1. Richard Reeves, "How New Ideas Shape Presidential Politics," New York Times Magazine, July 15, 1984; and idem, The Reagan Detour (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), pp. 9-14, 23-32.

2. One of the first books about the deteriorating state of intellectual life was Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Viking Press, 1985).

3. Thomas Byrne Edsall, The New Politics of Inequality (New York: Norton, 1984); see especially the chapter on the politicization of the business community, pp. 107-40. See also Sidney Blumenthal, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment: From Conservative Ideology to Political Power (New York: Times Books, 1986).

4. See Stephen H. Balch and Herbert I. London, "The Tenured Left," Commentary, October 1986. This belief was a major theme of conservative editors at The Nation's "Conference on Journals of Critical Opinion." See Garry Adams, "Insults Fly at Editors' Conference," Oakland Tribune, April 20, 1985; also see the report by Socialist Review editors in their sustainer's newsletter, the Public Sphere June 1985. This dogma is also documented in Adam Gussow, "Joseph Epstein and Company: The Rise of the Literary Right," Boston Review 9, no. 2 (March-April 1984): 7-10.

5. Edwin McDowell, "The Making of a Scholarly Best Seller," New York Times, November 17, 1987; Michael Hirschorn, "Bestselling Book Makes the Collegiate Curriculum a Burning Public Issue," Chronicle of Higher Education 34, no. 3 (September 16, 1987): A1.

6. Lionel Trilling, "On the Teaching of Modern Literature," in Beyond Culture (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1965), p. 23.

7. Ibid., p. 23; D. Bell, Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, pp. 40-41; Irving Kristol, "The Adversary Culture of Intellectuals," Encounter, October 1979, reprinted in Irving Kristol, Reflections of a Neoconservative (New York: Basic Books, 1983), pp. 27-42; Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1942), pp. 145-55.

8. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987).

9. Bloom claims that "Heidegger's teachings are the most powerful intellectual force of our times." Ibid., p. 312.

10. Hirschorn, "Bestselling Book," p. A22.

11. Bloom, Closing of the American Mind, pp. 47-137.

12. Ibid., p. 147.

13. Ibid., pp. 151-52.

14. Ibid., pp. 217-26.

15. Ibid., p. 260.

16. Ibid., pp. 311-14.

17. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950).

18. I was an undergraduate at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, where the curriculum consists solely of the Great Books Program (that is, there are no electives, only seminars and tutorials devoted to reading "great books"). Its faculty often took the attitude that social thought after Machiavelli was hopelessly corrupt. When I studied at St. John's, many (but by no means most) of the influential faculty members were students of Leo Strauss. Mortimer Adler, Allan Bloom, and Strauss were frequent guest lecturers at St. John's.

I am deeply ambivalent about the Great Books approach. I disliked the conservative educational philosophy that framed the St. John's program, but I benefited enormously from its disavowal of specialized training as prerequisite to reading important books. The Great Books Program actually teaches students how to study intellectual subjects in an interdisciplinary way. It can also inculcate a certain textual dogmatism.

19. Everett C. Ladd and Seymour Martin Lipset examine evidence showing that whereas university professors are more liberal (45 percent liberal, 30 percent conservative, 20 percent moderate) than the population at large, academics' convictions range across the political spectrum. See "Professors Found to Be Liberal but Not Radical," Chronicle of Higher Education, January 16, 1978.

20. Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Basic Books, 1987). See chapters 2 and 3: "The Decline of Bohemia," and "On the Road to Suburbia: Urbanists and Beats."

21. On the cultural radicals of the early 1900s, see: Christopher Lasch, "Randolph Bourne and the Experimental Life," in The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963: The Intellectual as Social Type (New York: Knopf, 1965); Arthur Frank Wertheim, The New York Little Renaissance: Iconoclasm, Modernism, and Nationalism in American Culture, 1980-1917 (New York: New York University Press, 1976); and Edward Abrahams, The Lyrical Left: Randolph Bourne, Alfred Stieglitz, and the Origins of Cultural Radicalism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1986). On the New York intellectuals, see James Gilbert, Writers and Partisans (New York: Wiley, 1968).

