A long (and long time coming) interview I did with the wide-ranging, not-easily-categorizable Bulgarian-French writer Tzvetan Todorov appears in the Winter 2008 issue of the journal Critical Inquiry. The full text, alas, is not available online, but this small sample -- just enough to whet the appetite -- is. You can purchase a copy of the interview, or a copy of the issue, here.
On Thursday, November 1st I appeared on the television program Front & Center with John Callaway to discuss "Iran: the Next Military Frontier?" The program took the form of a panel discussion at the Pritzker Military Library in Chicago. The first 60 minutes were recorded for broadcast on public television; an extended-play, 90-minute version is available as a podcast. From here both versions can be downloaded.
The eminent philosopher Richard Rorty died Friday, June 8th, at the age of 75. I am honored to have been granted the final interview with him before his death.
I'm grateful to Matt Rothschild of The Progressive for asking me to do the interview--as I am, needless to say, to Rorty himself for agreeing to it, particularly given the pain he endured during his final months.
The interview has appeared in translation in German (in the newspaper Die Welt), Italian (in the newspaper Corriere della Serra), and Portuguese (in the Brazilian newspaper O Estado de Sao Paulo). It will also appear soon in Polish.
I first interviewed Rorty in 1989. We remained in touch in the intervening 18 years, over the course of which we developed a warm relationship. I interviewed him a few more times over the years, and was his editor for this exchange between him and the Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo. Rorty's writings were a source of stimulation and excitement to me going back 20 years, to my first year of college. I will miss having him as a correspondent and interlocutor. Soon I will publish some further reflections on him. Stay tuned...
My interview with the Iranian philosopher and political prisoner Ramin Jahanbegloo, currently in solitary confinement in Tehran's notorious Evin prison, from the new issue of the journal Logos. See this backgrounder for more on Ramin's fate. Also, my friend Nader Hashemi and I discussed Ramin on an Australian radio show called The Philosopher's Zone recently. You can download that program by going here. A German translation of the interview appears in the daily newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau and also in the journal Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, a Serbo-Croatian translation appears in the Belgrade-based review Biblioteka Alexandria, an Italian translation appears in the bimonthly Milan-based magazine Reset, a French translation appears in the Paris-based magazine Courrier international, a Hungarian translation appears in the Budapest-based journal Múlt és Jövő, and a Spanish translation appears in the Mexico City-based magazine Letras Libres. I'm told that a Russian translation is soon to appear in the Moscow-based journal Logos. Perhaps one day it will appear in Persian.
The first and second installments of a long interview I'm doing with the Bulgarian-born, Paris-based writer Tzvetan Todorov can be found on the website of the journal Critical Inquiry. The full text of the interview will appear in print in a forthcoming issue of the journal, but the first few Q & As are being rolled out one at a time on the journal's website. The first two questions are about Todorov's thoughts on, respectively, the November riots in France and the Danish cartoon affair. Subsequent questions explore his take on the spring demonstrations in France, the future of Europe, 'critical humanism', the and many other topics. A new installment will be posted every few weeks, so keep checking back...
From the Summer 2006 issue of the journal Salmagundi, my interview with Fred Halliday--Middle East scholar, Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics, former member of the editorial committee of New Left Review and now a columnist for openDemocracy. The interview has now been translated into Persian and Serbo-Croatian, appearing in the Tehran-based newspaper Shargh and the Belgrade-based review Alexandria Biblioteka.
An interview I did with Richard Rorty way back in 1989 has just been reprinted in a book, Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself, a collection of interviews with the philosopher spanning more than 20 years. The interview--the first I ever published--originally appeared in the journal Philosophy & Social Criticism. A Spanish edition of the book actually came out first, in 2005.
The antepenultimate issue of Stop Smiling magazine--the "Chicago issue"--contains an interview editor JC Gabel and I did with Studs Terkel (with an introduction by me). Parts of the interview are online (Part I here and Part II here). If you want the full monty, you can buy the magazine by going here. The issue has interviews with an impressive array of literary and cultural figures, as well as an essay by Aleksandar Hemon. I highly recommend it.
The Summer 2005 issue of Dædalus contains an interview I did with the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski in which we discuss, among other things, the death of Czeslaw Milosz, Roman Polanski's The Pianist, Kolakowski's years in and out of the Communist Party, his exile from Poland, his views of the Western Left, modern humanism, the future of Europe, the state of Euro-American relations, and our metaphysical predicament.
The new (Summer 2005) issue of The Common Review contains an interview I did with Christopher Hitchens about his political journey.
