Books in Brief

THIS is a collection of essays that results in much more than its individual parts. As in Hazlitt’s Spirit of the Age, for example, or Trilling’s Liberal Imagination, the parts speak one with the other to produce a conversation of remarkable power. Hilton Kramer’s previous books have been confined mostly to art criticism. Had he written primarily about literature he probably would now command the rather large audience that Trilling at least once enjoyed, for his mind is of comparable force. In this book we find important considerations of the art critics Clement Greenberg and Meyer Schapiro, but most of the book deals with literature and culture in general, reflecting Kramer’s urgent concerns of recent years. Centrally, it has to do with the damaging effect of the progressive paradigm on a variety of writers or, as in the title, some “intellectuals.” The progressive paradigm is nicely defined by some sentences he quotes from Diana Trilling:

If we can say, as I think we can, that before this century the source of all political idealism was (however remotely) religion, I think we can also say that in our own century the source of all political idealism has been socialism, and, since the Russian Revolution, specifically the socialism of the Soviet Union. I do not mean that whoever has worked for political progress has necessarily been a socialist. I mean only that it has been from socialist theory that political progress has chosen its inspiration, and from socialist example its practice.

THIS is a collection of essays that results in much more than its individual parts. As in Hazlitt’s Spirit of the Age, for example, or Trilling’s Liberal Imagination, the parts speak one with the other to produce a conversation of remarkable power. Hilton Kramer’s previous books have been confined mostly to art criticism. Had he written primarily about literature he probably would now command the rather large audience that Trilling at least once enjoyed, for his mind is of comparable force. In this book we find important considerations of the art critics Clement Greenberg and Meyer Schapiro, but most of the book deals with literature and culture in general, reflecting Kramer’s urgent concerns of recent years. Centrally, it has to do with the damaging effect of the progressive paradigm on a variety of writers or, as in the title, some “intellectuals.” The progressive paradigm is nicely defined by some sentences he quotes from Diana Trilling:

If we can say, as I think we can, that before this century the source of all political idealism was (however remotely) religion, I think we can also say that in our own century the source of all political idealism has been socialism, and, since the Russian Revolution, specifically the socialism of the Soviet Union. I do not mean that whoever has worked for political progress has necessarily been a socialist. I mean only that it has been from socialist theory that political progress has chosen its inspiration, and from socialist example its practice.