Volume 4, Number 8 · May 20, 1965
Radicals and Intellectuals
By Alfred Kazin
The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type
by Christopher Lasch
Knopf, 349 pp., $6.95
History is haughty to writers not of the first quality; to crusading intellectuals who write their names in causes—programmatic intellectuals, idealistic, liberal, radical, utopian—it can be devastating. Mr. Lasch sees modern American radicalism as the expression of intellectuals, and these intellectuals as typically rebels against their own middle-class backgrounds; by the time he gets through analyzing the careers of Jane Addams, Randolph Bourne, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Lincoln Steffens, and on a smaller scale those of Walter Lippmann, Reinhold Niebuhr, Sidney Hook, Dwight Macdonald, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Norman Mailer, one recognizes the full extent of the snub, the classical stare of non-recognition, which one generation administers to another. I have been awaiting for some time a rejoinder to the veterans of the Thirties by a young historian born in the Thirties—and here it is, cool as you please, brilliantly thought out and sharply written, scholarly yet committed and open. This is a book to take seriously. Mr. Lasch is a careful and self-dependent thinker, he has no newer radicalism to offer but does have a great many subtle observations to make about the old, and his keen sense of the limitations of politics in our era of the bigger and bigger state tells a great deal about the overriding sense of American limitations from which this book arose.
Review, 1795 words
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