Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent
by Gerald Sorin
NYU Press

What makes an intellectual? For some, it seems enough to sit at a laptop in Starbucks. For others it is thick-rimmed glasses, or being caught out with a volume of Henry James, the latest McSweeney's or a twee-rock CD in your Walkman. In any case, it's largely a matter of what one consumes, rather than produces.

At the same time, when pressed, what we really think of as "an intellectual" has become much narrower. For most people, intellectuals reside in universities or think tanks, somewhere outside the mainstream, ensconced in an institutional setting. And so an odd tweaking emerges: Broadly, we can all be intellectuals, simply by playing the part. But on further review, without a graduate degree almost none of us fits the bill.

What we have lost, then, is that great tradition that once dominated the in-between: the public intellectual, the free-floating, sharp-thinking critic of anything and everything that crosses their path, the keeper of the flame passed down from Plato to Montaigne to Mark Twain to Alfred Kazin, to George Orwell and Edmund Wilson. True, some remain, mostly linked in some capacity to magazines or institutes — Leon Wieseltier at The New Republic, Michael Walzer at the Institute for Advanced Studies. Christopher Hitchens' cachet is largely built around the fact that he is one of the few truly freelance intellectuals left. But they're all getting older, and the next generation is not filling the gap.

The reasons are myriad: There are certainly more opportunities for deep thinkers at universities, at law firms and in big business. And the structure of higher education is such that few get the sort of general liberal arts education that produced the great intellectuals of the mid-century. But there are also dwindling opportunities to become a public intellectual in the first place; indeed, even the idea of "becoming" one rings somewhat silly to contemporary ears.

Gerald Sorin's magnificent "Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent," however, gives the impression that things were not always this way. Howe, one of the many Jewish intellectuals to come out of New York's City College in the 1920s and 30s, spent his entire adult life writing literary and political criticism; and while he eventually settled in as a professor (though he never held anything higher than a bachelor's degree), he was always suspicious of the sort of institutionalized knowledge production that academia represented, and that has largely taken over the field he once dominated. Howe found intellectual and financial sustenance instead in the scores of nonacademic yet high-minded journals active before and after World War II. (Imagine not one or two but 20 versions of McSweeney's, of various quality and approaches, available at your local bookstore.)

In the mid-1950s, Howe added to the mix by launching Dissent, a literary and political quarterly dedicated to non-communist, democratic socialism. Howe had been, up into his mid-20s, an ardent communist. But even while still in school, mounting evidence of Stalin's atrocities began pushing him away from those beliefs. In the early 1950s, having dropped all pretense of pro-revolutionary sentiment (and losing a good many friends in the process), Howe — by then on the faculty at Brandeis — sought to create a journal that would defend socialism from the conservative anti-communism borne by the cold war, while at the same time allowing himself and his cohort another avenue for serious literary and cultural analysis. By the end of the decade, Dissent had become a leading intellectual light, and though less read today it remains a bastion of left-wing thought.

Sorin, a professor at CUNY-New Paltz, excellently details the three guiding elements of Howe's life: politics, literature and Judaism. For Howe, the last was the most problematic; like those of many New York Jewish intellectuals, his early life was marked by a distinct, even willed absence of any sense of ethnicity, let alone religion. But as he matured, and until he died in 1993, Howe steadily developed an appreciation for his heritage. Indeed, his most famous and best-selling work, "World of Our Fathers," which tells in lively detail the Jewish immigrant experience, was just part of a larger project to record the cultural history of Yiddishkayt, or the European Jewish culture brought to America at the at the start of the 20th century.

Howe was concerned, above all, with the disappearance of Yiddishkayt, and by the 1980s he was convinced that it had all but died out. But his other lifelong loves, democratic socialism and literary criticism, have also largely fallen away. Democratic socialism — a commitment to social equality and political freedom — has given way to a fractious, impotent Far Left and a limp, New Democrat centrism. And the sort of nuanced yet accessible literary criticism Howe championed has been almost completely overtaken by impenetrable, identity-driven "critical theory," which in turn has driven criticism out of the public mainstream and into the side halls of academia.

And perhaps these extinctions also go to explain the disappearance of the public intellectual. In the mid-1900s, both democratic socialism and literary criticism revolved around notions of shared values and the dominance of Western ideas about politics and aesthetics. But with the emergence of identity politics and the deconstruction of all things "Western" in the 1980s and '90s, it has become much more difficult for someone to claim to speak for or to the "public," whether it be about politics or art. Not surprisingly, in his last decade it is the rise of political correctness and identity politics to which Howe turned his energies, seeing them as a threat to the liberal values and ideas he had spent so much time promoting.

In 1989, Howe told fellow CCNY alum and New York intellectual Sidney Hook that he felt "lonely" in the new world of academia, largely out of tune with his students and unappreciated on the lecture circuit. For Howe, perhaps it was a sign that his time, and his ideas, had passed, even though he remained committed to them as universals. Thanks to Sorin and the continuing success of Dissent, Howe's legacy will not easily be forgotten. But we can also look to his death as a passing of a different sort as well: the death of the public intellectual.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)