Intellectual Journals Research Articles

Irving Howe: Socialist, Critic, Jew (review)

Irving Howe: Socialist, Critic, Jew, by Edward AlexanderNear end of Edward Alexander's study of Irving Howe, he comments on two works Howe published in second half of 1970s. World of Our Fathers [1976], Howe embraced what he had once rejected; in Leon Trotsky, published in 1978, he repudiated much (if not quite all) of what he had once embraced. While this observation might seem touch off-hand, it hits upon several crucial elements in work of Irving Howe.Not least of these elements is wide array of intellectual areas in which Howe made significant contributions to American intellectual life, beginning in immediate postwar years and continuing until his death in 1993. As Alexander's subtitle suggests, Howe wrote provocatively and importantly as socialist thinker, as literary critic, and as historian and archivist of Eastern European Jews and their literary traditions. He was, in phrase of John Simon, man triumvirate.Yet Alexander's cryptic comment also suggests that careful reading of Howe's work shows not only inconsistencies, but sense in which his arguments often seem pegged to moment. Always intellectually engage, one can still feel heat of Howe's words, years after they appeared. What we may not feel, after reading about it all, is sense of total person.Edward Alexander has set about task of assessing this enormous literary outpouring. He has chosen, or felt obligated, to write a biography of Howe's telling us that he was unable to interview Howe's wives and children and prohibited from quoting from Howe's letters. A professor of English at University of Washington, Alexander moves through Howe's books and articles chronologically, tying them to issues and events of each era. This tends to create an awkward sense in which books and articles come to be equated with decades, crucial events only creating context for works.Alexander's approach does offer reader glimpse of multifaceted interests of this New York intellectual. But it ultimately leaves impression that sum of parts is different from whole. In 1970s, Howe catapulted out of more narrow world of intellectuals and critics and climbed to top of bestseller lists with his evocative portrait of world of his father. He had already taught at Brandeis, Stanford, and City University, had been published in all important intellectual journals of era, and was widely respected socialist and literary critic. Yet today, just five years after his death, Howe seems, if not forgotten, something of tangential personality of era.Perhaps this is because of his wide-ranging interests, perhaps because of his street-fighter's style. We read Alexander's summaries and analysis of Howe's works and come away with sense of brilliant and restless mind, but of no real coherence to his oeuvre. Some modern students may read Howe socialist theorist, once hardboiled Trotskyist who moved away from Marx but never abandoned what he called democratic socialism. Others may encounter literary critic, often attuned to modern temper but ultimately caught between champions of multiculturalism and frequently reactionary traditionalists who guard their notion of the canon like palace gates. Still others may turn to his anthologies of Yiddish writing, as well as his magisterial history. Yet, one does not get sense of an intellectual figure like that of his contemporaries Lionel Trilling, Sidney Hook, Alfred Kazin, or Daniel Bell. While widely different, what these intellectuals seem to possess is an overall intellectual coherence within their works.To explain why this is not case with Howe requires more than Alexander sets out to do. …

Parenting by persons with intellectual disabilities: A timely international perspective

(1999). Parenting by persons with intellectual disabilities: A timely international perspective. Journal of Intellectual & Developmental Disability: Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 3-6.

Publishing about intellectual disability: An analysis of the contents of the Journal of Intellectual and Developmental Disability, and its predecessors

The end of 1997 marked the publication of the 22nd volume of a scholarly professional journal by the Australian Society for the Study of Intellectual Disability (ASSID) and its antecedent, the Australian Group for the Scientific Study of Mental Deficiency (AGSSOMD). In its 28 years of publication, the Journal has changed its name on several occasions and there have also been marked changes in the Journal's content. This paper analyses the Journal of Intellectual and Developmental Disability, and its predecessors over the last 28 years, in terms of the nature and orientation of the contents, the type of publication, and the professional background and affiliation of the authors. The paper also examines the extent to which the Journal has reflected developments in research and changes in professional practice in intellectual disability, in Australia and overseas, over that period.

