that the central plank of Dissent’s policy platform was its hostility to splinter movements on the left, it must be noted that this platform had its limits. Dissent has never had any time for the Stalinist left and was founded in overt hostility to Stalinism. Indeed, the animating principle behind the New York Intellectual movement of which the Dissent circle was a part had been anti-Stalinism from the founding of Partisan Review in the mid-1930s (Cooney 1986, 144–45; Laskin 2000, 33–36).

Be that as it may, the decision that Irving Howe and Lewis Coser took to found Dissent in 1954 reflected a belief that the anti-Stalinist left, and especially Partisan Review, had “lost its bearings” and become moribund in the postwar United States, with the magazine’s maturity coinciding with a loss of vitality (Cooney 1986, 270–72). Worse still was Commentary, which took a hard line “liberal anti-Communist” stance (Bloom 1986, 285). The only one of the New York Intellectuals’ magazines that Dissent’s founders took to offer a “radical political alternative to the model of the revolutionary vanguard” was Dwight Macdonald’s Politics (Wilford 1995, vii–ix), which had gone out of business in 1949. ² In short, by the early 1950s, the founders of Dissent had concluded that the New York Intellectual community had ceased to serve an oppositionist role, and wished to revitalize the American left. Howe once said, “When intellectuals can do nothing else, they start a magazine” (Howe 1979, xv), so he and Coser decided to set up Dissent to meet two goals. Unlike Partisan Review and Commentary, it would be sensitive to the dangers to democracy posed by McCarthy. It would also not be soft on Stalinism.

The opening editorial of Dissent is the best source for these claims. In it, the magazine promised to “dissent from the bleak atmosphere of conformism . . . from the ideal assumption that a new war is necessary or inevitable,” which in the context of the 1950s meant that it would oppose attempts to deepen the Cold War and thus expressed the magazine’s anti-McCarthyism. The editorial insisted that the magazine would be in the “tradition of democratic socialism” and proclaimed, “We shall try to reassert the libertarian values of the socialist ideal,” thus differentiating Dissent from the Stalinist left (“A Word to Our Readers” 1954, 3).

The editorial also promised a broad-church radicalism, insisting that “Our magazine will be open to a wide arc of opinion, excluding only Stalinists and totalitarian fellow travelers on the one hand, and those former radicals who have signed their peace with society as it is, on the other” (“A Word to Our Readers” 1954, 4). Dissent’s democratic socialism did not commit it to accept all strands of political opinion, but the magazine did hope to encourage the development of a form of socialism that rejected the authoritarian tactics employed by Stalinists and that grew out of the postwar liberalism that it took to be so conformist. While growing out of that liberalism, Dissent hoped to avoid consenting to McCarthy’s purges and to express radical hostility to the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. So, in its early issues, it “aimed a good deal of its fire at those Cold War liberals who complied with the anti-radical witch-hunt, especially Sidney Hook and Irving Kristol” and was also severely critical of the segregationist policies then prevalent in the American South (Wald 1987, 324). ³

It is worth noting that anti-Stalinism did not just mean hostility to the Soviet Union. Howe and Coser, assisted by Julius Jacobson, dedicated much of their academic attention in the next few years to a lengthy critique of the American Communist Party (Howe and Coser 1957, 1962). The authors argue that the American Communist Party had, for nearly 40 years prior to its virtual collapse in 1957, “exerted a profoundly destructive . . . influence upon American radicalism” (Howe and Coser 1962, 499). The failure of the Communist Party was the result of its “sectarianism and obtuseness,” which allowed it to use workers who followed it cynically, and so to produce an “enormous waste of human resources” (Howe and Coser 1962, 272).

Throughout this work, Howe and Coser repeatedly contrast the “sectarianism” of the Communist Party, under the influence of Moscow, with what they take to be the golden age of American radicalism in the early twentieth century, when the Socialist Party, under the leadership of Eugene Debs, encompassed “a wide array of types of idea and platform, with no particular unifying banner” (Howe and Coser 1962, 2). The Socialist Party’s policy platform was, in Howe and Coser’s view, lacking in intellectual sophistication, being marked mostly by a belief in “Progress” and held together by little more than the rhetoric of Debs (Howe and Coser 1962, 4). The party failed to consider many of the important problems that confront socialist movements, such as the relationship between the workers and the party and the difficulties in aligning planning with freedom (Howe and Coser 1962, 6–7). Despite these failings, the Socialist Party under Debs was united and, for that reason, as Howe claimed again decades later, it would have been ideal for the American socialist movement for the clock to stop in 1912 (Howe 1985, 3). As Howe argued, “from a later socialist perspective, what seems most impressive about the Debsian party is that it was not a sect” (Howe 1985, 18).

