Maurice Isserman is one of the more resilient members of the radical genera­tion that came of age during the 1960’s. Although his apocalyptic ambitions were frustrated, he refused to succumb to gloom, setting out instead in search of a “tradition that could serve as both a source of political reference and an inspi­ration in what now was clearly to be a prolonged struggle.” Under the academ­ic tutorage of Eugene Genovese, he began to explore the history of the Amer­ican Communist Party, particularly dur­ing World War II, a time when Ameri­can and Russian interests temporarily converged. The result is Which Side Were You On?, which examines the par­ty’s naturalization and rehabilitation. It is nothing short of slander, according to Isserman, to view the party as a subver­sive and conspiratorial organization slav­ishly subservient to the dictates of Moscow. Zealots such as William Z. Foster notwithstanding, American com­munism has exhibited scant interest in violent revolution, concentrating its ef­forts instead on such eminently respect­able and unexceptionable aims as the ex­tension of civil liberty and the initiation of democratic reform. Isserman is at pains to point out, however, how often the party allied itself with FDR’s New Deal and how it advanced the causes of women and blacks.

This revisionist thesis is far more charitable than that defended by Theodore Draper in his pioneering Roots of American Communism, where he adopted the common sense view that during the years of Stalin’s rule any Americanization of the CPUSA was simply a “response to a Russian stimulus.” In order to counter this charge, Isserman has chosen to focus his attention on Earl Browder, an unlike­ ly hero, who led the party until his fall from grace in 1945 and who, we are in­formed, was an Americocommunist long before the Eurocommunists appeared on the scene. Granted, he lacked the elan and celebrity of more recent radicals, but Isserman claims that he possessed an in­stinctive understanding of American conditions that gave a prophetic air to his pronouncements, however pedestrian they might once have seemed to a younger revolutionary generation infat­uated with its own extravagant rhetoric. If he appeared to be unimaginative during the years when Hitler and Stalin were allies, he was vouchsafed a new vision after the Man of Steel met with Roosevelt and Churchill at Teheran in 1943. If Uncle Joe was willing to cooperate with capitalist leaders, so was Browder, and, by the end of the war, this rather unas­suming man had convinced himself that God–or rather History–had called him to lead the party “away from revolution” and toward a policy of reform that would flow gently into the mainstream of American political life. Isserman inter­prets this adaptation of the contemporary and temporary Soviet line as evi­dence of Browder’s peculiar genius for perceiving that in America communism could only mean democratic socialism. Had he not been stripped of authority, Browder might even have become the “American Tito,” leading his country­ men down the “American Road to Socialism.” It is safe to say, I think,that Earl never had a greater admirer than Maurice.

All in all, this book is properly read as the thinly disguised autobiography of an aging and chastened radical who has re­nounced apocalypse now in favor of a less-hurried regeneration. Presently a word-processor operator and a dues­ paying member of the United Auto Workers, Isserman is less interested in the past than in the future, for by rein­terpreting the American Communist Party’s dogged adherence to every shift in the Moscow line, he hopes to lay the foundation for a radical, but reformist, tradition of dissent that will no longer bear the stigma of treason. Communists, he insists, “felt no clash between their ties with the Soviet Union and their loyalty to the United States,” an asser­tion that may be true of the brief period when the two great powers were engaged in a common struggle against nazi Ger­many, but one that will not wash for the years after 1945, when the Cold War obliged one to choose sides. In his eager­ness to identify a native radical tradition that would refocus his own shattered vi­sion, Isserman has contrived to portray American communism as little more than a benign trade-union movement committed to democratic goals and processes. That he now favors a more moderate course of action is his own af­fair, but I doubt that parry regulars will be content to be co-opted by the left wing of the Democratic Parry.

William Barrett’s story takes up where Isserman’s leaves off–at the end of World War II, when, as a young man home from the European theater, he was introduced into the Partisan Review circle and soon joined the journal’s editorial staff. From the first, he was impressed by the chief editors, William Phillips and Philip Rahv, and by the imposing list of contributors from both sides of the Atlantic. Moreover, as a Marxist he shared the Review’s radical but decidedly anti-Soviet sympathies. Both Phillips and Rahv were outspoken critics of of­ficial communism, sophisticated intel­lectuals for whom the likes of Earl Browder simply did not exist. Yet if the Soviet Union was anathema and the American Communist Party beneath contempt, Phillips and Rahv proclaimed their allegiance to all “pure” Marxism in politics and to modernism in art, an ex­plosive mixture that continues to possess a wide appeal, however problematic it maybe.