« Intellectuels catholiques » ? Réflexions sur une naissance différée

"Intellectual Catholics"? History of a Postponed Birth, Etienne Fouilloux. How can it be explained that French catholic intellectuals did not have an official body before the 1945 creation of the Centre catholique des intellectuels français (CCIF) (Catholic Center of French Intellectuals) ? The first obstacle was French. At the time of the Dreyfus affair, the Catholics took objection to the word "intellectual, because it was associated with a Dreyfusard fight that the majority of them didn't share. This incompatibility continued in the period between the two wars, in spite of a renewal marked by the flowering of Catholic-inspired intellectual journals, in spite also of the waves of conversions from 1880 to 1930. On the Catholic side, the inheritance of the modernist crisis discredited any autonomy of Catholic thinkers with regard to the religious Catholic authorities. Theologians were relegated to the role of the training of Catholic elites and of the explanation of pontifical texts that kept them outside of intellectual debate. While the condemnation of the Action française in 1926 released the stranglehold and gave the floor to "civil theologians", it was after 1945 that the church became aware of the wrongs that this marginalization was subjecting it to. The involvement of Catholic intellectuals in public debate showed the interest of hearing a Christian voice without in-volving Rome directly. The intellectuals fully in the 1950 fights, but the reciprocal suspicion between them and the religious authorities inherited from previous decades never disappeared.

La chaire et le canon. Les intellectuels, la politique et l'Université aux États-Unis

Avec l'irruption dans le langage commun du terme political correctness, la polémique anti-universitaire a trouvé aux États-Unis un second souffle. Dans son best-seller de 1987, le philosophe Allan Bloom avait déjà dénoncé l'emprise du relativisme intellectuel (et moral) sur les universités. Le pamphlet de Roger Kimball sur les « radicaux de la chaire »2, qui incriminait en 1990 la politisation des universitaires, ne paraît guère y ajouter : tout au plus Jacques Derrida remplace-t-il Nietzsche et Heidegger dans le rôle de corrupteur de la jeunesse ; et la menace ne semble plus cette fois venir du relativisme, mais au contraire du dogmatisme académique. Mais l'essentiel du changement réside ailleurs : il s'agit désormais des humanités, plus que de l'humanisme ; et l'on est passé d'une apologie abstraite des valeurs occidentales à une défense pragmatique du canon, corpus d'œuvres consacrées par la tradition.Le tir n'est donc plus concentré sur la philosophie de l'Université, mais sur sa politique.

Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin.

The unexamined life is not worth living - this was James Baldwin's motto. Born in 1924 in Harlem, his first public success was as a boy preacher. His early essays and stories were published in New York's leading intellectual journals, but in 1948 Baldwin fled from the horrors of American racism to Paris. Living there in poverty, among the expatriate community, he wrote Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni's Room. Talking at the Gates is a biography of one of America's most influential black writers. It offers fresh insights into Baldwin's friendships and rivalries, with Norman Mailer, Richard Wright, Marlon Brando and others, his love for Martin Luther King, his flirtation with the Black Panthers, and his homosexuality.

Return to the West/Return to the East: Watsuji Tetsuro's Anthropology and Discussions of Authenticity

Since the publication of The Study of the Human Being in Pascal by Miki Kiyoshi in 1924, the question of the human being as 'ningen', or the 'being-between', has been repeatedly asked by Japanese writers who were engaged in philosophical debates both inside the academia of national colleges and universities and, outside it, in intellectual journalism, which was rapidly growing with the increasing number of subscribers to newly founded intellectual journals like Shiso, Kaizo, and Riso. The Study of the Human Being in Pascal probably marks the first serious and systematic

Scapegoat or Instigator of Japanese Aggression? Inoue Kiyoshi's Case against the Emperor

