IV. THE PRACTICE OF SOCIAL CRITICISM

§1. The Failure and the Success of Social Criticism

• A. When Social Criticism Fails
  • 1. The Prophet and the Sage
    • a. Waiting in the Desert
    • b. Compulsive Globalization
    • c. Nation-Building
  • 2. The Vanguard
    • a. Herbert Marcuse and the Critic-at-Large
    • b. Michel Foucault and the Critic-in-the-Small
• B. The Causes of Critical Failure
  • 1. The Imitation of Heroism
  • 2. Julien Benda's Homage to the Ascetic Monk
• C. The Ancient and Honourable Company of Social Critics
  • 1. Critical Success
  • 2. The Prophet as Social Critic
  • 3. Randolph Bourne the Modern Prophet

§2. Critical Distance

• A. Absolute Opposition
  • 1. Jean-Paul Sartre's Smokescreen Politics
  • 2. Simone de Beauvoir the Assimilated Woman
• B. Connected Opposition
  • 1. Antonio Gramsci's Common Sense
  • 2. Ignazio Silone's Moral Sense
  • 3. George Orwell's Red Pillar-Box
• C. The Heaviness of Connection
  • 1. Albert Camus on the Wrong Side of History
  • 2. Martin Buber and the Palestine Tragedy
  • 3. Breyten Breytenbach and Apartheid

§3. Another Honourable Company of Social Critics

• 1. A Christian Questioning of Walzer's Prophetic Paradigm
  • a. Differently Connected
  • b. Transcendent Element
• 2. The Evangelical Paradigm

§1. The failure and the success of social criticism

The last Talmudic story is well known among the Jews. It is often quoted to support the rabbinic doctrine that rational interpretation alone is sufficient to understand the given Torah. The rabbis who formulate this argument do not deny the possibility of revelation. On the contrary, they presuppose it, even in its most spectacular form as a voice coming from heaven. The rabbis ingeniously show that God himself has to bow to the shrewdness of human reason by using God’s words against God’s words. Rabbi Joshua’s protest is a direct reference to Deuteronomy 30,12: “It is not in heaven, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring it unto us, that we may hear it, and do it?” These are the words that God says to the Israelites. He tells them that he has given them his commandment and that they cannot pretend not to know it. He says, “But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it (Dt 30,14).” If the law is given and written down in readily comprehensible form, it is natural to infer that no one, with no exception for its author, should have special privilege or authority to interpret it. Once something is uttered, it is open to public interpretation. The correctness of its interpretation is not determined by the author or by an elected central committee. Rather it is left to persuasion and the majority rule. God must likewise obey this rule. Thus the Talmud confidently concludes: “After the majority must one incline.”^{1Baba Metzia 59b, I. Epstein (ed.), Hebrew-English Edition of the Babylonian Talmud, London, 1962.}

This rabbinic argument can have diverse implications. Walzer adapts and incorporates it into his moral interpretation. But one thing he does not mention, a downside in the Jewish history, is that the story conceals the failure of prophecy. The names of the rabbis in the story already hint at the conflict between the prophet and the sage: it is Eliezer versus Joshua. Eliezer might be an allusion to Elisha, the disciple of an outstanding Israelite prophet Elijah, who prophesied against the King and the Queen at the risk of his life, and who once challenged 450 prophets of Baal, defeated them, and slaughtered them all (1 Kg 17-19).^{2Cf. M. Walzer, M. Lorberbaum, N. J. Zohar (eds.), The Jewish Political Tradition. Vol. I: Authority, New Haven, CT – London, 2000, pp. 209-211.} Elijah is the symbol of a solitary, oppositional, and charismatic prophet. Joshua, on the other hand, was the disciple of Moses. He served the people more like a judge than a prophet. In the Talmudic story, Eliezer stands alone against a group of sages headed by Joshua. God is clearly on the side of Eliezer, but the sages manage to defeat him. And the victory is put in the mouth of Elijah: ^{3Baba Metzia 59b.}

The defeat is not merely the defeat of God. Its intended references are the defeat of supernatural revelation and the defeat of the practice of prophecy.^{4Cf. David Hartman’s commentary on Bava Metzia 59b, in The Jewish Political Tradition, pp. 264-269.} Since the failure of prophecy appears to be paradigmatic—that is, it has parallels with the failure of the twentieth century social criticism described by Walzer, it is worthwhile to look into it in more detail.^{5Walzer intends the prophet to be a paradigm of social criticism. But I suspect that his paradigm is more rabbinic than prophetic. As a full development of this hypothesis lies beyond the scope of this dissertation, I will just give some hints of the rabbinic criticism.}

A. When social criticism fails

1. The prophet and the sage

In the biblical literature, the basic meaning of “prophet” is “a messenger of God”—a person who receives a message from God and proclaims it to the people. Needless to say, this understanding is quite loose. Many personalities have been called “prophet,” though they have played different roles in the Jewish history. Moses, Samuel, Elijah, Amos, Daniel, Haggai, and Jonah, to name but a few, are all of them prophets. Not each one of them, however, may be understood as a social critic. In view of the diverse activities of the prophets, it is necessary to narrow down the spectrum to a certain type of prophets that will be useful in our comparison with the modern social critics. At first sight, the classical prophets to whom a collection of biblical books has been attributed are the closest match. Among them, Amos, possibly the first classical prophet, stands out sharply as a social critic. He is indignant at the current social practices, and believes that things are not done in the ways that they should be. In the name of God, the prophet speaks out against the injustice and condemns the oppressors to divine retribution.

It is difficult to trace with certainty the origin of prophecy in Israel. Some say it starts with Moses; others ascribe it to Samuel.^{6Cf. J. Blenkinsopp, A History of Prophecy in Israel. From the Settlement in the Land to the Hellenistic Period, Philadelphia, PA, 1983, Ch. 2.} We are not sure who the first prophet is. They, however, have one thing in common: they take charge of all things from great to small. We are told that Moses had to work “from morning unto the evening” until his father-in-law intervened and advised him to delegate part of his responsibility to other capable men (Ex 18,13-22). At all events, there was not yet a clear division of labour in governance. The early Israelite leader was simultaneously the lawmaker, arbitrator, administrator, military commander, and sometimes even priest. This kind of so-called judges went on to rule Israel until this institution collapsed under the pressure of Philistine aggression. Apparently, the political organization of the Philistines was more efficient than that of the Israelites. Their king, who had more authority and resources, could assemble a regular army and rapidly deploy it whenever necessary. The people of Israel seemed to have no choice but to replace the old system with the institution of kingship. Samuel, who was the judge at that time, yielded to public demand. He made the compromise of handing over the military and administrative power to the king while holding on to the spiritual authority himself. As a result, Paul Hanson opines, the office of judge was split into two separate offices: “the spiritual responsibility of discerning Yahweh’s will and translating the implications of his cosmic rule into the categories of history fell to the new office of the nābî’ (‘the one called’), whereas the political responsibility of carrying out the action required by this translation was invested in the office of nāgîd, or military leader.”^{7P. D. Hanson, The Dawn of Apocalyptic, Philadelphia, PA, 1975, p. 15.} In other words, Hanson suggests that the executive responsibility goes to the king and the legislative responsibility to the prophet. Hanson’s conception of prophet as a political office is inaccurate. As noted by the editors of The Jewish Political Tradition, “from the time of the monarchy forward, prophecy is more closely tied to divine knowledge and critical judgement than to political office.” Here, the word “role” is preferred to “office.”^{8The Jewish Political Tradition, pp. 202-203.} It is better to say that the role of the judge is divided into political and prophetic roles. While the former is institutionalized, the latter is vocational though its authority and function are generally acknowledged. The two roles are often antagonistic. Prophets are ill at ease with political power. They expose the hypocrisy of the ruling classes, condemn the abuse of power, and criticize foreign and internal policies.

a. Waiting in the desert

This division of labour was the framework of governance throughout the period of the kingdoms. It was only plunged into crisis when the First Temple was destroyed in 586 b.c. and the ruling élite was sent into exile in Babylonia. Now the Jews lost their sovereignty and the king was abolished. Could the prophet assert himself and adapt his mission to the new political milieu? Many theologians think that the blow is fatal, and that prophecy has come to its demise. Joseph Blenkinsopp contends against the popular opinion that prophecy has in fact entered into its second phase of proliferation and diversification. Quite a few prophets have arisen. They recorded the exilic history, condemned the foreign oppressors, encouraged the people in exile by proclaiming the hope of restoration, edited the previous prophetic oracles, and reinterpreted the history of Israel.^{9J. Blenkinsopp, A History, Ch. 5.}

If Israelite prophecy survived its first blow, it obviously could not stand the second. After the destruction of the Second Temple, the Jews refused to believe in prophecy anymore. The cause for the failure of prophecy is a long story. Here I can only briefly suggest some reasons. First, the king and the prophet are two complimentary roles in the Israelite social order. Prophecy exists and evolves around the political leadership. If sovereignty is taken away, prophecy will lose its immediate ground of existence. Second, in the exilic and postexilic periods, the prophet has had the chance to adjust his role and message to the new situation. He seizes it, but he does it in such a way that ultimately leads to the final failure of prophecy. In his reflection on the fall of the kingdom and the subsequent exile, the prophet attributes the cause not to God’s reluctance to intervene in human affairs or to the mightiness of their neighbours but to idolatry and oppression committed by the Israelites themselves. Hence exile is perceived as a divine punishment. The solution, he thinks, lies in reconciliation and restoration. He sets himself the tasks of asking the people to propitiate God with their genuine repentance, and of proclaiming the promise of restoration. The destruction of the Second Temple, however, utterly shatters this promise. By now, the hope of the people has been exhausted. Prophecy, in the form of criticism, judgement and redemption, has lost its credibility.^{10Walzer also opines that “the popular hatred of prophets” is not “entirely unwarranted” because “the sins of ordinary people don’t seem large enough to warrant the total destruction of the city.” The doctrine of collective punishment is suspect and looks always strained. If the promised redemption cannot be delivered, prophecy will become bankrupt. (The Jewish Political Tradition, pp. 217-219.)} Finally, prophecy is perceived as an ineffective means of education. A modern rabbi, Abraham Kook, commenting on a verse from the Talmud—“A sage is superior to a prophet (Baba Bathra 12a)”—argues: “And what prophecy, with its impassioned and fiery exhortations could not accomplish in purging the Jewish people of idolatry and in uprooting the basic causes of the most degrading forms of oppression and violence,—of murder, sexual perversity, and bribery,—was accomplished by the sages.”^{11A. I. Kook, The Sage Is More Important than the Prophet, in H. Dimitrovsky (ed.), Exploring the Talmud, Vol. I, New York, NY, 1976, 103-104, p. 104. Cf. The Jewish Political Tradition, pp. 271-273.} For a long period of time, the prophets have had the opportunity to educate the people, but they fail to achieve the intended result. The prophets blame the people for their stubbornness and rebelliousness. The sages, in their turn, shift the responsibility to the prophets: the chief cause of the fall is the inefficacy of prophetic instruction.

