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scholarship on, among other topics, Rawlsianism, republicanism, feminism, and
Freudianism. Designed to show how the "power elite" is still subtly controlling
us all, these summaries are invariably followed by the familiar empty
exhortations from the sixties about the need to rebuild/rethink. More often
than not the rhetoric promises more than it delivers. "We do need to know,"
Birnbaum thunders, "at what point institutional opportunity and human
potential can be best joined." And who can argue with that?
The text proper is followed by a bibliographic essay which is almost
indistinguishable from the loosely connected skein of apercus which compose
the body of the book. The typical section-a stream of bibliographic con–
sciousnes~onsists
of brief comments on a string of books and names. Birn–
baum's purpose in presenting what are little more than his lecture notes
seems avuncular. He wants, it appears, to recapture on paper the spirit of
sixties campus bull sessions when a faculty guru would enlighten the initiates,
usually anxious graduate students, long into the night by providing an anno–
tated scorecard ofwhich writers were or weren't kosher.
The hordes of graduate students have long fled from the lure of
sweeping social criticism, but Birnbaum has done those who remain a disser–
vice. This is an account of political and intellectual life which astoundingly
contains no mention of the most powerful intellectual currents of the seventies
and eighties. Neither Wittgenstein and neoromanticism, nor Nietzsche, the
intellectual godfather of these decades, rate a mention. The loss of faith in
social science and causal explanations of the social world, that debilitating dis–
ease Clifford Geertz has dubbed "epistemological hypochondria," is con–
sidered only in passing. The academic heirs of sixties arminianism, the
"grammatological Maoism" ofJacques Derrida,and the radical subjectivism of
Michel Foucault are nowhere discussed. While considerable attention is lav–
ished on figures from the fifties like the Marxist economists Paul Baran and
Paul Sweezy, there is no mention of the rise and fall of academic neo-Marx–
ism over the past twenty years. No mention is made of the inverse
relationship between the rise of academic radicalism and the decline of left–
wing politics. Neither neoliberalism nor Jimmy Carter rates a passing com–
ment
There is a moment early in the book when Birnbaum seems to ques–
tion his own assumptions. He writes at the beginning of Chapter Two, "I am
aware that I presuppose what a good deal of the analysis in these initial
pages so strenuously denies, that there is a public, still. That is also a matter
for inquiry." Had he continued along those lines, Birnbaum might have no–
ticed that the fragmentation of his own presentation mirrors the fragmenta–
tion of "the left," the honorific entity whose coherence he assumes. But the
left/right distinction has long been fundamentally scrambled by libertarian and
