Veterans of New York’s Intellectual Battleground Speak Out

One might begin the story of the New York intellectuals in 1936, when Philip Rahv and William Phillips, two young editors of a Communist Party-affiliated magazine, made a risky decision: to break with the Communists and publish the Partisan Review as an independent leftist journal.

At that time, as Joseph Dorman explains in “Arguing the World,” to break with the party was to risk being blacklisted in literary and intellectual circles. The New Republic, the Nation, even New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, were sympathetic to Stalin and consistently defended the purge trials.

The independent-minded individuals who edited and wrote for the Partisan Review were the core of the group that later became known as the New York intellectuals. This extended multigenerational “family” of contentious souls included such diverse minds as philosopher Sidney Hook, art critic Meyer Schapiro, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, James T. Farrell, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Bell, Norman Podhoretz and Susan Sontag. Their abiding interests were politics and culture. What made them significant was their commitment to writing at the highest possible level for a nonspecialist readership.

Starting in the 1980s, there has been a spate of books by or about the New York intellectuals. Thanks to Dorman, an independent filmmaker, there’s even been a documentary film, “Arguing the World” (1999), featuring in-depth interviews with Kristol, Bell, Glazer and the late Howe, four members of the “second generation” of intellectuals who first met as students at the City College of New York. For those who may have missed the film or who may prefer the medium dearest to the heart of any intellectual, the printed page, Dorman has put together what he calls “a much-expanded oral history” based on his film.

The book begins in the heady days of the 1930s, when the four Marxist college students--Kristol, Howe, Bell and Glazer--found themselves outnumbered by fellow radicals who still adhered to the Stalinist party line. Although Marxist critics of Stalin were called “Trotskyists,” it seems clear, from a letter Trotsky himself wrote to one of the Partisan Review editors in 1938, that these “Trotskyists” were not on Trotsky’s wavelength either: “You defend yourselves from the Stalinists like well-behaved young ladies who street rowdies insult. ‘Why are we attacked?’ you complain, ‘we want only one thing: to live and let others live.’ Such a policy,” he grimly warned, “cannot gain success.”

“A lot of American intellectuals made fun of us for being so oriented to Russia,” recalls Howe. “They were partly right. But they were largely wrong because the essential question which dominated our generation was the question of Stalinism. . . . Here was this . . . horrifying dictatorship which had risen out of socialist sources . . . which was . . . a parody of our hopes and desires. How could we cope with this? . . . [W]hat could it mean?”

World War II, the postwar economic boom and the demagoguery of Sen. Joseph McCarthy brought new challenges and strains, as Kristol moved from socialism to anti-communist liberalism (it wasn’t until the 1970s that he went all the way to neoconservatism) and Howe continued to uphold the ideal of a democratic socialism. Glazer and Bell moved away from ideology altogether (the latter, of course, was the author of “The End of Ideology”), preferring to use the tools of social science to analyze the efficacy of public policy. The 1960s brought a showdown between these old-style radicals and the New Left. Dorman juxtaposes what Howe, Glazer, Bell and Kristol had to say about the New Left with what New Left leaders such as Tom Hayden, Jackie Goldberg and Todd Gitlin had to say about them. The book concludes with some thoughts on the future as seen by each of the four men.

In presenting the story of these men primarily in their own words and the words of those who knew--and sometimes clashed with--them, Dorman has hit upon an ideal way of conveying the flavor of the intellectual life as they pursued it. Dorman also knows when--and how--to be helpful, providing the reader with the necessary background in a manner that is knowledgeable, unobtrusive, untendentious and fair-minded.