TWENTY years ago, in the Reagan years, Russell Jacoby was brooding over what he regarded as the taming of the American Left-in particular, of the generation that had come of age in the 1960s. What had happened to the young intellectual firebrands of that decade? Were they dead, exiled, imprisoned in the far-flung outposts of the American gulag? No. They were comfortably ensconced in the academy, seduced by tenure, producing unreadable monographs and feeling very self-righteous.
Jacoby wanted to write about this sad state of affairs, issuing a reproach and a call to arms, but he realized-or perhaps his literary agent reminded him-that only a few hundred people would be likely to buy such a book. So he conceived a grand thesis: Intellectuals in America, of whatever ideological stripe, were an endangered species. Old campaigners such as Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, and others of their generation-lucid, socially engaged, accountable to a large public-were still on the scene, but their successors were missing, swallowed up by the omnivorous university and the soulless suburbs. Here
Comments