As the years passed, Barrett’s initial enthusiasm for the journal’s ideology began to wane as his suspicion grew that parlor Marxism was self-deceptive and dishonestly detached. Sometime during the early 1950’s, therefore, he resigned and began to fashion a distinguished career as a professor of philosophy and an intelligent interpreter of European exis­tentialism, a tradition of thought that is uncongenial to the analytic pliilosophers who populate American departments of philosophy. With uncommon insight, Barrett recognized that Jean-Paul Sartre, the most famous of the existentialists, was not to be taken seriously as a philos­opher and early on he turned his atten­tion to Martin Heidegger, the single most influential thinker of the 20th century. In splendid works such as Time of Need and The Illusion of Technique, Barrett explored such famous Heideggerian themes as the problematic nature of technology and the quest of Being. Above all, however, he has pursued Heidegger’s–and Nietzsche’s and Dostoevski’s–insight that the greatest problem confronting our age is that of nihilism, the paralyzing conviction that life is without meaning.

Any one as familiar with modern liter­ature as Barrett is must have peered again and again into the abyss of Nothingness, for at the heart of modernism there lies the conviction, or at least the abiding suspicion, that ours is an absurd world. Thus, in an otherwise affectionate chapter, Barrett takes the late Lionel Trilling to task for having preferred E. M. Forster and Jane Austen to Dostoevski, Kafka, Joyce, and Proust. Without deny­ing the merits of the more conventional novelists, he knows that Dostoevski “reaches into regions of the human spirit that are not to be found in Jane Austen.” The Possessed and Crime and Punish­ment belong to our world, one in which naked souls search for each other and hunger for some meaning beyond the conventionalities of civilized behavior, however vital to public order they may be. In part, of course, it is the breakdown of manners and morals in the age of democracy that has brought us face to face with the Void. As Barrett points out in Time of Need, we are akin to Heming­way’s characters, for whom social con­ventions scarcely exist; thus left to our own devices, we too can be brought to utter that blasphemous parody of the Lord’s Prayer that Hemingway wrote for “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”: “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name.”

It is against the background of Bar­rett’s searching philosophic and human concerns that one should read The Truants, for the book is in essence a quiet meditation on the nihilistic mind of our century. Looking back on Rahv and other members of the old Partisan Review cir­cle, Barrett is now particularly struck by the “negative” or nihilistic character of their thinking. Like so many intellectuals of our time, their intelligence was largely destructive and their capacity for infec­tious enthusiasm and joyous affirmation exceedingly limited. Though never fully conscious of their spiritual emptiness, they were sensitive enough to know that they suffered from a profound and by no means purely personal malaise.

In his effort to provide a phenomeno­-logical description of this malaise, Bar­rett rightly emphasizes the disappear­ance of God and the attendant seculari­zation of our culture. As Ivan Karamazov confided to his brothers, if God is dead, everything is permitted; with that recog­nition, according to Camus, the moral and intellectual history of our time begins. Barrett has always been fascinated by the question of faith, and he is impatient with Heidegger’s well-known reluctance to consider moral and religious questions. While the great Ger­man thinker meditated in majestic soli­tude, Barrett saw that “the number who suffocate from the sense of meaningless­ness increases day by day.” Increasingly, therefore, Barrett read and pondered the peculiarly contemporary work of William James, for the American philos­opher was alive to the peril of nihilism and to the consequent importance of religion. Like James, Barrett is possessed of a genuine will to believe and is per­suaded that the path to personal and public renewal must finally lead back to the holy and the sacred. To be sure, his is a dim religious vision colored by, but quite distinct from, his Christian heri­tage. With Yeats, he believes that some rough beast “slouches towards Bethle­hem to be born,” that some new revela­tion is at hand, but he insists that the Word cannot be received until we achieve a preparatory reconciliation with nature, from which we have become alienated by technology and by our pro­fane and instrumental obsession with manipulation and exploitation. In the final analysis, he wrote in The Illusion of Technique, “we shall have to find our­selves within nature before God is able to find us.”

It is a beginning and by no means a bad one, but Barrett may be excessively pessimistic about the possibilities of a more-traditional religious experience in the modern world. He himself reports that whenever he enters his study, he makes the sign of the cross, the familiar symbol of sacrifice and redemption. Although he is not quite certain why he performs this daily ritual, it might not be too much to suggest that for him and not a few others the symbols of Christianiry are not yet completely dead and that the ancient faith may still offer a more authentic life than any adumbrated by some vague, hoped-for revelation. As Dostoevski, Eliot, and others have already demonstrated, modernism and Christianity are not necessarily incom­patible and, if the Messiah has come, there is no good reason to continue to wait for Godot. At the end, even Heidegger asked for and received a Christian burial.

In any event, Barrett is certainly right when he maintains that man “is the religious animal” and when he suggests that the notorious appeal of social revolution to modern intellectuals is very often in compensation for their loss of faith. Haunted by the specter of nihil­ism, they invest everything in the quixo­tic effort to achieve a total regeneration of society. Barrert witnessed this transfer­ence when he worked for the Partisan Review, and years of reflection have only strengthened his conviction that his fellow intellectuals “aspire to bring about heaven on earth for the dream of heaven they have lost.” It is not, to be sure, a novel insight, but it is one that Barrett has purchased at some cost, hav­ing once been mesmerized by what Michael Polanyi called the magic of Marxism. In his ongoing personal and philosophic search for a renewal of faith, Barrett has been a particularly thoughtful and courageous example to modern secular intellectuals.