[Radosh is an American educator and historian. In the following essay, he comments on the evolution of Howe's political views.]

Irving Howe was one of our greatest intellects, a man of passion and intelligence who epitomized the now-lost world of the 1930s and 1940s "New York Intellectuals," a term he himself coined in a 1968 essay. He was by profession a literary critic, who wrote about Celine and Emerson, and of course, the world of the Yiddish community in which he grew up, and from which he brought the world's attention to a then-unknown Isaac Bashevis Singer. But Howe was also a student of culture who could not separate himself from the turmoil of his own world. As he once put it, the socialist movement was his school and his university. He grew up in its milieu and, until his recent death, never left its ranks.

Future biographers will eventually give us a full picture of Howe's life. But it is not too early to set out some thoughts about his accomplishments and failures. Howe, of course, tried to do this himself, in his 1982 autobiography, A Margin of Hope. Herein he presented his own estimate of the meaning of his life's course. As usual with Howe, there is much wisdom to be found in its pages. Howe understood, as so many of his contemporaries did not, that in the search for utopia lay the seeds of the totalitarian mentality. Writing about the Spanish Civil War, Howe reflected on the dire fact that it was a group of brave and idealistic young American Communists who went to fight for the Loyalist regime, while others temporized. But in so doing, they became pawns of Stalin's secret police, which revealed to Howe "the tragic character of those years: that the yearning for some better world should repeatedly end in muck, foul play, and murder."

After a youthful Trotskyism and a political baptism in the sectarian world of the late Max Schachtman's Worker's Party and Independent Socialist League, Howe was to settle into the less dogmatic and more open world of moderate social democracy. Indeed, he would often say to me, in my own dogmatic socialist phase as a member of Michael Harrington's Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and later Democratic Socialists of America, "Why do you and the others have to call yourselves socialists? Isn't social democracy enough for America, indeed, isn't that but a remote possibility?" These words, it turned out, were similar to what Elliot Cohen of Commentary had said to Howe in the early fifties, when Cohen told him that whatever kind of revolutionary Howe thought himself to be, he really had a "social-democratic temperament." It was, Howe remembered, one of those transforming moments of recognition that he had long resisted. And to his successors, he tried, sometimes fruitlessly, to impart this same message.

In the new postwar world, having left the Leninist sects of his youth, Howe founded Dissent, which was to become his final legacy to the world. It was in its pages, as well as in those of Partisan Review in the 1950s—a decade, Howe wrote, of "suffocating complacency"—that he was to make his mark. The very introduction of his journal made a point he had made in these pages: America had to come out of an "age of conformity," wherein Howe warned intellectuals against accepting the entrapments of power and thereby abandoning their function as intellectuals. Unlike others around him, Howe warned that the intellectual atmosphere of freedom was "under severe attack," and that meant no temporizing to McCarthyism in any of its manifestations. By tying the intellectual and the journal to the newly emerging civil rights movement and to other currents of change, Dissent itself came to symbolize the promise of a new epoch.

At a critical juncture in the early Cold War, Irving Howe realized that for all its imperfections—some of which he most of all was keenly aware of—the West faced a justifiable and serious danger from the Soviet Union. At a time when the bulk of the so-called "left" was still mesmerized by the remnants of the wartime Popular Front in the guise of Henry Wallace's "Progressive" movement, Irving Howe argued time and time again that the fear of Communist power was well founded; that were Stalinism to win, the most precious values of the West would be destroyed. That meant one had to support both the Marshall Plan and the forces of liberal anti-Communism in Europe—precisely those forces which the international left was dubbing the agencies of American imperialism.

It was precisely his anti-Communism, however, which allowed Howe to respond forcefully at yet another critical juncture: the birth of the 1960s New Left. Howe and his associates had worked tirelessly for the reemergence of a left rooted in the American democratic culture. But when the New Left rose from the ashes, it reeked of anti-Americanism and a rather crude Marxism, and its young adherents tended to romanticize and support any third world dictatorship whose leaders used the rhetoric of Marxism-Leninism. Howe looked at this New Left and, reflecting on his own generation's bitter experience, saw a new version of the old "after Fascism—us" of the Third Period Communists. In a critical and biting essay, "New Styles in Leftism," Howe hit fiercely at the new currents of authoritarian leftism that soon would get the name "radical chic." Here he took on those who abided by the "heritage" of Stalinism which still existed, for those who endorsed the cult of Mao and Fidel, and those who thought that the "wish to shock" was a new form of social revolution.

