Intellectuals After the Revolution
Berman, Paul
The year of the stock market crash, 1987, was also the year of the intellectual crisis. Afterward the stock market seemed to right itself, but that can't be said about the world of thought....
...Foucault saw a link between rationality and repression...
...By definition, no bombast, no crisis...
...For bad writing in French is sometimes good...
...And whatever the flaws in Jacoby's survey, he was right, he was very brave, to stand up and say louder and more forcefully than any radical before him what conservatives have been saying with hypocritical glee for many years but radicals haven't wanted to concede...
...The little specifics of past and present may get away from Jacoby, but around these specifics glows hyperbole's larger truth...
...Yet the distressing conditions haven't driven these people into paying equally expensive graduate school tuitions...
...But his points about bohemia and the prospects for free-lance intellectual work I can judge...
...The process has been going on for sixty or seventy years...
...Actors and musicians lose their careers entirely if they move far away, which is not the case with writers...
...historians...
...Possibly Jacoby feels drawn for some reason to the gentleman-crank style, which is, perhaps, more of a WASP than a Jewish style...
...We have younger conservatives today, and younger liberals, and we have critics who sway back and forth according to what magazine assignment they receive...
...Levi-Strauss argued that, since the same structures of belief underlie all cultures, no "better" or "worse" can be identified in comparing one culture with another...
...The whole purpose of rebellion on the part of the student generation was to oppose people like that...
...Journals that are not obscure — conservative, but especially liberal—almost disappear from his survey...
...The fundamental points were: (1) What you see in front of you—for instance, a democracy, or the plot in a novel, or whatever—is an illusion...
...Bloom, though, is in the grip of cranky Straussian philosophical doctrines...
...philosophers...
...Who they are is probably a self-interested exploiter...
...In La pensee 68, Ferry and Renaut criticize Pierre Bourdieu, the sociologist, for following the same procedure in his own study of the 90 • DISSENT intellectuals, Homo Academicus...
...Not to mention inspirations from the German...
...Where is the younger intellectual generation...
...In a very intelligent earlier book, Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism, he expounded on differences between "scientific Hegelianism" and "historical Hegelianism...
...Ferry and Renaut mock these writers as "philosophists" and are dry about the results: "The philosophists of the sixties achieved their greatest WINTER • 1989 • 91 success in managing to accustom their readers and listeners to the belief that incomprehensibility is the sign of grandeur...
...Among Jacoby's heroes from the older generation is Gore Vidal, the gentleman-crank...
...Jacoby never quite says...
...The whole event tends to be subjective, which is to say, it varies according to authorial predilection...
...But taking the academic radicals as a whole, Jacoby's assertion of mass disappearance is true enough...
...But they are not old-fashioned intellectuals...
...The old neighborhoods have either risen into bourgeois splendor or sunk into lumpen squalor, and either way are no longer suitable for bohemian life...
...Who are they...
...It was the same during the Great Depression, and doubtless it was that way, too, for the writers who came of age during the Second World War...
...The method of criticism is to stand up when occasion requires and say about a given body of work: Well, it's not wearing a jacket...
...As someone has said, the method of tailors is to sew a jacket, a shirt, a collar...
...I think we have to put the economic winds to the side and look instead at the history of ideas in the sixties...
...Jacoby's way of describing the crisis is to announce a break in the chain of intellectual inheritance in America...
...Even television came to be extolled...
...Jacoby's generation, the people now in their thirties and forties, went through an earthquake like that...
...But the intellectuals of every generation don't organize a group...
...Events have to organize it for them—big events, the size of the First World War, preferably...
...A miserable way to live...
...Edmund Wilson noticed the first stage in his Greenwich Village novel of 1929, I Thought of Daisy: "I did not know that I was soon to see the whole quarter fall a victim to the landlords and the real estate speculators, who would raise the rents and wreck the old houses...
...Anyway, what is this radicalism that resolute WASPs so stoutly champion...
