Irving Howe
RADICAL QUESTIONS
AND THE AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL
Suppose we were to ask ourselves, "What have been the
decisive trends in American intellectual life these past few decades?"
The answer, I think, would have to include some of the following:
The disintegration of Marxism as a frequently accepted
mode of social analysis and subsequent efforts to patch
together surrogate ideologies or, finding virtue in necessity,
to dispense with ideology entirely.
Even those intellectuals who were never under the sway of Marx–
ism have been strongly affected by its crisis and collapse, both as a
system of politics and an encompassing Weltanschauung. At least part
of what has happened among our intellectuals these past twenty-five
years can be regarded as the result of the loss or abandonment of a
powerful sustaining belief: one that, in its psychological dynamics,
operated as a variety of religious experience. Future historians of
ideas are likely to see this experience as similar in consequence-in
pain, disorientation and a series of brilliant reactive improvisations–
to the experience of those mid-nineteenth-century English writers who
broke away from orthodox Christianity yet could not rid themselves
of a yearning for transcendence. A whole generation has been marked,
often marred, by the deflation of the revolutionary mystique. Some
intellectuals have, in fact, been so thoroughly captive to a nostalgia
for apocalypse that they have failed to respond to the urgencies of
political life today. Others have conducted a frantic search for a
lIubstitute "proletariat," ranging from hipsters to the alienated under-
