ROLE MODELS? THE CONTINUING RELEVANCE OF THE "NEW YORK INTELLECTUALS"

Abstract

Susan Stout Baker. Radical Beginnings: Richard Hofstadter and the 1930s. Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Press, 1985. xxi 4- 268 pp. Howard Brick. Daniel Bell and the Decline of Intellectual Radicalism: Social Theory and Political Reconciliation in the 1940s. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986. xiii 4- 280 pp. Terry A. Cooney. The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle, 1934-1945. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986. xi + 350 pp. David Seideman. The New Republic: A Voice of Modern Liberalism. New York: Praeger, 1986. xiii + 205 pp. Alan M. Wald. The New York Intellectuals: the Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. xvi + 440 pp. Stephen J. Whitfield. A Critical American: The Politics of Dwight Macdonald. Hamden, Ct.: Archon Books, 1984. x + 179 pp. It has been argued that the appearance of a formidable stack of books about a small group of writers may be a sign of approaching obscurity, of the turning-point in the history of thought at which their capacity to appear contemporary, to serve as role models, disappears. So R. W. Johnson predicts the decline of the Parisian intellectuals of the 1960s.1 And so it may be with the subjects of this daunting pile, an incomplete selection of works focused on writers active around New York City from the 1930s until now, many of whom achieved first fame in the pages of the legendary journal Partisan Review, with its electrifying mix of Trotskyism, anarchism and belief in the social and ethical value of artistic modernism.