PA R.'r I SAN REVIEW
tensity insufficient to compel our attention or to provoke meaningful
reactions in American culture. Existentialism was, I suppose, the
last consequential movement to engage our interest, but the literary
work that it produced turned out to be of small consequence.
Moreover, the impression
is
that much of the culture-building
energy of Europe's intellectuals is now dissipated in political ad–
venturism; that in their thinking both of their position and ours
they are apt to fall into disastrous over-simplifications, such as put–
ting the United States and the Soviet Empire on the same level as
rival power-blocs, and that far too many are tempted to be done
with it all by plunging into the abyss of Stalin's Utopia.
But if among us that fatal temptation has been largely over–
come, it is scarcely because we have been especially endowed with
good sense or idealism. The difference lies in the more fortunate,
more spacious American environment. Thus it is imperative not to
overlook so direct and concrete a factor as the long spell of prosperity
that America has enjoyed since the War. It has at long last ef–
fected the absorption of the intellectuals into the institutional life of
the country. The prosperity that followed the First World War had no
such result, the game being strictly business and the intellectuals re–
maining mostly on the outside looking in, while this time their
status has been strikingly improved by the phenomenal expansion of
the economy. Writers and artists have succeeded in breaking down
the scholastic barriers that kept them out of university-teaching,
and many economists and sociologists have made their way into
government bureaus. In particular it has been the many-sided ex–
tension of the educational system which has furnished the greater op–
portunity. Consider that the intellectual bohemian or proletarian
has turned into a marginal figure nowadays, reminding us in his
rather quixotic aloneness of the ardors and truancies of the past. \ Ve
are witnessing a process that might well be described as that of
the
embourgeoisement
of the American intelligentsia-a process that
is plainly not unconnected with the changes of mind and mood we are
analyzing in this symposium. In the main, it accounts for the fact that
the idea of socialism, whether in its revolutionary or democratic
reference, has virtually ceased to figure in current intellectual
discussion.
Yet the material security so newly gained must be seen as an
