![]() ![]() ![]() Intellectuals, by contrast, aim to be “specialists in generalizations,” as another New York intellectual (the sociologist Daniel Bell) once put it, pronouncing on the world from out of their individual experiences, habits of reading and capacity for judgment. In “The New York Intellectuals,” his seminal 1968 essay looking back on the coterie of writers who burst on the scene in the late 1930s and exercised an outsize influence on the American mind until the rise of the New Left in the early ’60s, Irving Howe nicely captured what is distinctive about intellectuals in all times and places.Ĭultivating a “style of brilliance,” the New York writers ranged widely across literature and politics, continually aiming to push beyond the ostensible topics of their essays “toward some encompassing moral or social observation.” When it came to style, they took “pleasure in dispute, dialectic, dazzle,” prized “freelance dash, peacock strut, daring hypothesis, knockabout synthesis,” and “celebrated the idea of the intellectual as antispecialist, or as a writer whose specialty was the lack of a specialty.” All of this made their writing and thinking “radically different from the accepted modes of scholarly publishing and middlebrow journalism.”įor all of their differences in method, scholars and journalists tend to aim in their work for something like impartiality, bracketing their individual idiosyncrasies in favor of a largely selfless pursuit of objectivity through focused, meticulous research. ![]()
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