Page 68 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

GERMAN SOCIOLOGY

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which man grapples with and assimilates reality”; a similarly Romantic
moment his later call to arms: “we must strain our inventive and
creative faculties to the utmost…let us go into the fight together
encouraged by the thought that the fate of our language and the
struggles to develop it, have…always been…closely bound up with
the struggles of our country for national salvation”. 38
In each case, determinist sociology and Romantic polemic are held
in dynamic tension only by a near-apocalyptic understanding of the
supposed “general crisis of capitalism”, in many respects startlingly
reminiscent of Leavis’s own. For it was the very urgency of the perceived
crisis, the same urgency that compelled both Caudwell and Fox to
volunteer for Spain, that conjured up the peculiar necessity of this
voluntarism. But when Western capitalism settled into its long post-
war boom, all of this began to seem hopelessly antiquated. As Raymond
Williams was to recall of his own brief association with British
communism: “It may have seemed a natural response [to Leavisism]
to retort that the point was not how to read a poem, but how to write
one that meant something in the socio-political crisis of the time. But
when the productive mood which was our way of replying by not
replying faded away after the War, and we had to engage in literary
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criticism or history proper, we found we were left with nothing”. As
cultural theory, socialist realism remains radically inadequate:
predicated on a fundamental epistemological confusion between fiction
and history, it led to a type of cultural criticism that was often both
authoritarian and philistine. Much more readily defensible, however,
was the communist insistence, first, that the political effects of art are
perfectly proper matters of concern for the politically motivated artist;
and secondly, that realistic literary technique might very well have a
distinctly subversive such effect, by virtue precisely of its capacity to
expose to public view previously hidden aspects of contemporary
social reality

German sociology
Western Marxism very obviously developed by way of reaction against
communist Marxism. But it derived much of its initial theoretical
inspiration, at least, from an earlier encounter between German classical
sociology and Second (that is, Socialist) International Marxism. The

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