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important in the recent progression of its intellect. He is right to be
skeptical about the conventional notion that a secularized Protestantism
accounts for the morality of social reform. Yet the despair of an earlier
generation may have been due to something profoundly repressive in
the Protestantism to which they were heirs. (He does acknowledge this
might be the case for Bourne.) It isn't plausible, further, for an author
to evoke New York's role as the center of American intellectual life
while ignoring the eastern European Jewish immigration. These im–
migrants, like the Calvinists, were people of the book-but they came
to America, generally, without Europe's high culture. Some of the
characteristics of the American intellectuals, as a group, have surely been
affected by this wave of Jewish immigration-a certain adaptiveness,
receptivity and volatility associated with New York. Lasch also says noth–
ing about Catholicism. (It is striking, however, that younger American
Catholics influenced by E.uropean Left Catholicism are now so prominent
in American social and political criticism. Perhaps they'll bring to Amer–
ican intellectual life some of the elements it has been missing-a certain
trust in the future, a certain charity.) Lasch is quite silent about a
problem which is still pertinent: the American intellectuals' relationship
to Europe. An older generation returned from Europe in despair at their
own country's shallowness, its esthetic decrepitude, its lack of a public
sense. Voices of this sort have been silent for twenty-five years, at least.
Our contemporaries are resigned, it seems, to the fact that cultures
differ: wishing won't turn Morningside Heights into the Latin Quarter
or William James Hall into the Tiibingen Stift. More important, per–
haps, America's power has persuaded its intellectuals that they are at
the center of human culture as well as of thermonuclear politics. The
American intellectual today, despite his travels, is less cosmopolitan than
his predecessor of a generation ago--with serious consequences for the
detachment and suppleness of his thought. Lasch's method, which con–
centrates on continuity, allows him to ignore important breaks in his–
torical pattern of this sort.
Yet another break is mentioned by Lasch, but he skirts it. He begins
his book by identifying the intellectuals as a special class in a fragmented
society, ends it by noting that a technical intelligentsia in the service of
power now has an enormous stake in the maintenance of society. By his
own criteria, the technical intelligentsia are not necessarily intellectuals.
The latter think; the former worry about "on-going research." The polar–
ization of American intellectual life between the programmer and the
hipster is one historical variant of a general problem. Perhaps the prob-