In the same issue is an excellent essay by Kevin Mattson on David Brooks and cultural criticism, an excerpt from Morris Dickstein's new book, a superb piece on Isaiah Berlin, and other fine scribblings. If you feel a sudden urge to subscribe, I won't stop you. It's an outstanding magazine -- well worth the $12/year it costs to subscribe. (And I don't say that just because I serve on the editorial board...)
My interview with Ron Aronson about his book Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended It, from the Winter 2005 issue of Logos.
See also this extremely generous post about the interview from the blog of journalist Doug Ireland.
And here Aronson debunks Bush's wild distortion of Camus in his recent speech in Brussels—and takes on "the Camus vogue" among neoconservatives more broadly.
WHAT
Ron Aronson discusses his new book Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It, in conversation with Danny Postel
WHERE
Left of Center Bookstore (Chicago)
1043 W. Granville (a block east of the Granville red line stop/a block & a half east of Broadway)
WHEN
Thursday, March 25 @ 7:00 p.m.
For more about the book, see Russell Jacoby's review in The Nation.
For further information, please contact:
Left of Center Bookstore
773-338-1513
leftofcenterbooks@att.biz
Terry Pinkard's Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge University Press, 2000) is the only English-language biography of the colossally influential 19th-century philosopher once described by Schopenhauer as a "vulgar, dull, repulsive, witless charlatan." In this August 2000 interview with Danny Postel, Pinkard discusses the history of Hegel's reception in the Anglophone world and the relationship between the philosopher's life and ideas.
Britannica.com
August 1, 2000
Interview | Hegel: Spirit of the Times
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) is widely regarded as the most influential philosopher of the 19th century. Indeed many consider him one of the greatest of all modern thinkers. Yet he was not without his detractors: Arthur Schopenhauer, his contemporary, called him a "vulgar, dull, repulsive, witless charlatan." Karl Popper accused him of being an "enemy" of "the open society." Hegel's ideas have been blamed for everything from Nazism to Communism.
But who really was Hegel? Why have his ideas inspired such divergent interpretations and virulent reactions? What resemblance is there between his actual thought and the various uses to which it has been put?
The first English-language biography of the enigmatic philosopher, Hegel: A Biography, has just been published. Britannica.com's Danny Postel sat down to talk with its author, Terry Pinkard.
Britannica: This is the first English-language biography of Hegel. It's been almost 170 years since his death. Why do you think it's taken so long for a biography of such a major figure in modern intellectual history to be written?
Pinkard: The question itself points to a fascinating piece of intellectual history: the reception of Hegel in the English-speaking world. First, there was the establishment of Analytic philosophy by Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore in the beginning of the 20th century, which was itself always billed by both of them as an attack on "Hegelianism" in particular and "idealism" in general. Part of the force of that attack had to do particularly with Russell's own, rather stark modernism. He and that whole Edwardian generation were rebelling against the overdecorated Victorian house and against what they saw as irrational, suffocating Victorian morals—in short, against the whole panoply of overstuffed, overdecorated, pompous Victorian "earnestness" (think of Oscar Wilde's witty play on Victorian stuffiness) and the puffed-up excess that seemed to go with it. Against all of that, men cut their hair, shaved their mutton chops, and started wearing modern suits. Modern, rigorous houses were built, modernism in poetry became a movement unto itself, and so forth.
All these things signified a cultural change of no small magnitude. In philosophy this was touted as a defense of reason, a truly "scientific" approach to things, a mathematization of theory, a paring down to the arguments pro and con for a position, and the like. For Russell, the opposite of all that was the overly inflated, pretentious "Hegelianism" of his day. "Hegelianism" seemed like the perfect philosophical embodiment of everything that the "modernists" (in art, architecture, painting, poetry, and philosophy) were against. Thus, one of the great achievements of Anglophone philosophy—the invention of Analytic philosophy, its techniques of argument, its professionalized style, its extreme seriousness about itself—was achieved by, as it were, "killing off" Hegel. There is something almost Oedipal in the reaction of Anglophone philosophers to Hegel: He just had to be dead. Analytic philosophy could only be created by "killing" the Hegelians (Russell's and Moore's teachers); if Hegel were to return, the whole Analytic show, it was felt, would be doomed.
The other set of events had to do with the demonization of Germany in World War I and the German moral catastrophe that led to World War II. In both cases, for rather spurious and scandalous reasons, Hegel became identified with the kind of "Teutonism" that gave all things German a bad name. The Nazis never liked Hegel, and he was always considered by the party hacks to have too much "Jewish" influence in his thought to be really German. (Of course, there were also opportunistic philosophers in Germany trying to make Hegel, just as they tried to make all kinds of other German philosophers, into heroes of Hitler's state.) Nonetheless, in English-speaking countries, "Hegel" (already the bane of Analytic philosophers poised for their postwar takeover of philosophy departments) became the evil German Hegel. He thus became not only stuffy and pretentious, to be jettisoned in favor of the cool, sparse, argumentative rigor of Analytic philosophy; he became evil.
