Humanizing the Technocracy

In his memoir published last year, Martin Peretz, the long-time owner and editor-in-chief of The New Republic, reflects on a life devoted to cultivating a distinctive and fractious form of liberalism

Martin Peretz, in 2009, speaking at his alma mater, Brandeis University. (Screenshot taken from a YouTube video available here.)

I’ve never met Martin Peretz. Now that he’s 85 years old, I suspect it’s unlikely I ever will. That’s unfortunate, given how much The New Republic, the magazine he purchased in 1974 for $380,000 and owned and oversaw for the better part of four decades, has meant to me.

Some small part of that affection follows from the fact that I wrote three cover stories for TNR and ended up being asked to serve as one of its contributing editors for a few years in the early 2010s. But those happy things happened because I loved what Marty had done with the magazine long before I worked up the nerve to pitch an essay to one of his editors. That prior love is why I resigned my honorific title as quickly as I could once Silicon Valley simpleton Chris Hughes actively destroyed what Peretz had painstakingly built. That was in the final days of 2014. A magazine called The New Republic continues to be published today. It has little if anything in common with what it used to be.

What TNR Was

I first became a TNR subscriber in 1992, when one of my teachers in graduate school told me it was required reading for anyone aspiring to be an intellectual—someone who devotes himself to ideas, thinking, and the life of the mind. He was right. The magazine—especially the back of the book overseen by Leon Wieseltier—provided an education to rival the one I acquired in my graduate studies in history and political science over the next six years. (You can read my tribute to Leon and his enormous contribution to American culture in the essay I wrote shortly after he resigned from the magazine in protest of Hughes’ (and his team’s) ambition to break shit.)

This means I began reading back during Andrew Sullivan’s tumultuous but incredibly fruitful editorial oversight of the magazine, from 1991 to 1996. These days, know-nothing critics on the left would have you believe Sullivan (with Peretz’s backing) turned TNR into a right-wing rag during these years because in 1994 he published an excerpt of The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein (alongside nearly two dozen essays, many of them severely critical of the book, its argument, and its methods) and a handful of other articles considered heterodox for a left-of-center magazine.

The truth is Sullivan continued and deepened what Peretz started during the 1980s, when he began gathering together a fractious group of brilliant editors and writers, ranging from the left to the center-right, to wage intellectual battle with each other as well as conventional wisdom in Washington. There was Mike Kinsley, an all-purpose skeptic. And Rick Hertzberg, a refugee from the Carter administration and the irascible house lefty. And Charles Krauthammer, another former Carter administration staffer whose hawkish views on foreign policy placed him closer to Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party than to the Democrats of the time. And Wieseltier, a stunningly erudite and combative editor and writer who took his intellectual cues from Isaiah Berlin and Lionel Trilling—the great pluralist liberals of the postwar decades.

It was quite a group, eager to make a big splash in the normally placid and chummy wading pool of the nation’s capital. And that’s exactly what they did—with Peretz himself serving as editor-in-chief while maintaining a multi-decade-long perch in the interdisciplinary Social Studies program at Harvard University, where he served both as a charismatic undergraduate teacher and a gifted talent-scout for the magazine.

The number of prominent writers and editors who either started out working for the magazine or cycled through it early in their careers is astonishing. Fred Barnes, Mort Kondracke, Michael Lewis, Ann Hulbert, Dorothy Wickenden, Tim Noah, David Samuels, Richard Holbrooke, Samantha Power, Emily Yoffe, Bart Gellman, Larry Grafstein, Jason DeParle, James Bennet, Dana Millbank, Anthony Blinken, Jonathan Chait, Jonathan Cohn, Christopher Orr, Michelle Cottle, Judith Shulevitz, Jeffrey Rosen, John Judis, Julia Ioffe, Jed Perl, James Wood, Adam Kirsch, Michael Kelly, Charles Lane, Peter Beinart, Frank Foer, Richard Just—those are just some of the names. Many came through Peretz’s Harvard connections. The rest were friends or students of his many friends around the country and the world.

The result, verified in issue after issue, year after year, was nothing less than the best weekly magazine in America.

