SOURCE: “Criticizing Social Criticism,” in Boundary 2, Vol. 18, No. 2, Summer, 1991, pp. 207–26.

In the following excerpt, Wolff examines the waning vitality of leftist social criticism and Johnson's “right-wing tirade of rage” in Intellectuals.

These are anxious times for social criticism and social critics, especially for those who approach from the Left. Movement toward social democracy has been reversed in the United States for more than a decade. An individualism defined in terms of private wealth and power accumulations proclaims itself as the solution to all social problems. The 1950s’ celebration of U.S. capitalism as a pluralistic, democratic near-utopia—rudely interrupted by the 1960s’ New Left—seems once more to be in gear. Individualist thinking is the ascendant moral tone, political slogan, and economic fetish. Even movements associated with the Left have in part felt obliged to accept and promote individualism. One of the new kinds of Marxist theory proclaims...