Those two events—the attack on Hegel that led to the establishment of Analytic philosophy and the false identification of Hegel with German militarism and Nazi terror—made Hegel persona non grata in the Anglophone world until, really, only a few years ago. Only now has Hegel begun to be taken seriously enough that anybody would think of writing such a biography.
Of course Hegel never left continental European philosophy, where people were not taken in by the idea that he was a gasbag who couldn't "argue" or was really in his heart a proto-Nazi. Hegel simply never got burdened with those misreadings on the continent, where he stayed alive while he lived at best an underground existence in Britain, the United States, and Australia.
Britannica: What about some of the other tenets ascribed to him? For example, the notion that he was an idealist: that he believed reality to be ultimately conceptual or spiritual. Not true?
Pinkard: "Idealism" is a particularly hard word to pin down. The sense of the word in English philosophy tends to be associated with the 18th-century British philosopher George Berkeley. It has to do with the idea that all reality is (somehow) mental, that (ultimately) all we are confronting in the world are our own mental representations of it. A more contemporary form of this is "linguistic idealism," which is the idea that all we are ultimately confronting are our own ways of talking about things, not confronting any kind of nonlinguistic thing in itself. (In its postmodern forms this comes down to saying that there isn't just "one" reality, but as many different ones as there are ways of talking about reality.)
As that "idealist" notion gets developed and cashed out by the successors of Immanuel Kant (Hegel among them), it develops into the idea that we understand people and societies best when we understand them in terms of what they themselves ultimately value, how they evaluate themselves, and what is authoritative for them. The opposite of this form of "idealism" is the notion that we understand, for example, societies best when we don't look at what they ultimately value but at some other material force that is driving them (such as the economy or the geography of the place).
Nonetheless, just as Kant was originally taken to be an "idealist" in Berkeley's sense, Hegel was also interpreted as being a kind of cosmic idealist—it was thought that in his case he was saying that everything was mental and that the universe was therefore one big mind that was developing itself historically as it thought about itself. People like Russell jumped all over this as the embodiment of silliness and pretentiousness itself. Taking Hegel to be an idealist in that sense also made it easy to link Hegel and Marx: Hegel thought everything was mental and developing, Marx thought it was material and developing, and so forth.
There was a period in the late 19th century when it was thought that this form of "cosmic idealism" might be the only way to salvage religion from the attacks coming from those who accepted Darwin's rather convincing theory. The idea was that, yes, evolution is true, but it's all part of a bigger story about the Big Mind thinking about itself and "evolving" different conceptions of what it's all about, so that it develops conceptions of itself as ants, then salamanders, then apes, then us, who are its almost perfect expressions. Hegel was thus taken as the "synthesis" of Darwin and religion. That was a short-lived intellectual moment, and it made itself into a big, sweet target for secular debunkers like Russell.
Britannica: One of the things most associated with Hegel's thought is the thesis/antithesis/synthesis scheme, the process by which reality unfolds and history progresses. But you claim this never appears in Hegel's work.
Pinkard: This myth was started by Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus. It appears in a history he wrote of recent German philosophy (published in the 1840s), in which he said, roughly, that Fichte's philosophy followed the model of thesis/antithesis/synthesis, but Hegel went further and cosmologized that notion, extending it to the entire universe. The book was widely read (apparently the young Marx was one of its readers), and the idea stuck. It's still touted in a lot of short encyclopedia entries about Hegel. Like many little encapsulations of thought, it has the virtue of being easy to understand and easy to summarize. It's just not very helpful in understanding Hegel's thought. It has also contributed to the lack of appreciation of Hegel in Anglophone philosophy. It's not too hard to point out all the places where it doesn't apply, dismiss it as a kind of dialectical trick, and then just go on to conclude that Hegel isn't worth reading at all.
Both ideas (Hegel as cosmological idealist, Hegel as seeing the development of this Great Mind as progressing from thesis to antithesis to synthesis) represent a falsification of Hegel's thought, and their ongoing popularity surely has to do with their sound bite quality. You can sum up Hegel quickly, get the impression you understand him, and also dismiss him just as quickly. Looking at the real Hegel is harder but more rewarding. If, to keep it as simple as we can, we try to understand how societies evaluate themselves and what is authoritative for them, then, so Hegel thought, we will also need to understand the complexities involved in how societies historically have come to evaluate themselves, how in turn they have historically become skeptical about whether those very terms of evaluation are themselves adequate, and about how such schemes of evaluation have historically broken down as it became more and more difficult for the participants in that way of life to live out the lives required by those schemes of evaluation they were mutually imposing on each other.