A Project for a Lifetime

But what made it great—and distinctive? Peretz’s title—The Controversialist: Arguments with Everyone, Left, Right, and Center—doesn’t help answer those questions because it lacks specificity. Peretz didn’t start and sustain arguments for their own sake without regard to what each side stood for. On the contrary, he was out to defend something substantive. But what?

We get a decent answer about a hundred pages into the book, when Peretz recounts getting into a bit of a public tussle with sociologist Daniel Bell at a conference in 1968, shortly after student protesters took over the campus at Columbia University, where Bell had taught for a decade but would soon depart for Harvard. The details of the disagreement are less important than a few sentences Bell uttered in the midst of their back and forth.

If there is a problem for the intellectuals, it would seem to me a double one, which is part of the role of the university in a postindustrial society. It’s how you humanize the technocracy and how you tame the apocalypse. Having seen some of my students attain the apocalypse, I would submit that it is much easier to humanize a technocracy.

Though Peretz appears not to have recognized it right away, Bell had provided him with the project of a lifetime. Over the coming years, Peretz would use the considerable resources made available to him by his marriage (in 1967) to Anne Devereux Labouisse, heir to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune, to humanize the technocracy—meaning those college graduates who hold top public and private jobs in the professional-managerial class as “knowledge workers” or “symbolic analysts.” The New Republic would be Peretz primary vehicle for pursuing the task of humanizing them.

Peretz’s vision of humanism was somewhat similar to the one that animated the early neoconservatives who gathered around The Public Interest, the influential quarterly journal of public policy co-founded in 1965 by Irving Kristol and Bell himself. Like Kristol and Bell, Peretz came to dissent from the left’s turn away from liberalism and open embrace of anti-American ideologies in circulation during the late ’60s. But unlike Kristol and his allies at Commentary magazine, Peretz never moved all the way over to the right. Instead, he attempted to keep alive a distinctive vision of liberalism that made its home just to the left side of the ideological center while inviting a wide range of reporters, writers, and thinkers further to his left and somewhat to his right to engage in a broad-minded conversation and argument about the country, its culture, and the wider world.  

This meant that Peretz would sometimes publish essays that poked holes in various left-wing shibboleths or took Republican policy proposals seriously. But the magazine never carried water for the GOP and it never hesitated to criticize conservatives in lacerating terms, especially when they transgressed fundamental liberal principles and commitments (as Peretz and his handpicked staff discerned them).

Against “One World”

For me, the most illuminating passages of the book are those where Peretz describes how he understands his own distinctive, combative, and embattled form of liberalism. Few will be surprised that it grows out of a dispute with his fellow Jews, many of whom, then as now, embraced homogeneous universalism—or what Peretz dismissively refers to throughout the book as “One Worldism.” This is the view that morality demands the overcoming of all particularistic attachments—religious, cultural, and political—that make the world heterogeneous and conflict-ridden.

The most insipid and facile version of this outlook can be found in John Lennon’s hippie dirge-anthem “Imagine.” Imagine no heaven, no hell, no countries, nothing to kill or die for, no religion, no possessions, no greed or hunger, just “a brotherhood of man.” Imagining these things “isn’t hard to do,” Lennon assures us. And once we imagine them, they can be made real.

Such sentiments were widely shared during the late 1960s and ’70s, affirmed by many on the antiwar left. It was both possible and desirable to jettison all particularistic attachments, many believed. In fact, it was the key to world peace, which was within reach, just over the horizon or around the bend.

For many Jewish leftists, such convictions grew out of personal discomfort with their own particularism—a discomfort that mirrored the unsettled feelings of non-Jews about whether and to what extent Jews would be willing and able to fit in among the Christian and post-Christian majorities that dominated the nations of the West. The uncomfortable topic wasn’t limited to Weimar-era anti-Semites on the far right. It’s obviously a major theme in the origins of Zionism. Variations on it also come up often in the myriad tributaries and backwaters of the Marxist tradition, and in Marx’s writings themselves. It can even be discerned as far back as the late 18th-century debate between Immanuel Kant and Moses Mendelssohn over the proper scope of the Enlightenment and its political, cultural, and religious implications for Jews.