The reason that sectarianism is so damaging to radicalism in the view of Howe and Coser is not just that disunity is a political disadvantage. Rather, they held that the development of splits in the socialist movement following the Socialist Party convention in 1912 started the process by which socialism became unsettled from its mooring in the actual lives of the workers whom it hoped to represent (Howe and Coser 1962, 15–17). For example, in 1912, the American Federation of Labor, which formed the right of the party under the leadership of Victor Berger, succeeded in adding a clause to the party’s constitution that stated that advocates of the use of crime or violence in the movement for working-class emancipation should be expelled from the party. The upshot was that the International Workers of the World were alienated and the Socialist Party broke decisively from that stratum of American workers. Howe and Coser’s work is in large part an argument about the importance of avoiding repetition of such events by focusing on the actual lives of workers (Howe and Coser 1962, 26–28).

Howe and Coser argue that sectarianism is dangerous because it fails to distinguish between “fact and desire,” between theory and practice. Hence, it often leads to “an effort to force the will of the frustrated sect upon the rhythm of social developments; the sect, unable to make history, feels tempted to violate it” (Howe and Coser 1962, 31). Such thoughts apply equally to sectarianism of left and right and could be aimed with justification at McCarthyism. As the authors point out, the McCarthy era was “an ugly moment in the history of the United States,” the worst of which was “that little of the Communist hunting which filled the headlines week after week had anything to do with what was really troubling Americans” (Howe and Coser 1962, 480).

In other words, Dissent had both immediate and broader justifications for aiming its fire simultaneously on McCarthyism and Stalinism. The major reason was, of course, their prominence in world politics in the 1950s. More generally, each movement reflected what the Dissenters took to be a dangerous tendency to abstract from the concerns of importance to the lives of ordinary Americans. One of Dissent’s enduring concerns has been, as we will see, to ground its protest in the ongoing life of the community of which it is a part. Seeing that community as committed to democracy as a political form and to liberalism as a set of values, including tolerance, pragmatism, and pluralism, the Dissenters have advocated a socialism that is both liberal and democratic.

The Market and Authority: Dissent in the 1960s

As the conformity of the 1950s faded, and the radicalism of the 1960s emerged, Dissent continued to oppose those elements on the left that it saw as endorsing authoritarian tactics, and fleshed out the ways in which its commitment was to a democratic socialism that drew on liberal insights. For reasons of space, I focus on one example of each of these things. First, the “market socialism” defended in the magazine by Ben Seligman, which demonstrates its ongoing commitment to working within but transforming American politics as it manifested itself. Second, the magazine’s reaction to the New Left in the 1960s, which was initially cautiously positive, became more and more critical because of Dissent’s perception that groups such as SDS had adopted authoritarian methods in the mid-1960s.

Seligman put his position most clearly in a 1959 Dissent article titled “Socialism Without Marx” (Seligman 1959a). He argued that any future socialist economy must combine cooperative and redistributive ambitions with the “moral and political aims that socialists seek” and claimed that the competitive aspects of the market could not be absent in such an economy (Seligman 1959a, 273–74). This meant that socialism had to coexist with the democratic procedures of liberalism and that “socialism can no longer be discussed purely in economic terms” (Seligman 1959a, 273). As Neil Jumonville notes, market socialism remained Seligman’s pet project in Dissent (Jumonville 1991, 96). Nonetheless, Howe and Coser published a slew of articles on the topic by Seligman, which suggests that the magazine wanted market socialism to be discussed (Jumonville 2007, 371–72). Certainly, they gave plenty of attention to Seligman’s attempt to “reject the economic philosophy of both conservatives and Marxists and to carve out a place between them for the democratic socialists” (Jumonville 1991, 95). Seligman’s writings on market socialism in Dissent can be understood as the economic branch of the magazine’s political commitments, in that he took to task both Marxists, for being too certain of the truth of their theories, and Keynesians, for being too willing to consent to the inevitable inequalities produced by a capitalist society (Seligman 1954, 1956, 1958, 1959b). Seligman, like the other writers on the magazine, felt that democratic socialism had to prioritize “the values of individual autonomy, personal freedom of choice, and decentralization of economic and political power” (Jumonville 1991, 95).