What is still controversial in all that is that Hegel thought that we had to understand that complexity "internally," not in terms of our being driven by blind economic forces or just our natural (these days we would say "genetic") makeup. There is, he thought, a kind of "logic" to the way these matters develop, and we understand them best when we understand them from the point of view of the people living those lives, how they matter to them, and why they come to find they can't "carry on" in that way anymore. Of course, it's just so much easier to say "ah, the thesis, then the antithesis, then the synthesis." Easier but not more enlightening.
Britannica: You write that Hegel's life "intersected with his thought in a variety of deep ways." What were some of those ways?
Pinkard: One of the most obvious ways is the extent to which Hegel responded to his own Württemberg upbringing. "Old Württemberg" had, to borrow the term from the historian Mack Walker, a "hometown" structure. It was organized into a series of small communities, each of which had a clear sense of who belonged, who didn't, what the social rules in that particular community were, what were the duties of the community to support its members, and so forth. Basically, there were lots of little communities, and you had to be part of that community to know what its rules were and what mattered to it.
This posed a severe challenge to all reformers and modernizers: Attempts, for example, to open up employment to talent, or for the emancipation of Jews, or to allow competition in the local marketplaces, were deeply resented and resisted by the "hometowners," who would see this as undermining and corrupting their own particular way of life. (They were, by the way, right about that.) Hegel, as a modernizer, had a good understanding and an appreciation of what drove those "hometowns," but unlike many others, he did not fall into the one-sided solution either of romanticizing the closed "communitarian" nature of these "hometowns," nor of simply cheering on the bureaucratic attempts to impose rational, universal structures from "on high." Instead, he struggled to find a way to reconcile those two elements within his thought. It's a problem we still struggle with today in various forms.
Another way in which Hegel's own Württemberg upbringing played a significant role in his thought had to do with the celebration in Württemberg of what was called "the good old law." As I said, many Württembergers were deeply suspicious of the various Enlightenment schemes to impose universal legal solutions on people. One of Hegel's youthful heroes, J.J. Moser, developed a rich sense of how the law of a land develops out of its particular historical past and is both contingent (in the sense that it can only be understood in terms of that particular past) and at the same time necessary for that people (although Moser himself was never very clear as to just why it was necessary). That left Hegel with a clear sense of one of the key modern paradoxes, which in turn he strove in his own thought to come to terms with: the contingency of our basic evaluative stances (how they could have been otherwise had our particular history gone just a little bit differently) and how they nonetheless called out for a justification in terms that, at least at first glance, aren't relative. That problem of the relativity of our standards versus the nonrelativity of the ways we go about justifying them is also one of those issues with which we are still trying ourselves to come to terms nowadays. Hegel's own attempts at this are still alive and instructive for us.
Hegel's stay in Bavaria as a high school teacher in Nuremberg also allowed him to see some of the problems in modernizing Europe in general and Germany in particular. He was living in a Protestant area that had been subsumed in the Napoleonic wars into the Catholic kingdom of Bavaria. He thus had a firsthand experience of what it was like to be a religious minority in an area that on paper was committed to full confessional rights for all its members but which was still torn by deep-seated divisions and suspicions within its own ranks. His own mature political philosophy was worked out during this period, and some of his best insights into the problems of modern political and social life were developed while he was both managing and teaching in a Protestant high school (a "gymnasium," as they are called in Germany) in Nuremberg.
It's safe to say that Hegel's own attempts at understanding just what this new, modern world required of us—how it called on us to sail out, as Hegel used to say, into the open with nothing above us and nothing below us—intersected crucially with his own experiences of the revolution in France and the ensuing Napoleonic wars in Germany, with all the upheaval they caused, the fears they instilled, and the hopes for a reformed world to which they gave rise. Hegel's generation—the group born around 1770—experienced a wrenching change from a way of life rooted in (at least what seemed like) ancient European practices into the unsettling modern world of political, social, and economic revolution. Hegel's own agenda became that of figuring out how to think our way through all that—what kind of "logic" do we need, what kind of view of ourselves and nature, ourselves and God, the role of modern art, the structure of the modern, constitutional state, and so forth. How, in short, do we conceive of ourselves and the world in terms of continuous upheaval and continuous renewal, as always tearing things down and building them up again? That was Hegel's own life, and it was the object of his thought.
