566
PARTISAN REVIEW
Hard as it is for me to conclude that this superbly qualified
group of people would view the content of the humanities in an en–
tirely relativistic way and deny to the humanities any particular in–
tellectual commitments or systems of values, this is the astonishing
conclusion to which I must come . Here is a report drawn up in 1980
on the humanities in American life that never mentions the domi–
nant and revolutionary trends in the humanistic disciplines in our
time. Not only do the names of Marx, Weber, Freud, and Jung re–
main absent, but one never hears of Braudel' Le Roy Ladurie, Levi–
Strauss, Geertz, Foucault, Wittgenstein, Habermas, Chomsky,
Piaget, Barthes , Frye , Bloom, or other seminal thinkers , European
or American, whose systems have massively reshaped the humani–
ties disciplines since 1945. The humanities turn ou t to be marketable
commodities for the educational system in which our college super–
markets place a variety of brand names on the shelves and allow the
student to choose at will under the guise of "cultural pluralism." This
is a falsification of both the educational and intellectual history of the
twentieth century.
With respect to education, while the humanities have played a
dominant role in the shaping of the college curriculum - as at the
University of Chicago in the Hutchins era and beyond, the Contem–
porary Civilization Program at Columbia from the thirties into the
sixties, the Harvard "Red Book" general education program of the
fifties, the large variety of curricular experiments on many campuses
in the sixties and early seventies - it has always been within the con–
text of a deep commitment to a particular and in some instances
rather narrow spectrum of ideas . The Hutchins-Adler great books
curriculum at Chicago was inspired by Neo-Thomism; the Harvard
general education program by political and intellectual conservatism
in the tradition ofT.S. Eliot; the Columbia program in its era of vi–
tality in the forties and fifties was infused by a very strong dedication
to the value system one can call metropolitan liberalism as exempli–
fied by Trilling and Barzun. The curricular experiments of the six–
ties and early seventies normally operated within a framework of
values associated with the New Left ideology of that era.
In considering the formative period of the American doctoral
and research university (1890-1920) , a defiinable amalgam of speci–
fic value systems can also be readily seen to have shaped the gradu–
ate school curricula - and the character and temperament of the
faculty. Around a core of nineteenth-century positivism, there was
added a thick stratum of imperialist social Darwinism, occasionally
