T.S. Eliot: The critic as radical
Eliot was too subtle not to recognize (and too honest not to acknowledge) that his more general pronouncements about political philosophy were unsatisfactory. Like all general pronouncements (in my William James-ian view, at least), they reduce to truisms. Continuity is best, except where change is necessary. Much tradition, some innovation. Firm principles, flexibly adapted. His often-cited remark (in praise of Aristotle) that “the only method is to be very intelligent” helps in estimating his own political criticism.
Concerning two matters of large contemporary relevance, Eliot was profoundly, though unsystematically, intelligent. Eliot’s political utterances were, for the most part, fragmentary and occasional: occurring in essays, lectures, and the regular “Commentaries” in his great quarterly The Criterion. His compliment to Henry James—“he had a mind so fine no idea could violate it”—applied to Eliot as well, for better and worse. He was never doctrinaire; but on the other hand, he was rarely definite. As one commentator observes: “To gesture toward, but not to reveal; to pursue, but not to unravel, this is Eliot’s procedure.” But although he eschewed programs, there is much matter in his asides.
About economics, he repeatedly professed theoretical incomprehension. But just as often, he professed skepticism that any immutable laws of political economy proved that extremes of wealth and poverty were inevitable or that state action to counter disadvantage must be futile. Disarmingly, he acknowledged:
I am confirmed in my suspicion that conventional economic practice is all wrong, but I can never understand enough to form any opinion as to whether the particular prescription or nostrum proffered is right. I cannot but believe that there are a few simple ideas at bottom, upon which I and the rest of the unlearned are competent to decide according to our several complexions; but I cannot for the life of me ever get to the bottom.
Nevertheless, “about certain very serious facts no one can dissent.” For “the present system does not work properly, and more and more are inclined to believe both that it never did and that it never will.”
What were some of these “very serious facts”?
… the hypertrophy of Profit into a social ideal, the distinction between the use of natural resources and their exploitation, the advantages unfairly accruing to the trader in contrast to the primary producer, the misdirection of the financial machine, the iniquity of usury, and other features of a commercialized society.
Sometimes he wondered whether Western society was “assembled round anything more permanent than a congeries of banks, insurance companies and industries, and had any beliefs more essential than a belief in compound interest and the maintenance of dividends.” On one occasion he sounded almost like a communist:
Certainly there is a sense in which Britain and America are more democratic than [Nazi] Germany; but on the other hand, defenders of the totalitarian system can make out a plausible case for maintaining that what we have is not democracy but financial oligarchy.
Indeed, Eliot was full of surprises on the subject of communism. Try to imagine his drearily predictable acolytes at The New Criterion saying something like this:
I have … much sympathy with communists of the type with which I am here concerned [i.e. “those young people who would like to grow up and believe in something”]. I would even say that … there are only a small number of people living who have achieved the right not to be communists.