Britannica: Yet you point out that Hegel himself "firmly resisted the idea that the philosophical author's life sheds any light on his works." Doesn't this stand in direct opposition to your attempt to link his life and his ideas?
Pinkard: In one sense it quite obviously does. Hegel thought that in philosophy, the less there is of "This is my opinion" and the more there is of "Here's my argument for my position," the better off we are. Hegel was also being very modern in this approach. He extended this not just to philosophy but also to the various arts. In this way he anticipated, for example, people like T.S. Eliot, who also argued for the "disappearing author." The idea is that you should be able to approach a work of philosophy, or a painting, or a poem, and be able to appreciate it and, most importantly, evaluate it—to ask, "Is it true?"—without having to know anything about the author in question. Quite the opposite is true in, for example, politics, where you need to know something about the politician in order to be able to evaluate whether what he or she is doing or proposing is perhaps more of an expression of power or self-interest than it is something aimed at the common good.
There is, however, another important sense in which linking Hegel's life to his works doesn't contradict some of the other things he says. For Hegel, one of the fundamental tensions in all life, and especially in philosophy, is the one between the way a particular thinker embodies a very specific outlook on things—the result of his or her own personality, upbringing, historical situation, what he or she has come into contact with—and the way in which that thinker makes assertions that purport to be more than just expressions of individual points of view. When a person asserts that, say, constitutional government is the best form of government, he is asserting more than that this just strikes him as the best or that this is an expression of his own personality; he's saying that it really is the best. On the other hand, the person asserting this is also a particular person with his own set of taken-for-granted beliefs and assumptions, and his assertions also have to be understood within that context. This is the tension between the "universal" and the "particular" in Hegel's thought.
To give a somewhat simplified version of what this amounts to, consider the following: When we come to find out that what we had taken as "the truth" has, in our historical experience, turned out to be only the expression of a particular "interest" of some social class or a particular group, we lose our allegiance to that purported "truth." At one point, for example, we might have thought that rule by kings was simply written into the nature of things, that nothing else was consistent with human nature, maybe even that there was a kind of divine plan behind that system of rule; we gradually came to find out, though, that what had seemed like very good arguments for that system had turned out to be tainted by the "particularity" of the people making them and that, bit by bit, the assertions of the inevitability of monarchic rule gradually failed to hold our imaginations any longer.
Actually, the story, even on Hegel's own account, is much more complicated than that, but it makes (I hope) a general point: that the basic tension animating "us moderns" has historically come to be that between, first of all, the inevitability of our seeing all our various claims—for the superiority of capitalism, of limited government, of human rights, or even for the sheer relativity of all such claims—as being themselves purely contingent, resting on accidental configurations of history, personality, and circumstance; and secondly, the necessity to provide a justification of those claims, to redeem them in some way that is not simply the expression of a point of view but something more in which we can also put our allegiance. (Even the hard-core relativist has to give us some way of redeeming his or her idea that all these things "really are" relative, that we should throw our lot in with the relativists and not with the nonrelativists, and that this view isn't just some idiosyncratic personal "thing.")
In writing about Hegel's life and times, I've tried to bring that tension out. I've tried to show how much of what he did and said was related to his own circumstances or was even a product of them; my goal was for us to be able to put ourselves, so to speak, in the Hegelian position of being able to evaluate Hegel himself.
One other thing: A biographical (as opposed to a more detached, nonbiographical) treatment of Hegel also stays true to one of his key dictums: that only the concrete is real; abstractions have no reality until they are embodied in flesh and blood people and real institutions and social practices. If we accept that Hegelian dictum, then Hegel's own thought should never be considered purely as an abstraction but rather in terms of the way it was concretely embodied in the practices, history, and institutions of his time. It's a mistake to reduce a thinker to his own time and place; but it's also a mistake to abstract him out of it. Yes, Hegel was a middle-class 19th-century German intellectual; but not every middle-class 19th-century German intellectual was Hegel.
© 1999-2000 Britannica.com Inc.
Also on philosophy and biography
"The Life and the Mind: More and More Biographies of Philosophers are Being Written. Do They Tell us Anything Important about Philosophy?"
Lowell Bergman, a correspondent for PBS's Frontline and a frequent contributor to The New York Times, was played by Al Pacino in The Insider, the 1999 film about Bergman's battle as a producer for 60 Minutes to tell the story of tobacco industry whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand. In the 1960s Bergman studied under the philosopher Herbert Marcuse. In this August 2000 interview with Danny Postel, Bergman discusses the influence of Marcuse on his worldview and his approach to journalism.