In any event, our interest here is more in the consequences of the failure than in its causes. They may offer us (and Walzer as well) a perspective to conceptualize the responses of modern social critics to their failure. What would the Jews do when prophecy failed? A straightforward response would be to carry on the prophetic tradition regardless of adverse circumstances. And this was precisely what happened. After the destruction of the First Temple, instead of beginning to wane as some might expect, prophecy actually entered its renaissance in the exilic era. Signs of its decline can only be found in the postexilic period. We may even say that it is not declining, but that it is transforming into a new kind of apocalyptic literature, which proliferates well after 70 a.d.^{12Readers who are unfamiliar with the apocalyptic literature can consult R. H. Charles’s two-volume collection: The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English, Oxford, 1913.} Prophecy and apocalypse, as noted by Hanson, form a continuum: apocalypse is prophecy adapted to the socio-political milieu of sovereignty lost.

According to Hanson’s analysis, there are two important elements in Judaism: vision and reality, or the cosmic realm of the divine council and the historic realm of everyday life. The prophet, who is endowed with divine privilege, witnesses the happenings and the decision made in the divine council. After returning from the cosmic world, the prophet translates his vision into reality, and instructs the ruler or the people in the proper reaction. Prophecy thus consists of vision and its application.^{13P. D. Hanson, The Dawn, p. 11.} A typical example can be found in Isaiah 6. In the year when king Uzziah dies, the prophet Isaiah has a vision in which he ascends to the divine court, and sees God sitting on his throne with his divine council. Isaiah hears God saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” The prophet immediately responds, “Here am I; send me (Is 6,8).”^{14Cf. The Jewish Political Tradition. Vol. I: Authority, New Haven, CT – London, 2000, pp. 206-208.}

In stark contrast to this emphasis on revelation, there are other passages that emphasize the concealment of revelation. At the end of the Book of Daniel, the prophet is told to “shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end (Dn 12,4).” What it means is not to bury or burn the book but to conceal the interpretation of the vision. Hanson points out that this is the main difference between prophecy and apocalypse: prophecy contains visions and interpretations, but apocalypse contains visions only.^{15P. D. Hanson, The Dawn, pp. 11-12.}

Although Hanson’s study is restricted to the corpus of eschatological texts, his distinction between vision and reality is quite useful for our purpose. The preexilic and exilic prophets, generally speaking, are mainly concerned with real politics. They invoke the name of God and appeal to cosmic vision, but their aim is to deal with a particular problem in a concrete historical context. In the postexilic period, prophets tend to leave their visions unexplained. As for the apocalyptists, they formulate their visions in specialized languages which, though tangible to the members of their own groups, cease to address the concerns of ordinary people.

The transition of prophecy from perspicuity to ambiguity, and then to obscurity is readily understandable in the light of Israel’s history. In the beginning, the prophets firmly believed they could bring about real social change. Even in the exilic period, they were optimistic that if the people followed their instruction, Israel would regain its sovereignty and past glory. They had hope in this world; their tangible messages reflected their optimism. The test of their prophecy came when the Jews were given the chance to rebuild their community in Judea. Under the reigns of the Persian kings, they were allowed to return to their own land. But the restoration, the fruit of their hard labour, was far from the ideal promised by the prophets. This time, it became nonsensical for the prophets to blame solely the people for its failure when there were successive oppression and exploitation inflicted by their Persian, Greek, and Roman masters. The prophets, though trying hard to uphold the hope, lost the optimism of its fulfilment in the near future. Instead, they proclaimed visions to encourage the people, but they were unwilling to translate them into real politics. Such visionary prophecy was difficult to attract a large audience, and it eventually slid into apocalypse. Gradually, the apocalyptists had lost all hope of establishing a righteous kingdom in this world. Their hope had to be otherworldly, which would not be fulfilled until the coming of the Son of Light, who would then establish his kingdom on earth and reign forever with his righteousness. Hence they, as exemplified by the community of the Essenes in Qumran, retreated into the desert and waited for the Messiah.

b. Compulsive globalization

Another way to give meaning to the exile is to invent the idea of compulsive missionary or globalization. Such idea is certainly not extraneous to the Jewish monotheism. Since God is the creator of heaven and earth, abundant in love and grace, he could not be so partial or mean as to elect only the Israelites. His election of Israel should be seen as the initial step of his universal salvation plan. He intends Israel to be a holy people, a kingdom of priests, and a light unto nations. The Israelites fail to understand this global mission and God has to execute his plan himself, without their full understanding, by dispersing them among the nations.

There are some biblical texts that support the idea of compulsive globalization. The Book of Jonah is an example. Although it contains no reliable data as regards its date of writing, it is highly probable that, judging from its language and its message, it was written in the exilic or postexilic period.^{16Cf. U. Simon, Jonah (The JPS Bible Commentary), Philadelphia, PA, 1999, pp. xli-xlii.} The book is composed in a third-person narrative genre, which is different from the first person narration usually found in other prophetic books. The author portrays Jonah as a prophet on the run, who refuses to accept the mission of preaching in a foreign land. God commissions Jonah to go to the city of Nineveh, but Jonah flees instead to Joppa and boards a ship bound for Tarshish towards the opposite direction. God impedes the prophet from running by hurling a great storm into the sea. Jonah, however, does not care. He sleeps under the deck while the other passengers are earnestly praying to their gods. When all means have been exhausted, they cast lots and discover Jonah to be the cause of their misfortune. Jonah admits it. Nonetheless, instead of pleading to Yahweh, he asks the crew to throw him into the sea. The prophet is stiff-necked. If he is not allowed to go to Tarshish, he prefers to go to hell. But God has no intention to let Jonah go to hell. He sends a great fish to swallow up Jonah. After three days and three nights in the purgatory, Jonah yields and cries out to God. God orders the fish to vomit Jonah onto the land, and sends him to Nineveh again. This time Jonah reluctantly obeys.

Why is Jonah so reluctant to preach in Nineveh? Is it because of the awkwardness of the mission? Who would believe in a stranger pronouncing judgement in the name of his tribal god? The author, however, assures us that this is the least thing that needs to be worried about. Jonah is so proud of his Yahweh, the God of heaven, that he will not be shy of speaking his name (Jon 1,9). Besides, the Gentiles are God-fearing and ready to repent. (One must say that they are too pious and too willing to repent.) We are told that when the passengers of the ship hear the name of Yahweh and Jonah’s rebellion, they are “exceedingly afraid,” and afterwards they offer sacrifice to God (Jon 1,10-16). When Jonah casually walks through one-third of Nineveh and heartlessly issues the doom, the people return to God whole-heartedly: they put on sackcloth, sit in ashes, and fast, from the greatest to the least, with no exception for the animals (Jon 3). The reluctance of Jonah is an enigma to the theologians. Why would a messenger of God refuse to save people from the wrath of God? Several explanations have been put forward.^{17Cf. U. Simon, Jonah, pp. vii-xiii.} Apparently, the “mercy-versus-justice” hypothesis is the most plausible. On the one hand, God is love and merciful, whose ultimate will is to save, both Jews and Gentiles. On the other, man’s demand for justice exceeds his love and he cannot love as God loves. Jonah knows that God will surely forgive the people of Nineveh once they repent, but he thinks that the Ninevites should receive their due punishment. Hence he refuses to prophesy in Nineveh. This hypothesis, albeit plausible, has one weakness: the biblical author has never explicitly told us the reason for Jonah’s reluctance. For some reason, Jonah refuses to preach in Nineveh. Perhaps we should take the face value of the book seriously and withhold our judgement. It is true that God’s ultimate will is to save, but for some unidentified reasons, the messenger of God does not want to carry out his mission. This is also a plausible interpretation.

If the allusion of Jonah in the stomach of a fish as the suffering Israel looks rather strained, there are other passages in the Bible that interpret the affliction of Israel as divine providence. Second Isaiah is full of such allegories of which the Song of the Suffering Servant is the most well-known (Is 52,13-53,12). In this song, Israel-in-exile is portrayed as the suffering servant of God. “For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not (Is 53,2-3).” Afflicted and despised, yet the servant of God is a “righteous” man. He suffers not for his own wrongdoings but for the sins of others. God wills him to be the sacrifice for the iniquities of mankind. “But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all … Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin … (Is 53,5-10).” By using the concept of scapegoat, Israel’s exile is interpreted as the atonement for all sins. This explanation may seem incredible to the modern mind, it may look the same as well to the Israelites. The Israelites have themselves slaughtered many scapegoats, but this does not make it easier for them to accept themselves as a scapegoat. Even the prophet exclaims, “Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? (Is 53,1)” Incredible though it is, the prophet is pressed by an emergent need to seek an alternative rationalization, and he chooses to couch his explanation in symbols plucked from their sacrificial rites.

Since the Song is written in allegorical form, the suffering servant has been given various interpretations despite some explicit references in second Isaiah which suggest the servant to be Israel (Is 44,1; 44,21; 48,20). The early Christians overwhelmingly took it for granted that Jesus of Nazareth was the fulfilment of the suffering servant. The conversion of a Judaistic proselyte into Christianity recorded in Act 8,26-35 reveals that the Song of the Suffering Servant might be a strategic text in the hand of Christian preachers. The story begins with an eminent Ethiopian eunuch, a proselyte of Judaism, returning home from his worship in Jerusalem. The eunuch is reading Isaiah 53,7-8 in his carriage, but he does not understand who the suffering servant is. A Christian preacher, Philip, approaches him and explains to him that this servant is Jesus. The Ethiopian eunuch is convinced beyond doubt, and on his own initiative, he is immediately baptized into Christianity. Jesus as the suffering servant was a fundamental conviction in early Christianity. Indeed, the Gospels follow basically the plot of the Song. All of them directly or indirectly refer to it. The Nazarene movement has certain connection with the idea of compulsive globalization. Whether the disciples of second Isaiah have anything to do with the Nazarenes, we cannot be sure. In any case, the movement finds its inspiration and justification in the Song.

c. Nation-building

Besides retreating to the desert or going global, some Jewish intellectuals have worked out a third way. These rabbis neither want to detach themselves from the people and to wait for the Messiah in the desert, nor desire to universalize their religion and to dissolve themselves in the Empire. Their option is to stay with the people, and their mission is to keep the community intact. Apparently, the rabbis have devised an effective strategy that is similar to the “national-popular” position described by Walzer.^{18The term originates from Antonio Gramsci and is elaborated by Walzer. See Critics, pp. 83,233-238.}

The two main issues confronting the Jews in the postexilic period and afterwards are the messianic hopes and the religious worship in the temple, which are related to the prophets and the priests respectively. The numerous messianic passages collected in the Jewish canon indicate that messianic salvation was widely preached among the Jews. This hope accords with the traditional Jewish collective desire for national identity and independence. They believe that God delivered them from the bondages of Egypt through Moses, and that God will save them again through the Messiah. It is not surprising that the Nazarenes, who daringly broke down the wall of partition between the Jews and the Gentiles, were condemned by the rabbis as the first Jewish heretics. The prophets, in the eye of the rabbis, rightly sustain and elaborate the national self-understanding by their prophecies. In the name of God, they bolster the faith of the community by invoking the messianic redemption. The prophetic hope, however, must be tangible and imminent. Otherwise, the proclamation will be unverifiable, and it will be rendered into a false prophecy (Dt 18,21-22).^{19True and false prophecy is an important category in the Jewish tradition. Cf. The Jewish Political Tradition, pp. 220-235.} History happens to work against the prophecy: the Messiah, according to the Jews, has yet to come. The late-coming of Messiah creates a tension in the prophecy. To resolve it, the sages disparage revelation but affirm the messianic hopes. Being free of the burden of divination, they can extend the coming of the Messiah to an indefinite time, and urge the people to wait for the salvation without putting their credibility at stake. The people wait for the Messiah, and they have a cause to cling to the community despite the loss of sovereignty and the hazard of discrimination.

