INTELLECTUAL LIFE, INDEPENDENCE, SELF-CRITICAL REFLECTION

Irving Howe, A Voice Still Heard: Selected Essays of Irving Howe, edited by Nina Howe, foreword by Morris Dickstein (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2014) (From "This Age of Conformity" [1954]: "But no one who has a live sense of what the literary life has been and might still be, in either Europe or this country, can accept the notion that the academy is the natural home of intellect." Id. at 3. 9. "No formal ideology or program is entirely adequate for coping with the problems that intellectuals face in the twentieth century. [] The most glorious vision of the intellectual life's still that which is loosely called humanist: the idea of a mind committed yet dispassionate, ready to stand alone, curious, eager, skeptical. The banner of critical independence, ragged and torn though it may be, is still the best we have." Id. at 25. From "What's the Trouble? Social Crisis, Crisis of Civilization, or Both" [1971]: "I want . . . to assume that we cannot be 'certain,' as many of us were in the past, that there is an ineluctable motion within history toward a progressive culmination. I want to discard any faith in the necessary movement of History--even its much-advertised cunning. Not that I would create instead a gnostic melodrama in which man stands forever pitted against his own history, a promethean loneliness against the runaway of civilization. I simply want to put the question aside, and then to say: the obligation to defend and extend freedom in its simplest and most fundamental aspects is the sacred task of the intellectual, the one task he must not compromise even when his posture seems intractable, or unreasonable, or hopeless, or even when it means standing alone against fashionable shibboleths like Revolution and The Third World." Id. at 139, 159. From "Introduction: Twenty-five Years of Dissent" [1979]: "To be a socialist in Europe means to belong to a movement commonly accepted as part of democratic political life, a contender in the battle of interest and idea. To be a socialist in America means to exist precariously on the margin of our politics, as critic, gadfly, and reformer, struggling constantly for a bit of space. Lonely and beleaguered as it may be, this position of the American socialist has, nevertheless, an advantage: it forces one to the discomforts of self-critical reflection." Id. at 198, 198. Also, see generally Franklin Foer, "Partisan Reviewer," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 1/18/2015.).