Britannica.com
August 22, 2000
Interview | Philosophy and The Insider
The name Lowell Bergman might not ring a bell—unless you saw the movie The Insider (1999), which starred Russell Crowe as tobacco industry whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand and Al Pacino as Bergman, the 60 Minutes producer who fought to get Wigand's story out. Though the film was nominated for seven Academy Awards—including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Crowe), and Best Original Screenplay—and enjoyed critical success, it was scarcely marketed and did poorly at the box office. Some suspect that the Disney Company held back in promoting the film because of its controversial political implications—its raising of tough questions about the relationship between the media and corporate power and the ethical responsibility of journalists when confronted by the contradictions that often arise from that relationship.
There's a passing allusion in The Insider to Bergman's having been a student of the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, a seminal influence on the international student movement of the 1960s and the generation of writers and intellectuals that came to be known as the New Left. It's not often that a philosopher's name comes up in a Hollywood movie. Naturally curious, Britannica.com's Danny Postel decided to ask the real Lowell Bergman about his apprenticeship under Marcuse and how it influenced his now-famous career as a journalist.
Britannica: Tell me about your relationship with Marcuse. What led you to him and what did you study with him?
Bergman: I studied with him as a graduate fellow in philosophy at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) from 1966 to 1969. It was a Ph.D. program in the history of philosophy. I completed the written exams but never finished, although I did stay in touch with him until his death a decade later. Marcuse conducted a lecture for upper division and graduate students in German philosophy and a regular seminar on Kant and Hegel. I participated in the seminar and audited the lecture.
I had studied at the University of Wisconsin with the sociologist Hans Gerth and with the historian George Mosse. They both recommended Marcuse as a scholar of Hegel and Marx and as an unusual person in terms of his background (his association with the Frankfurt School) and his insights.
My own involvement in political activity in the '60s sent me on an intellectual search for a viable "social theory"—what Marcuse called a "new political theory that could guide practice." The assumption was that everything from liberal theory to Marxism was nonfunctional or obsolete. Gerth had introduced me to the work of the radical Hungarian philosopher György Lukács. Mosse had introduced me to 19th-century utopian and anarcho-socialist thought. It was this quest for a humanist socialism that attracted me to Marcuse. I read his book One-Dimensional Man early in 1966 and some of his other essays before heading to San Diego that summer.
Oh, and the graduate school paid me to show up. It also helped with changing my 1-A classification. The fellowship, ironically, was under the National Defense Education Act. It was left over from those given to the many Nobel Laureates in physics at UCSD.
Britannica: You refer to your "own involvement in political activity in the '60s." What did this consist of?
Bergman: I was involved in the early '60s in both the nascent peace movement and student groups at the University of Wisconsin, supplying primarily logistical support to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). We did runs from Madison [Wis.] and Chicago with everything from books to blankets leading up to the Mississippi summer [1964]. After that I became very active in the anti-Vietnam War movement while I was doing work on the Selma [Ala.] march.
Britannica: What did you get out of reading One-Dimensional Man in '66? How did it, and the essays you refer to, influence you?
Bergman: My first real contact with Marcuse came [when] reading his book Reason and Revolution, which remains one of the best, if not the best, expositions of Hegel in English. It was—maybe there are others now—the only coherent presentation of his philosophical insights in relation to the development of Marx's thought.
That book led me to read some of his writings from his time in Frankfurt [Ger.], especially a seminal essay on liberalism, which Gerth found very impressive. I was reading Marcuse while I was wading into Lukács. Gerth had me working on an unpublished translation manuscript he had of Lukács's (now classic) History and Class Consciousness back in 1965-66.
Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, and Rosa Luxemburg became my obsession as I explored the possibility of a social theory of change and a philosophy of history that was neither mechanistic (orthodox Marxism) nor ahistorical (Platonism).
One-Dimensional Man provided a unique way of looking at the rise of the authoritarian state in advanced industrial society. The suppleness of the analysis provided a way of thinking that ran counter to the dominant notion of "progress" and "Nature" that permeated thinking on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Marcuse began to articulate ideas about the way in which the culture and mass media were no longer presenting information except for the sake of presenting it. There was no depth, no history, no analysis. Information for information's sake without any attempt to help people understand.
Britannica: Speaking of the media, how did you go from studying critical theory to doing journalism?
Bergman: I already had a background in political organizing at the University of Wisconsin—SNCC (1964) and the National Coordinating Committee to End the War (1965). Combined with a short stint working for the university newspaper and an earlier high school experience working in a typography shop in New York, and the jump to journalism was not so big in 1969.
