Introduction

      It has become a commonplace in the modern world to regard the intellectual as estranged, maladjusted, and discontented. Far from being disturbed by this vision, however, we have become increasingly accustomed to seeing our intellectuals as outsiders, gadflies, marginal men, and the like. The word “alienation,” indiscriminately used to signify the most banal of dyspepsias as well as the deepest of metaphysical fears, has become the chief cant phrase of our time. For even the most discerning of observers, reality and pose have become difficult to distinguish. To the horror of those who can genuinely claim to have suffered from its effects, alienation has proved a highly profitable commodity in the cultural marketplace. Modernist art with its dissonances and torments, to take one example, has become the staple diet of an increasingly voracious army of culture consumers who know good investments when they see them. The avant-garde, if indeed the term can still be used, has become an honored ornament of our cultural life, less to be feared than feted. The philosophy of existentialism, to cite another case, which scarcely a generation ago seemed like a breath of fresh air, has now degenerated into a set of easily manipulated clichés and sadly hollow gestures. This decline occurred, it should be noted, not because analytic philosophers exposed the meaninglessness of its categories, but rather as a result of our culture’s uncanny ability to absorb and defuse even its most uncompromising opponents. And finally to mention a third example, it is all too evident in 1972, a few short years after the much ballyhooed birth of an alleged counterculture, that the new infant, if not strangled in the crib, has proved easily domesticated in the ways of its elders. Here too the mechanisms of absorption and cooptation have shown themselves to be enormously effective.

      The result of all this is that intellectuals who take their critical function seriously have been presented with an increasingly rigorous challenge to outdistance the culture’s capacity to numb their protest. One response has been an ever more frantic flight into cultural extremism, a desire to shock and provoke by going beyond what had previously been the limits of cultural tolerance. These limits, however, have demonstrated an elasticity far greater than anticipated, as yesterday’s obscenities are frequently transformed into today’s bromides. With the insufficiency of a purely cultural solution in mind, many critical intellectuals have attempted to integrate their cultural protest with its political counterpart. Radical political movements, characteristically of the left, have continued to attract discontented intellectuals in our own time, as they have done traditionally in years past. But this alliance has rarely proved an easy one, especially when the realities of left-wing movements in power have become too ugly to ignore. Consequently, the ebb and flow of radical intellectuals to and from various leftist allegiances has been one of the constant themes of modern intellectual history.

      This oscillation stems as well from a more basic dilemma faced only by intellectuals of the left. The elitism of those who confine their extremism solely to the cultural sphere, rejecting its political correlate, does not necessarily engender any particular sense of guilt. For the radical intellectual who chooses political involvement, however, the desire to maintain a critical distance presents a special problem. Remaining apart, not just from society as a whole but also from the movement on whose victory he counts, creates an acute tension that is never absent from the lives of serious leftist intellectuals. The endless self-criticism aimed at exorcising the remnants of elitism, which has characterized the New Left in recent years, bears witness to the persistence of this concern. At its worst, it produces a sentimental nostalgie de la