22. In just two years—1986 and 1987-at least eight books in addition to Jacoby's Last Intellectuals appeared on public intellectuals; four alone (not counting memoirs or biographies) are about the New York intellectuals. The eight books are: Terry A. Cooney, The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle, 1934-1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986); Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Howard Brick, Daniel Bell and the Decline of Intellectual Radicalism: Social Theory and Political Reconciliation in the 1940s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986); Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); one about New York as an intellectual capital—Thomas Bender, New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City, from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time (New York: Knopf, 1987); one on leftist intellectuals of the World War I period—Abrahams, The Lyrical Left; and two literary theoretical explorations of the intellectual's role—Paul A. Bove, Intellectuals in Power: A Genealogy of Critical Humanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); and Jim Merod, The Political Responsibility of the Critic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987).

23. I say neointellectuals so that we can discuss them as a group but also because they share a critical stance toward the 1960s model of political culture and social movements.

24. For evidence of this development, see Gregg Easterbrook, "Ideas Move Nations," Atlantic Monthly, January 1986, 66-80; and Joseph G. Peschek, Policy-Planning Organizations: Elite Agendas and America's Rightward Turn (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987). Blumenthal, Rise of the Counter-Establishment, also documents this trend.

25. Although it is a little dated now, see Randall Rothenberg, "The Neoliberal Club," Esquire, February 1982.

26. Chuck Lane, "The Manhattan Project," New Republic, March 25, 1985, 14-15.

27. See Jan Clausen, A Movement of Poets: Thoughts on Poetry and Feminism (Brooklyn: Long Haul Press, 1982) for an interesting analysis of poets' role in leading the women's movement.

28. See Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: Morrow, 1967)—one of the all-time great histories of intellectuals.

29. Cornel West, "The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual," Cultural Critique, no. 1 (fall 1985); Martin Kilson, "Paradoxes of Blackness: Notes on the Crisis of Black Intellectuals," Dissent, winter 1986, 70-78; Greg Tate, "Cult Nats Meet the Freaky Deke: The Return of the Black Aesthetic," Village Voice, Voice Literary Supplement, December 1986, 5-8.

30. Kilson, "Paradoxes of Blackness," p. 74, and West, "Dilemma of the Black Intellectual," p. 112. Greg Tate also makes this point in "Cult Nats." In his plea for a "popular poststructuralism for black culture," Tate argues that there "are artists for whom black consciousness and artistic freedom are not mutually exclusive but complementary, for whom 'black culture' signifies a multicultural tradition of expressive practices" (p. 7).

31. Kilson, "Paradoxes of Blackness," p. 77.

32. Esther Newton, "Academe's Homophobia: It Damages Careers and Ruins Lives," Chronicle of Higher Education, March 11, 1987, 104.

33. Lisa Duggan, "History's Gay Ghetto: The Contradictions of Growth in Lesbian and Gay History," in Presenting the Past: Essays on History and the Public, ed. Susan Porter Benson, Stephen Brier, and Roy Rosenzweig (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), pp. 281-91.

34. One of the earliest articles that brought together lesbians who had studied the history of sexuality was Deirdre English, Amber Hollibaugh, and Gayle Rubin, "Talking Sex," Socialist Review, no. 58 (July-August 1981). Both Amber Hollibaugh and Gayle Rubin were members of the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project. The two most influential anthologies of feminist writings on sexuality include pieces by veterans of the lesbian and gay history projects: Allan Bérubé, Amber Hollibaugh, John D'Emilio, Joan Nestle, and Gayle Rubin.

35. Bérubé, "History of Gay Bathhouses," pp. 15-19. A longer version of this piece was submitted as an exhibit in court cases in New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

36. Gouldner, Future of Intellectuals, pp. 28-43.

37. "The culture of critical discourse" is not without value as a set of norms for intellectual discourse, but adopting its norms can inhibit intellectuals' participation in the hurly-burly of the public sphere.

38. Both Victor Navasky, "The Role of the Journal of Critical Opinion," and Ilene Philipson, "On Critical Journals," appear in Socialist Review, nos. 82-83: 15-29.