[Hac-announce] 10/10 Conversations

[L.M.C. Harvey]

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Just a Reminder folks!   This Saturday we'll be watching
and discussing a film about four men who began their education passionately
involved with ideas and ideology.  They
have continued to influence politics and ideas. 
From Conversations Coordinator
Cynthia Harvey    

   

Excerpts
from articles posted on PBS site:  
arguing at pbs.org 

"With
Age, a Softening Of Radical Ideologie"   By
STEPHEN HOLDEN       NYT, 1/7/1998 

Joseph
Dorman's documentary, "Arguing the World," … follows the lives and
careers of four eminent New York thinkers -- Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, Nathan
Glazer and Irving Kristol -- all of whom attended City College in the '30s and
belonged to leftist organizations…. 

….The
conventional wisdom about political ideology and personal growth has always
held that as we age we inevitably cast off our youthful dreams of changing the
world and become increasingly conservative. 

…. In
the 1930's, when Communism was in its infancy, Marxism seemed an attractive new
ideology to a generation of young, Jewish intellectuals growing up in New York
City in the lean years of the Depression. Radicalism is easier to embrace when
you're poor. Or to paraphrase Bob Dylan, when you have nothing, you have
nothing to lose. 

The
heady dream of Marxism put into action for a more just and socially equitable
world died a painful death with the rise of Stalin and news of his purges.
Inevitably, many 30's radicals began questioning their Marxist ideology.   

>>
=== << 

The New
York Intellectuals in Perspective 

….  What is an intellectual and what is his or
her place in society? Literary critic Morris Dickstein defines an intellectual
as "someone concerned with general principles, devoted to thinking things
through, beyond the confines of a single field."  …. 
[Bell] lightheartedly [answered] when a professor in graduate school
asked him what he specialized in. "I specialize in generalizations!"  

….  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 New York Intellectuals are the first
influential critics to rise from America's working classes. During the 1930’s,
these sons and daughters of turn-of-the-century East European Jewish immigrants
formed an obscure intellectual circle where radical politics and the cultural
avant-garde collided.  By the late ‘40s
they were rising to prominence as left-wing political and cultural critics in
post-war America…. 





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