Arts and Manners

Professor Barzun, A Winner

At the peril of sticking out my neck, and his, I herewith nominate Professor Jacques Barzun of Columbia University as the certified sage of our intelligentsia. He—and not Mr. Edmund Wilson or Mr. Lionel Trilling or even Mr. David Riesman—will, I dare say, emerge as the high man on their totem pole, and for the good reason that he uniquely matches the need of the contemporary intellectuals: Mr. Barzun has mastered the difficult trick of studying, using, and approving of all the nonconformists of the past, in order to conform so much the better with the present. He has obtained the ultimately viable status of a contemporary intellectual: he can identify himself with the reigning Establishment; and yet, he still can savor the spiced vocabulary of the rebel. Greater pride knoweth no man.

WS

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William S. Schlamm

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Alexis de Tocqueville

William Shakespeare

Aristotle

Professor Barzun, A Winner

At the peril of sticking out my neck, and his, I herewith nominate Professor Jacques Barzun of Columbia University as the certified sage of our intelligentsia. He—and not Mr. Edmund Wilson or Mr. Lionel Trilling or even Mr. David Riesman—will, I dare say, emerge as the high man on their totem pole, and for the good reason that he uniquely matches the need of the contemporary intellectuals: Mr. Barzun has mastered the difficult trick of studying, using, and approving of all the nonconformists of the past, in order to conform so much the better with the present. He has obtained the ultimately viable status of a contemporary intellectual: he can identify himself with the reigning Establishment; and yet, he still can savor the spiced vocabulary of the rebel. Greater pride knoweth no man.