Harvard Commutes to Washington

In a saner age, Thomas Molnar’s The Decline of the Intellectual would become a political classic overnight. But in a saner age the book would not have to be written. The decline of the intellectual, says Mr. Molnar, is the decline of the West; for we have gambled all our inheritance on the ideologue, the man who promises to build a better world.

The condition of this rebuilding is the abandonment of the rigid philosophical and religious forms that have hitherto prevented the manipulation and free technical disposal of reality. It was the Renaissance optimism that launched man on this effort at total control of world. What seemed an overwhelming enrichment of man, however, was bound to become a reduction of his scope: the dense stuff of reality had to be thinned, artificial constructs had to be substituted for the resisting and inviolable mysteries, if man was to maintain an easy mastery of things. The first great raids on reality, the titanic achievements, seemed to exhaust the world of its wealth meaning. Humanism settled into the of narrow precision and predictability of the eighteenth century. The ever-dwindling religious capital of the West forced men into ever more daring attempts to substitute an imposed plan for a received world.

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Garry Wills

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In a saner age, Thomas Molnar’s The Decline of the Intellectual would become a political classic overnight. But in a saner age the book would not have to be written. The decline of the intellectual, says Mr. Molnar, is the decline of the West; for we have gambled all our inheritance on the ideologue, the man who promises to build a better world.

The condition of this rebuilding is the abandonment of the rigid philosophical and religious forms that have hitherto prevented the manipulation and free technical disposal of reality. It was the Renaissance optimism that launched man on this effort at total control of world. What seemed an overwhelming enrichment of man, however, was bound to become a reduction of his scope: the dense stuff of reality had to be thinned, artificial constructs had to be substituted for the resisting and inviolable mysteries, if man was to maintain an easy mastery of things. The first great raids on reality, the titanic achievements, seemed to exhaust the world of its wealth meaning. Humanism settled into the of narrow precision and predictability of the eighteenth century. The ever-dwindling religious capital of the West forced men into ever more daring attempts to substitute an imposed plan for a received world.