The Last Intellectuals: American Culture In The Age Of Academe

257 Pages·2000·1.12 MB·English

by  Russell Jacoby

The Last Intellectuals
Other Works by Russell Jacoby
THE END OF UTOPIA: CULTURE AND IDEOLOGY IN THE AGE OF
RESIGNATION
THE LAST
INTELLECTUALS
American Culture in the
Age ofAcademe
With a New Introduction by the Author
RUSSELL JACOBY
For Sarah and Sam
CONTENTS
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION TO THE 2000 EDITION
Chapter 1
Missing Intellectuals?
Chapter 2
The Decline of Bohemia
Chapter 3
On the Road to Suburbia: Urbanists and Beats
Chapter 4
New York, Jewish, and Other Intellectuals
Chapter 5
The New Left on Campus I: The Freedom to Be Academic
Chapter 6
The New Left on Campus II: The Long March Through the Institutions
Chapter 7
After the Last Intellectuals
NOTES
INDEX
PREFACE
"WHERE ARE our intellectuals?" In his 1921 book, America and the Young
Intellectual, Harold Stearns (1891-1943), a chronicler of his generation, asked
this question.' He found them fleeing to Europe, an act he supported and soon
followed, joining what became the most celebrated of American intellectual
groupings, the lost generation.
Stearns's question may speak to the present, but his answer does not. He
believed that the hostility of a commercial civilization to youth in general, and
to intellectuals in particular, drove young writers to Europe. This does not
capture the current situation. Youth is lionized; intellectuals, if noticed, are
usually blessed or subsidized. The young head for Europe not to flee, but for
vacations, sometimes for conferences. Few American intellectuals live in exile.
The question still stands. Where are the younger intellectuals? It is my starting
point.
I have not located many-and I am using a criterion of "young," under forty-
five or so, that will scandalize the authentically young. Nor are my standards
absolute. The "last" generation of American intellectuals is my benchmark,
those bom in the first decades of this century. They possessed a voice and
presence that younger intellectuals have failed to appropriate.
Yet this misleads; the issue is not a moral lapse but a generational shift. The
experience of intellectuals has changed; this is not exactly news, but the causes
are unexplored, and one consequence-at least-is unnoticed and profoundly
damaging: the impoverishment of public culture.
Intellectuals who write with vigor and clarity may be as scarce as low rents in
New York or San Francisco. Raised in city streets and cafes before the age of
massive universities, "last" generation intellectuals wrote for the educated
reader. They have been supplanted by high-tech intellectuals, consultants and
professorsanonymous souls, who may be competent, and more than competent,
but who do not enrich public life. Younger intellectuals, whose lives have
unfolded almost entirely on campuses, direct themselves to professional
colleagues but are inaccessible and unknown to others. This is the danger and
the threat; the public culture relies on a dwindling band of older intellectuals
who command the vernacular that is slipping out of reach of their successors.
In the following chapters I survey this breach in cultural generations; I offer
some possibilities and appraise the costs. Nothing more. A small book
confronting a large subject requires a thousand qualifications. I will skip most
of them, but several are in order.
Apart from some references to novelists marking the landscape, I confine my
account to nonfiction, especially literary, social, philosophical, and economic
thought, where I believe the generational break is most emphatic, most
injurious. I am excluding music, dance, painting, poetry, and other arts. No
single proposition applies to all cultural forms. To be sure, none exist in
isolation from the larger society; and I suspect a critical and generational
inquiry into other areas might be revealing.
For instance, the migration of fiction into the universitiesthe establishment of
"creative writing" centers and writers "in residence"; the rise of the academic or
English department novel; the absence of an avant-garde for years, even
decadesall this suggests that newer fiction registers the same pressures as
nonfiction. The increasing prominence of novels by Latin Americans, Eastern
Europeans, and black women also suggests that the creative juices flow on the
outsides, the margins, as malls and campuses cement over the center.
Nevertheless the trajectory of fiction is more complex than nonfiction.
Perhaps because the poets and novelists were always outsiders, only
occasionally noticed, they can subsist as they always have, picking up crumbs
off the table.' The plethora of small literary periodicals, sometimes called "little,
little" magazines, that print fiction and poetry, indicates that imaginative
literature flourishes.
Yet even the moving spirits of the "little, little" magazines allow that their
moment seems over; that there are too many journals, the by-product of cheap
offset printing and subsidies; and that they seem to have lost their zeal and
