Word: visional
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Functionally, Marxism is a vision, belonging more to poetics than to science or politics. It began as a sensitive man's response to an early stage of a fundamental transformation in the human condition. The great change that had set in by the middle of the 19th century still rolls on, gathering speed and extending its breadth. Today, as in Marx's time, men feel the change as both a threat and a promise. It evokes fear and hope simultaneously. The Marxist vision is a peculiar, sometimes deadly-but for many men an effective-way of perceiving...
...Marx concocted a "total" theory, a consistent set of symbols, to explain the course of history, and he intended his theory to be swallowed whole. The vision derives much of its poetic force from its unity, although few modern men gulp down the whole brew. Outside the Communist countries, formal conversion to Marxism is now rarer than it was a generation ago. Much Marxist influence is indirect and fragmentary. In some minds, fragments of the Marxist vision coexist-illogically-with Christianity or Freudianism. For most, it provides a rationale for criticizing society as it is, rather than a plan...
...where it was possible to meet a considerably wider assortment. Still, I continued to assume, come the revolution, that I would leap forthwith into the ranks of Harvard's insurgents, whoever they might be. And I continued to assume as much through the three years that invented between the vision and the event. So it was until it-happened-here that I learned any different...
...might argue that it must be serious, since it is forbidden. But I would prefer merely to say that it is serious because it is the major commitment of the best undergraduates at Harvard. No one can pretend to have a clear vision of what happened two weeks ago if he fails to realize that the brightest and most creative people at Harvard were in University Hall at 5 a.m. Thursday morning...
Considerable resistance will be met, of course, in trying to persuade the University's two governing boards to allow these reforms even if they are possible-- the old men who run the University appear quite willing to risk shutting down Harvard present to serve their vision of Harvard past. But if reform is impossible, it is not so for legal reasons...