democracy’s Democracies

Toward the end of his elegant memoir on life among the Partisan Review crowd in the 1940s, William Barrett observes that if “you follow the zigs and zags of any given intellectual . . . you may turn out to be reading the fever chart of the next generation.” Nowhere are the zigs and zags of American intellectuals more accurately charted than in what used to be called “the little magazines”—the quarterlies. In “the little magazines” intellectuals and opinion-makers discuss the topics that years later cultural middlemen translate and term “new.”

Some might dismiss this claim, of course, and others dismiss intellectuals’ shiftings as the spasms of over-exercised minds. Yet no one who seriously contemplates movements of public improvement (or degeneration) misses the fact that they consist of shifts of public sentiment working in tandem with similar, though rarely identical, changes in intellectual opinion.

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Michael A. Scully

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Toward the end of his elegant memoir on life among the Partisan Review crowd in the 1940s, William Barrett observes that if “you follow the zigs and zags of any given intellectual . . . you may turn out to be reading the fever chart of the next generation.” Nowhere are the zigs and zags of American intellectuals more accurately charted than in what used to be called “the little magazines”—the quarterlies. In “the little magazines” intellectuals and opinion-makers discuss the topics that years later cultural middlemen translate and term “new.”

Some might dismiss this claim, of course, and others dismiss intellectuals’ shiftings as the spasms of over-exercised minds. Yet no one who seriously contemplates movements of public improvement (or degeneration) misses the fact that they consist of shifts of public sentiment working in tandem with similar, though rarely identical, changes in intellectual opinion.