Competition for leadership also came from the priests. In the Second Temple period, the high priests were effective rulers of Judea. Under the imperial edicts, they took over the political authority and became a kind of priest-king. The Pharisees, however, did not accept the hegemony of the priests and the Sadducees. They thought that the only legitimate authority had to come from the interpretation of the tradition. Apparently, the Pharisees and the Sadducees have different interpretations. The Pharisees insisted that theirs was superior, for correct interpretation hung upon learning and piety and it had nothing to do with heritage. Nevertheless, they recognized that the priests were doing an indispensable service to the nation by performing cultic rituals in the temple. Thus, the Pharisees affirmed the cultic role of the priests but rejected their spiritual leadership.^{20Cf. The Jewish Political Tradition, pp. 196-198.} The Sadducees were finally defeated not by the arguments of the Pharisees but by the army of the Romans. The destruction of the temple in 70 a.d. swept away the very foundation of the authority of the priests, and their demise followed. In spite of their antagonism towards the Sadducees and the ruin of the temple, the rabbis devoted more than half of the Mishnah (the oral Torah) to the temple cult.^{21E. R. Trattner, Understanding the Talmud, Westport, CT, 1978, p. 19.} This fact reflects the centrality of the temple in the life of the Jews in the Second Temple period. The rabbis captured this national spirit and successfully transformed the temple rituals into other forms of religious acts. A modern Jewish theologian, in assessing the work of the rabbis, comments: “The greatest accomplishment which the teaching of the Talmud achieved for the Jewish people was to make them feel that the end of the Temple did not imply an end to their religion. Severe as the loss was, the way of approach to God was kept open. In addition to charity, justice, and Torah-study there was also prayer, which was declared to be even ‘greater than sacrifices’ (Ber. 32b). On the basis of the words, ‘We will render the calves of our lips’ (Hos. xiv. 2), the doctrine was taught, ‘What can be a substitute for the bulls which we used to offer before Thee? Our lips, with the prayer which we pray unto Thee’ (Pesikta 165b).”^{22A. Cohen, Everyman’s Talmud, New York, NY, 1975, pp. 157-158.} The rabbis, indeed, took over the duty of the priests. But they did not claim this privilege only for themselves, they also distributed it among members of the household. They invented domestic rites, established laws, and taught every Jew to observe them.^{23Cf. G. F. Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era. The Age of the Tannaim, Vol. I, Cambridge, MA, 1958, p. 114.} In this way, the Jewish people are entrusted with the responsibility of building a spiritual temple in each of their own homes.

The rabbis’ assumption of both spiritual and political functions, one suspects, will put an end to the critical prophetic tradition. The prophet has the king or the priest to criticize. But the rabbi has neither a target, nor is he himself the object of criticism. How can he be critical now? Walzer seems to share the same concern. Nevertheless, he affirms that the rabbi still retains certain critical edge. The editors of The Jewish Political Tradition, of which Walzer is one, point out: “Rabbinic interpretation replaces prophetic inspiration and turns out … to be more accommodating (though never easily or entirely so) to political considerations.”^{24The Jewish Political Tradition, p. 205.} Conceivably, the rabbis can now criticize the people or one another. Criticism does not come to an end with the prophet. Rather it takes up a new form in the rabbinic literature. The rabbi, I think, tends to focus on what Walzer calls the second task of criticism: “he [the critic] gives expression to his people’s deepest sense of how they ought to live.”^{25Critics, p. 232.}

2. The vanguard

The twentieth century social criticism, as perceived by Walzer, is a failure. At the end of the Company of Critics—a study on a series of social critics and movements, he draws the following conclusion: “The movements they [oppressed men and women] create, heroic in their origins, turn out later on to be lethargic, bureaucratic, corruptible.… In the best of cases, neither national liberation nor socialist revolution meets the standards of the social critic; and sometimes the new regimes are as bad as the old; sometimes they are far worse.”^{26Critics, p. 227.}

Popular movements do not originate in the twentieth century. They are rather commonly said to have originated with the 1789 French Revolution. First come the bourgeois, then the socialists, then the communists, and then the nationalists. Although the movements are organized by different radicals and for different purposes, the storyline of liberation undergirds all these struggles. Liberation, in fact, is also not a modern idea. It owes its origin to the biblical narrative of Exodus. Many leaders of radical movements, Walzer notes, have received their inspiration from the narrative. He argues that the Exodus is “a paradigm of revolutionary politics.”^{27M. Walzer, Exodus and Revolution, [New York, NY], Basic Books, 1985, p. 7.} Nobody wants to be enslaved in Egypt, and the alternative is Exodus. Partly due to the intuitive imperative of liberation and partly due to the centrality of the Bible in Western societies, intellectuals who see themselves as the conscience of society unreservedly endorse the liberation movement. They join the movement and become critics of society. They have great hopes that the modern world will soon become an earthly heaven free of oppression and inequality. Surely, exodus should be recommended to the oppressed if not for its risky nature. The army of Pharaoh is strong and his chariots formidable. And before stepping into the promised land, freedom fighters must traverse the dangerous desert where some will certainly perish. For the heroic intellectuals, risk is a threshold of authenticity; those who refuse to take risk do not live a genuine life. The intellectuals see to it that everyone joins the exodus, and whip the people into motion if necessary.

In the struggle for liberation, revolutionaries have developed a two-stage strategy: (1) control the state power by any means; (2) use the state as an instrument to implement social reforms or developments. Many Marxists and nationalists have succeeded in achieving the first goal, but they are unable to deliver the ultimate goods that the people desired. They leave Egypt, defeat the army of Pharaoh, cross into the promised land, and set up a people’s country. The people work hard to realize their dream. Having gone through years of great effort, it proves that their country will never become a land flowing with milk and honey as its prophets have promised. More distressingly, the life in the people’s country is all in all worse than that in Egypt. The liberation movement has failed, and the failure is twofold—the vanguards are, at best, the same as the conservatists; and the radical ideals are infeasible. Ironically, the radicals gain power only to prove their politics impractical. The former British-occupied Hong Kong, for instance, symbolized the triumph of Egypt over the people’s country. Hong Kong is geographically connected to Mainland China and inhabited by the same people. The people of both sides were divided only by barbed wire, one side under the rule of the capitalist imperialists, the other under the communist nationalists. It was under this setting that the people on the two different sides lived drastically different lives. It is rather sad that the Hong Kong people seemed much happier, in all respects, than their relatives in the Mainland. Of course, the case is absolutely too simplistic. No serious researchers will compare the two places in such a simple way. Nevertheless, ordinary people, including those in Mainland China, do perceive it in exactly the same way, not to mention the propagandists who want to make Hong Kong a showcase for laissez-faire economy. In the twentieth century, radical politics has failed, and so did its critics, who failed to revert its fate. Could the failure be interpreted as the end of radical politics? How should the intellectuals respond to the defeat and disappointment?

a. Herbert Marcuse and the critic-at-large

One of the responses, Walzer says, is to become a “critic-at-large.” The critic, by now, is disappointed down to the ground with popular revolt, and loses his faith. He detaches himself from any further movement. Yet, he wants to remain a true intellectual. Firmly rooted in his mind, an intellectual is nothing if not critical. Once a critic or an intellectual (the two are interchangeable), he cannot be otherwise. To shift to other career is to debase himself. The critic has to continue criticizing, albeit without any specific objective. He criticizes, as it were, for the sake of criticism. Art for art’s sake, and criticism for criticism’s sake. This will hardly trouble the critic, for he values the purity of intention. There is, however, a problem in his criticism. Wrenched loose from a particular interest or purpose, the critic is free to criticize anything he dislikes, but only in general terms. He criticizes at ease; no major achievements can escape his scrutiny: modernity, culture, institutions, material well-being, science, technology and so on and so forth. But such a critic, Walzer comments, lacks “critical penetration,” and people can easily “shrug off” his criticism. Moreover, “the tone of such work suggests a collectivist version of misanthropy.” The members who belong to this group of misanthropists are: critical theorists, leftist admirers of Greece and Rome, latter-day Rousseauians, conservative communitarians, religious fundamentalists, and the exemplar of critic-at-large Herbert Marcuse.^{28Critics, pp. 188,190,227.}

Marcuse, in the opinion of Walzer, sets himself up as a negative example of critics—an example that novices should not imitate.^{29The following account of Marcuse is based on Walzer’s interpretation in Critics, Chapter 10 Herbert Marcuse’s America.} (It is unfortunate that many people have mistaken him for a positive example.) By overrating negativity, he turns himself into a “false” critic, and provides the would-be critics a second dimension of social criticism for study.^{30Walzer does not classify social critics as “true” or “false.” I borrow the categories of true and false prophets from the Jewish tradition and apply them to modern social critics. Cf. The Jewish Political Tradition, pp. 220-235.} So far, I am describing Marcuse in his own terminology. To the unfamiliar readers, I have to give some explanation.

Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man is a critique of the post-Marxist American society. In America, Marcuse observes that the class of proletarians has been eliminated, and that people are gratified by all kinds of enticing commodities. On the surface, this is a triumph of humanity. But further analysis reveals that human condition actually gets worse. Marcuse believes that material well-being should be the stepping-stone for the pursuit of spiritual well-being. Matter exists for the sake of the Geist. Material satisfaction can never be justified as an end in itself. The affluent society reduces everyone to the material dimension and effectively annihilates one’s consciousness of the second dimension. In the past, the proletariat was a form of negativity, shaped by material deprivation into a “living contradiction to the established society.” Now, this embodiment of the spiritual consciousness is submerged by the flood of commodities. As if the killing of the living embodiment of the Spirit were not enough, the affluent society continues to subvert the second form of negativity—“the oppositional, alien, and transcendent elements [of] the higher culture by virtue of which it constituted another dimension of society.”^{31H. Marcuse, quoted in Critics, p. 180.} This negative force is undermined by the commercialization of high culture, and by the cultivation of tolerance. The evidence that Marcuse provides to support his argument is that Plato and Hegel are published by rival publishers in colourful paperbacks standing side by side in the same drugstore bookrack with gothic romances and murder mysteries.

