A Lament from the Left

...The Nation still does business at the same old stand, but hardly anyone notices...

...Whereas the academic Marxists sin by being inarticulate outside their profession, Hook sins even more by being the reverse...

...Nevertheless, that did not keep Dewey, Veblen and Charles Beard, among others, from thinking and writing boldly...

...How much better it is to have the Left-wing professors out hustling grants, angling for raises and promotions, founding institutes, holding seminars, editing journals, and the like...

...While lip-service is paid to others, no one receives more applause from him than the group of Marxists associated with...

...Monthly Review...

...One would think that Hook is exactly the kind of academic intellectual whose passing Jacoby regrets...

...academic freedom was a joke, or a wan hope at best...

...Jacoby neglects to mention that Monthly Review defended Stalinism until the Khrushchev revelations made that impossible, then switched to glorifying Chairman Mao...

...This is not what he wants, however, so he reacts as he always does when faced with a paradox—he ignores it...

...Politically motivated firings are now rare, as Jacoby, a sometime professor himself, ought to know...

...comfortable and lucrative conformity...

...Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Professor of history, Rutgers, author, "American High: The Years of Confidence, 1945-1960" Russell Jacoby rightly maintains that for most of this century there have been two kinds of intellectuals in the United States: those based in the universities, of whom Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey are among the earliest and best examples...

...The author misses not so much a particular type of intellectual as what they used to say, and the important audience to which they said it...

...This is indisputably the case, as is Jacoby's corollary that the generation of intellectuals which came of age in the 1940s and '50s has no heirs...

...It may also be highly specialized and little read except by other experts, yet that is the nature of scholarship—something else Jacoby refuses to admit...

...But these conceits are easily borne when one considers the alternative...

...Jacoby thinks his second proposition explains the third: Younger intellectuals are less notable than their forerunners precisely because they operate from secure academic bases...

...Although for the most part Jacoby appears to think radical academics have sold out, at times he suggests that reaction and repression have crushed their spirit...

...Here is a historian writing, says Jacoby, about the results of the student movement: "In terms of epistemclogy, we are seeing a serious challenge to both universalization and sectorialization and an attempt to explore the methodology of holistic research, the implementation of that via media that had been excluded by the nomothetic-idiographic pseudo-debate...

...Hook is the right type but has the wrong ideas, so he must be shown to be the wrong type after all if Jacoby's case is not to fall apart—which it does anyway...

...Whereas the academic Marxists are damned for being too scholarly, Hook is not scholarly enough, having written nothing original since the '30s according to Jacoby...

...Universities these days are full of Leftist scholars, most of them products of the '60s, when as student activists they condemned the institutions they now gladly find shelter in...

...What Jacoby is really getting at becomes evident when we see the type of "independent" intellectual he most esteems...

...So much for the fearless pursuit of truth...

...Yet the reasons for it are obscure, and I think Jacoby is wrong to blame higher education...

...He further submits that in recent years the second stream has been absorbed by the first, so that it is now rare to find an intellectual who is not in higher education...

...The point is driven home by many unintentionally amusing selections from academic Leftists...

...to withstand...

...A maddening feature of academic life in the late '60s was the politicization of every question, the tendency to settle an issue not on its merits but only in terms of its relation—usually nonexistent—to peace, racial justice or whatever was uppermost in the minds of students that week...

...To imply the greater liberty prevailing on campus today produces worse results, as Jacoby seems to do, suggests that the cure is more repression...

...He charges that instead of using it as a means to transform the world, academic radicals devote most of their effort to cultivating their own careers, writing unreadable books and articles aimed at fellow specialists, and creating centers and institutes so as to obfuscate on an ever grander scale...

...This is indeed a far cry from C. Wright Mills, to Jacoby the standard by which Left-wing academics should be measured...

...Had those students who became faculty members retained this habit, academic life today would be intolerable...

...At the very minimum, it seems perverse to fault radicals for behaving professionally...

...True, they usually are more sanctimonious about their activities than the professoriat in general, inclining to identify smart career moves as steps toward a better world...

...A brilliant philosopher and teacher, Hook has been a political activist all his adult life as well, and has produced a great river of controversial books, articles and pamphlets—lucidly argued, clearly written and aimed at the general public...

...The universities were far more restrictive 70-80 years ago than they are at present...

...He compares them to Edmund Wilson and Lewis Mumford, and writes with unstinting praise of their "coherence, originality and boldness," their disdain for the constraints of university life, and their honesty...

...That is the real loss, to Jacoby's mind, and his book would make more sense if he owned up to it...

...The university prizes conformity and collegiality, he claims, and both are deadly to independent thought...

...Besides, even though Jacoby does not want to recognize it, in history at least (and probably in other disciplines too) much of the work done by Leftist scholars is quite good...

...A Leftist himself, Jacoby is scathing about the consequences of this massive infiltration of the academy...

...Much of the time Jacoby blames the soft life for seducing intellectuals away from their proper duties...

...Paul Baran is admiringly quoted on intellectual integrity: "The desire to tell the truth is only one condition for being an intellectual...

...The author's treatment of Sidney Hook is the flip side of the coin...

...The Last Intellectuals is not analysis, it is special pleading, a lament for the kind of political influence exercised by the Nation and the New Republic in the 1930s and '40s...

...Of course, the true reason that Jacoby detests Hook is political...

...He drags up the campus Red scare of the '50s, and names radical professors in recent years who have been denied tenure...

...This is nonsense...

...Maybe academic freedom is still a myth, he seems to be saying...

...Universities do not exist mainly to promote social change, as he would have it...

...Many people at opposite ends of the political spectrum agree with him, and the author has the quotations to prove it...

...Probably he does know, since he devotes comparatively little space to advancing his "reign of terror" line...

...The other is courage, readiness to carry on rational inquiry to wherever it may lead...

...But no...

...and those located outside the academy, typified by such figures as Max Eastman and Randolph Bourne...

...Their mission, rather, is to increase the store of knowledge...

...The decline of effective social and cultural criticism noted in The Last Intellectuals is regrettable, to be sure...

...To the degree Leftists do this, they are entitled to the same respect as everyone else...

...Jacoby wanders over a darkening plain, his argument crossing and recrossing itself as he goes until it becomes untraceable...

...His thesis is doubtful all the same...