In the 1960s, the most noteworthy feature of Dissent’s political engagement was its interaction with the New Left, and in particular with SDS. In a sense, this interaction was predetermined by the support of various Dissent writers, such as Howe, for continued American involvement in Vietnam, and by their opposition to the Cuban Revolution, because leading elements in the New Left took the contrary position on both issues. Howe called them “authoritarian” because of this (Harrington 1970, 33–39; Howe 1970b; Wald 1987, 327–30). Nonetheless, Vietnam and Cuba did not necessitate tension between Dissent and SDS; after all, younger Dissent writers, such as Michael Walzer, spent a huge amount of time campaigning against Vietnam, which was to be the inspiration for Walzer’s most famous book, Just and Unjust Wars (Walzer 1977). Furthermore, Dissent took an initial interest in SDS, inviting its leaders to visit the magazine’s offices in 1962, and getting Walzer to chair a symposium of the young radicals (“The Young Student Radicals: A Symposium” 1962; Jumonville 1991, 202–11). However, the meeting did not go smoothly, and Howe later admitted that Dissent had handled it poorly (Howe 1982, 291–315).

Suddenly, cast in the role of Old Left, the Dissent circle was ruffled. Coser put these concerns cogently, expressing worry about the lack of appreciation for democracy and analysis, and about the excessive interest in revolutions in the developing world, and concluding that the student radicals were too “visceral” (“The Young Student Radicals” 1962 , 159–62). In its interaction with the students, Dissent displayed the lingering legacy of the fear of Stalinism that had generated the impulse to found the magazine. For example, at the meeting, Howe objected to SDS’s usage of the term “participatory democracy” in distinction to liberal or representative democracy, on the grounds that it “was reminiscent of the Stalinists’ rejection of ‘mere’ bourgeois democracy” (Howe 1985, 152–54; Jumonville 1991, 204). The students argued that the United States was a failure as a democracy. The cornerstone of radical politics, as defined by the American radical democratic tradition was, as C. Wright Mills argued, to reverse the conservative tendency to celebrate society as it is (Stears 2010, 206). This must include the view that liberal democracy does not meet the conditions required for a polity to be defined as truly democratic. For this reason, SDS had a great deal of sympathy for attempts to subvert liberal democratic norms, and made heroes out of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Mao.

Although Dissent found this to be a worryingly authoritarian tendency, the magazine came to this view only after a great deal of deliberation. As Howe later put it,

When the phrase “participatory democracy” first began to be heard, it gained its impact partly as a response to a genuine problem that had been troubling both socialist and nonsocialist thinkers . . . What could be done to stop the gradual erosion of democratic institutions, in which the formal appearance of participation by the people continued but the real substance declined? (1970a, 12)

Howe, and fellow Dissent contributors, did not want to acquiesce in procedures that masked the reality of elite domination and saw this early emphasis on participatory democracy on the part of the New Left as “a profoundly welcome and promising reinvigoration of American public life” (Howe 1970a, 7). They were therefore cautiously optimistic about SDS’s founding document, the Port Huron statement, which they saw as proposing a view of politics close to Dissent’s own. Howe summarized that view as proposing improving democratic procedures by working within them, reactivating a coalition of “liberal-left-labor” forces, and hoping for a “slow regathering of forces” by understanding the needs of American workers and unions, while not staying rigidly within the confines of post–New Deal liberalism (Hayden 2005; Howe 1970a, 14–15).

By 1962, however, Dissent had come to the conclusion that SDS, and other elements of the New Left, no longer paid sufficient attention to the actual experiences of Americans and that the call for participatory democracy laid the ground for authoritarian politics, because dismissing “formal democracy” outright made any type of democracy impossible. Democracy must, the Dissent circle concluded, be committed to procedures, even if procedures alone were insufficient (Graubard 1970, 144–65; Howe 1970a, 12–13). As Allen Graubard put it, by dismissing the value of such developments as a “semi-welfare state,” the student radicals, like their intellectual inspiration Herbert Marcuse, ignored “the actual meaning of these changes to the people who experience them as real improvements” (Graubard 1970, 163–64; Walzer 1988b, 170–90). Graubard clearly expresses the Dissent circle’s fear about the legacy of Marcuse’s pessimism on the student radicals: it discourages a belief that any immediate improvements can be effective prior to revolution, ⁴ and therefore moves dangerously close to Stalinism, and it valorizes total statements that are “tougher” and “more powerful” (1970, 145).

Howe summed up Dissent’s critique of SDS by arguing that, although its opposition to Vietnam was useful, its key commitments were flawed. For Howe, it is not true that “achieving short-term goals within the present society is incompatible with working toward long-range social change” (Howe 1970a, 4–5). That is why Dissent’s attitude toward SDS, especially after the meeting between the two in 1962, is paradigmatic of the magazine’s policy platform. As with the American Communist Party, Dissent felt that the New Left failed to recognize the importance of the very real values of American liberalism and, instead of working to improve them immanently, was happy only with total overhaul. The circle therefore believed that the New Left would not be able to engage the loyalties of sufficient numbers of potential American radicals, because the vast majority of American workers sought only improvements within the system.