The argument betrays Marcuse’s lack of common sense. One may say that he is a man having special knowledge in abundance but not sufficient common sense. He criticizes his fellow Americans with whom he is not well acquainted. He spends no time talking to them or doing empirical research before he jumps to his conclusion. The one-dimensional man appears to him as a salient fact. In the introduction to the One-Dimensional Man, he tells us how he does his research: “Perhaps the most telling evidence can be obtained by simply looking at television or listening to the AM radio for one consecutive hour for a couple of days, not shutting off the commercials, and now and then switching the station.”^{32H. Marcuse, quoted in Critics, p. 171.} How could a scholar write social criticism on the basis of this kind of information? In fact, Marcuse has his sources. He depends largely on the American social critics of the 1950s: C. Wright Mills, William H. Whyte, Vance Packard, Fred Cook, David Riesman, and John Kenneth Galbraith. Their works describe a quintessential American phenomenon on which Marcuse exercises his theoretical formulation. Without the constraint of common sense, he is left at large to the creation of the one-dimensional man that has actually no match in reality.

The mistake made by Marcuse is the consequence of his detachment from the populace and his disgust with popular culture. Marcuse is an aristocrat. Even when he plays the role of a liberator (rather than a ruler), his attitude towards the ordinary people is still the one that is typical of the aristocracy. He holds the standard view that the poor is a nameless mass, whose only meaningful existence is to provide the necessities for human betterment. His view is no difference from that of the townsmen in Ignazio Silone’s Italy, who says, cafoni are flesh used to suffering.^{33I. Silone, Fontamara, in The Abruzzo Trilogy. Fontamara. Bread and Wine. The Seed beneath the Snow, trans. E. Mosbacher, South Royalton, VT, 2000, p. 36.} The townsmen value the poor for their production and services; and Marcuse, because of his simplicity, for their suffering itself. The poor are born to suffer by virtue of which they embody the second dimension of human existence. Deprived them of their suffering, they become nothing. Could education transform the poor into human individuals? Perhaps. But Marcuse has no faith in the American education. General education that produces the semi-educated masses is but a sacrilege leading to profanation. The past cultural aristocracy, Marcuse writes, “provided a protected realm in which the tabooed truths [of art and literature] could survive in abstract integrity—remote from the society that repressed them.”^{34H. Marcuse, quoted in Critics, pp. 181-182.} Now society has destroyed the abstract integrity of the tabooed truths by popularizing them. Once the classic is translated into the vulgar, its antagonistic force will be lost. In the process, the Spirit is slowly dying. The only way to save the Spirit, in Marcuse’s opinion, is to erect the “educational dictatorship” of the philosophical élite.

b. Michel Foucault and the critic-in-the-small

In contrast to the critic-at-large, Walzer reports another response to the critical failure, namely, the “critic-in-the-small.”^{35Critics, p. 228.} Unlike the critics-at-large, some critics, who are more serious and less optimistic, accept the failure of the radical project. People on the left, the critic admits, have been defeated by themselves. Could he continue to pretend to know a better future? Could he tell another grand story? No, he couldn’t. Yet, the critic is not prepared to lay down his critical weapon. He still wants to wage war against oppression. Our relentless critic, then, falls into delirium; he has difficulty in locating his object of criticism. Proletarians are a minority in developed countries. Even if they are found, the critic has lost the courage to repeat the old tactics. Instead, he turns his weapon towards the ruling class. There, he has the difficulty of identifying the oppressors too. The head of the king has already been cut off and the ancien régime abolished in a brave move. In liberal society, politicians are elected by the people, and they are assumed to be working for the people. Likewise, the capitalists are indispensable if the people are to enjoy useful and beautiful goods. (This is, at least, the majority opinion.) Besides, the capitalist appears almost like a philanthropist in comparison with the communist apparatchik. Liberal society has erased the symbol of oppressors. The critic, nonetheless, knows that oppression still exists. The differences are that power has been dispersed to the local authorities, and that oppression is localized at home, at school, at work, and most visibly in prison. Therefore, the struggle has to shift to local sites, and the critic has to fight infinite small issues. In other words, the critic-in-the-small aims not to change the whole system, but to improve a little bit of everything here and there. Perhaps, when infinite infinitesimal improvements are added together, the sum would amount to a new system.

The strategy of local resistance sounds banal. In fact, we all, since infancy, resist, at home, at school, or at work. We resist if necessary and if we can. We know as well that individual strength is limited. We thus form alliance. But the defeated critic is hurt and afraid of political association. He has lost the discernment of legitimate and illegitimate coercion, and refuses to join any political league. He wants to be a lone fighter. In due course, his criticism becomes more and more personal, and few people can understand him. He slides from a critic-in-the-small-matters into a critic-in-the-small-world. Walzer has a description of the transition:^{36Critics, p. 228.}

The quoted paragraph is written with Michel Foucault in mind. Foucault, in Walzer’s portrait, is a person who vacillates between being a critic-in-the-small-matters and a critic-in-the-small-world.^{37Cf. Critics, Chapter 11 The Lonely Politics of Michel Foucault.} As a critic-in-the-small-matters, Foucault seems to conceal the defeat of the leftists by his analysis of contemporary power relations. His argument starts with the proposition that the king is the only possible physical embodiment of sovereignty. When the king was executed, the ancien régime fell and sovereignty disappeared forever. Democrats believe that political power is distributed equally among the people, and then centralized in the government. But Foucault thinks that this is just a fable, for there is no general will of the people or any stable coalition of interest groups. Neither the people nor the government controls the political power. Rather, power resides in the mechanisms of professional expertise and local discipline. In the modern state, political power has no focal point but is dispersed to the extremities. Hence power has to be challenged at numerous points.

It is interesting to note that, in the first place, Foucault’s theory has anti-Leninist implications, that is, if power is not at the centre, there is no more power to be seized and no more revolution is possible. Second, Foucault’s analysis is “rhetorically inflated.”^{38Critics, p. 193} While it is true that power is exercised in local disciplines regulated by professional expertise, there exists obvious power centre or centres in liberal states. Moreover, politicians can influence, if only indirectly, the expertise mechanism through the allocation of resources, the appointment of experts, or the distribution of recognition. Foucault neglects all these well-known facts. Maybe Foucault is a one-sided thinker. Or he is driven to this conclusion by his disappointment with leadership—the leftists are no better politicians than the liberals, and it is better for them to stay away from power positions.

Foucault’s disappointment eventually pulls him into his own small world. Though hopeless of the radical enterprise, he refuses to accept the liberal society as if it were corrupted beyond redemption. He thinks that the liberal society is an oppressive system being primped up by its crafty beauticians as democratic, scientific, technological, and progressive. The absence of power centre does not lead to the extinction of oppression. Rather the oppressive force now operates from its “underside.” Disciplinary agencies work together, as though coordinated by a dark force, into an oppressive whole. Foucault calls this system in a variety of names: “capitalism,” “the disciplinary society,” “the carceral city,” “the panoptic régime,” or “the carceral archipelago.” His ultimate indictment is that the liberal society is a prison, where the discipline of prison extends itself in various forms across all spheres of ordinary life. No one would deny that surveillance and discipline exist in every society. They are even more intensively used in the modern world. Nevertheless, there is significant difference between the discipline of a school or a factory and that of a prison. “Foucault tends systematically to underestimate the difference,” Walzer writes.^{39Critics, p. 200.} His tendency makes him perceive idiosyncratically the liberal society as the carceral archipelago.

What alternative does one have if liberal society is beyond redemption and communism is unworkable? Has Foucault any idea? Yes, he has: “It is possible that the rough outline of a future society is supplied by the recent experiences with drugs, sex, communes, other forms of consciousness, and other forms of individuality.” A glimpse of hope provokes Foucault to disown the practical value of local resistance. Commenting on the prison reform he is engaging in, he says, “The ultimate goal of [our] interventions was not to extend the visiting rights of prisoners to 30 minutes or to procure flush toilets for the cells, but to question the social and moral distinction between the innocent and the guilty.” The loss of utopia leads Foucault to question the distinction between not only innocence and guilty but also sanity and insanity. He advocates experimenting some novel forms of existence that are even more extravagant than utopia. Except for some impractical social experiments, I can’t see how Foucault can find a better world for us, who can distinguish the sane from the insane. Here I have to add a word of caution. Foucault is not always living in his own small world. He returns to the common world in his better days, and is entirely capable of making sound judgement. Once he castigated his faithful followers of his prison reform for following his words too literally, he said: they stumbled for “a whole naive, archaic ideology which makes the criminal … into an innocent victim and a pure rebel…. The result has been a deep split between this campaign with its monotonous, lyrical little chant, heard only among a few small groups, and the masses who have good reason not to accept it as valid political currency.”^{40M. Foucault, quoted in Critics, pp. 202-203.}

Foucault is totally disillusioned with the leftist ideal, but he refuses to reconcile with the liberal society. He accepts the failure of Marxism, but at the same time he continues to resist. Unlike the postexilic prophets of Israel, he lacks a cosmic vision. Maybe he has some visions induced by drugs. He knows that such visions will not be realized by themselves or by an invisible hand. He cannot lead his followers to wait in the desert. To realize the visions, he has to work in the real world. But the question is: would people be convinced by his visions? It seems unlikely that he will have enough followers to change the world. In any event, the above argument is counterfactual. Foucault, according to Walzer, does not have any vision; he is a nihilist. It is more difficult for nihilism to attract audience than for hallucinative visions. Moreover, Foucault himself does not believe that local resistance can really change the world; his actions only serve the purpose of provocations. This is the dilemma Foucault creates for himself. So, he vacillates between the local social reform and his own inner world, which, like the Nirvana, only a privileged few can access.

The critic-in-the-small comes to a dead end just as the critic-at-large, albeit in different ways. They offer no practical direction or advice on social reform. They lead radical forces and the critical enterprise astray. Their criticism is only lamentation for the loss of utopia. They confess in negative ways that the ultimate victory belongs to the liberals. Indeed, they are later rejoined by the liberal prophet Francis Fukuyama singing “The End of History” at the historic moment of the fall of the Berlin Wall.^{41F. Fukuyama, The End of History?, in The National Interest 16 (1989) 3-18.} Personally, I doubt the credibility of any end-time saying, be it the religious or the secular version. Fukuyama’s eulogy is at most the end of American History. No doubt, liberalism is at its height: the major rival has fallen, and the remaining commissars of China are converted into red bourgeois. That does not mean, however, it will prevail forever. Even if we suppose it will last forever, it still needs criticism, and we can criticize it by holding up, using the image of Walzer, a Hamlet’s glass. The critic can do what Hamlet does to his mother:^{42W. Shakespeare, Hamlet, III. iv. 19-20. Cf. Critics, p. 230.}

Walzer also points out that the death is the death of a social theory, not social criticism itself. Social criticism is a specialized form of complaints. Can we imagine a society without complaint? That is impossible. As long as there is society, there will be complaints and the specialists of complaints. The failure of a social theory is its failure to shape the popular complaint into a practical way of life, or a realistic political programme. The common complaint is out there, waiting to be shaped into a practical way of life. In every situation, it is “almost always” possible to do something, Walzer affirms.^{43Critics, pp. 230, 239.} The choice is up to the critic. He can either commit himself to the people, like the rabbis of the Jews, or wrench himself loose and criticize for the sake of criticism itself, like Marcuse, or form a critical cult, like Foucault. Social criticism has not finished yet, and the critic will become wiser if he learns from past failures. The first lesson Walzer tries to teach is the causes of their failures.

