Book Review : Awaiting the Next Intellectual Wave

The Radical Renewal by Norman Birnbaum (Pantheon: $16.95; 265 pages)

“Smart child,” the Washington Post said recently, is in. A number of widely reviewed books have chronicled the history of the New York intellectuals; Alan Bloom’s analysis of Nietzsche and Heidegger has become a best seller, and the President whose ideas are as deep as a file card is leaving office.

Norman Birnbaum’s “The Radical Renewal” is both one more sign of these changing times and, more significantly, an analysis of how they might lead to political revival. It is an important, irreverent study by a most independent thinker of extraordinary range.

Intellectual Associations

For Birnbaum, it was no accident that so many professional intellectual associations--the American Historical Assn., the Political Science Assn., the Sociologist Assn.--were founded between 1884 and 1905. This was the time of the professionalization of intellect in German-style graduate schools and of progressive politics and journalistic muckraking. Knowledge was, in short, becoming social and political as never before.

Even in the conservative ‘20s, John Dewey, the Beards and Veblen went about their subversive work in a time of smug national celebration. And when the energies of the New Deal welled up in the sphere of culture, knowledge once again became political--and politics reacted back upon culture. F. O. Matheissen and Perry Miller discovered a new past and American studies were born; the New York intellectuals brought cosmopolitanism to America as they tried to synthesize Marxism and the European avant-garde, Trotsky and the Anglo-Catholic conservative, T. S. Eliot.

But after World War II came the period that Birnbaum abominates: the era--roughly from 1945 to 1960--of “consensus” social science, dominated by thinkers like Louis Hartz and Richard Hofstadter who emphasized that radical change was a deviation from the basic American tradition of privacy and non-involvement. Birnbaum is at his best when he attacks the dominant culture of these times, even though I think polemic makes him unfair to both Hartz and Hofstadter. However, he captures the spirit of those De Toqueville-quoting times marvelously well.

Then came the ‘60s and the new intellectual concerns that rise out of social movements: Imperialism became a topic again with the anti-war movement, black history was reinterpreted in the light of the civil rights struggles, feminists realized that history had omitted half of the human race, Catholics burst out of their ghetto, and there were new accounts of social change written from the perspective of the rank and file rather than of leaders. But the ‘60s, Birnbaum argues, slighted social class and never did define a political and social project that synthesized race, gender, ethnicity and religion with class.

Destroyed Literate ‘Publics’

That raises the possibility, first defined by C. Wright Mills in the ‘50s, that the evolution of our society--and our electronic culture--has destroyed those literate “publics” that transmitted the new intellectual discoveries to the mass institutions like political parties. When there is a new political shift to the left, Birnbaum asks, will the party of opposition that now exists in relative isolation within the American academy once again find its way into the mainstream of American life? Or, is that pattern now simply passe?

“The Radical Renewal” does not answer that question since it will be settled in the future. Birnbaum thinks that if there is to be a new, relevant intellectuality, it will focus on an analysis of the new potential of a social class-based politics and/or a revival of the concept of “citizenship,” of “Republicanism,” which has been rediscovered in the American past by scholars like Hannah Arendt, Sean Wilentz and Nick Salvatore.

The strength of this book is its sweep--Birnbaum seems to have read all of the basic works in half a dozen disciplines--its irreverence and its basic dedication to the notion that knowledge should be social and political.

The weakness of “The Radical Renewal” is, as is so often the case, the flip side of its virtues. Its very range and willingness to take intellectual risks sometimes makes the book a bit disconnected. But that, to my mind, is a minor problem. This book is not solemn and pontifical like Alan Bloom’s volume but is animated by drive and passion as well as scholarship.

It is fitting that this excellent and provocative study appears just as the man who gave the nation the most empty-minded political campaign in recent American history is about to leave the stage.

I agree with Birnbaum: There is no way to predict whether we are on the eve of a new era of socially relevant intellect or not. But that is at least a possibility, and this book might help it become a reality.