IT'S AN ANTI-INTELLECTUAL CULTURE:

THE POLITICAL AND CULTURAL ferment of New York City in the 1960s had been building for 30 years, since the Great Depression and the New Deal. While I don't intend to recapitulate here the successive ideological waves that continually altered the shoreline of the debate, it was conducted largely in the offices of the Partisan Review, a journal founded in 1934 as an anti-Stalinist but communist-influenced organ, and in one-bedroom apartments and coffeehouses in Brooklyn, Morningside Heights, and Greenwich Village. Almost all of the contending parties were exponents of one or another form of socialism.

By the time Irving Howe sat down to write about them, the New York intellectuals were a distinct breed, not to be mistaken for the academic careerists who populated English and philosophy departments in universities and colleges all across the prospering country. The latter wrote books for an audience of professors and graduate students; by contrast, the New York intellectuals wrote pithy articles to provoke debate among other New York intellectuals, and they created, in New York City, a hothouse environment that felt to its participants like something more (or less) than a debating society -- for their arguments were not static: most of the participants eventually renounced or slid away from their early enthusiasm for anti-Stalinist communism, and a few of them evolved, in the fullness of time, into political conservatives.

For a brief period -- from circa 1955 to circa 1975 -- the United States had a cadre of "public intellectuals" who spoke out in the press and on television to advance (or retard) one progressive program or another, fighting among themselves over which programs were worthiest of support. To be sure, the public intellectual in the United States bore only a faint resemblance to his or her counterpart in France, where such figures had deeper roots and a longer tradition. But, during the score of years I have designated, it was possible, occasionally, to turn on your television and watch William F. Buckley Jr. flick his serpent's tongue between his lips as he mixed it up verbally with one of his liberal guests -- Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, Norman Mailer -- on his weekly program, Firing Line. Buckley became an almost universally recognized public intellectual without really being an intellectual. 

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