The New York Intellectuals Reader

ISBN-13: 9780415952644 / Angielski / Twarda / 2007 / 456 str.

Neil Jumonville

Opis

In the early 1930s 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 incredibly prolific, and their debates ranged over a wide array of topics everything from McCarthyism and anti-communism to the significance of modernism in art and literature, to mass culture and the role of kitsch. 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. They have been the subject of many books and even a widely acclaimed documentary on PBS, but never have their most significant writings been collected in one place.

Recenzje

"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

Spis treści

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

O autorze

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.