Reconciling Socialism and Liberalism

Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, senior figures in the Dissent circle committed themselves to defending a form of socialism that was in their own account indistinguishable from liberalism, except that the setting was socialized.

The earliest development of this move toward what we might describe as liberal socialism was Lewis Coser’s work on “Greedy Institutions,” which shifted the Dissent circle’s attention toward pluralism. Coser’s argument was to be a major influence on Michael Walzer’s much later work Politics and Passion (Coser 1974; Walzer 2004b). Coser offered a critique of those groups that, throughout history, had tried to claim the entirety of their members’ loyalties such that the claims of competing roles were reduced to insignificance. Greedy Institutions thus make “omnivorous” demands on their members (Coser 1974, 4). Coser argued that such groups were common throughout European history and included the disciples of Jesus, utopian communities and sects, and the church’s requirement that priests be celibate. The demands made on wives and mothers by greedy families are the example with the greatest sociological significance (Coser 1974, 5–18). In all these cases, the group subsumes the person’s identity, and she or he is not allowed to develop additional or alternative attachments.

Coser objected to Greedy Institutions on the grounds that they require their members to relinquish the autonomy that they might gain from multiple identities. He argued that Greedy Institutions were anathema to the preservation of an open society (Coser 1974, 18). The hallmark of the modern world is that it encourages multiple levels of commitment, or what Walzer would later refer to as multiple “spheres” of social life (Walzer 1983). Greedy Institutions is an important statement of the Dissent circle’s pluralism, because it emphasizes the importance of decentralization, conflicting identities, and autonomy. Coser noted that the work was inspired by recent intellectual developments that “tend to deplore in a rather indiscriminate fashion the differentiated, segmented, and ‘alienated’ character of modern life” (1974, 17–18). Coser felt that attempts to create “wholeness,” rather than plurality, would end up restricting individual freedom and autonomy. For this reason, socialism must be pluralist and not statist. Given the interaction between the Dissent circle and the New Left, the reference appears clearly to be to Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man and its influence on SDS.

Contemporary Dissenters have openly adopted Coser’s pluralism as a rallying cry. Walzer (1983, 312–21; 2007, 68–80) did so in Spheres of Justice, the subtitle of which proclaims the work to be “A Defense of Pluralism and Equality,” in which he argued that justice in contemporary society required separation between the different spheres of social life. Such separation is necessary to ensure that respect is paid to the meaning of social goods and to our shared understandings, central commitments of Walzer’s political theory that he developed, in part, because of Dissent’s insistence on a form of equality that respects our lived experience. Greedy Institutions is more directly influential in Walzer’s discussion of the accommodation that might be granted to cultural minorities that wish to restrict the education of their children (Walzer 2004b, 44–65).

The turn to pluralism was a common feature of American radicalism in the 1970s (Bevir and Reiner 2012). The next noteworthy development in the thought of the Dissent circle was less common. That was Howe’s attempt to go beyond arguing that socialism must develop out of liberalism and claim that the two could and must be reconciled. “Socialism and Liberalism,” first published in Dissent in 1977, is the clearest account of the attempt to embrace as many ideological positions as possible in the radical movement. In its reprinting in Socialism and America, it appears alongside reiteration of other arguments made by Howe that this article has discussed. These include the claims that the era of Debs was a golden age for American socialism (Howe 1985, 3–48) and that the American socialist movement has subsequently been hamstrung by the impact of the Communist Party and by the failure to recognize the complexity of American life and the positive worth of some of the values of American liberalism (Howe 1985, 87–144).

While the first half of Socialism and America thus reiterates Howe’s stance from the 1950s, the second half develops it further. In “Thinking about Socialism,” Howe takes seriously the idea that socialism may have outgrown its usefulness and that the label should be changed. However, he insists that the central socialist insight—“the yearning for a better mode of life”—will continue (Howe 1985, 177–218). Howe thus searches for alternative labels, considering both “economic democrats” and “democratic radicals” (Howe 1985, 217). “Socialism and Liberalism,” which is an attempt to survey the most common socialist criticisms of liberalism, ends up arguing that the difference between social liberalism and democratic socialism is getting continually smaller and will soon be “no more than incremental” (Howe 1985, 170). Furthermore, Howe takes it that the critiques of liberalism could also apply to democratic socialism, but that the two are jointly responsible for whatever hopes we still have for a free world (Howe 1985, 175).

For Howe, then, at this point, socialism is not an improvement on liberalism but something that must sit alongside it, with a permanent need to balance the two. Indeed, in a note to the essay by Walzer that Howe appends to it, Walzer criticizes Howe for this and for taking socialism to be indistinguishable from “communitarianism” (Howe 1985, 164). Walzer summarizes the essay thus: “You describe the communitarian critique of liberalism, acknowledge its power, but proceed quickly to note the distortions of communitarianism, and end by pleading for a balance between the communal and the individual” (Howe 1985, 163).

