RADICAL QUESTIONS
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be
a respectable point of view; but the sour hostility toward their
own past, the frantic pursuit of intellectual "novelties," the barely
disguised contempt for freedom which some ex-radical intellectuals
showed in their devotion to the Cold War-all this was a good deal
worse than conservatism.
Do
I exaggerate in saying that for the ex–
radical intellectuals there was a steady need to depreciate the menace
of Senator McCarthy's hooliganism, and that what really mattered
was a kind of
union sacr'ee
in behalf of "anti-Communism"? Or that
under the tranquilizing influence of a new affection for the Ameri–
can system, social problems were regarded as largely solved or, in
more exalted moments, as symptoms of that impulse toward evil
forever lodged in the human soul?
An increasing tendency toward and an implicit acceptance
of intellectual specialization, what might be called the "pri_
vatization of work/' so that the very idea of the intellectual
vocation has come into question.
We are
all
familiar with the troubled inquiries as to whether
the intellectual as a distinct type is likely to survive in an increasing–
ly managerial and technological society. We are also familiar with
privately voiced complaints-some may reflect no more than the
sourness of people getting older, but some are a recognition of
painful truth-that among younger writers these days there
is
no
shortage of talent, energy or ambition, but rarely evidence of that
freewheeling and "dilettantish" concern with general ideas which we
take to be characteristic of the intellectual life. No one supposes that
in any future society intellectual work can possibly cease; what is at
stake is whether such work can be broken down into a series of
discrete and specialized functions, so that the larger animating
concerns with values and ideals may gradually (or at least sooner
than the state) wither away. What in some accounts
is
said to have
happened to modern philosophy, seems a possible terminus for the
life of the intellectual as an historical type.
Criticism of social institutions has in the last few decades
been increasingly appropriated by journalists who combine
useful expose with a lack of fundamental theory and/or
values.
Much of the muckraking-the attack upon specific deforma–
tions and failures of the welfare state which appeared during the
fifties and early sixties-was composed by journalists with little
