"The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self" 3.2

In some respects Chapter 7 ("The New Left and the Politicization of Sex") of Carl Trueman's book follows simply from the conclusion of Chapter 5 (that all of human life is political in the sense that all societies are varying arrangements of power) and Chapter 6 (that human psychology can be reduced to ramifications of sexual desire). But of course there's more to the story. The fusion of neo-Marxism and post-Freudian libidinal theory was not inevitable. And while Trueman connects the dots between the two schools with some of the usual suspects (Gramsci and Marcuse (but not Jacques Lacan)), he also engages in serious interaction with the works of Wilhelm Reich and, more importantly, feminist writers Simone de Beauvoir and Shulamith Firestone.

Trueman's work with de Beauvoir and Firestone is especially cogent. More than others in the so-called second wave of feminism, de Beauvoir and Firestone anticipated significant aspects of current feminist thought that goes beyond equality in the spaces of law and employment and focuses more distinctly and critically (in the neo-Marxist sense) on the long-standing institution of the family. After quoting at length from Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex*, Trueman concludes that "the sexual resolution ultimately has one goal, the destruction of the family [because] the family is the primary means by which values are transmitted from one generation to the next [and thus] the family [is] the means by which false consciousness is passed on and replicated over time." (262-63) One might wonder if Trueman has conflated effect with intention.

In any event, I am not entirely persuaded that Trueman has accounted for all the historical contingencies that lay behind the politicized sexuality of today. While Trueman gives a shout-out to the historic Frankfort School, the bête noire of Evangelical worldview commentators, he skips over more contemporary public intellectuals in the tradition of the Frankfort School like Jürgen Habermas. Similarly, he fails to mention less anti-family feminist writers like Catherine Hall. It is not that Trueman should have worked Habermas and Hall into his book; it's that his intellectual history fails to account for why the views of the featured fusionists prevailed. 

Or maybe he does. Toward the end of this chapter Trueman observes that

Society now intuitively associates sexual freedom with political freedom because the notion that, in a very deep sense, we are defined by our sexual desires is something that has penetrated all levels of our our culture. Even the typical songs of teenage pop stars now proclaim that idea as truth, as do the commercials that use sex appeal to sell us consumer goods. ... Sex as revolution or sex as commodity; both are predicated on the idea of sex as the answer to human ills. (263-64, emphasis added)

But is Trueman's suggested order of cause and effect correct? In other words, would the sexualization of contemporary American political culture have occurred without the power of advertising to an American social imaginary already dominated by a consumerist, market economy? Drawing on my own reading of historians of nineteenth century America like Charles Sellers, Gordon Wood, and Daniel Walker Howe, I believe the answer is no. Self-expressive individualism was alive and well in the popular culture of the United States long before the 1960s. And the turn to a sexualized vision of self-expression owes more to the long-prevailing state of that culture than to the ideas of the intellectuals that Trueman mines.

Regardless of whether Trueman has properly ordered the reasons for the rise of a sexualized and politicized form of expressive individualism in America, it remains that such is the current state of affairs. In his epilogue to this part of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self make another significant observation: the contemporary importance of victimhood to identity. The psychologization of self-understanding "massively expanded the number of potential victims" and thus the number of persons who could plausible claim to suffer a violation of a right. A psychologized version of Mill's harm principle increases the number of wrongs and thus the corresponding number of rights of redress.

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*

And just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself, so the end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would not longer matter culturally. ... [T]he dependence of the child on the mother (and vice versa) would give way to a greatly shortened dependence on a small group of others in general, and any remaining inferiority to adults in physical strength would be compensated for culturally.