What do you think?
Rate this book
Arguing the World: The New York Intellectuals in their Own Words
Joseph Dorman's film Arguing the World won New York Magazine's Best New York Documentary award in 1999 as well as the Peabody Award in 1999. His work has also appeared on The Discovery Channel, CBS, and CNN, and has been nominated for two Emmy Awards.
Joseph Dorman's acclaimed documentary, Arguing the World , included stunning interviews with Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, and Nathan Glazer. Now with a new preface, Dorman converted the film into this book that includes an overview of the New York Intellectuals and a chapter on the future of the public intellectual. Expertly spliced together from the film and new material, this book gives the sense that these men are still engaged in their fiery debates that targeted everything from the Depression to McCarthyism to the rise of the New Left through the Age of Reagan.
Joseph Dorman's acclaimed documentary, Arguing the World , included stunning interviews with Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, and Nathan Glazer. Now with a new preface, Dorman converted the film into this book that includes an overview of the New York Intellectuals and a chapter on the future of the public intellectual. Expertly spliced together from the film and new material, this book gives the sense that these men are still engaged in their fiery debates that targeted everything from the Depression to McCarthyism to the rise of the New Left through the Age of Reagan.
240 pages, Paperback
First published August 15, 2000
2 people are currently reading
47 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 11, 2018
Good book. Certain discussions or threads in this book might seem to be discussed or analyzed only superficially. But I've read this book several times and it's given me much to think about. The interviewees occasionally proffer deep or sublime observations on the era they lived thru.
12/1/18
================================
excerpts:
William Phillips:
[The communists] were concerned only with their schematic notions of political organization. And we felt that if radicalism is to have any meaning, any value, to be desirable in any way, to be fulfilling in any way, it had to come together with and represent, in a way, the farthest reaches and the most profound forms of modern consciousness. It couldn't simply be something that ignored these things. And if it ignored these things, then in ways in fact that we couldn't foresee completely, it was bound to distort political and human existence. I hate to use a word that's become cliché by now but we thought that these writers whom I'm calling Modernists reflected the complexity and the alienation of modern life. There's no point in creating a better world or a new world which the left or the Communists claim to be concerned with if you aren't trying to perpetuate the best values of this world. If you are simply negating what seemed to be the most profound and the most interesting and the most humane values of this world, then what's the point of creating another world?
=========================
Daniel Bell:
Tom Hayden came to see me after he graduated Michigan. He'd read {Bell’s book} The End of Ideology, he was curious. And he was sort of caught between Wright Mills and myself—those were his two poles, in a way. And clearly, he chose Mills. But what struck me most about Hayden, apart from the personality of the man, which I never liked—someone once called him the Richard Nixon of the left, which I think is a very good appellation for Hayden—was that these {New Leftists} were people who had lost a sense of historical memory. The thirties were sort of lost in the fog, the fifties were confused for them, and they thought they were coming out of themselves. They had no feeling for Stalinism, they had no feeling for things we'd gone through in this way and there was a hubris of being new.
=========================
Irving Kristol:
I thought, my goodness, we're getting a replay of an old movie. I had nothing against those young people. Most of them were young socialists or would have been young socialists. I thought their political program was Utopian—in and of itself, harmless. And I thought they had some reason to be upset about the condition of American society. And particularly the conditions of the universities—which had become huge bureaucratic, impersonal institutions. But, at its origins it was suburban radicalism, a phenomenon that was alien to me. We were born of the Great Depression. They came out of affluent suburbs, for the most part. Their parents had made it. So the situation was quite different. I mean, we really feel we suffered deprivation unnecessarily because the system should have worked better than it did. Their resentment was much more ambitious. They wanted to change the world. Well, in the end, we decided we wanted to change the world, too, but I think we had better incentive to change the world than they did.
================
Todd Gitlin:
We weren't afraid of the Depression, and in fact, we were sort of tired of hearing about it from our parents. We were the children of the Cold War, not of fascism. We didn't feel the immigrant's sense of relief at having arrived in a country which was supportive, and where you could live. We were more easily revolted by the fatuousness, the plastic quality, the racism of the culture. The Bomb was a much worse danger to us than any Communist regime. We thought we were in an unprecedented historical situation. We thought the existence of the Bomb set us aside. The Bomb had driven a knife through history, and we were now faced with the possibility of the end of humanity, and therefore, no one who had been born much before us, no one who had a memory before Hiroshima, could possibly understand the anguish we felt.
=========================
Daniel Bell:
I've said repeatedly that people always hunger for an emotional creed. And therefore, there will always be a search for new ideologies to that extent. If one conceives of ideology as a kind of joining of a world map with a mission, there will always be these kinds of hungers. The crucial point I was trying to make was that up until the 18th century, roughly the French Revolution as a kind of symbolic turning point, most of the politics were basically cast in religious terms. You have religious wars. Even though there were political interests, the terminologies were religious. What you have after the French Revolution was a crossover, namely that terminology was now political, but often the impulses were religious: messianic, eschatological, apocalyptic. And what I was saying with The End of Ideology is that the impulse in which you now had purely a political terminology for these religious impulses was probably finished intellectually.
