The Company of Critics [antikvár]

PREFACEI decided to write a book about social criticism for personal as well as political and philosophical reasons. Over a number of years, 1 have been arguing (most clearly in Spheres of Justice [Basic Books, 1983]) against the claim that moral principles are necessarily external to the world of everyday experience, waiting out there to be discovered by detached and dispassionate philosophers. In fact, it seems to me, the everyday world is a moral world, and we would do better to study its internal rules, maxims, conventions, and ideals, rather than to detach ourselves from it in search of a universal and transcendent standpoint. But many reviewers and commentators have said that this argument makes social criticism impossible; it binds us tightly, inescapably, to the status quo. Unless we are in sight of the sun, like Plato's philosopher, we can make no judgment about life in the cave. If we are unable to appeal to the outside, critics inside must turn apologist. I take this response seriously, take it to heart, indeed, since I don't mean to turn my own work into an apology for this (or any other) society. And so I have tried to figure out what it is that social critics do and how they go about doing it. Where do they find their critical principles? Where do they stand when they make their critique? How are they connected to, or disconnected from, the men and women whose society they are criticizing?Questions like these are best answered with reference to the life and work of actual critics. Hence my eleven subjects, all of them intellectuals, publicists, political activists, who have spoken harshly and angrily about their own society. They constitute a small part of the twentieth-century company of social critics, but not, I think, an unrepresentative part; and their lives pose, often in dramatic ways, the question implicit in my title: what further company should critics keep? What is the preferred character of critical accompaniment? Some critics seek only the acquaintance of other critics; they find their peers only outside the cave, in the blaze of Truth. Others find peers and sometimes even comrades inside, in the shadow of contingent