...Another writer from the same group is Pascal Bruckner, whose criticism of Third Worldism in France, The Tears of the White Man, has come out in English with a valuable introduction by the translator, William Beer, applying Bruckner's strictures to American attitudes.* The writers haven't received much press in the United States, and even less that is favorable...
...They became unintelligible because they believed that unintelligibility is profundity...
...As a result, intellectually minded people who grew up in the sixties had no alternative but to seek careers 88 • DISSENT as professors, where they inevitably succumbed to academic values and ideas, especially the idea of ruthlessly rising through the departmental hierarchies...
...Possibly the successes of liberal humanism had proved so great that the old doctrines could no longer contain them...
...What would prevent professors from supposing that value in literature is merely an illusion fomented by the dominant class and end up teaching their students to feel content with reading Louis L'Amour, narrator for the masses...
...A distressing situation...
...On the other hand, if criticism of the Enlightenment was extended to mean that democracy and human rights are merely Western anthropological curiosities, what would prevent structuralist anticolonialism from turning into a defense of the most reactionary Third World dictatorships...
...The heirs to Edmund Wilson or to Lewis Mumford or to a figure like C. Wright Mills, whom Jacoby regards as a great sociologist, don't exist, and things have come to a very sorry pass indeed, with no sign of getting better...
...What is to be done...
...They wrote in jargon because they insisted on it...
...Reality is undecipherable, or else decipherable only with the aid of science...
...Men do not make history just as they please, but they make their own history," Rosa Luxemburg said...
...Book-buying doesn't diminish during an intellectual crisis...
...It's a shame...
...In any case, the posture that followed from Points One and Two was the Great Refusal, the posture of absolute rejection, of final rupture with everything soft and humanist and subjective that had been thought before...
...They offered sharp criticisms of abusive uses to which Enlightenment ideas had been put...
...They are, most of them, in the academy...
...Where are they...
...but then, some of his radical heroes are genuine libertarians, too, not that he discusses anything so relevant as dictatorship versus liberty...
...psychologists...
...It is an astonishing thing...
...Jacoby complains that the New York Review of Books has failed to bring along a younger generation of writers, which may be true, though less and less...
...Post-Structuralist Thought, which laid out aspects of the debate unobtrusively in advance...
...The defense of the masses thus evolved into a defense of the popular-culture exploiters of the masses...
...For if the subject of the sixties and its intellectual upshot has at least been broached from an honest standpoint that isn't seeking ideological advantage, maybe a serious discussion can finally begin, in English, without disciplinary guidelines...
...But the odor of experience is not on these younger writers, except in a few cases...
...Do the various American books and articles constitute a parallel effort on this side of the Atlantic...
...Or possibly there was more to the generation gap than that...
...They are nowhere, says Jacoby...
...They specialize...
...Criticizing such a claim was an appropriate first reaction to the politics of the post–Second World War period...
...Finally, the whole enterprise caved in, and above the rubble hovered the dust of pretension that always hovers when earnest Americans try to imitate the French or the Germans...
...Ideas like democracy, human rights, and the freedom of the individual were mobilized precisely in order to maintain the continuity of imperial power...
...They embrace narrow disciplines...
...The criticism of liberal humanism, having turned into a systematic extreme, produced everything necessary for a thorough intellectual collapse—the collapse of lucidity and sense, the loss of the ability to distinguish the important from the ephemeral, the collapse also of leftism, in whose good name some of the fatuous claims were made...
...It's a pity Jacoby doesn't address himself to these beliefs...
...It was, after all, love of democracy that supposedly made us do it...
...In the twentieth century the center of intellectual activity has always been New York, and New York has become ever less hospitable to the kind of penury in which intellectuals must normally live...
...The bohemian neighborhoods were merely the eccentric parts of the old tenement and pretenement districts...
...He holds up political radicalism as a central obligation for intellectuals and then offers an idiosyncratic theory about Jewish intellectuals having been less firmly attached to their radicalism than bony WASP intellectuals...