The spark was the incessant appearance of editorials in the San Diego Union-Tribune demanding that the University of California regents fire Marcuse. This came after students in Europe ran around in 1968 chanting "Marx, Mao, Marcuse!" When Herbert went back to Germany that summer he was feted not just at universities but at outdoor rallies.
Back in San Diego the very conservative community reacted at first with virulent publicity and then physical harassment. Marcuse's telephone lines at home were cut. Someone drove by and fired at his garage door. There were phone threats. The tension was mounting. San Diego had an active right-wing vigilante movement, which I encountered later when I got into journalism.
So his graduate students decided to start escorting him to school every morning, a 15-minute walk. This was in the time when UCSD was a small campus with a small undergraduate college and as many graduate students.
This experience led the students to discuss the idea of putting out an alternative newspaper in what was and is a monopoly newspaper town. San Diego was not only the largest staging area for the Vietnam War; it was also home to a large military retirement community and politics that made parts of the deep South look liberal. Thus was born the San Diego Free Press, which a year later was renamed the San Diego Street Journal.
Before the change of names I left San Diego for Canada to work as a lecturer in sociology and political philosophy at the University of Saskatchewan. A group of Marcuse's students (five of us) were hired en masse to augment their faculty. In our group was Robbie Conal, the political poster artist now in Los Angeles—he's remained a good friend.
Saskatchewan? Turns out it had the first socialist government in North America (1944) and a very progressive faculty. But a year of the cold and isolation sent me back to San Diego where I gave up the third year of my fellowship and joined the staff of the fledgling paper.
We began upon my return with a series of stories on who ran the town. With Gerth I had studied the "power elite" analysis of the sociologist C. Wright Mills (who had been Gerth's student), as well as the work of Max Weber and the other German sociologists. So our focus became the wealthiest and most powerful members of the community. And so it was that number one was a gentleman by the name of C. Arnholt Smith—Mr. San Diego of the Century. Number two was one John Alessio—Mr. San Diego for 1969.
In the tightly controlled world of San Diego, they reigned with undisputed power. We told the story of how Alessio used his political clout (in the Democratic Party) to get the Navy to give into building a bridge to nearby Coronado Island and his new renovated hotel, the Del Coronado. This despite the Navy's objection that for all kinds of reasons they wanted a tunnel—security, aircraft carriers, etc. Alessio made a bundle because he owned the approaches on both sides and of course the world famous hotel.
Then Smith, Alessio's mentor and partner, used his own political clout (in the Republican Party) to garner all kinds of favors from his favorite politician, Richard Nixon. Smith was his first big contributor back in 1946 and was alone with him on election night in 1968. Suffice it to say that Smith and his bank and conglomerate were heavily involved in dealing with and influencing city politicians and the police bureaucracy.
All this started appearing in detail in our pages, which resulted in all kinds of vigilante attacks, harassment, and fire bombs, with a few arrests sprinkled in. We survived; the two gentlemen—and a cast of other characters—wound up going to jail. It just took a couple of years and a lot of harassment.
Good triumphs! I was hooked.
Britannica: I want to go back to Marcuse for a moment. You refer to the hostility and harassment to which he was subjected in San Diego. Why such vicious attacks on a philosophy professor, and an old man at that? What was it about him that inspired such extreme measures?
Bergman: The publicity in Europe—and it was then repeated in the U.S. press—that he was an ideological leader came to the attention of the anticommunist ideologues associated with the Copley Press (the San Diego Union-Tribune). In those days the paper, now a conservative but civilized rag, was to the right of Barry Goldwater. Richard Nixon called San Diego his "favorite city." And when the then mayor got indicted—as part of the scandal we covered during our tenure putting out the paper—Nixon called personally to console him, saying, "We in public life take a lot of knocks." It did not matter that the mayor was a Democrat, or at least he passed for one in San Diego. The mayor was convicted.
Marcuse was a symbol, which became even more threatening when one of his students, a veteran of the Hegel seminar and before that a student of Marcuse's at Brandeis, went to work at UCLA. That was Angela Davis. The ensuing row brought in [then] governor Ronald Reagan and more action to terminate her appointment. His own reputation, enhanced by hers, made him a central target of the anticommunists of the Reagan right in the late '60s.