Since the war, some changes are discernible in Japanese attitudes towards the Emperor and the Imperial institution. When asked, those expressing support for the maintenance of the institution still comprise a stable and vast majority of the people (84 percent in 1973), but there has clearly been an increase in indifference, especially among the young. The other change is the recent emergence, after a long period of relative dormancy, of an emotional reaction on the part of a small minority against both the institution and the Emperor for their involvement in the per-1945 establishment. in the pre-1945 establishment. Bitter criticisms and attacks have dominated the intellectual journals and have spilled over into the mass media. There are strong emotional currents on both sides of the issue. One emotion, becoming more vocal, is iconoclastic; the other, not much represented in the mass media, is protective. In the immediate postwar period, the Emperor and the Imperial institution were associated in the minds of many Japanese, especially among those of left-wing persuasion, with repression, war and defeat. The problem of the ‘Emperor system,’ as the Communists called it, not yet decided by a new Constitution, became a political issue for a short period when Communists released from prison in 1945 mounted an attack on the Emperor as well as on the ‘Emperor system.’ But between 1946 and 1971, it was not of great importance as a political issue.

Human cardiovascular adjustments to exercise and thermal stress.

Human cardiovascular adjustments to exercise and thermal stress.

Statskundskab og journalistik – et mage par?

Due to a common intellectual heritage, journalism and political science share a number of common features, for instance their object of study, sources, and methods. Consequently, the two professions can engage in a fruitful partnership and in fact often do benefit from one another both in terms of teaching and research. For instance political scientists often use journalistic articles as source of information on a given matter, and journalists often cite political scientists as sources for their articles. At the same time the two professions have their distinct identities that sometimes makes their relationship difficult. However, as in any well functioning partnership there must be differences and individuality or it won’t work!

University students and politics in underdeveloped countries

The University in Underdeveloped Countries The tasks of the universities in the underdeveloped countries of the world are fundamentally not very different from what they are in more highly developed societies. They must transmit in a more differentiated and more specific way the cultural heritage the history, the scientific knowledge, the literature of their society and of the world culture of which their society is a part; they must train persons who will become members of the elites of their societies to exercise skills in science, technology, management and administration; they must cultivate the capacity for leadership and a sense of responsibility to their fellow countrymen and they must train them to be constructively critical, to be able to initiate changes while appreciating what they have inherited. The universities must contribute new knowledge to the world's pool of knowledge and must stimulate in some of the students, at least, the desire to become original contributors to this pool, as well as equipping them with the knowledge and discipline which, given adequate endowment, will enable them to do so. Regardless of whether the university system seeks to educate only a very small fraction of the stratum of university age or a quite large proportion, these tasks remain the indispensable minimum. A university system which fails to perform these functions, however useful it might be in other respects, is not doing its job. It will become parasitic on the university systems of other countries and will be unable to cope with the tasks of national development. In the underdeveloped countries, the role of the universities is especially important because the elites of the modern sector of the society are drawn very largely from the reservoir of persons with university training. There is no class of indigenous business enterprisers who, without university training, have taken or are likely to be allowed to take the main responsibility for economic development as they did in Europe and America in the nineteenth century. There is no class of highly skilled artisans from whom significant technological innovations will come forth. There is very little research in most new states, apart from the little that is done in universities although the balance is now beginning to change in favour of non-university research establishments. Much of the intellectual journalism, e.g., analytical commentary on public policy, emanates from the universities. Thus the universities alone must not only produce much of

The Welfare State : A Sociological Interpretation

It is the business of sociologists to classify social phenomena and arrange them in categories. They base their operations on concepts which have been rigorously denned and purified to the point at which they resemble prime numbers. The practice has not unnaturally spread into that intermediate area of literature which can be called either popular sociology or intellectual journalism according to taste. But there it is used for tying labels round the necks of highly complex social systems—like “Welfare State”, “Affluent Society” and “Meritocracy”. This is likely to make the purist shrink and shudder. All generalizations are dangerous, and those cunningly expressed in tabloid form are the most dangerous of all. They pass into the language of common speech as familiar truths, instead of being quoted as propositions offered for discussion. One can hardly avoid using a term like the “Welfare State”, and one cannot, when using it, introduce a qualifying parenthesis, since there is no room for parentheses in a catchword. One must either accept it or discard it.