Why was this? Howe’s argument depended on the claim that “the socialist criticism . . . contained at least two strands: one that disdained liberalism for its failure to live up to its claims and one that disdained liberalism for its success in living up to its claims” (Howe 1985, 165). The claim that the socialist critique of liberalism alleged both that it misrepresented social life and accurately represented undesirable features of social life was part of the general position of the Dissenters. They held that it is easy to spot the limitations of liberalism. However, given the limits of historical possibility, they believed that it was less easy to know how to develop a better society (Howe 1985, 165). As a result, Howe claims that all the socialist criticisms of liberalism must sit alongside recognition of the importance of the related liberal insights.

Consider the socialist criticism of classical liberalism, which on Howe’s account is that “the historical conditions of early capitalist society made a mockery of any notion of free and equal competitors entering into free and equal exchange.” This criticism, Howe says, has been absorbed by all except “such ideological eccentrics as Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman” (1985, 150). Howe insists that socialists have also always noticed the vitality of capitalism, as shown by the depiction of the bourgeoisie in The Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels [1848] 2002). Howe also holds that the quintessence of modernity, the notion of the self, could not have come into being without classical liberalism (Howe 1985, 151–52). So, even the strongest socialist criticism of liberalism must be accompanied by some explanation of how it might be possible to do away with liberalism. Howe concludes that socialism “at its most serious . . . proposes a dialectical relationship with ‘classical’ liberalism” (1985, 152).

If socialism is in dialectic with classical liberalism, it is, in Howe’s view, all but synonymous with modern liberalism. Consider, Howe suggests, the claim that liberalism defends the values of “egotism, competition, private property” and that socialism upholds those of “community—human fellowship, social grouping” (1985, 162). Insightful though the criticism is, there is nothing in it that cannot be found, according to Howe, in John Stuart Mill’s critiques of Bentham and Coleridge, so liberalism can easily absorb the criticism. Indeed, liberalism and socialism have influenced each other for the better, and must do so, because human beings are both social and solitary (Howe 1985, 162–63). Howe makes similar points about further socialist criticisms of liberalism—for example, that liberal liberties rest on acquiescence in bourgeois domination (1985, 166–69) and that liberalism has failed to extend its concern with democracy into the economic realm (1985, 169–71). Howe grants that there is something to the critiques, but insists that it is most applicable to classical liberalism, while noting that each critique can “be brought to bear with equal cogency against social democracy” (1985, 173).

The point, for Howe and the other Dissenters, is that no political system is flawless. Liberalism has its failures, but it is also responsible for historical achievements. A radical movement can only improve on our situation by entering into a permanent coalition with modern liberal forces. So, from growing out of liberalism, Dissent had come to accept a democratic socialism that sat as comfortably alongside liberalism as it did pluralism. Although other members of the Dissent circle were not so sanguine about accommodating liberalism, they rarely rejected it outright. ⁵

Democratic Socialism in the Age of Cultural Identity

By the end of the careers of Dissent’s founding fathers, the magazine had made its peace with liberalism, in part by making the move to pluralism. On Howe’s death in 1993, the editorship passed to Michael Walzer. He has remained Dissent’s editor, in collaboration at different times with such figures as Mitchell Cohen and Michael Kazin, ever since. The major contribution that Walzer has made to the Dissent circle has been to extend the democratic socialist concern beyond the economy and into the cultural arena. In doing so, he has significantly expanded the range of ideologies that are to be kept in balance with democratic socialism in Dissent’s radical agenda. He did this, first, by seeking a permanent balance for “communitarianism” alongside liberalism and social democracy, and later by redefining social democracy as the balance between ideological perspectives necessitated by the increasingly multicultural nature of American society.

Let us start with communitarianism. Walzer’s 1990 Political Theory article “The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism” achieved some fame as a contribution to the then prominent liberal-communitarian debate as an attempt to reconcile the perspectives (Walzer 1990; reprinted in Walzer 2004b, 141–63; and in Walzer 2007, 96–114). Walzer had until that point normally been taken by analytic political theorists to be a communitarian. I argue that the article is a straightforward successor piece to Howe’s “Socialism and Liberalism” and can be understood only as a product of the Dissent circle’s political thought. This is made manifest when Walzer’s addendum to “Socialism and Liberalism” is considered.

