NORMAN F. CANTOR
569
nificance in the humanities faculties of American universities pe–
tered out over time? Why must we Americans have to turn around
and, like eighteenth-century colonists waiting at the dock for news
from London, import much of the same ideas from Europe several
decades later? Why did the revolution in philosophy that Peirce fore–
shadowed in the late nineteenth century not spread out into a full–
scale analytical movement? Instead, we had to turn to Viennese and
English sources for the reconstruction of American philosophy in the
later fifties and sixties. Why has the social and cultural history of the
French Annales school recently inspired such a transformation of
American historiography when there is very little in what Febvre,
Braudel, and Le Roy Ladurie have to propound programmatically
that was not perceived by the New History ofJames Harvey Robin–
son, of Charles Beard, and of Carl Becker in the first third of this
century? Why have our departments of literature had to learn the
primacy and autonomy of the text from the French structuralists
when in a somewhat less didactic and more good-tempered way the
American New Critics of the thirties were propounding much the
same priorities in literary interpretation? Why did it take so
long
for
the cognitive approach to social psychology suggested by G.H.
Mead and the applied sociology advocated by Robert Park in the
twenties and early thirties to dominate these fields and then only
with the help of ideas and examples imported from Europe since
1940? Why did the literary toryism, royalism, or authoritarianism of
Yeats, Eliot, and Leavis come to have such a powerful influence in
our English departments after World War II while at the same time
the social liberalism of Trilling and Mathiessen was not transmuted
into a comparably broad and powerful nativist tradition? Why did
the ideas of New Left thinkers of the sixties like Marcuse, Gouldner,
Laing, and Norman O. Brown have such an ephemeral and superfi–
cial impact upon our campuses?
My formulation of these questions is admittedly controversial
and in some respects possibly vulnerable, but behind them certainly
lie critical issues about the humanities in America that will not go
away because they are ignored by establishmentarian commissions.
As is already well-known from press reports , the single interest–
ing recommendation of this Commission was that the National En–
dowment for the Humanities and other humanistic funding agencies
should address themselves to the problems of elementary and secon–
dary education. That the problems are there and that our public
school system is in a shambles is obvious, but how the application of
