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THE INTELLECTUAL IN AMERICA
Most were born and grew up in the Jewish immigrant neighborhoods of New York City. Other non-Jewish members came to the city as young men and women. The documentary focuses on four of the most influential members of the second generation who came together at the City College of New York: Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer. This website features a genealogy of the group, created by Daniel Bell for his essay The Intelligentsia in America.
Daniel Bell differentiates the scholar who adds "to the accumulated, tested knowledge of the past" from the intellectual who "begins with his experience, his individual perceptions of the world, his privileges and deprivations, and judges the world by these sensibilities." Bell perfectly captured the essence of what it meant to be a New York Intellectual more lightheartedly when a professor in graduate school asked him what he specialized in. "I specialize in generalizations!" he quickly replied.
Cultural and intellectual historian Richard Hofstadter in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Anti-Intellectualism in American Life saw this commitment as stemming from the "belief that in some measure the world would be made responsive to [the intellectual's] capacity for rationality, his passion for justice and order: out of this conviction arise much of his value to mankind and, equally, much of his ability to do mischief."
The term intellectual, as we use it, originated with the French group of thinkers and writers such as Emil Zola, Anatole France and Marcel Proust who wrote vociferously in defense of their countryman Alfred Dreyfus, wrongly accused and convicted of being a German spy. Originally a term of derision it came to be accepted as denoting those thinkers involved in a "war of ideas" as Daniel Bell has written.
Intellectual historian Russell Jacoby writes in The Last Intellectuals, a controversial book about the fate of intellectualism in American life, that in an age of increasing academic specialization, the New Yorkers may be our last great generalist critics both in their attempt to write about all facets of culture and their desire to reach a large public. But many have since disputed his provocative theory arguing that new circles of intellectuals, among them African-Americans, feminists, and conservatives have arisen. What distinguishes these from earlier generations is the landscape in which they work. With American intellectual culture more diffuse and the country more ethnically diverse, no one group can dominate as the New York Intellectuals once seemed to. In his study of the New York Intellectuals, Critical Crossings, Neil Jumonville describes the New York Intellectuals’ field as "cultural criticism" because they sought to "synthesize and generalize cultural trends."
Puritan Jonathan Edwards, founder of Princeton University, would be considered by many among the first American intellectuals. America's intellectual founding fathers, such as Madison, Jefferson and Hamilton whose lives also encompassed dissent, were distinctly public thinkers.
Later the century produced The Genteel Tradition including writers such as Charles Eliot Norton and Richard Henry Stoddard. Primarily poets and novelists they were not as deeply involved in cultural debate as their forbears. During this period writer Henry Adams, editor of the North American Review practiced cultural criticism.
And there were the Southern Agrarians who became known as the New Critics centered around Vanderbilt University. Poets, novelists and critics such as Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom and Allan Tate, they extolled an anti-urban politically conservative ethic.
It was during this decade that the New York Intellectuals themselves arose. Though working class Jewish immigrants they were the rich inheritors of the radical political and cultural traditions of Greenwich Village. Cultural and social critics, they were primarily essayists as opposed to novelists or poets. They would carry on the American and Western intellectual debate within the political and social confines of their era: the rise of communism and the Cold War in the second half of the twentieth century, and the triumph of the modernist esthetic.
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