Walzer’s major argument in “The Communitarian Critique” is that communitarian criticisms of liberalism are, like fashions in the arts, “transient but certain to return” (Walzer 2007, 96). No liberal rebuttal will permanently defeat communitarianism, but no communitarian critique will ever be more than a recurrent critique. A recurrent critique that wins “small victories,” then fades away, only to return, is both useful and inevitable (Walzer 2007, 96; cf. Walzer 1971, 116–19). Communitarianism is thus usefully contrasted with social democracy, which has succeeded in establishing just such a permanent presence alongside liberalism. Social democracy acts as a useful corrective to liberalism, because it fosters communal identification, but it is also prone to many of the same criticisms as liberalism, because of its commitment to economic growth, which tends to promote “deracinated” social forms (Walzer 2007, 96–97).

So, Walzer takes it that Howe’s project of establishing a permanent uneasy coalition between liberal and social democratic ideas has been successful. He seeks to extend it to include communitarianism. What demonstrates the influence of Howe on Walzer is that the reason that communitarianism must perpetually recur is that there are, in Walzer’s view, two communitarian critiques, and they are to a degree mutually exclusive. First, liberal political theory is taken to be an accurate representation of social practice in liberal states, and liberalism is thus taken to promote a society of atomized and isolated individuals cut off from those around them. This is the communitarianism of the young Marx and of Alasdair MacIntyre (MacIntyre [1981] 2007; Walzer 2007, 97–99). Second, however, liberal theory is taken to be a radical misinterpretation of social reality, which does not and could not function in the manner depicted by liberals. This is the communitarianism of Robert Bellah and, perhaps, of Michael Sandel (Bellah et al. 1985; Sandel [1982] 1998; Walzer 2007, 99–101).

Walzer insists that each critique is “partly right” but “in a way that undercuts the value of the other” (2007, 97). That is to say, it is true that contemporary society is becoming increasingly isolated and unsettled, as a result of what Walzer calls the “Four Mobilities”: geographic, social, marital, and political (1997, 103; 2007, 101–105). Geographic mobility refers to the frequency with which people change their residence (Walzer 2007, 101). Social mobility refers to our ability to choose an occupation for ourselves and to change our social status (Walzer 2007, 101–102). Marital mobility refers to our ability to escape from unhappy relationships (Walzer 2007, 102), while political mobility means that we choose our allegiance for ourselves (Walzer 2007, 102). Liberalism endorses these mobilities but fails to notice their disruptive effects. We can, for example, move down the social scale as easily as we can move up it, while divorce causes unhappiness and loneliness as well as liberation (Walzer 2007, 101–103).

So, the first communitarian critique is partly true: liberal values really do lead to social atomization. So, however, is the second, because the Four Mobilities do not separate us to the extent that mutual comprehensibility is challenged. Our differences remain within the confines of a set of shared understandings (Walzer 2007, 104). Liberalism thus requires periodic communitarian correction because, although it is the set of shared understandings by which we live, it constantly seeks to undercut itself and hence “tends towards instability and dissociation” (Walzer 2007, 112). Our commitment to liberalism is strong enough to make a permanent curtailment of the Four Mobilities undesirable, but we must notice their negative effects. The only (political) community that any of us knows is the “liberal union of unions,” but this is “always precarious and always at risk,” so communitarian reinforcement is necessary but temporary, and communitarianism is “doomed . . . to eternal recurrence” (Walzer 2007, 112).

For three reasons, this argument is the successor to Howe’s position in “Socialism and Liberalism” and the updated version of the Dissent circle’s platform. First, where Howe sought a permanent balance between liberalism and socialism, Walzer takes that to have been achieved and seeks to extend it to communitarianism. The second, more important, reason is that Walzer’s analysis of the communitarian critique is identical to Howe’s account of the socialist critique. In each case, liberalism is described as being both unreflective of social reality and as accurately describing an atomized way of living. Howe and Walzer note that the criticisms of liberalism incorporate the claims that liberal theory accurately describes an atomized society (Howe 1985, 165; Walzer 2007, 97–9) and that liberalism is mistaken in thinking that society could ever be atomized (Howe 1985, 165; Walzer 2007, 99–101). Furthermore, each man takes it that the criticisms may both be partly right but cannot be totally right (Howe 1985, 165; Walzer 2007, 97), and holds that for this reason, a permanent balance between liberalism and more cooperative modes of social organization is necessary (Howe 1985, 175; Walzer 2007, 105, 112). Moreover, this analysis shows the legacy of each man’s thought to the Dissent circle and his influence on it, for liberalism is taken to be both reflective of real social values that are such important parts of American—possibly Western—society that we cannot think of ourselves without them, and responsible for many of our society’s failures via the decline in attachment and our increasing distance from each other.