direction. Insofar as they print exclusively fiction and poetry, unlike their
distinguished predecessors, they also testify to cultural fragmentation. Few of
these magazines, notes a coordinator of small literary journals, "take a critical
stand; essays, even book reviews and correspondence, are less and less
common." Nowadays they, seem to be devoted to "knitting up the tattered
edges of the present."3
My generalizations are based on American (and Canadian) intellectuals. I
exclude the foreign-born and foreign-educated (the Bruno Bettelheims, Hannah
Arendts, Wilhelm Reichs) not because of their minimal impact-the opposite is
true-but simply to distill out the American generational life. Once they are
excluded, their colossal impact can be glimpsed. The individuals I do include
hardly add up to the whole. Every selection of intellectuals can be answered by
another. There is no royal road to the zeitgeist. Intellectual life resists neat
charts; to demand precision when culture itself is imprecise damns an inquiry to
trivia. The discussion of a missing generation requires sweeping statements; it
means scrutinizing some writers while ignoring others. It necessitates dealing in
the glittery coin of generations, long a mainstay of cultural counterfeiters. It
also means the risk of being wrong.
I will employ, but not exhaustively define, various categories-bohemia,
intellectuals, generations, cultural life. Too many definitions, too much caution,
kill thought. Modern analytic philosophy, laboring for decades to establish
sound conceptual methods, has only established its inability to think. Its bleak
record, of course, does not warrant reckless judgments. With care the coin of
decades and generations can be traded.
Since I probe, sometimes ungently, the oeuvre of younger intellectuals, and I
question the impact of universities on cultural life, I should state: I do not write
as an outsider. When I say "they" or "younger intellectuals," I mean "we."
When I take up a "missing" generation, I am discussing my own generation.
When I question academic contributions, I am inspecting the writings of my
friends and myself. I have published articles in academic journals and a book
with a university press. I read academic monographs and periodicals. I love
university libraries, endless bookstacks, giant periodical rooms. I have taught at
a number of colleges. I do not for an instant pretend that I am made of different
and better stuff. My critique of the missing intellectuals is also a self-critique.
I should add, however, that I am not a complete academic insider. In a dozen
years I have wandered through seven universities and several disciplines. I have
more than once made a stab at living as a free-lance writer. Perhaps I should
also note that this book was aided by no foundation largesse or university
grants; I cannot thank teams of research assistants and graduate students. Nor
can I thank the center for the advanced study of this-or-that for a year of
support.
At the risk of false advertising-pretending something is more controversial
than it is-I might state: no one will completely agree with this book. It violates
conventional loyalties. My friends, generation, and self are not the heroes-or
victims. I prize a younger left intelligentsia that I believe has surrendered too
much. I take as a measuring rod an older generation of intellectuals, whose
work I often criticize; I value conservative intellectuals whose estimable vigor
covers yawning hypocrisies and contradictions. Thought shrivels when it
honors friends and labels before thinking.
Some final remarks: the title, "the last intellectuals," is deliberately
ambiguous-it refers to a final generation of intellectuals, as well as to the
generation most recently past (as in last year), implying there soon will be
another. I write with no optimism, but not as a seer. As I was completing this
work a number of books in diverse areas began to appear, each challenging a
single discipline-books such as The Tragedy of Political Science, The Rhetoric
of Economics, International Studies and Academic Enterprise, and Radical
Political Economy Since the Sixties.4 They do not uphold a single position, but
they evidence discontent with excessive professionalization; they hint at a
reversal, a delayed effort to recapture a public culture.
There are other signs. A specter haunts American universities or, at least, its
faculties: boredom. A generation of professors entered the universities in the
middle and wake of the sixties, when campuses crackled with energy; today
these teachers are visibly bored, if not demoralized. One report found college
and university faculties "deeply troubled" with almost 40 percent ready and
willing to leave the academy.' This subterranean discontent might surface,
reconnecting with public life. Conservatives suspect and fear this; hence they
continuously rail against what they imagine as the threat from the universities. I
think they are wrong. I hope they are right.