The de Tocqueville of Saskatchewan: an appreciation of Seymour Martin Lipset

Inroads: A Journal of Opinion, Summer-Fall, 2008 by John Richards

In his youth, the author of Agrarian Socialism was a Trotskyist; in his mature years, he figured prominently among neoconservative intellectuals, a group whose ideas and debates played an important role in shaping American public policy over the second half of the 20th century. It is an understatement to say this was a wide swing in political ideology. Admittedly, Seymour Martin Lipset's swing never went all the way. He never identified as a Republican. His natural political allies were centrist and conservative Democrats such as Bill Clinton and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Nonetheless, he contributed to the set of ideas that American conservatives now embrace.

Lipset, who died in December 2006 at the age of 84, studied at City College of New York, a decidedly non-elite institution that formed many who, like him, were second-generation Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe. An excellent introduction to the importance of CCNY graduates in advancing neoconservative--but not only neoconservative--ideas is the documentary film Arguing the World, which traces the intellectual evolution of four graduates from youthful radicalism in the 1940s to reflective maturity in the 1990s. (Three of the four have neoconservative links; one remained faithful to the ideas of the left.) Lipset does not figure in the film but it inspired him to write what to my knowledge was his only movie review. (1)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

At the heart of CCNY's political life in the early 1940s, when Lipset was an undergraduate student, were three alcoves in the student cafeteria. Here is his description:

   The alcoves were ... a venue for a steady stream of debate and
   invective between Stalinists and anti-Stalinists. They were
   room-sized chambers in the college cafeteria with wooden benches on
   three sides and an opening to the main eating area. In front of
   each alcove was a large table, strong enough to hold the orators
   who frequently stood atop it to harangue those who gathered. The
   Stalinist or Communist alcove was known as the Kremlin, and the one
   next door, inhabited by a variety of anti-Stalinist
   radicals--Trotskyists, Socialists, anarchists, socialist Zionists,
   members of assorted splinter groups--was called Mexico City in
   honor of Leon Trotsky's exile home. Proximity, of course, led to
   shouting matches, even though the Communists forbade their members
   to converse with any Trotskyists, whom they defined as fascist
   agents. My recollection is that students, occasionally joined by
   some junior faculty, were there all day, talking, reading, arguing,
   and eating.

What united those in his alcove, says Lipset, was the moralistic tone of their arguments. They knew what they wanted for the world; they were less sure than those in the two other alcoves (the third was occupied by ardent Zionists) as how to realize it. Whether the Soviet Union would have been a more humane empire if Trotsky and not Stalin had succeeded Lenin is one of the great hypothetical questions of the 20th century. At the time Lipset and others in his alcove were debating such questions, Trotsky himself had recently died in Mexico, a martyred exile. A Soviet agent, who had successfully insinuated himself into Trotsky's entourage, had planted an ice pick in his head.

By the mid-1940s, when Lipset launched his doctoral studies, he had abandoned Trotskyism. But he retained the moralism of his CCNY alcove. He decided to study the CCF in Saskatchewan not for reasons of professional advancement or because his supervisor at Columbia University was particularly interested, but because he hoped to find in the Canadian prairies a model for a democratic, noncommunist socialism capable of taking root in North America. Agrarian Socialism, his revised doctoral thesis, was first published in 1950.

You can only understand home when you leave it

Agrarian Socialism is an important book in the context of Canadian political studies as the definitive study of the rise to power of the CCF in Saskatchewan. While I think Lipset right in his conclusion that it was essentially an extension into Canada of analogous democratic movements among farmers in the Dakotas and other plains states, I also agree with Allan Blakeney that the CCF was more than that. Lipset did not go very far in pursuing the question of how the CCF differed from its U.S. precedents--this omission was less excusable in the "updated edition" published in 1968 than in the initial 1950 version.

In this early work, Lipset illustrated several themes to which he returned over a long career. The most straightforward was his conviction that academics must go abroad if they hope to understand their own countries or the world. In Agrarian Socialism, it is clear that Lipset was interested in more than a case study. He was seeking answers to questions that transcend Saskatchewan or Canada: Why had there been no successful socialist party in the United States? What are the determinants of democratic politics and, in particular, how can democratic movements contend with the threat posed by bureaucracy? To what extent does American differ from Canadian political culture?