The third reason is that Walzer’s account of the Four Mobilities closely follows what he said in the note to “Socialism and Liberalism” that Howe attached to that article. The purport of Walzer’s note is that Howe calls for a balance between communitarianism and liberalism but fails to distinguish adequately between communitarianism and socialism. Walzer goes on to argue that this distinction is important because it emphasizes the power of the communitarian critique. He then says that socialism

represents . . . a kind of middle position between the solitary individual and the overheated community . . . I don’t know what the alternative to liberal individualism is, but it’s not . . . communitarianism; it might have more to do with such old socialist values as cooperation, mutuality, communal provision, public life, and so on . . . [L]ife in a liberal society has been made bearable by the existence of social ties that liberalism does not create and . . . does not sustain, and one of the things that socialism is or ought to be about is the creation of new ties (and sometimes the strengthening of old ones). (Cited in Howe 1985, 164)

As in “The Communitarian Critique,” Walzer holds that liberalism needs the sustenance of social bonds that it cannot provide. Walzer also uses the evidence of the rising American divorce rate and increased number of single-person households, which was to become “Marital Mobility,” and the increase in suicide, mental illness, alcoholism, and drug addiction that results from liberalism, which were to become the downsides of both “Geographic” and “Social” Mobility (Howe 1985, 164).

In On Toleration (Walzer 1997), at a time in which Walzer’s attention was largely focused on questions of cultural identity and the “politics of difference,” he argued again that there was a permanent need for a balance between positions. In this case, the balance needed was between multiculturalism and individualism, between communitarianism and liberalism, and between modernism and postmodernism. That balance was social democracy (Walzer 1994; 1997, 112). For Walzer, multicultural policies are examples of communitarianism at work, and they are an essential part of a program for greater equality. However, at the same time that we defend group difference, we must attack class difference (Walzer 1997, 111). In an era in which cultural differences are of increasing salience, a radical politics must be liberal, communitarian, pluralist, and multiculturalist. If it manages to be all of those things, then it will, for Walzer and the magazine that he edits, be a successful example of social democracy in practice.

Conclusion: Dissent, the End of Ideologies, and the Radical Democratic Tradition

My argument in this article is that the leading figures of the Dissent circle—Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, and, later, Michael Walzer—sought a social democratic politics of a particular kind. The story I tell sees them define social democracy in opposition to Stalinism and authoritarianism on the left, and as growing out of, incorporating, or being held in balance with liberalism. Dissent argued against factionalism on the left and held that a radical movement would be successful only when it incorporated as vast a grouping of ideological elements as was compatible with the twin aims of rejecting the inequalities produced by American capitalism and the hierarchies of Stalinist communism. ⁶ I then argue that, in later years, the Dissent circle sought to extend that incorporation to include pluralism, communitarianism, and multiculturalism.

It will no doubt be objected that the initial criticisms of the magazine made by Norman Podhoretz and Daniel Bell that said that it did not really dissent in any meaningful way were indeed accurate, and that Dissent’s position seems indistinguishable from that of many liberals, even some neoconservatives. Advocating the incorporation of almost every ideological perspective can look suspiciously like advocating the end of ideological disagreement, and so Dissent’s position can look very much like Bell’s “end of ideology” thesis. ⁷

However justified criticisms of particular positions taken by writers on the magazine may be, it is important not to confuse Dissent’s advocacy of a perpetual tense balancing of perspectives with an end-of-ideology position. For, while writers such as Bell came close to arguing that public disagreement on values either had or would disappear from political life, the Dissenters held that ideological debate is a never-ending and important part of politics. Indeed, one of Walzer’s major critiques of philosophical liberalism has been that it moves dangerously close to suggesting that philosophy can provide permanent answers to political questions and thus may undercut the vitality of political debate (Walzer 2007, 1–21, 134–46). There are, in Walzer’s eyes, no final answers in politics, only a recurrent set of temporary resting points. Dissent’s attempt to incorporate liberal, communitarian, pluralist, and multicultural elements into its project did not represent an attempt to stifle disagreement, but to claim that disagreement takes place within the context of broader agreement. Entries into public debate are part of a complex web of ongoing contributions to an indefinable but definite set of arguments about how we organize our collective life. That is why I have said that Dissent seeks an overlapping dissensus, which we might define as a sort of anti-Rawlsian recognition of shared values and understandings that frame our disagreements and give them meaning.

