surveillance. Work had become a disagreeable routine, voting a meaningless ritual, military service something to be avoided at all cost. The attempt to enlist public confidence in government had given way to the search for "credibility." Authorities in almost every realm had forfeited public trust; but the only way to counter the resulting cynicism, it seemed to me, was to reform our institutions so as to make them worthy of trust, not to play on this cynicism by insisting that it was impossible to trust anyone over thirty.

That I was over thirty myself no doubt colored my perception of these matters. My generation—those of us who hadn't sold out to the New Frontier—found itself caught in the middle of a struggle in which generational issues rapidly overshadowed issues of class and race. The young militants denounced us as enemies of the revolution, by virtue of our having jobs, families, and positions of responsibility (however severely circumscribed by the realities of bureaucratic power), while our elders— the old social democratic, anticommunist left, well on its way to neoconservatism by this time—lectured us on our ingratitude to the society that had favored us with every advantage and given us tenured positions in its universities. We ourselves regarded our criticism of American society, of the university in particular, as an act of loyalty, designed to restore public confidence in authority. The old social democrats saw it, however, as willful and calculated subversion, another instance of the "treason of the intellectuals"—more reprehensible, if anything, than the rebellion of the enragés, which could be excused as an excess of youthful idealism.

My growing dissatisfaction with the new left did not imply any break with the historic traditions of the left, which I held in higher regard the more I came to understand them. The trouble with the new left, it seemed to me, lay precisely in its ignorance of the earlier history of the left, as a result of which it proceeded to recapitulate the most unattractive features of that history: rampant sectarianism, an obsession with ideological purity, sentimentalization of outcast groups. By the late sixties, I thought of myself as a socialist, attended meetings of the Socialist Scholars Conference, and took part in several attempts to launch a journal of socialist opinion. Somewhat belatedly, I plowed through the works of Marx and Engels. I read Gramsci and Lukács, the founders of "Western Marxism." I immersed myself in the work of the Frankfurt school—Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse. Their synthesis of Marx and Freud—to whom I had

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