...New Yorker writers had about as much chance as Frank Sinatra to articulate emotions of the middle and late sixties...
...But in The Last Intellectuals, though Jacoby echoes her maxim, writers don't make their own history...
...The bright and accomplished intellectuals from the younger generation—the people whose bylines Jacoby doesn't know or doesn't respect—never quite organized a group...
...The year of the stock market crash, 1987, was also the year of the intellectual crisis...
...Naturally, these points are expressed in different ways by each of the doctrines...
...Conditions at these places are exploitative...
...The participants have to share values, assumptions, purposes, at least sufficiently to allow for conversation...
...It begins by reversing Jacoby's question...
...For humble though they be, younger critics, sociologists, historians, political writers, doctrinal polemicists, and columnists do exist...
...Cities around the country still have radical weeklies with mass circulations and these weeklies are happy to publish young writers, the younger and more radical, the better...
...The victory had aroused hopes that were greater than the postwar achievements, which in the eyes of a younger generation that didn't experience the war, made the ebullience look hypocritical...
...They refused to use simple narrative techniques, they abhorred old-fashioned lucidity...
...Inconveniently for Jacoby's thesis, the Neuro is written and edited largely by members of the supposedly missing generation, who turn out not to be missing at all but, oddly enough, visibly prolific...
...Intellectual crises take place in the land of hyperbole, e.g., "God is dead," "The End of Ideology," "The Closing of the American Mind," "La defaite de la pensee...
...he actually praises the apology by C. Wright Mills for the Castro dictatorship...
...Maybe that's what it was like in the Marxist thinking that came out of the sixties...
...The latter group sometimes benefits from the golden vaults of the right-wing think tanks...
...That may have happened a little too quickly in the reception given to Jacoby's The Last Intellectuals...
...But the posture of the Great Refusal required turning these points into systems...
...The Thompson Marxists among graduate students were in the humanist tradition and therefore different from the others (and some of the younger historians, as I say, have continued to follow their own course, as has Thompson...
...Crude determinism is bad...
...he wants to know...
...The younger social historians, jewels of their generation, have produced brilliant volumes of social history—even if Jacoby, hobbled by his own discipline of hyperbology, won't acknowledge their achievement...
...Aside from housing, the New York working class used to maintain a considerable intellectual culture, mostly in the left-wing parties...
...Camus and the existentialism of Sartre disappeared, and what dominated instead was Althusserian Marxism, E. P. Thompson Marxism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, structuralism, the Frankfurt School, deconstruction later on, and so forth...
...He argued that the development of reason in the seventeenth century led to persecution of the insane...
...And if Jacoby doesn't see this, how can we take his denunciations seriously...
...What caused the remarkable march into the academy...
...Ferry and Renaut even specify a month: May 1968...
...Or the criticism of the Enlightenment might derive from linguistics via Levi-Strauss and structuralist anthropology...
...But Jacoby has succeeded in focusing our attention on the method of criticism...
...There was Marcuse's famous argument that democracy's most obvious virtues, for instance, freedom of speech, are actually the hidden workings of bourgeois control...
...This too is exasperating...
...The philosophers of the sixties accordingly developed writing styles that were opaque, enigmatic, paradoxical, scientific-sounding, and complex...
...Now, as reportage, that is a vulnerable claim, not to mention an irritating one...
...But can this distressing situation explain what Jacoby wishes it to explain...
...Nor is it impossible to get into print...
...On what basis, as Alain Finkielkraut asks, can even the most savage of customs be condemned...
...They write in jargon...
...If the only barbarism is the idea of barbarism, how can we identify any barbarism other than our own...
...There are thousands of these people...
...The very idea of sanity began to look dubious from a Foucaultian perspective, as if words like sane and insane were mere conveniences of definition, brought into currency by the social need to dominate and exclude...
...What began then has either run out of steam, or never had any steam, or has gone off track...
...The fear of totalitarian dangers became less and less realistic, more and more paranoid, producing ultimately the delusionary perceptions that led Americans into Vietnam...