The overlapping dissensus owes a debt, certainly, to other members of the New York Intellectual community. Consider, for example, Sidney Hook, often taken to be the “intellectual forefather of the New York group” (Bloom 1986, 103; Jumonville 1991, 17), who started life attempting to develop an American Marxism that incorporated Dewey’s pragmatism (Hook 1933; Jumonville 1991, 19–21), became a virulent anti-Communist while continuing to describe himself as a democratic socialist (Kurtz 1983, x), and is frequently taken to have moved firmly to the right by the end of his career (Kurtz 1983, xi; Wald 1987, 4). Hook bequeathed to the Dissenters a notion of the importance of pragmatism in politics and ideas that influenced their emphasis on grounding reform in the life of the community. Like them, he rejected “empty philosophical abstractions,” sought to “relate thought to concrete subject matter,” and was always “eager to confront the genuine issues of human concern” (Kurtz 1983, x). Like the Dissent circle, Hook advocated tolerance of other opinions, and combined this with sustained hostility to Communist totalitarianism (Jumonville 1991, 1–3, 16–17). We might conclude, then, that Hook was “an ally of the dissenters” (Jumonville 1991, 146).

Despite the debt, Dissent sought to differentiate its position from that of Hook, associating him with their rivals Commentary, holding that he failed to perceive that McCarthyism was as great a threat to American freedom as was Stalinism, and accusing them of pandering to McCarthy by seeking to deny civil liberties to Stalinists (Bloom 1986, 287; Jumonville 1991, 84). The accuracy of Dissent’s critique of Hook has been debated, but is beyond this article’s remit. The crucial point is that Dissent used insights drawn from Hook to develop the dissensus, and used those same insights to criticize his position and demonstrate the possibility of opposing both Stalinism and McCarthyism. In the circumstances of American politics in the early 1950s, the same values that American liberals claimed to promote—civil liberties, freedom of speech, and tolerance—could be turned against those who tried to stifle dissent and ensure conformity.

Put another way, Dissent’s position is that social democracy must be something like what Walzer calls “social criticism” in action. Social criticism occurs when political theorists and public intellectuals try to improve the world not by appeal to abstract moral principles that they claim either to have invented or discovered, but by appeal to situated moral principles that, they claim, are already extant in our conception of the world (Walzer 1987, 3–32; 1988b, ix–x, 3–28). Justice, on this account, is our mirror and not our critic. We ground our criticism in shared values and seek to show society how it fails to live up to the values that it claims to live by (Walzer 1988b, 229–33).

The Dissenters’ point is that debate then proceeds not by insisting that the values of the opposition are wrong but that they are not being applied. The reason this is important is that the “detached and disinterested moralist drones on and on, and we don’t care. But the silence of the connected social critic is a grim sign—a sign of defeat” (Walzer 1988b, 152). So long as we have hope for American public life, Dissent holds, we must think that its intellectual groupings have the resources to continue to argue against exclusion, marginalization, atomization, and isolation. The failures of the American left are, in this view, due to the tendency to splinter. The successful construction of an overlapping dissensus is the best way to avoid that tendency.

To make this point clearer, I close by situating this article methodologically. I have adopted a “traditions and dilemmas” approach to the history of ideas (Bevir 2000; 2011; Stears 2010). The leading Dissenters grounded their magazine’s approach in liberalism because of the dilemmas that they took to face the left following the moral failures of Stalinism. Later on, Dissent reconciled with liberalism because of further dilemmas raised by the authoritarianism of elements of the New Left and its rapid decline as an active force in American politics. Hence the conclusion that the magazine drew from the experience of the American left in the twentieth century was that, in the American context, any radical movement could succeed only if it accepted small victories and elements of the liberal tradition, because of the meaning of those things in people’s lives.

For this reason, Dissent is properly seen as one of the heirs to what Stears (2010) describes as the “radical democratic” tradition. Stears defines that tradition as an alternative to both “democratic realism” and “deliberative democracy.” Like democratic realists, the radical democratic tradition held that “the inadequacies of American democracy ensured that political change could not be forged through a politics of reason, consensus, and inclusion alone” and would require crusading political action (Stears 2010, 12). Like deliberative democrats, the radical democratic tradition looked forward to a time when “such actions were no longer necessary, a time when democratic politics would become more open, less exclusive, more egalitarian” (Stears 2010, 12). Stears takes Walzer to be a democratic realist who is pessimistic about the possibility of democratic transformation (Stears 2010, 2–3). If the argument of this article is correct, however, then Walzer and the other Dissenters are, however cautiously, optimistic about the possibility of developing a social democratic politics that is indeed open, inclusive, and egalitarian. By incorporating a broad range of ideological perspectives—social democracy, liberalism, pluralism, communitarianism, and multiculturalism—the magazine’s leading figures have sought openness and inclusivity and have hoped to reground American politics in such a way that perpetual disagreement continues to exist alongside recognition that what binds us together shapes what continues to hold us apart. If and when this happens, the Dissenters believe, the united American radical movement will go from strength to strength.