THE CORE CURRICULUM AS INTELLECTUAL MOTIVATION
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modernism. And it pursued such analytic methods as psychoanalysis, along
with some of the more useful critical findings of social science. This stream
has been for the present, extended moment bracketed.
2. There was the inclusion and interiorization of a number of European
cultural critics: the Frankfurt school in particular, first Herbert Marcuse in
the late 1960s, followed in the next decades by Theodor Adorno.
3. The Frankfurt critics were for the most part neo-Hegelian and
proto-post-Marxist on the Left. But there was also a powerful drift of
writings from an outlying miscellany of continental and Marxist cultural
thought from the 1920s to the present: such figures as M. M. Bakhtin,
Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, and Louis Althusser began to be
mixed into the new critical infusions.
4. These were among the sectors that were not included in the suc–
cessive waves of French theoretical writings that accompanied and
followed the political events of the second part of the 1960s and that were
equally part of that decade and the next fifteen or more years on the cul–
tural-intellectual front. First came the structuralist thinkers, with their
emphasis on linguistics, poetics, and a new kind of formalism-high-Ievel,
mandarin theory, at an often refreshing level of abstraction. These were
followed by their logical successors, the post-structuralists, who also
pointed the way by including anything and everything within their dis–
courses: if there was nothing outside of the text, then it followed that
there was nothing that could not be examined as part of one's legiti–
mate intellectual activi
ty.
5. In addition, there was the irregular incorporation of the writings of
the English cultural school, in literary and general criticism, chiefly the
work of Raymond Williams, and after him that of the Birmingham group
founded by Richard Hoggart, and in history and related studies the writ–
ings of E.
P.
Thompson. Williams, in particular, acted as a brake on excess
to those who troubled to expose themselves to his influence.
6. Above all, there was steady, continued pressure of another concep–
tion of culture that infiltrated itself into intellectual projects in an
atmospheric way. This idea descended in large measure from modern
anthropology and conceived of culture as the ensemble of relationships
among living groups of human beings. That is to say, it was not the same
idea of culture that derived from Goethe or Arnold or their Euro-Anglo–
American humanist descendants, though at the same time not entirely
unrelated to it.
It
was in its origins and on principle broad, humane, toler–
ant, inquisitive, open-minded, and on the surface at least non-judgmental.
It
was doctrinally relativistic, as such specifications imply. And this relativism
was without question double-edged; it could be and was applied in the
work of interpretation, in the finding of meaning in everything human,