...I think their troubles may surpass those of predecessor generations, leaving aside writers from extremely oppressed circumstances...
...Points of similarity to the French writers do exist...
...Here is a rough sketch of a historical explanation...
...Where are the intellectuals whose work does still reflect what was unique about the younger generation...
...It is said that two thousand four hundred articles on sociology are published every year...
...Jacoby invokes "the economic winds that propel cultural life, and at times chill it...
...Can high culture be regarded as more serious or important than low or popular culture...
...Landlords, tenure committees, and editors make the history...
...The same urban conditions afflict people in the perform ing arts even more severely...
...Today the "economic winds" have blown the working class largely out of the city...
...They are not, in truth, great masters (though Finkielkraut in particular is very talented...
...But the others have a hard time of it...
...THE REVOLUTION What's Happened Since the Sixties...
...Pascal Bruckner, The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt...
...They thought they were making the revolution...
...Intellectual crises tend to be that way...
...Then the speculators ruined the next quarter and the quarter after that...
...The only barbarism, from this point of view, is the belief that there is barbarism...
...The opposite is more likely: performing artists feel less horrified than intellectuals at accepting the proletarian occupations that still survive...
...He might have been expected to...
...Jacoby says he has asked his friends to identify the younger writers and they can't think of any, and the possibility will arise in the minds of many readers that Jacoby's friends must live in California...
...It is, in fact, a tragedy...
...Sophisticated subjectivism is good...
...Were the two points absurd...
...Hyperbole's difference from simple reportage consists, however, in being bigger...
...It was the revolution of the 1960s...
...Point Two in the grand metaphysic—the idea that anyone who claims to see reality is doing so in order to dominate someone else—was at bottom a criticism of reason and the Enlightenment...
...On the other hand, if many subjectivities yield an objectivity, one element of the crisis can reasonably be declared a fact...
...Is that because performing artists are more likely than intellectuals to come from wealthy backgrounds and can afford high rents...
...sociologists...
...Point One— the illusory quality of what lies before you — might, for instance, be stated in a semiotic or deconstructionist way (the distinction between signifier and signified, the impossibility of affixing a meaning), in a Freudian way (the governing role of the unconscious), in a Marxist way (the dominance of bourgeois culture), or in a structuralist way (the governing role of anthropological structures...
...17.95...
...He can't do it...
...Even so, the performing arts haven't collapsed altogether...
...And this, too, has disappeared along with the class itself and the old streets and the affordable rents and the institutions that affordable rents allowed to flourish...
...Naturally some of them succeed in escaping the academic vices...
...Discussions like that are hard to arrange...
...But—here the larger truth comes up from the waves—for some reason their experience didn't translate into a serious discussion...
...The debate in France over Martin Heidegger and his Nazi enthusiasms (conducted in an endless number of books and articles), along with the debate in this country over Paul de Man, reveals a deeper philosophical version of the same crisis, since the sudden worry about Nazi backgrounds bespeaks, I think, a loss of confidence in several of the main ideas that pass as most "advanced...
...on the contrary...
...And five or ten years later, when incomprehensibility reached American shores, the consequences were, of course, even woolier...
...Jacoby goes further, actually, since the poor American professors that he belabors in The Last Intellectuals don't even get to express social forces...
...The participants have to form a group, even a squabbling group...
...Cultural historians of the future will not look kindly on the way America has let real estate speculators trample over what is best about New York...
...290 pp., $18.95...
...A reader of The Last Intellectuals might conclude that a publication called Telos stands at the center of contemporary life...
...Yet these elderly figures were New Yorker writers...
...But to find opportunities to learn how to mminn WINTER • 1989 • 89 write, to publish your views—that can be done...
...Freelance writers make less money than before...
...In short, what was to prevent the valuable and progressive criticisms of imperialism, snobbism, and prejudice from becoming reactionary defenses of tyranny abroad and ignorance at home...
...Afterward the stock market seemed to right itself, but that can't be said about the world of thought...
...Jacoby criticized this logic mercilessly...