B. The causes of critical failure

1. The imitation of heroism

The standard image of the critic is a solitary intellectual who, cutting loose from every connection and walking in the blaze of the sun, pays tribute to nothing but the Truth. Julien Benda writes a script for such a critic. The practising critic, however, finds it difficult to play Benda’s script. He is demanded to walk out of his solitude in order to show solidarity with the people he claims to serve. Martin Buber, Antonio Gramsci, Ignazio Silone, and Albert Camus, all struggle between solitude and solidarity without coming to any definite conclusion. After the defeat of the radical politics, the critic, represented by Herbert Marcuse, returns to his solitude and surveys the world from his absolute height.^{44Critics, p. 228.} This is the trend of the twentieth century social criticism. This is not, Walzer argues, necessarily the only or the proper way of doing social criticism.

The disease of the twentieth century critical profession, according to Walzer’s diagnosis, is disconnection. To take disconnection as the prime requisite of social criticism is to undermine the critical enterprise; it is entirely counter-productive. The idea of the critic as a solitary is a misconception resulted from a greater disconnection—the disconnection from tradition. Modern men and women liberate themselves from tradition to such an extent that some become ignorant of it. They mistake social criticism as a totally new project, and give free rein to their imagination. They romanticize the critic as “self-conscious,” “oppositional,” and “alienated”—a nascent kind of intellectuals.^{45Critics, p. 4.} Their underlying motive, Walzer suspects, is the imitation of heroism.

Complaint without the passion of heroism is palaver. Intellectuals naturally want to see themselves as heroes instead of woman-like gossips. Few intellectuals, however, would admit that they are motivated to criticize by an urge to imitate heroes. In their self-descriptions, Walzer notices, they usually ascribe their motive to benevolence. The critic is a disinterested observer, who criticizes for the well-being of his fellow citizens, or more generally, for humanity’s sake. “Criticism may be ruthless and painful, but the critic talks to us like Hamlet to his mother: ‘I must be cruel only to be kind.’ Kindness forces his hand, but since what he says doesn’t sound kind, he would be happier to be silent.” This is the myth of the reluctant critic, Walzer says. Walzer does not believe in this myth; he suspects that this is not generally how one becomes a critic. Benevolence can be a mask of misanthropy. “In fact, there are many critics … who, like the Roman Cato, positively enjoy the castigation of others.” Perhaps, misanthropy, rather than benevolence, is the more frequent motive for criticism. We dislike something, so we criticize it. Walzer, however, attributes this adversative feeling not to the pathological misanthropy but to the normal emotion of disappointment. He says, “Disappointment is one of the most common motives for criticism.”^{46Critics, pp. 20,22.} We have certain expectations of our society and of our friends. When things happen contrary to our expectations, we are disappointed. We want to put them right, and we are driven to criticize them.

Benevolence, misanthropy, and disappointment are some of the motives for criticism. Legitimation is not a question here: neither of them can be used to legitimize or to discredit criticism, for a critique should be evaluated on the merit of its argument. Walzer’s point is not the proper motive of social criticism, it is “connection.” Benevolence, misanthropy, or disappointment is not the ultimate motive of criticism. The lover of humanity, if he is really disinterested, will not meddle in other people’s affairs. If he finds the truth or the way of life, he can write it down for himself, for the philanthropists of his own kind, or for later generations. There is no need to shape it into a critique. The critic, on the other hand, must have some concern for the people. Likewise, the misanthropist cannot be disinterested. It is highly improbable that a person would criticize for the pure pleasure of torturing the others, even “disappointment isn’t enough,” Walzer adds.^{47Critics, p. 23.} Criticism must originate from connection.

Connection is a very general term. Indeed, it is so general that one may find it somewhat difficult to apprehend. What does Walzer mean by “connection”? There are two types of explanations in the Company of Critics—one explicit, one implicit. Explicitly, Walzer mentions “moral tie” twice without caring to define it formally. A better explanation is the one in the introduction:^{48Critics, pp. 23,229.}

Here, moral tie refers to a feeling of responsibility or an identification. Yet the explanation is vague, and can have diverse interpretations.

Implicitly, Walzer elaborates connection in the portraits of the connected critics, such as Martin Buber, Ignazio Silone, George Orwell, Albert Camus, and Breyten Breytenbach. All these critics are aware of the givenness of life and strive to commit themselves to the givenness. Take Buber for example. After the hope of a binational state for Palestine was shattered, some of his comrades left for other “more suitable” countries, but Buber insisted on staying in Israel:^{49M. Buber, quoted in Critics, p. 77.}

Buber’s announcement is, as usual, “portentous.”^{50Critics, p. 64} He emphasizes too much the “I” and annoys some committed Jews. He speaks like a liberal having made up his mind in a process of rational calculation, as if he could refuse to accept the State of Israel as his. In fact, it is his givenness more than his reason that leads him to hold on to the connection.

If Buber’s case still leaves room for doubt, Silone’s tie with his fellow villagers is beyond dispute. His connection to them is undeniably founded on his givenness, and is quite mystical: it comes from his deepest being and binds him forever to his native Abruzzi. Frustrated by the ignorance, selfishness, and resignation of the Abruzzi’s peasants, Silone left his village for the city to join the radical movement. He seemed to have cut the tie with his villagers. But, when he thought that his end was near, he wanted to return to his village and rest with his ancestors. At that moment, he was fleeing from the fascists and hiding in Davos. He could not return. So, he wrote a book dedicated to his native land. In the note of that book Fontamara, he writes:^{51I. Silone, Fontamara, pp. 3-4.}

The struggle with commitment to the givenness is more intense in Breytenbach, and hence the connection more conspicuous. Breytenbach was openly at war with the South African apartheid régime, which he found completely unredeemable. Neither liberalization nor humanization could save it from the crimes it had done. He insisted that political power should be turned over to the black Africans, though he did not believe that the black nationalists could make a better country. He fought with pen, then with arms, and then with pen again. He was in exile, then imprisoned in South Africa, and then in exile again. While residing in Paris, he could not forget his country. He occupied his mind in forging a new national identity for the South Africans—the people he both loved and hated. The situation was grim, and the hope dim, but he continued to “hang in there”:^{52B. Breytenbach, quoted in Critics, p. 220.}

The kind of connection elaborated and praised by Walzer is the intense commitment to one’s givenness. The bond with one’s people is natural for “premodern” men and women, but mystical for modern minds. The above-mentioned critics could choose another identity. Indeed, they had lived abroad and experienced another way of life. But they chose to follow the inward calling, and remained connected with their own peoples. The connected critics are modern men who can still hear the inward voice, and respond.

Connection, Walzer argues, is the basic motive of criticism, and that every social critic should acknowledge it. Modern critics do acknowledge it, but as a fetter that hampers one from reaching an objective or impartial judgement. Since criticism is harsh words, we expect it to be based on accurate analysis and expressed in modest terms. The pioneers of modern criticism recommend that sound argumentation can only be made on a condition free from social and emotional bonds. Though Walzer offers no definite idea of how a better critique is to be written, he disagrees with the prevailing opinion. He argues from history that disconnection does more harm than good to social criticism. On the theoretical level, he refutes it by pointing out that the conception of disconnection is based on the romanticization of the critic’s role, and that detachment cannot guarantee a better criticism.

The act of criticizing, Walzer admits, requires a certain distance between the subject and the object of criticism. What he objects to is the standard view of total disconnection, which he thinks it impossible to attain. A long distant critique, in the best case, turns social criticism into “palaver.”^{53Walzer concedes that there is some substance in the criticism of the critic-at-large. But that criticism lacks “specificity and force,” and hence becomes a palaver. Cf. Walzer’s comment on the old and new Breytenbach, in Critics, p. 228.} Critical distance is very short; in Walzer’s own words, it is measured in “inches.”^{54Critics, p. 41.} The majority of critics have exaggerated the distance needed. Their exaggeration is motivated by the imitation of heroism, and bolstered by romanticization of the critical role. Their stories have a common form: social criticism is a highly risky enterprise; since nobody, especially the ruler, likes chastisement, a critic will be intimidated by all means into silence or defection; hence before the critic undertakes the critical venture, he must cut all his social ties and prepare to die at any moment.

This storyline is appealing because it matches our daily experience. We all remember the sorrowful break-up of relation after a fierce quarrel with friends or family members. We know that complaint may harm relationship, so in order to maintain good relationship, we may distort or suppress our complaint. Hence if we want to complain boldly and rightly, we had better cut off all relationships first. This experience is reinforced by the legends of critic-heroes. We all inherit a certain kind of tales in which the heroes speak out courageously and relentlessly against injustices and are put to death at the exhaustion of the authorities’ patience. We read their critiques and admire their courage. Needless to say, not many of us dare to imitate them. But it only makes our heroes even more admirable and gives the courageous few more motivation to imitate.

Walzer mentions two Western exemplars of critic-heroes.^{55Critics, pp. 12-16.} The first is a religious figure, Jesus. Besides being described as the Saviour of the world, Jesus is sometimes regarded as a social critic. He severely criticizes the Pharisees and stirs up the crowd to go against the Priests. As a result, he dies a cruel death on the cross. Jesus knows his destiny, but takes up his cross nonetheless. He tells his disciples: “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me (Mt 16,24).” The self-denial, the cross, and the discipleship are supported a well-known passage (Mt 10,34-39):

Jesus stands for the truth. To pursue the truth, one must be ready to forego one’s relations, and be ready to die. This is the price of following the truth, but the reward is handsome— it is the authentic life.

Socrates is the Greek and philosophical version of Jesus. In the portrait of his disciples, Socrates is a critic-hero, who devotes his life first to the pursuit of truth and later to its proclamation; he cares nothing but the truth. Socrates has extraordinary endurance for hardship. He has served as a hoplite for several wars. But he has no interest in holding public office, for office will compromise the truth that he treasures the most. Socrates takes no formal occupation and lives in poverty. He walks in the streets of Athens and talks to anyone he meets. His teaching method, which stresses reflexivity, is well advance of his time: he questions his audience about their beliefs and leads them to discover the truth. Youths are attracted to his instruction, but the elders find it too irritating and subversive. They think that if Socrates is not stopped, he will bring disorders to the city. They put Socrates on trial for the corruption of youth and the worship of new gods. Socrates is unrepentant, he insists on defending himself in his own way. His message is clear: kill me, or I will do what I used to do. There is no middle ground for Socrates. He will speak either nothing or the whole truth. Life or death is out of his consideration. He will tell anyone who advises him to save his life as follows:

In Socrates’ mind, the philosopher-critic must have the courage of a warrior, who fights a good fight. “Had Achilles any thought of death and danger?” he asks. Like a good warrior, the fate of a true intellectual is to die for his mission:^{56Plato, The Last Days of Socrates, trans. H. Tredennick, London, 1959, pp. 59-60 (Apology 28B-D).}

Socrates dies as he wishes. He drinks the cup of hemlock without regret. He is faithful to his fate, and sets an example for the would-be critics.