Britannica: I guess what I'm getting at is that one doesn't normally associate political upheaval and mass mobilization with philosophy professors—at least not in the United States. Moreover, the figure of Marcuse doesn't exactly square with the style and tone of the '60s counterculture. There was something of a baroque quality about him: By that time he was fairly ancient, wore nice suits, spoke with a heavy German accent. There's a striking scene in the documentary film Herbert's Hippopotamus in which a group of student activists are holding a demonstration of some sort on the UCSD campus. They're running around, banging on drums, singing—and then Marcuse steps up to speak, using language right out of 19th-century German philosophy. Yet he captivated them. They fell silent and listened to his every word. This struck me. What was it about him—because I think he was fairly unique in this sense—that so many young people revered and were inspired by?
Bergman: Despite his Germanic professorial bearings and his old world roots, Marcuse was a captivating orator. His lectures on Hegel were phenomenal. The best way to describe them is to read Reason and Revolution. Few, if any, books on Hegelian philosophy and its aftermath are so cogent and to the point.
In the world of UCSD at the time, Marcuse was an intellectual superstar. It was a little surreal, in the midst of San Diego county, high on a plateau, within sight of the largest military complex in the world.
Britannica: OK, back to journalism. It sounds as if C. Wright Mills not only influenced your thinking about the world but specifically informed the way you approached journalism. Can you talk about that? And could this be said of Marcuse as well?
Bergman: Mills used a Weberian model for describing the social and power structure of the country. It provided a lot more depth and dimension than, for example, traditional Marxist class analysis. Similarly, Marcuse provided a supple, dialectical view of how culture and economics work. Together they gave me ways of thinking about how political and economic power are exercised and where to look for stories. At the same time they provided a contextual base for assessing a story.
When I started out in the "underground" press in San Diego, we decided to focus our attention, as I mentioned, on profiles of the "power elite" à la Mills. In a time (1969) when public information about the people who ran the town was scarce at best, our stories turned out to be not only explosive but also newsworthy.
Marcuse's dialectical analysis did not depend on heavy-handed "conspiracy" theories or mechanistic economic determinism. That would save me from falling into some of the simplistic traps that lure many people looking for tidy explanations.
And the "sociology of knowledge" provides intellectual tools for putting journalistic work in perspective. In my case it was Gerth who engaged me in conversations about legality and illegality—both in terms of social movements and what we call organized crime. You can formulate a functional explanation of organized criminal activity (i.e., the Mob is really just a business that cannot collect its debts in court).
Britannica: There's a scene in The Insider between you and your wife in which you express doubts about whether "it was all worth it" in the end. "What have I been doing all this time?" you ask. Did you get to a point like that, where you questioned whether your battle was worth fighting after all? And how do you feel about that now?
Bergman: I have always "doubted" the value of what I was doing. I remember doing the first in-depth story about the Super Max prison at Pelican Bay, Calif. It raised issues about putting the mentally ill into solitary confinement. The audience reaction to the piece was—if you believed the mail—build more prisons!
But there is no question that for a while I started to see myself and what I was doing on 60 Minutes, after 12 years, as being a "token effort." In simplistic terms I was the "repressive tolerance" that Marcuse wrote about. There were—and are—limits to what can be reported on, and I knew this early in my career in television and before that in print. I had discovered what I call the "crime story model" of doing stories, which can get at the real nexus of power while appearing to be nothing more than applying the principles of law and order to not just the streets but the suites.
At the same time there is no question that the tobacco story and the decisions made around the Jeffrey Wigand story brought into focus my doubts about what I had been doing. Until then I felt that while I had to compromise to get stories done and on the air, I had not done anything that I found hard to justify to myself or anyone else. I liked to say that "my name has not been on any story that in hindsight I would take it off of." I thought I was at least keeping my rep clean. But the choices set up by CBS in the Wigand case—and the failure of my bosses in the news division to vigorously protest—made things very clear.
If I continued and accepted it, then I was complicit. I had asked others to come forward or to do something about their situation—make it public, for instance. Here I was in a similar situation and there did not seem to be any choice other than to act if I was going to live with myself.
I thought long and hard before I acted. I "exhausted all legal means" and, although everyone else asked why I was bothering, I called the president of the news division early one morning in October and said: "The lawyer, the general counsel, is just an advisor. What does CBS management say?" He replied: "The corporation will not risk its assets on this story." It was done. I knew that once I set the ball in motion there was no turning back.
At that point I no longer doubted the value of what I had done. I was only concerned with accomplishing two things: one, making sure that the people I had given my word to were protected; and two, getting the substance of the story out. I accepted the idea that I would lose my job and probably get destroyed professionally. My kids were through college. My mortgage was affordable. I had no excuse not to take the risks involved. To this day I still find it amazing that others who had a lot less to lose refused to act until they realized that the whole story was going to come out with or without their involvement.
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