...Possibly a gigantic underground shift had occurred from a culture of hardship to a culture of consumption...
...The academic radicals have performed tremendous labors, yet the product of these efforts, the work of several varieties of university Marxists, of elegant deconstructionists, Foucaultians, Lacanians, structuralists, interpreters of the Frankfurt School, the criticism written by earnest people who regard someone named F. Jameson as a major literary figure, the harvest, all in all, of a leftwing academic generation— this product, vast, flat, infertile, dry, has the look of a Soviet wheat disaster...
...Historical Hegelianism leads to a sophisticated Marxist subjectivism...
...Newspapers have shut down...
...Hyperbole is easily laughed off...
...If you look carefully there's not even a collar...
...Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind raises questions about the influence of Heidegger that were raised a year earlier by Ferry and Renaut...
...I don't think they propel the intellectuals—short of "in the last instance...
...244 pp...
...No one herded the academic radicals into the universities...
...The points are not foolish...
...Having said all this, I hate to invoke still other French writers as an alternative...
...Intellectual crises are never easy to describe...
...These younger intellectuals publish prominently...
...In that way and no other way the task of clarification goes on...
...I'll have to describe this truth in my own way...
...Anyone who wants to dismiss arguments about an intellectual crisis need only demonstrate hyperbole's difference from simple reportage, and the arguments appear to sink...
...Altogether stupid, these contentions...
...And sure enough, the performing arts do suffer...
...His eye stops at all the wrong places...
...But leaving the humanists aside and allowing for inconsistencies and exceptions on all sides, the various doctrines can be boiled down to a single grand metaphysic, which came to influence almost everyone in the left-wing graduate school environment...
...That is the decline of the urban working class...
...Disorientation is never momentary...
...The question in reverse comes out: Why didn't the older generation produce heirs...
...New York: Basic Books, 1987...
...The debates over curriculum at Stanford and Duke universities, Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, E. D. Hirsch, Jr.'s Cultural Literacy with its famous list of five thousand items every educated person is supposed to know—these show the crisis merely in its American pedagogical form...
...As for learned or scholarly journals, these have become a threat to the ecology...
...Alternatively, the criticism might derive from Marx, as in the work of Horkheimer and Adorno...
...The business of the intellectuals, let us say, is to get up a discussion of how to live, what to feel, what to think...
...The confidence in liberal humanism seemed grotesque given the greatest of the postwar events, which wasn't the battle against totalitarianism but the global movement for decolonization...
...I've cited Ferry and Renaut, the authors of La pens& 68, and Alain Finkielkraut, who wrote La defaite de la pensee...
...New York bohemia existed in the past as a kind of adjunct to the proletariat...
...What was to prevent naive students from demanding, instead of an education, courses that would 92 • DISSENT merely congratulate them on their ethnic background...
...Peculiar judgments fly every which way from his pages...
...And the result was, by the middle sixties, that liberal humanism had in large measure lost the ability to make sensible judgments about its own performance...
...The criticisms of reason and the Enlightenment spread into a criticism of all kinds of evaluation...
...But on a principle of fighting fire with fire, I note that in France, a countermovement has begun among younger intellectuals who are calling, in effect, for a rehabilitation of liberal humanism, suitably updated...
...Then the radicals started flooding the graduate schools...
...And if you add up these omissions and commissions, as Jacoby's critics have done, and factor in the admiration for Vidal and the empty spot where the New Republic should be, the details begin to weigh, and The Last Intellectuals begins to take on water, and then—but this is the danger—his argument sinks with a fearsome glub before your eyes...
...If large numbers of people who came up in the New Left never took an interest in becoming old-fashioned intellectuals, if they became professors instead and undertook to write in jargon on topics an inch wide, if they abandoned playing a public role, I think the social factors merely smoothed the way...
...and their own contribution will come off as slightly artificial...
...Every generation produces critics and writers in the different fields of intellectual life—as even Jacoby acknowledges in a couple of sensible passages...
