For the Gentleman Rebel

INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF AMERICAN RADICALISM by Staughton Lynd. 184 pages. Pantheon. $4.95.

The New Left--comprising what Bayard Rustin calls the "disaffected sons and daughters of the middle class"--has found a curiously appropriate leader in Staughton Lynd. He is the Brooks Brothers man as revolutionary. Harvard graduate, former assistant professor at Yale, he is the son of Robert S. and Helen M. Lynd, authors of Middletown and Middletown in Transition, both classic sociological studies of a small city in the 1920s and 1930s. Staughton, now 38, is best known as editor of the book Nonviolence in Amer ica and as a confirmed peace marcher and self-appointed citizen-envoy to North Viet Nam. He seems to be acting out his own role in a contemporary sequel to his parents' books that might be called Middletown in Revolt.

Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism is a kind of historical guide and handbook for the gentleman rebel --Emerson-cum-Marx rather than Rap Brown-cum-Mao. "I am less interested in 18th century radicalism than in 20th century radicalism," Lynd admits, and at times he makes American history read like one long protest march in which Jefferson, Thoreau and Staughton Lynd are fraternity brothers linked arm in arm. Lynd writes as a scholar as well as a proselyter, and his slim volume valuably documents the American tradition of dissent. But it must be read with the proper skepticism due any partisan credo.

Snake in Eden. Like a film running in reverse, Lynd's version of American history reels backward from the New Left to the Declaration of Independence --"the single most concentrated expression of the revolutionary intellectual tradition." Yet even in the beginning, Lynd observes critically, there was a snake in Eden. "Property, property! That is the difficulty!" cried John Adams upon rereading Rousseau's The Social Contract in the White House. "It was indeed," Lynd echoes. Even the radicals of 1776, he laments, believed that the best way to support individual freedom was by guaranteeing the rights of "property rather than conscience."

For Lynd, the history of American radicalism has been a series of accelerating "guerrilla attacks upon the right of property." A Quaker as well as a Marxist, he is at his most original in suggesting that members of Nonconformist English sects--many from the Society of Friends, as were William Penn and Thomas Paine--were the first of the guerrillas. In the latter part of the 18th century, these Dissenters argued that the only "absolute and inalienable" rights were human rights, not property rights. Bringing theology and politics into coincidence, they established conscience--the "inner light"--as the divine right of the common man. In the 19th century, Lynd says, the doctrine was assimilated into the American main stream: "Property was no longer the ark of the covenant. It was recognized to be not a natural right but a social convention."

Final Spiral. In Lynd's quick march, the next main engagement that had to be fought by the American radical was to establish "a freedom to act as well as think and speak." History, he believes, provided the appropriate issue in abolitionism, which expanded the private privilege of conscience into the public privilege of civil disobedience. The radicals of 1776 stipulated that "only majorities could renew the social contract," explains Lynd. "Abolitionism was obliged to discard that restriction so as to justify individual disobedience to laws which sanctioned slavery."

This final twist--Lynd ends his slim outline at the Civil War--brings American radicals surprisingly close to what he regards as the final spiral in their evolution, "a frontal assault on the authority of the state." Enter the radicals of the 1960s right on cue, taking literally the nearly 200-year-old advice of the influential English political philosopher William Godwin, who declared that established authority has no more right to regulate an individual's actions than to regulate his thoughts.

Lynd concedes that the ultimate risk of this position invites "generalized disrespect for law," but he slides away from consequences. When in doubt, he radiates an unqualified trust in the natural goodness and perfectibility of man that makes such an early wishful-thinker as Rousseau look like a cynic.

Morality Politics. First and last, Lynd is a moralizer. For all his meticulous scholarship, his instinct is to reduce American history to a series of black and white questions. Ought we to tolerate slavery? Should we fight unjust wars? Are we revering property more than people? To these questions, the reader seems to hear echoing between the lines Lynd's own answers: Civil rights. Pacifism. Socialism. Seeing less the tangled events than the abstracted issues, Lynd has composed not so much a position paper as a posture paper for the New Left. This is the politics of righteousness, or moral style. "I feel drawn," he has admitted, to people who feel and act in "the mystical-romantic-adventurous-sectarian" manner.

Despite his evangelical fervor, Lynd leaves a final impression of ambiguity, partly justifying the Yiddish proverb that Irving Howe recently directed at him: "He wants to dance at all the weddings." Lynd winces before the untender either-ors of history. He cannot settle flatly even on Viet Nam. "Were I in Viet Nam, I think I might be an anguished neutralist Buddhist some place," he has confessed to an interviewer.

Caught between the yogis and the commissars of the New Left, he falls back on a semimystical vision of the world as town meeting, proposing an ideal society that stresses religion rather than politics. With his transcendental interpretation of history, his uncompromising rectitude, and his wobbly ambivalence in the face of actuality, Lynd seems like a 19th century Brook Farm Utopian who has wandered nobly but by mistake into the 20th century.

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