Peretz staked out a strong position in this debate against universal homogeneity. His liberalism was distinctive in permitting and encouraging an appreciation and respect for particularistic attachments. In this, his outlook resembled that of Isaiah Berlin, whose liberalism emerged in dialectical conversation with and criticism of those (like Giambattista Vico, Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Georg Hamman, and other members of what Berlin called the Counter-Enlightenment) who dissented from the most universalistic and cosmopolitan strands of enlightened, liberal thinking.

Unlike Berlin, however, Peretz had deeper and more passionate attachment to one specific form of particularism: Zionism. (Berlin’s appreciation for Zionism has aptly been described as “modest.” No one would describe Peretz’s stance toward the Jewish state using such a lukewarm term.) The intensity of Peretz’s Zionism has shaped just about everything else about his journalistic, moral, political, personal, and professional commitments.

That very much includes the distinctive way he attempted to humanize the technocracy with his magazine. His vision of humanism included universalistic values and aspirations along with a great appreciation for specific cultural inheritances and traditions, which he usually strove to treat with respect. That combination of commitments—and the deep tensions between them—proved intellectually fruitful, opening up space for broad disagreements and contestation among contributors over big questions of policy and political philosophy. It also pointed toward a wise appreciation for the hard and possibly immovable obstacles to anything resembling a true “end of history” or the creation of a smooth, homogeneous world of soft edges and easy solutions to (often ineradicable) problems.

The Big Blind Spot

Note the words “pointed towards” (rather than “helped him achieve”) in that last sentence.

Looking back at the trajectory of TNR over the course of his ownership in light of the way he tells his life story in The Controversialist, what strikes me as most peculiar is the way Peretz’s criticism of “One Worldism” and openness to the hard claims of particularism sat side-by-side all those years with an unwavering faith in the ability of American military power to serve as a means to champion universal-humanistic moral idealism around the world.

To say that faith stands in tension with his skepticism about the capacity of the world’s rivalrous and often hostile groups to transcend particular attachments is a major understatement. That tension has (at least) two dimensions. One wonders, first of all, why he was so sure American military might could be successful in playing such a humanitarian role (in Central America during the 1980s; in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s; in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria in the years following 9/11) when, according to his own assumptions, the humanitarian impulse is so very weak in the world and the human heart. And then there’s the domestic side of that very same point: What made Peretz think the American people were eager or even reluctantly willing to serve in the role of a humanitarian policeman over the long term?

Don’t both presumptions stand in rather stark contradiction with his bedrock convictions about human beings and their tendency to prioritize more local or tribal attachments?

In this respect, I find something fittingly ironic about Peretz getting booted in 2010 from his own magazine (after first selling and then becoming once again its partial owner) for an undeniably bigoted attack on Muslims in the unedited blog he had begun publishing at the TNR website. Not that I took or take any joy at his humiliation. (He was canceled long before it was cool.) But those unfortunate events were nonetheless a kind of unintentional vindication of his own longstanding skepticism about humanitarian impulses in the world—a skepticism that should have played a bigger part in a number of his past editorial decisions on coverage of and pronouncements about foreign policy. This is most glaringly true about the Iraq War. But it also applies to the muscular, crusading moralism that animated the magazine’s defense of numerous ill-fated adventures around the globe before and since 2003.

A Life Well Lived

When Peretz’s book approaches the present in its closing pages, he claims to be unsurprised by the GOP’s turn toward Trumpism, and I believe him. Not that Peretz supports the man and his political movement. But his lifelong awareness of the power of the particular in human life—of attachment to and love of this party, this religion, this people, this nation—should serve as an inoculation against shock that someone, somewhere would eventually rise up, even in a United States founded on a cluster of ringing universal ideals, in explicit defiance of the impulse toward the cosmopolitan, the humanitarian, the global.

Peretz ends his book by expressing distaste for Trumpism as well as contemporary progressivism. Believe me, I get it. The question remains, though, of how to understand what lies between those poles. Is it merely a negation of the extremes on either side? Or is there a positive outlook distinct from the left- and right-wing alternatives? A substantive liberalism that can guide us through the narrow ideological straits while also humanizing the technocracy?

Even with its blind spots, TNR under his leadership did an extraordinary job, measured in decades, of cultivating just such a humanizing liberalism. For that, liberal humanists everywhere owe Martin Peretz an expression of sincere gratitude and thanks. There are many measures of a life well lived, and this is surely one of them.