The Twilight of the Intellectuals: Culture and Politics in the Era of the Cold War

For nearly half a century, Hilton Kramer has been closely involved with the political and cultural world of American intellectuals in an age when their character was, as Lionel Trilling once wrote, predominantly of the Left. In this provocative and engaging collection of his essays and reviews, Mr. Kramer explores, in effect, the intellectual history of the cold war and its divisive impact on our politics and culture. We live now, he notes, in the aftermath of an immense intellectual upheaval. Marxism and modernism, which for the most of the century had defined intellectual life in America, have now lost much of the moral authority they long enjoyed. Communism in the Soviet Union and its satellite states has collapsed; modernism is under assault in Western democratic cultures. In this sense, Mr. Kramer observes, we live in the twilight of an intellectual era. Tracing the critical debate that has governed this upheaval in our thinking, Mr. Kramer surveys the writers who were in the forefront of that debate Whittaker Chambers, Lillian Hellman, Sidney Hook, Dwight MacDonald, Mary McCarthy, George Orwell, Clement Greenberg, Susan Sontag, Irving Howe, and others and the issues that animated their criticism and controversies. The Twilight of the Intellectuals is certain to excite comment and argument as passionate as the debate it describes.