The above portraits are only snapshots of the silhouettes of the two heroes. They can be quite misleading if they are interpreted with a romantic spirit. “The stories of Socrates and Jesus,” Walzer says, “have been oddly confused and conflated. The trial of the philosopher, the passion of the prophet/savior are made to yield a single message: death is the entailed risk of philosophy and prophecy alike whenever these two are critical in character.”^{57Critics, p. 14.} Traditionally, Jesus’ death is taken to be inevitable—the centre of history and an act of God. Walzer has doubt about its inevitability in political terms, but he does not contest it, apparently because its theological interpretation is definite and many people have accepted it. He states, however, that it is factually wrong to superpose the theological interpretation of Jesus’ life on Socrates. Socrates’ death is not inevitable. In Socrates’ self-understanding, his work does not incur or require the penalty of death to complete his mission. He has no intention to die. He defends himself before the jury, and contends that it will be a loss to the Athenians to kill a benefactor like him, who forfeits his personal interests for the purpose of exhorting others to care for truth and virtue, and for the affairs of the state. Indeed, they should reward him, he argues—he should be paid to carry on his work for the rest of his life. In the opinion of his fellows, Socrates is not an unpopular figure. He has friends and followers, who neither betray him to the accusers nor desert him at his trial. He may even have been acquitted. He is surprised that the votes on the two sides are so close. “It seems that,” he says, “if a mere thirty votes [out of five hundred] had gone the other way, I should have been acquitted.” In a retrospective mood, he continues, “Even as it is, I feel that so far as Meletus’ part is concerned I have been acquitted; and not only that, but anyone can see that if Anytus and Lycon had not come forward to accuse me, Meletus would actually have forfeited his £50 [one thousand drachmae] for not having obtained one-fifth of the votes.”^{58Plato, The Last Days, p. 69 (Apology 36A-B).} It is true that Socrates is faithful to his principle and suffers accordingly, but this faithfulness does not lead inevitably to death.

Social criticism does not entail persecution and death. Social critics, of course, face risks, and hence need courage. Risks, however, vary from society to society. A totalitarian régime may impose imprisonment or death on some of its critics. But many governments cannot or prefer not to practise this kind of naked brutality. On the contrary, many societies have an office for their social critics. The officials recognize the critics’ contribution and protect them, as Socrates argues that they should. In ancient China, the ruler actually set up an Office of Criticism responsible for criticizing the monarch and high officials. The liberal society too, in a less formal way, has its professor-critics in the university.

The twentieth century theorists of social criticism somehow confuse danger with disconnection. In fact, neither Jesus nor Socrates is disconnected. The theorists wrongly identify disconnection as the first risk and the touchstone of social criticism. A real critic, they believe, must pluck up courage to break loose from all relations. This article of faith is understandable. Persecution or death is a remote and uncertain event. The critical endeavour does not guarantee the trophy of heroism. But the title of Hero is badly needed in advance. If the heroic drama does not present itself, the critic has to make it up for himself. There is nothing better than disconnection that transforms the critic into a living dead.

Once disconnection is affirmed, theories have to be constructed to legitimize it. The standard philosophical theory is “detachment.” It assumes that a connected critic tends to tilt toward the side of his connection. His bias will corrupt social criticism and turn it into a struggle for self-interest. Can we avoid this pitfall? Yes, we can, some philosophers assure us. We can have an objective standpoint if we take an impartial position. To attain impartiality, detachment is indispensable. The critic must step back mentally and detach from the injured and angry self in order to create the impartial self. Self two looks at self one and the world with a created indifference, and he is deemed to be in a better position to speak the moral truth.

Walzer does not deny the possibility of stepping back, but he doubts if the indifferent self would actually take the trouble to criticize the world. Why does it become “a radical sceptic or a mere spectator or a playful interventionist, like the Greek gods?” he asks.^{59Interpretation, p. 50.} Floating free, one is not obliged to criticize. One could choose any activity that pleases oneself. Given the unpleasant character of social criticism, it is unlikely that the critic would like it for long. Socrates, the acclaimed philosopher-critic, does acknowledge his connection, which the theorists selectively ignore. He tells the jury that he questions, examines, tests and reproves every willing person he meets, “young or old, foreigner or fellow-citizen; but especially to you my fellow-citizens, inasmuch as you are closer to me in kinship.”^{60Plato, The Last Days, p. 61 (Apology 29E-30A).} We have every reason to believe every word he says, for Socrates is indifferent to the safety of his life and will not use rhetoric to solicit the sympathy of the jury. Socrates concerns about other people, especially his fellow Athenians. He criticizes because he is connected.

Thomas Nagel entertains the difficulty of detachment and admits the limits of objectivity. Yet, he does not give up the ideas of detachment and objectiveness. He tries to give them a more nuanced account. To start with, Nagel assumes that stepping back is possible. For him, it is unnecessary that self two should detach totally from the connected self and the world. Self one has some partial knowledge of the world. Self two detaches from self one and judges the opinion held by self one. Self two regards the knowledge of self one as subjective appearance of the world. By comparing it with the real world, self two corrects the appearance, and consequently achieves a more objective view of the world. In matters of morality, self two needs not give up the concerns or values of self one. What he needs is to open himself to the innumerous values in the world. “To find out,” Nagel says, “what the world is like from outside we have to approach it from within: it is no wonder that the same is true for ethics. And indeed, when we take up the objective standpoint, the problem is not that values seem to disappear but that there seem to be too many of them, coming from every life and drowning out those that arise from our own.”^{61T. Nagel, The Limits, p. 115.} Nagel’s method boils down to two steps. First, immerse self one in a flood of values. Second, let self two examine the sea of values and select the ones that he deems to be the best.

An account of detachment as such is more credible. Yet, one question remains: how could self two know what is the best? Walzer skips this question, and assumes that self two can experience the values, “though not quite in the common mode,” and choose the best ones among them. But then, this is not the undertaking of social criticism in Walzer’s understanding. Social reform is based on the criticism of what is to be reformed. The drowning out of one’s values and their replacement by others are, in Walzer’s own words, “an enterprise far more radical than social criticism … an enterprise more like conversion and conquest: the total replacement of the society from which the critic has detached himself with some (imagined or actual) other.” Walzer’s criticism of Nagel stops here. He does not want to go on to define social criticism so as to exclude Nagel’s venture. He just remarks that replacement is “most often … a morally unattractive form of social criticism and not one whose ‘objectivity’ we should admire.”^{62Interpretation, pp. 51-52.}

Besides self one and self two, Walzer suggests a self three (the equivalence of the superego?), who should be a better critic than both self one and self two. We all have experience of remorse on the occasions when we behaved badly in public. We have a painful picture of ourselves, and the painfulness is a proof that that picture is seen from without. We form an opinion of ourselves not from our own ideals but from the standards of the significant others: our parents, our teachers, our lovers, or our friends. These standards are not arbitrary or idiosyncratic; they are values shared in the part of the world where we live. In other words, they are local values. When we use these local values to criticize ourselves, it is self-criticism. When we use them to criticize others, it is social criticism. Thus an objective social criticism does not require a detachment to the point of nowhere. Moreover, Walzer comments that self three “is bound to be more critical” than self two. Self two is looking at himself looking at society. This activity itself betrays the special interest the critic bestows on himself. It might not be narcissism, but apparently he values himself more than the others. Would it be more accurate to say that he is not completely detached or impartial? There is a more detached one, self three, who looks at society from the view of the society.^{63Interpretation, pp. 49-52.}

The other justification of disconnection is “alienation,” which Walzer has also tackled. This explanation approaches disconnection from a sociological point of view. The sociologist proposes that disconnection is a consequence of alienation. It is imposed not from within but from without. Whenever a member of a society is neglected and abandoned, he becomes angry and hostile. This hostility then motivates him to criticize. This is how one becomes a critic. Walzer cites Christopher Lasch’s argument as an example:

Lasch opines that the critic is an intellectual predisposed by his circumstances to rebellion. His explanation has the form of the standard sociological answer to every question, namely, that society is infinitely larger than individuals and the main cause of individual actions. As if to confirm my suspicion, Lasch uses the same alienation to explain why a critic ceases to criticize:^{64C. Lasch, quoted in Critics, p. 21.}

“It is as useful in explaining the end as the beginning of radical criticism,” Walzer comments, “which makes it too useful by half.” Why do some estranged intellectuals become critics, and some don’t? Why do some critics cease to criticize, and some don’t? Lasch’s theory of estrangement falls short of giving an adequate explanation. In view of these general difficulties, Walzer suggests that estrangement should be replaced by marginalization. The critic is not alienated. He is a member of the higher class. For some sociological reasons, he is pushed out of the power centre to the margin. Or he identifies himself with the oppressed, and wilfully marginalizes himself. The critic is both connected and oppositional. His is a kind of “antagonistic connection.”^{65Critics. pp. 21-22.}

2. Julien Benda’s homage to the ascetic monk

The imitation of heroism, a product of confusion and conflation between Socrates and Jesus, is probably an allusion to Julien Benda. In his Trahison des clercs, which can be taken as the manifesto of the twentieth century social critics, Benda repeatedly refers to Socrates and Jesus as the exemplars of social critics. At the end of his book, Benda actually places Socrates side by side with Jesus.^{66J. Benda, La trahison des clercs, Paris, 1990 (repr., 1995), p. 228.} Underlying Benda’s romantic ideas of heroism is the conceptual framework of the ascetic monk. Walzer opines that the ascetic monk as a paradigm of social criticism is seriously misleading, and that this paradigm is one of the major factors that lead to the failure of the twentieth century social criticism. Walzer wants to correct this misconception, and hence directs his criticism squarely at Benda.

In the narration of Walzer, Benda is a universalist clerk after the Augustinian tradition. Unfortunately, he is born in the wrong place at the wrong time, when monasticism is on the decline and the masses are rising up. He naturally finds socialist reform and nationalism irritating. Most disgusting of all, even the clerks join these popular movements. Not only that, they actually volunteer to be the cheerleaders, inflaming the passion of the activists and stirring up more people to join the tumult. These clerks use their expertise to translate antagonism among people into coherent doctrines of hatred, and moralize them. As a result, nations, classes, and races are all depicted as perpetual enemies that will attack one another whenever opportunity presents itself. War is bound to come as the culminating point of this kind of passion politics. Benda’s indictment to these false intellectuals is “betrayal.” They betray their vocation of “single-hearted adoration of the Beautiful and the Divine,” and go into politics. They betray their (divine) duty of telling people the eternal truth; instead, they tell lies.^{67Critics, pp. 33-34. Cf. J. Benda, La trahison, pp. 107-123.}

The cause of the betrayal, according to Benda’s analysis, is passion, primarily the passion of nationalism, then the passion of race, and then the passion of class. The passions for identification and belonging drive the intellectuals into a chauvinist mania. Amid this frenzy, Benda remains calm and disinterested. He reminds his fellow intellectuals, by quoting Jesus’ words, saying: “Mon royaume n’est pas de ce monde.” The intellectuals are in the world but not of the world. Although they are physically present in the world, their mind and spirit are fixed upon the Beautiful and the Divine, which are not of the world. In Benda’s thinking, the model for modern intellectuals, as Walzer correctly points out, is the Catholic clerk of the Middle Ages. At the beginning of the chapter Les clercs. La trahison des clercs, Benda divides the walks of life into two classes. The masses—bourgeois, ordinary people, kings, administers, and politicians—belong to the class of “laity,” whose function “par essence, consiste en la poursuite d’intérêts temporels.” Except the attention to the Divine, Benda stresses. The other class reserved for this function, he calls the “clerk,” who “par essence, ne poursuit pas de fins pratiques, mais qui, demandant leur joie à l’exercice de l’art ou de la science ou de la spéculation métaphysique, bref à la possession d’un bien non temporel.”^{68J. Benda, La trahison, pp. 131-132.} For Benda, the one and the only employment worthy of the clerk is to contemplate, if not the Eternity itself, then the signs of eternity.

