In the early 1930’s in a small alcove at City College in New York a group of young, passionate, and politically radical students argued for hours about the finer points of Marxist doctrine, the true nature of socialism, and whether or not Stalin or Trotsky was the true heir to Lenin. These young intellectuals went on to write for and found some of the most well known political and literary journals of the 20th century such as The Masses, Politics, Partisan Review, Encounter, Commentary, Dissent and The Public Interest. Figures such as Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Sidney Hook, Susan Sontag, Dwight MacDonald, and Seymour Lipset penned some of the most important books of social science in the mid-twentieth century. They believed, above all else, in the importance of argument and the power of the pen. They were a vibrant group of engaged political thinkers and writers, but most importantly they were public intellectuals committed to addressing the most important political, social and cultural questions of the day.
Here, with helpful head notes and a comprehensive introduction by Neil Jumonville, The New York Intellectuals Reader brings the work of these thinkers back into conversation.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
I. FINDING NATIVE GROUNDS
1. Alfred Kazin, Starting Out in the Thirties
2. Irving Howe, New York in the Thirties
3. Irving Kristol, Memoirs of a Trotskyist
4. Mary McCarthy, Philip Rahv, 1908-1973
5. Editorial Statement, Partisan Review, 1934
6. Editorial Statement," Partisan Review, 1937
7. Dwight Macdonald, I Choose the West
II. AGAINST ABSOLUTISM
8. Sidney Hook, The New Failure of Nerve
9. Hannah Arendt, Total Domination
10. Philip Rahv, The Sense and Nonsense of Whittaker Chambers
III. LIFE AND CULTURE AT MIDCENTURY
11. Meyer Schapiro, Nature of Abstract Art
12. Clement Greenberg, Avant-Garde and Kitsch
13. Dwight Macdonald, Homage to Twelve Judges
14. Lionel Trilling, Reality in America
15. Alfred Kazin, The Historian as Reporter: Edmund Wilson and the 1930s
16. Harold Rosenberg, Twilight of the Intellectuals
17. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology in the West
18. Dwight Macdonald, Masscult & Midcult
19. Lionel Trilling, On the Teaching of Modern Literature
20. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation
IV. THE COLD WAR
21. Paul Goodman, To Young Resisters
22. Irving Kristol, "Civil Liberties," 1952—A Study in Confusion
23. Sidney Hook and Bertrand Russell, A Foreign Policy for Survival: An Exchange
24. C. Wright Mills and Irving Howe, Intellectuals and Russia: An Exchange
V. CULTURES AND COUNTERCULTURES
OLD AND NEW LEFTS
25. Norman Podhoretz, The Know-Nothing Bohemians
26. Irving Howe, Problems in the 1960s
RACE AND ETHNICITY
27. Norman Podhoretz, My Negro Problem—And Ours
28. Nathan Glazer, Negroes & Jews: The New Challenge to Pluralism
VI. LEGACIES
LIBERALISM AND THE LEFT AFTER 1965
29. Michael Walzer, In Defense of Equality
30. Irving Howe, Socialism and Liberalism: Articles of Conciliation?
NEOCONSERVATIVISM
31. Nathan Glazer, On Being Deradicalized
32. Norman Podhoretz, Between Nixon and the New Politics
33. Irving Kristol, The Adversary Culture of Intellectuals
Biography
Neil Jummonville is the William Warren Rogers Professor of History and Chairperson of the Dept. of History at Florida State University. He specializes in U.S. Intellectual History with an emphasis on post WWII liberalism and American Studies. He is the author of two previous books and is currently working with Routledge author Kevin Mattson on a book of essays on the current state of liberalism.
"A specialist on the New York intellectuals, Jumonville provides a terrific...introduction to this important collection of several of the group's noteworthy essays. (The New York Intellectuals) sought to reach a broad audience, transcend disciplinary boundaries, and grapple with significant contemporary issues." "Recommended." -Choice