For these thoughts Howe became anathema to the New Left. At a now-famous meeting in one of those old Workman's Circle lecture halls, Howe debated Tom Hayden, then the young leader of Students for a Democratic Society, author of the Port Huron Statement (the early New Left's manifesto), and spokesman for those who rejected anti-Communism, as Hayden and Staughton Lynd then put it, as "the equivalent of rape." While Howe made his points, Hayden turned pale and stormed out of the hall, indicating by his action that a major rupture had taken place; that the breaking of the tie between the old socialists and the emerging young movement was now complete. For Howe, Tom Hayden and his supporters lacked "historical sense." He was right, and they would never forgive him for the espousal of his principles and for the firmness with which he enunciated them.

Years later, Howe would write that perhaps he had "over-reacted, becoming at times harsh and strident," that perhaps he did not have to act in such a contentious fashion towards the New Left. But Howe was right then, and his criticism of the New Left holds up, twenty-five years after the short life span of the movement. And this, indeed, brings me to the path taken by Howe during the last fifteen years of his life. An opponent of Reaganism, he became bitter about what he saw as the new greed prevailing in our culture, and this became somewhat of an obsession. Howe could never resist taking a potshot at the hated neoconservatives, his former comrades who had drifted away from their roots to embrace the new conservative mood. To be fair, they were not too kind to him, either. Writing in The New Criterion, Hilton Kramer chastized Howe for clinging to the dream of a socialist project whose time had passed. After all, in Howe's own publication, Robert Heilbroner had acknowledged that it was economic thinkers of the right, Hayek and Von Mises in particular, who had proved more prescient about socialism than any of the left had. And Marxist historians like Eugene Genovese had written—in the journal Howe had come to disdain most, Commentary—that socialism had finally "met its Waterloo"; rather than face the meaning of this successful counterrevolution, Genovese wrote, its adherents preferred "to happily dwell on the evil legacy of Ronald Reagan."

That was precisely the path and tone adopted by Howe from the 1980s on. Kramer, however, was unfair to say that Howe tried to hide his esteem for Trotsky, an accusation that attempted to hint that Howe had supposedly hidden ultra-revolutionary roots. Trotskyism was a ghost Howe had long since abandoned. As he wrote in his short book on Trotsky, Trotskyism had become a "petrified ideology." Yet in his obsessive dislike for his old comrades who turned to the new neoconservatism, Howe could not acknowledge the role played by Reagan in helping along the demise of the Soviet Union, nor give his administration any credit when it was due. Evidently Howe could not see that there was anything to be said in criticism of the inadequacies of the New Deal liberalism that had emerged from conservative circles, nor acknowledge the obvious failure of so many old liberal bromides.

All of this might have been expected. But sadly, Howe also seemed to repudiate many of his old, most basic criticisms that had held up with time. An opponent of American policy in Central America, he could not criticize the Sandinistas when it would have helped, preferring to see them, as he once put it at a Dissent meeting, as a "new formulation." He even seemed to believe that it was futile to criticize black support for Communism, since Communists in South Africa and elsewhere fought for black freedom when other whites were silent. That Howe himself had answered these specious arguments years earlier seemed to matter little.

At one point during the Vietnam years, Howe and his comrades had sought a third force—a social movement in Asia and Europe that would provide a way to reject both capitalism and Communism. He worked for the success of such a group in Vietnam, only to find it nonexistent or incapable of gaining political success. The effect was to blind his judgment when it came to an entirely new epoch. Thus, the man who once endorsed Joseph Buttinger's work against both Communist and French imperialism now was saying, as he said to this writer, "I have learned that there is no third force." The implication—for Nicaragua especially—was that one had to choose the Sandinistas. Here, Howe was endorsing the then-conventional wisdom of the very New Left he had earlier rejected. That this put him at odds with his Latin American counterpart, the social democratic poet and writer Octavio Paz, was something he did not mull over. It also had ramifications for Howe's chosen political course. It enabled him to finally reconcile with those very elements of the New Left that had for so many years wanted nothing to do with him. This was acknowledged in an approving New Yorker piece, whose author observed that those former "student radicals grew a little older and saw the value of a more tolerant, less dogmatic, more democratic approach to the remaking of society," and thus Howe was there to now "welcome his young critics back." True, perhaps, for a few. But careful readers of Dissent could notice many examples of the kind of left-think articles and specious arguments which had been absent in the journal's formative and influential years.

Whatever our differences with Howe's last period, his contributions and his erudition, his thoughtfulness and his commitment to democracy will be sorely missed. Even when he disagreed, as was often, he opened the pages of his journal to that very disagreement. Howe could not allow himself to give up the socialist project. Indeed, he inexplicably reaffirmed it after having himself abandoned it years ago. But in his belief that it was the duty of the intellectual to articulate democratic values, and to reject authoritarianism, he has left us a lasting legacy. Howe knew that the wave of the future was simply democracy, and that to speak on behalf of its ideal could unite conservatives, liberals, and radicals. In a time of new beginnings, when the Cold War has ended and those on opposite sides of the fence are beginning to work together in a new framework and period, that is a legacy still worth cherishing.