...Something exists and Jacoby ought to have taken the trouble to identify it correctly, if only to sharpen his denunciation...
...Doubtless a tiny honor roll of exceptions to the rule could be assembled from other disciplines, too...
...There is no modem for the saxophone...
...New Left heroes of the late sixties were, as Jacoby recalls, writers of the fifties and early sixties—Sartre, Camus, Fanon, Marcuse, Deutscher, Reich...
...Who are these resolute WASPs...
...Russell Jacoby's The Last Intellectuals, * Alain Finkielkraut's La defaite de la perdee, Bernard-Henri Levi's L'Eloge des intellectuels —these express the crisis as experienced by a younger generation of writers who can't help fearing that intellectual life is grinding to a halt...
...Bloom as its defeat...
...The anticolonialist ideas that derived from LeviStrauss were particularly powerful...
...All of the American authors, left, right, and liberal, plus all of the French authors I have named, agree that the crisis had its origin in radical trends of the 1960s...
...The new tone that might have been expected from the younger generation, half-utopian, half-crushed, light and heavy at the same time, the radical shift that might have emerged, the maturation of student revolution into an intelligent intellectual life, the elaboration of what seemed twenty years ago to be great new inspirations—none of that, or not much, has come to pass...
...They were liberal humanists themselves, even if with some radical points of view...
...In any event, if there is an intellectual crisis today, there was also one in the middle sixties, a feeling that things had fallen apart, which on the part of the student generation took the form of revulsion against liberal humanism and its style...
...If we are not the partisans of Enlightenment, what is to prevent us from becoming the partisans of every kind of obscurantism, especially when the obscurantists raise the flag of anticolonial resistance...
...Jacoby may have forgotten this atmosphere when he regrets today the failure of that same generation to produce equivalents of Wilson or Dwight Macdonald...
...They merely get kicked around by them, like pebbles...
...These questions were likewise worth raising...
...The intellectual crisis has been amazingly widespread...
...Jacoby understands the crisis as a triumph of the academy...
...Scientific Hegelianism results in a crude logic of determinism...
...Many of the older intellectuals whose radicalism Jacoby thinks proved unreliable, plus some of the people whose radicalism never faltered, grew up in that environment...
...But do they really "propel cultural life...
...He asks: Why hasn't the younger generation produced a lively intellectual life the way that older generations did...
...Even the New Republic, Edmund Wilson's old home—the Neuro he used to call it—a very influential magazine, barely rates mention...
...New York: The Free Press, 1986...
...But in English, bad is worse...
...He admires the Fidelista writers...
...The critical ideas that derived from structuralism and other doctrines of the sixties made a great battering ram for clearing away all kinds of snobbism and prejudice that obstructed genuine critical appreciation...
...The ordinary literary virtues of lucidity and straightforwardness do not seem like virtues to someone who regards the obvious world as an illusion...
...They nod hello twice a year...
...Here again, the point could be expressed according to different systems...
...It may even be that The Last Intellectuals will prove historic...
...What happened in the sixties that prevented the work of older writers (including writers who were fairly young at the time) from inspiring imitators, followers, critics, and detractors who would have formed an equivalent to the generations that came out of the thirties and the Second World War...
...Lately the situation has been aggravated by a second stage that Jacoby, as a Marxist, will surely acknowledge...
...The Second World War generation emerged from their youth ebullient in victory, perhaps a little exhausted, fearful of totalitarian dangers, confident in the values of liberal humanism for which the war had been fought...
...Leading younger critics...
...Even if it were true completely, surely there are other journals, more today than anybody could possibly read...
...Among the writers cited above, Russell Jacoby's predilection is Marxism, whereas Bloom's, if you read him closely, is pre-Periclean monarchy...
...The academic radicals entered because they wouldn't be stopped from entering...
...I know talented young writers who publish frequently and yet still bounce around from sublet to sublet without ever finding an affordable apartment of their own...
...Foucault's version derived from Nietzsche...