To fulfil his vocation, the clerk must undertake a strenuous course of strict discipline, something like the practice of ascetic monks. Benda is not so much concerned with sensual enjoyment as with the intoxication of passions. The greatest temptation of the time, Benda discerns, is the indulgence of affection. Passion, unlike the joy of contemplation, hangs on the attachment to relations, which are temporal and particular.^{69J. Benda, La trahison, p. 125. Cf. Critics, p. 31.} The true clerk must abstain from passions and adhere to the exercise of detachment. Benda repeatedly exhorts the clerks to be “désintéressé,” and teaches that “le vrai intellectuel est un solitaire.”^{70J. Benda, quoted in R. Nichols, Treason, Tradition, and the Intellectual. Julien Benda and Political Discourse, Lawrence, KS, 1978, p. 164. Cf. Critics, p. 37.} It does not mean that the clerk has to put himself in seclusion, but it does say that he must withhold his passion in everything he is involved in. “He plays human passions instead of living them.”^{71J. Benda, quoted in Critics, p. 31.} This virtue is, without doubt, very difficult to attain. In fact, few clerks can achieve this. Benda, in a reflection recorded in the Exercice d’un enterré vif, suddenly discovers that his own solitaire is facilitated by his Jewish statelessness: “elle [la spécialité de l’esprit critique] pourrait bien tenir en partie à ce qu’étant pour la plupart liés aux nations qu’ils adoptent par des liens intellectuels et non charnels, ils échappent aux préjugés nationaux et traitent certains problèmes avec une liberté que ne connaissent pas toujours les non-Juifs les plus affranchis ou à quoi ils n’accèdent qu’avec effort et résignation.”^{72J. Benda, Exercice d’un enterré vif, in La jeunesse d’un clerc suivi de Un régulier dans le siècle et de Exercice d’un enterré vif, Paris, 1968, p. 374.} Thus, Benda’s detachment is, at least partly, a historical consequence; he is socially predisposed to be un solitaire, and a perfect example of sociological alienation. Walzer sarcastically remarks that Benda’s solitaire is double: he is not only “a Jew cut off from other nations,” but also “an assimilated Jew cut off from other Jews.”^{73Critics, p. 37.}

What is Benda going to do with his double portion of detachment? One would naturally expect him to invest his fortune in the contemplation of the signs of eternity. I have no idea about his activity in art, science, or metaphysical speculation, but I know that he did sometimes engage himself in social criticism as well as in political actions. These activities are both temporal and particular. Why did Benda enter the realm that he warned other clerks to avoid? One possible answer is that he wants to defend the eternal. In Walzer’s understanding, Benda’s explanation is a functional one: the clerk is not of the world, but while he is in the world, he serves the world. “Benda is a dualist and a functionalist,” says Walzer. His world view is Augustinian and Lutheran rather than Catholic. He divides human activities into two realms. The realm of reality belongs to the laymen, among them politicians and soldiers are the dominant players. Politicians conceive the world in a utilitarian way and act unscrupulously what is necessary to cater for the well-being of the society. On the other side lies the ideal realm, where the intellectuals alone dwell. The clerks are entirely disinterested in practical ends. They pursue whatever is beautiful and eternal. The only obligation that the intellectuals owe the people is to use their speciality in critical discernment to criticize the politicians, and to make sure that they understand what they do is immoral.^{74Critics, pp. 30-31.} The intellectuals “jetèrent dans le monde, au prix de leur repos, l’idée de moralité.”^{75J. Benda, Exercice, p. 372.} Mysteriously, both the aimless contemplation of the signs of eternity and social criticism serve an indispensable and irreplaceable practical end, that is, the furtherance of civilization. Benda, revamping the argument of the monastic monks, writes: “La civilisation … ne nous semble possible que si l’humanité observe une division des fonctions; que si, à côté de ceux qui exercent les passions laïques et exaltent les vertus propres à les servir, il existe une classe d’hommes qui rabaisse ces passions et glorifie des biens qui passent le temporel.”^{76J. Benda, La trahison, p. 190.}

Benda, who endeavours to paint and live the ideal image of the intellectual, is a sincere and honourable man. Despite acknowledging this, Walzer severely criticizes the picture of Benda’s intellectual, for the reason that the ideal is unrealistic and misleading. Benda’s clerk, in Walzer’s criticism, is psychologically deprived and politically naïve. He is psychologically deprived of love, or more accurately in Benda’s terms, deprived of passion. Love sans passion, Benda seems to say, is the purest love. The clerk must cut his fleshy ties and reconnect through his intellect. If he expresses any emotion, he plays it for the sake of courtesy. His being inside is still and undisturbed. This is the ideal human being in certain philosophical or religious tradition. But I have doubts about it. Benda divides human beings into two classes: the common class of laity who possesses love and passion and the superior class of clerks who cultivates the pure love. I suspect that those who can make connection both intellectually and emotionally are superior. (One has only to image the difficulty to engineer emotion in a robot.) I also suspect that human beings (under normal circumstances) possess both intellectual and affective faculties, which cannot be annihilated once and for all or suppressed always and entirely.

The clerk is naïve in the matters of politics. In order to become a true intellectual, he has to suspend his intellect in political affairs. The clerk, of course, knows the eternal truth about human conduct, but that truth is not workable in the present world order. The world has its own rule, which the clerk does not care; (he probably does not understand either). Benda insists, Walzer says, that “Caesar’s morality is the right morality for the prosperity of worldly kingdoms.” He puts Benda’s political maxim side by side with Luther’s dictum: “You have the kingdom of heaven, therefore you should leave the kingdom of earth to anyone who wants to take it.”^{77Critics, p. 31.}

This two-kingdom rationality is very problematic. The clerk claims to uphold the ideals, but at the same time he forsakes the practical interests of the people. What kind of values is he defending? The dialogue between Benda and his contemporary Paul Nizan best illustrates the point. In 1932, Nizan launched a savage attack on the French intellectuals, among whom Benda was taken to be “the shrewdest.” Nizan criticized Benda’s detachment as a cover for indifference; it actually upheld the established order. Reasoning in Nizan’s mode, Walzer writes: “When one leaves the world to Caesar, one doesn’t serve the ideal; one serves Caesar. Everything else—universal values, critical detachment, the pursuit of truth—is mere hypocrisy. The only alternative is to join the class struggle, to attach oneself to the working class.” Benda’s response to Nizan, as reported by Walzer, was that “if he had to choose between the maintenance of oppression and the loss of intellectual independence, he would ‘resign [himself] to maintaining oppression’.”^{78Critics, pp. 39-40.}

Benda’s response, one has to concede, is consistent with his beliefs. On the other hand, it confirms Nizan’s or Walzer’s charge that “when one leaves the world to Caesar, one doesn’t serve the ideal; one serves Caesar.” If one proposes that Caesar’s morality is the morality of the real world, isn’t he ceding legitimacy to Caesar? What kind of intellectuals would Caesar prefer? Machiavelli will surely be the most welcome, the second will be the apologist, the third will be Benda’s oppositional consenter. The first two classes are useful to Caesar. But the clerk criticizes Caesar with the eternal truth, how come Caesar applauds him? A clever Caesar would certainly do that as long as the eternal truth does not touch any real issue. The clerk’s cacophony is tolerable if he admits that his ideal is not of this world. Caesar rules the world by his law, and the clerk criticizes the world by his ideal. Together they work to sustain the civilization. There is opposition but no inherent contradiction: the critic condemns Caesar as immoral, but he consents to his work. Moreover, a clever Caesar can claim himself to be a hero, someone like the Greek tragic hero. He can speak in the same way as the communist leader Hoerderer in Sartre’s Dirty Hands: “Well, I have dirty hands. Right up to the elbows. I’ve plunged them in filth and blood. But what do you hope? Do you think you can govern innocently?”^{79J.-P. Sartre, Dirty Hands, in No Exit and Three Other Plays, trans. L. Abel, New York, NY, 1955, p. 224. Cf. M. Walzer, Political Action. The Problem of Dirty Hands, in Philosophy and Public Affairs 2 (1973) 160-180, p. 161.} If the answer is no, then someone must get his hands dirty. Caesar goes into the world, plunges his hands in filth and blood, and risks descending into hell. The clerk retreats from the world, keeps himself aloof, and criticizes. To whom should we be grateful?

The script of the intellectual written by Benda is almost impossible to play, not even for Benda himself. Benda was not psychologically deprived. He had passion as well as commitment, not to the Jews but to the French. “The Betrayal,” Walzer writes, “is full of naive expressions of his love for France, a love that went far beyond the ‘affection … based on reason’ that is all he permitted to true intellectuals.” Benda is “wholly absorbed” in the life of France. To prove his case, Walzer cites an example of his language preference. In the 1930s, Benda was preaching a unified Europe. He suggested that French, because of its “rationality,” would be the best substitute for Latin, which was no longer in use. Walzer regards Benda’s “rationality” as a sign of his passion for France.^{80Critics, pp. 38-39.} Another incident that betrays Benda’s passion is the Franco-German war of 1914. That year, Germany invaded the neutral Belgium. Benda openly supported the French campaign to drive out the Germans. He insisted that his motive was not based on national interests but on the abstract, Scholastic principle of jus ad bellum. According to that principle, France rightly waged war against Germany. Walzer, however, queries why Benda does not go on to criticize the Germans for using poisonous gas, which is a clear violation of jus in bello. The reason, Walzer suspects, is that the French has also used gas. “If the Germans had been alone in their use of gas, Benda would have been more open to arguments about just and unjust means of warfare.” “When it came to the French and the Germans,” Walzer pronounces his verdict, “he was never a disinterested clerk.”^{81Critics, p. 35.}

