NORMAN F. CANTOR
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interlaced with Dewey's pragmatist instrumentalism and the more
liberal social doctrines associated with progressivism. These "norma–
tive values," with relatively modest modifiications, still dominate the
curricula and ambience of our major graduate schools. No open–
ended "cultural pluralism" here. Social Darwinism keeps revivifying
itself in slightly modernized forms - the vehement racism and anti–
Semitism that flourished in our distinguished universities well into
the fiifties; the eager service of natural and social scientists to the De–
fense Department, the CIA, and other federal agencies that has
waxed and waned and waxes now again; the domination in recent
years of Friedmanite market theory in economics; sociobiology.
Commitment to the positivist dogma that the advancement of learn–
ing and theory in a given discipline is linear is still the governing
principle of our graduate school curricula, even though much of the
critical thought and art of the twentieth century brings the validity of
such a linear view into question.
In considering instances of the condition of the humanities be–
yond the shaping of instructional programs, one always perceives a
distinctive intellectual commitment on the part of the faculty and of
intellectuals writing from outside the academy . There is always a
very strong commitment to a precise set of "normative values," to a
particular way of seeing the world, to a special interpretation of hu–
man nature and social behavior whenever humanistic disciplines are
in a creative and exciting mode . A slovenly cultural pluralism and a
vacuous lack of commitment to a particular approach to literature,
history, anthropology, philosophy, or whatever is not at all the situa–
tion in which the humanities have been meaningful and important to
people within or without the university in the Western world. Cer–
tainly in the past twenty years (comparably one might argue in the
past twenty centuries) , Marx and Freud, T.S. Eliot and Trilling,
Foucault and Le Roy Ladurie, Rawls and Habermas all mean
something very special to learned people - they represent distinctive
cultures, defiinable intellectual systems. These systems condition
whole ways of looking upon the world, including American life.
Intellectual systems do not just "give historical perspective."
They immediately, right this moment, shape our understanding of
ourselves and others. Ultimately they provide an ideological frame–
work which powerfully affects human behavior and social and politi–
cal action . And this was true as much in past eras as it is today .
It
made a very big difference whether one was a Platonist or an Aristo–
telian in the ancient world, whether one was a Thomist or Ockamist
