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Mind Loss |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Larry D. Nachman |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 6/1/1991 |
| Size: 2,920 Words, 18,155 Characters |
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THE CYNICAL SOCIETY
The Culture of Politics and the Politics
of Culture in American Life
Jeffrey C. Goldfarb
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991
216 pp., $22.50
In the last two decades, as American liberals have moved to the left, the American voter has moved to the right. Even further to the left are American intellectuals whose current dominance of American colleges and universities has not brought them any closer to convincing the electorate to accept their vision of the world. Moreover, that dominance of the academy has meant that many intellectuals do not, in their daily lives, have to defend their positions against fundamental criticism. Conservatives, and even centrists, are relatively rare in the American academy. Intellectuals of the Left have become accustomed to participation in a narrow debate that rarely touches first principles and that frequently fails to meet even elementary standards of proof and evidence. There are, to be sure, many formidable intellectuals on the Left. One thinks of Irving Howe, Michael Walzer, James Miller, Christopher Lasch, and Eugene Genovese. But much of what passes for "politically correct" today is dreary and repetitive. By its very institutional success, American radicalism has lost much of its intellectual audacity and originality.
Jeffrey Goldfarb's The Cynical Society is not a very good book. It is, however, interesting in its flaws. This work of a sociologist is of sociological interest. It exemplifies, I think, much of what is lacking in the contemporary academic Left.
Do conservatives believe what they say?
American politics and culture are corrupted, Goldfarb contends, by cynicism. He writes:
I believe that the single most pressing challenge facing American democracy today is widesp...
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...ot permitted to be questioned. In every instance, it may be that Goldfarb's principles are true and Bloom's wrong. But in order to attain that conviction and in order to have a clear perception and lively impression of such truths, there must be a clash of arguments. As long as one of the positions is dismissed as mere cynicism, not even believed by its author, such a clash cannot take place.
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
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articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
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a new issue online each month. |
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