Benda was not an entirely unreconstructed naïve critic. He was not ready to leave the world to Caesar, neither in his act nor in his writing. He joined the Dreyfusards in the 1890s, and again the antifascists and the anti-Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s.^{82Critics, pp. 31,40.} Benda was pressed by real circumstances to stray from his ideal and compromised: “J’admets le clerc séculier, le clerc militant, le clerc qui, pour obtenir quelque chose de la nature humaine, se résigne au relatif. Mais je tiens qu’à côté de ce séculier il faut des réguliers, de purs spéculatifs, qui maintiennent l’idéal dans son absolu.”^{83J. Benda, Un régulier dans le siècle, in La jeunesse, p. 259. Cf. Critics, p. 40.} Benda allowed some clerks to concern themselves with temporal and particular things (secular) and even to become militant. There are still some temporal human values for Benda to strive for at the expense of his life, or more importantly, of his peaceful contemplation of the Absolute. Contrary to his two-kingdom thinking, Benda was always unwilling to let Caesar rule the world by his law. “There is ample evidence,” Walzer says, “that he preferred victory to defeat and the triumph of justice to the martyrdom of its advocates.”^{84Critics, p. 36.} An ironical example can be found in La trahison, the same book in which he preaches the separation of the two kingdoms. Benda rebukes those intellectuals; he calls them “mystical pacifists” who criticize the joy of the French victory over Germany and the French demand for indemnification. “Le mobile qui animait ici ces moralistes,” Benda says, “est la pensée que le juste doit nécessairement être faible et pâtir; que l’état de victime fait en quelque sorte partie de sa définition. Si le juste se met à devenir le fort et à avoir les moyens de se faire rendre justice, il cesse pour ces penseurs d’être le juste.” Benda’s condemnation of these moralists, which is equally applicable to himself, is that they establish “la religion du malheur” by way of equating justice with defeat.^{85J. Benda, La trahison, p. 219. Cf. Critics, p. 36.}

There is contradiction between theory and practice. Benda upholds the ideal of the intellectual but at the same time strays from the ideal. His difficulties, according to Walzer, arise from his inaccurate analysis of the state of affairs at his time, and from his incorrect prescription. Benda rightly catches the spirit of his time. He correctly predicts that the frenzy of nationalism would ultimately lead to mutual destruction. He attributes the frenzy to the human passions for identification and belonging. Intellectual traitors dive into the passions; mystical pacifists oppose these passions with the sole result of falling into another passion of impartiality. Benda thinks that the right response is detachment, and hence proposes the paradigm of ascetic monk and the two-kingdom framework.

While agreeing that passion breeds intellectual betrayal, Walzer suggests another possibility. He observes that the surrender of critical judgement “is a yielding more often to power than to passion.”^{86Critics, p. 43.} Benda has not failed to perceive the influence of power on intellectuals. But he thinks that power only comes indirectly, and that the main cause is passion. Walzer sees it the other way around. Intellectuals love power, but that is something they usually cannot acquire. A substitute for this desire is the direct access to power—whispering to the ear of the prince. Which is the more likely cause of intellectual betrayal: passion for fellowship or passion for power? It is really difficult to say. But I tend to agree with Walzer that “justice is a judgment on power, not on love.”^{87Critics, p. 43.} While love is indispensable to the formation of personality, power, which is indispensable to society, is a hindrance—wise men advise the lovers of justice or wisdom to eschew it. Socrates, for instance, did not teach a life of detachment from love. On the contrary, he walked down to the market and greeted the people he met, especially his Athenians, in a brotherly way. For him, if one wants to conduct a philosophic life, the thing that he needs to shun is politics. In an explanation of his position to the jury, Socrates said:^{88Plato, The Last Days, p. 64 (Apology 31E-32A).}

The conceptual frameworks used by Benda are wrong insofar as justice is concerned. There is no such sociological division of the two kingdoms, nor is there a kind of pure clerk or pure layman. “Pure science, art for art’s sake, the contemplation of God,” Walzer says, “these may well carry their votaries, not into another realm, but out of the reach of the rest of us…. But the love of justice is very different. It brings the intellectual back into reach, forces him to stand among his fellows. Here the proper model is not the medieval monk but the biblical prophet.”^{89Critics, pp. 41-42.}

Has Benda weighed the two models? Apparently, the social critic comes closer to the prophet. Why did Benda choose the monk? The answer as given by Walzer is that Benda, despite being a Jew, never read the prophetic books until the early 1940s, when he was already in his middle seventies.^{90Critics, p. 42.} Had he read them before the publication of La trahison and had he reconciled with his Jewish origin, his clerk would have been cast in a more correct mode. What a pity that such a sincere man as Benda could lead himself astray by being disconnected.

C. The ancient and honourable company of social critics

The twentieth century social criticism is a grim story. It begins with Benda’s high posture, but ends with Marcuse’s airy criticism and Foucault’s entanglement. Social criticism seems to have come to a dead-end. But this is not what Walzer believes. “I complain, therefore I am,” he says.^{91Critics, p. 3.} As long as individuals interact with each other, there will be complaints. How can it be otherwise? Since social criticism is only a specialized form of complaint, we can expect its continuation. Society needs criticism, and someone will play the specialized role as a critic. The concerns of the critical enterprise are the right kind of social criticism and the right kind of social critics. Social criticism, Walzer argues, is not a new phenomenon. It is an ancient venture, as old as society itself. Benda traces its origin to Socrates and Jesus, and models its practice after the ascetic monks. This is a big mistake owing to the ignorance of tradition. Walzer points out that the first appearance of the specialists in complaint, at least in the Western history, is in the land of ancient Israel. The Israelite prophets are the inventors of social criticism who have started “the Ancient and Honourable Company of Social Critics.”^{92Critics, p. 8.}

1. Critical success

Something more has to be said about why the prophet merits imitation whereas the hero or the monk does not. At the beginning of the chapter, I have described the failure not only of the twentieth century social criticism but also of prophecy, which Walzer does not mention. Arguably, the twentieth century intellectuals and the prophets have made mistakes of different kinds. The intellectuals injudiciously choose detachment as their basic discipline; whereas the prophets, while not adopting any practice that is intrinsically contradictory to social criticism, single-mindedly identify foreign conquest as the punishment of God. Israelites have sinned and God punishes them by foreign hands. If they repent, God will re-establish their country. History somehow does not seem to follow this theology, and the prophets lose their credential.^{93I am aware that the above explanation involves a lot of theological controversies, but I deem it quite unnecessary to pursue them further here as what I propose is just a possibility.} Their message has failed, but their practice is still worthy of imitation.

The practice of the prophets is, in the words of Walzer, a “critical success.” If a critic can attract a large crowd of audience, inspire faithful followers, and bring about the kind of social reform he preaches, he is certainly a successful critic. Every critic wants that kind of success, but very often he finds himself ending up in the opposite—like a lone voice crying in the wilderness. In this respect, the prophets are no more successful than the modern intellectuals. “Success as the world measures it is not the measure of social criticism,” Walzer says.^{94Critics, p. 79.} Critical success is of a different nature. The prophetic message is caustic and difficult to follow. Indeed most Israelites did not follow. Yet why did they copy, preserve, and repeat the prophetic message? asks Walzer.^{95Interpretation, p. 70.} Why did they value something they did not practise themselves? The reason, Walzer suggests, is that the prophet has articulated the core beliefs and aspirations of the people in such a powerful way that he hurts his listeners and haunts them for generations.^{96Interpretation, p. 89; Critics, p. 79.} They may not follow his words, but the words sting, and they have to deal with the sting. The prophet forces the people to confront themselves. This is the critical success which impresses all other critics.^{97Critics, p. 235.}

An eloquent example of the critical success can be found in Walzer’s Interpretation. The incident is recorded in the prophetic book Amos. Amos, who lived in Judah, went to Beth-El of Israel, where the temple was built, and prophesied against the cultic practices. His attack was not so much against the priests as against the avaricious merchants. Amos was born in a period of transition, when the loose and dispersed political power became centralized in the king. Under the newly established monarchy, a new upper class of merchants emerged and took hold of the country’s economy. These merchants were unrestrained in the accumulation of wealth. They unduly extracted profit by extortion and by fraud. In spite of their exploitation and oppression, they were patriots, and they expressed their patriotism in religious observance. They kept the Sabbath, participated in festivals, offered sacrifice, and probably donated money for the maintenance of the temple. Amos has an ironical description of the merchants’ piety:

Amos questions their beliefs: what kind of patriotism and what kind of piety are these if the pious patriots exploit the people and offer part of the acquisition to bribe God, and pretend patriotic in order to cover their damage done to the nation? This is his warning to them: justice is more important than sacrifice.

Amos’s theology is a well-established doctrine nowadays; it has been elaborated in the Sinai tradition. But it was not so in the days of the prophet. At that time, justice and ritual, Walzer suggests, were competing for superiority. Why justice, rather than ritual, was the true expression of piety was not self-evident. The royalists, the merchants, and the priests affirmed that cultic observance was the true and sufficient service to God. Amos denounced it as religious hypocrisy. How would a just god possibly be pleased with an extorted offering? Worship without praxis is a self-deceit. Amos stood out, and, drawing upon a previous tradition which was later systematically formulated in Deuteronomy, he attacked the cultists. Amaziah the priest of Beth-El responded by sending a message to Jeroboam, king of Israel, saying: “Amos hath conspired against thee in the midst of the house of Israel: the land is not able to bear all his words (7,10).” Then, Amaziah told Amos: “O thou seer, go, flee thee away into the land of Judah, and there eat bread, and prophesy there: But prophesy not again any more at Bethel: for it is the king’s chapel, and it is the king’s court (7,12-13).” Amaziah does not defend the cultic religiosity, Walzer emphasizes, but appeals for political power to force Amos out. The priest of Beth-El should not be in want of words. So why does he choose the path of politics? It is because, Walzer opines, Amos’s argument articulates the core values of the people so that Amaziah is forced to silence.^{98Interpretation, pp. 73,84-89.} When argument runs out, physical coercion becomes the next option. Amos defied Amaziah’s intimidation. But we are not told that Amos remained in Beth-El and fearlessly confronted the guards of the king. Probably he went back to Judah, ate bread, and wrote down his prophecies there, as Amaziah had told him to. The priest continued his routines in Beth-El, and the merchants gladly rejoined the celebrations. Amaziah won the contest. So did Amos, though of a different kind—a victory that is most appropriate to a social critic. Critical success as such is not valued by the worldly standard, but it is one of the highest honours that one can achieve in the world.

2. The prophet as social critic

At the end of the Company of Critics, Walzer extracts the essence of social criticism and states it in terms of three tasks:^{99Critics, p. 232.}

Walzer accredits the first two to Breytenbach, and the last one to himself. They appear to be the conclusions drawn at the end of the study of a series of social critics. These tasks have, however, already been explicated in the last chapter of the Interpretation, which constitutes a “theoretical preamble” to the Company of Critics.^{100Interpretation, p. vii.} Since they bear close resemblance to the practice of the prophets, I will take them as though they were laid down by the prophets, and show briefly how Walzer extracts them from the prophets.

First, the prophet exposes the false appearances of his own society. This task can easily be seen in the messages of the prophets. Most prophets are patriots and nationalists. Their main concern is their own country Israel, and their writings display the fiercest love for it. Speaking in the name of God, Amos told his countrymen:

Although there exist many nations and many countries, “you only have I known.” These are the words not only of God but also of Amos. “The paradigmatic task of the prophets,” Walzer writes, “is to judge the people’s relations with one another (and with ‘their’ God), to judge the internal character of their society.”^{101Interpretation, pp. 79-80.}

“For the same reason,” Walzer states, “the message of the prophets is resolutely this-worldly.” This statement appears to be too resolute and to