...And then, well: On the matter of writing style, for instance, it's obvious that any system of thought affirming the illusory quality of the visible world is going to exact consequences...
...There's no future in Bloom, only a past...
...There's a tendency to compare them to the great masters of the sixties and be disappointed...
...Anyone who reads their books will see how many of their ideas I've borrowed, not necessarily in ways they would applaud...
...You see this in the strangely Thespian demeanor of Manhattan shopclerks, waiters, and taxi drivers...
...And still another book, Alain Renaut and Luc Ferry's La pensee 68, caused a stir earlier that same year and foretold much of what has now happened...
...But when criticism of the Enlightenment had at last gone beyond countering the foolish and snobbish to become a thorough system in itself, what was to prevent tin-eared music critics from claiming, say, that a Duke Ellington on one side and a heavy-metal rock band on the other are really all on a plane...
...I'm in no position to evaluate what Jacoby says about the corrupting aspects of academic life, though I'm ready to believe anything, especially remarks as modest as his...
...Jacoby, as the anti-Bloom, adopts an ultraradical sixties posture of the Great Refusal...
...If sanity isn't necessarily superior to insanity, if one culture cannot be said to be more advanced in important respects to another, can literature be said to have superior and inferior expressions...
...No, they were an obvious place to begin criticizing smugness and blather...
...He adopts the posture of a nattering curmudgeon and ends up grounding his arguments on a reactionary dislike for the reforms of the sixties...
...Of course, that may be part of the problem...
...but it was a period also of snobbism among critics, who managed not to see these obvious achievements...
...How to explain the radical professors, then...
...That means recalling why the radicals became radical to begin with, and what their radicalism became...
...They read each other's work...
...The same distressing conditions afflict writers who did not flee into the corrupting embrace of the academy—the people who became old-fashioned intellectuals despite the rumors of their demise—the journalists, the contributors to the conservative magazines...
...WINTER • 1989 • 93...
...Because with an event like that, the young writers come home from driving ambulances to discover that they no longer think and feel the way people thought and felt before, and the young writers can understand one another because of this, and have something new to say...
...On the contrary: terrific efforts were expended at herding them out, and continue to be expended...
...Ultimately these people made their own choice...
...This makes for still another difficulty in identifying what is 86 • DISSENT Intellectuals happening today...
...But as one critic has observed, they're doing a fine job of dismantling the great masters...
...The answer should be obvious...
...Or else the participants will drift into groups that already existed when they came on the scene, discusWINTER • 1989 87 Intellectuals sion will be routine...
...They liked narrow topics...
...The "economic winds" exist...
...Ferry and Renaut complain that Bourdieu foreswore vulgar Marxism in his introduction, then set about showing how French intellectuals express the larger social forces nonetheless...
...2) Those who say otherwise do so because of who they are, not because of what they see...
...The young radicals followed other examples, European ones mainly, usually at the distance of five or ten years...
...But by the middle sixties, each of these feelings had taken on a false quality...
...Wilson had a bit of gentleman-crank in him—though he was a serious man of ideas, which can't be said of Vidal...
...The postwar era was a period of genius in certain popular arts, for instance, in black America popular music and its imitators...
...There is no "enlightened" versus "unenlightened" —except in the eyes of imperialists...
...That is the pertinent question, and Jacoby has given the answer...
...Above all, the demise of modern cities has squeezed out the old bohemian districts that in the past created environments congenial to writers...
...If they don't, everyone will go baying each in his own corner and no one will make sense...
...Did we rain bombs on the peasants of Indochina...
...These winds have whittled away the traditional bases of independent intellectual life...
...At least that is what everyone who succeeded in publishing a book seems to think...
...It's not wearing a shirt...
...The metaphysic contained two fundamental points, plus a posture...
...It is a land of stubble...
...Unlike stock crashes, they have no material manifestation...
...There was a book that came out in England in 1986, J. G. Merquior's From Prague to Paris: A Critique of Structuralist and * The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe...
Vol. 36 • January 1989 • No. 1
