There is a danger, of course, of predicated human solidarity on the representative man, the one who, in setting himself against the prevailing convention and exemplifies its reformation. Of course, one might well give one's self over to Ghandi, or to King, but the 19th century valorization of Napolean and the 20th century valorization of Hitler serve to remind us that, if one gives too much credence to the satanic impulse, one may well give one's self over, not to an hypothetical, but an actual hob-goblin of evil. It is perhaps this possibility that causes Rorty, for example, to hold firm on the distinction between private and public. It is one thing to recreate one's self, to radicalize one's thinking, quite another to insist on one's self as a representative man, the exemplar of an emergent order. The difficulty, of course, is manifest and stems from the predicating assumptions. If there is nothing but what we have constructed for ourselves, if we are the pure product of an historical contingency resulting in this convention, if that historical contingency has gone somehow awry -- and inevitably history has gone awry -- then it must posit a way of being more authentic. There is a temporal dimension to this, a looking back and looking forward. The romantic impulse is, more often than not, fundamentally regressive insofar as the truly authentic existed (or its potential existed) before historical contingency went awry. Hence the romantic impulse to recover more primitive folk religions, and as Ian Buruma points out, "elegiac sentiments and leftist politics are not necessarily in contradiction. At one point Judt describes the left as a permanent form of protest: 'and since the thing most protested against is the damage wrought by rapid change, to be on the left is to be a conservative." The irony for Marx was this: with the communist manifesto, he ceased being a social scientist and became prophetic. Socialism is one thing, communism another, and the latter is predicated on an apocalyptic vision different in detail but not in kind from the apocalyptic vision of religion, except that it required, not patient endurance, but active engagement for its realization. The romantic impulse is essentially a revolutionary impulse, but if the revolution were ever wholly successful, if the intentionality of their acts ever fully satisfied, the opposition that defines them dissipates and no longer has meaning. Consequently, the revolution must never be allowed to complete itself. The representative man, whether it be Mao on the left or Hitler on the right, falls into the same pattern. The revolution, once institutionalized, wages war against a prevailing subjectivity, the remnants of an old subjectivity not yet fully subjected to the new way of being in the world, the new form of life.
It is a central insight of the late romantics, that no comprehensive doctrine is fully comprehensive -- that is to say, true once and for all. I have made the claim elsewhere that Adam and Eve in Eden provides a central organizing myth for the American psyche, and if Adam and Eve learned a central truth from their own interaction with Satan's willful obversity, they learned the Eden had boundaries -- that it was fully comprehensive of God's universe. The fall represents the transition from the innocence of pure ignorance to the knowledge of boundaries, first and foremost the boundary between good and evil, innocence and guilt, but also the boundary between a lost paradise and the present contingency of a world replete with suffering. This nostalgia for a lost innocence, signals the prevailing characteristic of the willfully obverse in American political morality. The willfully obverse becomes an insistence on the innocence of pure ignorance, and for American conservatism represents a turn from both the rational and the secular. On the right it is represented by such potentially representative men as Jerry Falwell, whose legacy one sees reiterated in the current swing to the right. It insists on recovering a faith-based theocentric state, one guided by a set of evangelical principles that are, if not satanic, then clearly oppositional. The paradise lost was the America of the 50s, and they are against the historical contingency that emerged in the so-called 60s and early 70s, a state of innocence lost with the changes in American demographics and the integration of blacks, with the changes in sexual mores made possible by the pill, and the list, of course, goes on across the full panoply of oppositional values. The same, however, could be said of the American left and its opposition to the still emergent historical contingency of the new global economy that has decimated the working class. The paradise lost was the new deal America, and they are against the historical contingency that emerged in the so-called 80s and early 90s, a state of innocence lost with the changes in American economics and the damage wrought by the rapid change from a labor-based to an information-based economy.