===============
Tom Hayden:
The phrase "participatory democracy" came from a professor of philosophy in Ann Arbor, Arnold Kaufman, who was kind of a mentor to many of us. I think it was a label that helped us enormously in trying to give some theoretical foundation to what we were talking about. All it really meant was a greater emphasis on direct democracy from the bottom up, instead of representative democracy where you rely more and more on incumbent politicians or bureaucrats to solve your problems for you. But it was also a style. It meant that movements were more important than bureaucracies, and people were more important than experts in generating the conditions for social change, and it meant that movement organizations should be participatory, rather than hierarchical. This put us squarely in the tradition of Native Americans, Quakers, Transcendentalists, Romantics, and all kinds of populist traditions in America. Our parents had built some material opportunities for success that the world hadn't seen, but had left us without identity or without a spiritual anchor in a world of trouble. Participatory democracy gave us a certain base to argue from, morally and politically.
=========================
Nathan Glazer:
The Vietnam War was a very painful, difficult situation, but when the young critics of the Vietnam War—and I was a critic all the way, from the very beginning to the very end, wrote articles, joined organizations, and so on—looked at the matter as some kind of attempt of American capitalism to save itself, I thought that this was just stupid. We {Old Leftists} thought the United States on the whole was a good society. It may have taken us a while to get to that point, but we did. We thought its political structure was right and we thought its economic structure was sound enough. We thought its opportunities for the poor and the underprivileged and minorities were extensive and were right and we thought it was moving in the right direction of extending these opportunities. When we saw this attack launched in the most extreme terms, we simply didn't understand what they were arguing about or what they were fighting about. The critique they launched of the United States was something we simply could not accept. And yet they had gone through a process whereby they had moved to this kind of extreme criticism, which then also began to extol violence as a way of getting rid of this terrible society.
=========================
Irving Howe:
We felt very strongly that by 1968 or so, the New Left people were not engaged in intellectual dialogue or debate or political struggle with us. They were out to destroy our bona fides. They were out to deny that we had a right to exist. The New Left spoke of confrontation. It was not as if they were confronting the board of directors of GM. They were confronting, most of the time, liberal professors. They were choosing very much their own targets. They were confronting precisely the people they should have been trying to form alliances with, who had in fact a certain sympathy with them, at least initially. We were against the Vietnam War, but we around Dissent had no illusions about the regime in North Vietnam. The differences became very sharp and very acute, and I had some bitter, difficult experiences on various campuses where I was booed by the New Left, which did not exactly develop into civility of discourse. Their confrontations were a form of sectarianism and they suggested a spirit of intolerance that would only end in self-destruction.
=========================
Todd Gitlin:
I think there was something going on which was maybe not so fully thought out—and it was part of a larger tendency, within the movement of those years—to think that we could go it alone. Because liberalism was fundamentally tainted, because institutions seemed fundamentally corrupt, because normal American life seemed so barbaric, or fatuous, or unsatisfying or unsexy, or stultifying that if you succeeded, in style, in culture, in way of life, in temperament, in relationships, that you could, in a sense, found yourself a new nation. And that nation would fight, as nations had traditionally fought, for self-determination. By toughing it out. I think there was this subterranean sense that it was possible to start the world all over again.
=========================
Irving Howe:
The most tragic consequence of the New Left was what it erased. There was a very great deal of idealism among tens of thousands of young people. Some of it remains, but a lot of it has been destroyed. A lot of it has died out and gone sour. It also, I think, created a very bad series of political backlashes. These kids had an extraordinary gift for knowing how to use and manipulate the American mass media. They were probably responsible in some sense or to some degree for the election of Richard Nixon. The New Left were the ones who created an atmosphere in which people reacted strongly against it and ultimately turned to the right.
12/1/18
================================
excerpts:
William Phillips:
[The communists] were concerned only with their schematic notions of political organization. And we felt that if radicalism is to have any meaning, any value, to be desirable in any way, to be fulfilling in any way, it had to come together with and represent, in a way, the farthest reaches and the most profound forms of modern consciousness. It couldn't simply be something that ignored these things. And if it ignored these things, then in ways in fact that we couldn't foresee completely, it was bound to distort political and human existence. I hate to use a word that's become cliché by now but we thought that these writers whom I'm calling Modernists reflected the complexity and the alienation of modern life. There's no point in creating a better world or a new world which the left or the Communists claim to be concerned with if you aren't trying to perpetuate the best values of this world. If you are simply negating what seemed to be the most profound and the most interesting and the most humane values of this world, then what's the point of creating another world?
=========================
Daniel Bell:
Tom Hayden came to see me after he graduated Michigan. He'd read {Bell’s book} The End of Ideology, he was curious. And he was sort of caught between Wright Mills and myself—those were his two poles, in a way. And clearly, he chose Mills. But what struck me most about Hayden, apart from the personality of the man, which I never liked—someone once called him the Richard Nixon of the left, which I think is a very good appellation for Hayden—was that these {New Leftists} were people who had lost a sense of historical memory. The thirties were sort of lost in the fog, the fifties were confused for them, and they thought they were coming out of themselves. They had no feeling for Stalinism, they had no feeling for things we'd gone through in this way and there was a hubris of being new.
=========================
Irving Kristol:
I thought, my goodness, we're getting a replay of an old movie. I had nothing against those young people. Most of them were young socialists or would have been young socialists. I thought their political program was Utopian—in and of itself, harmless. And I thought they had some reason to be upset about the condition of American society. And particularly the conditions of the universities—which had become huge bureaucratic, impersonal institutions. But, at its origins it was suburban radicalism, a phenomenon that was alien to me. We were born of the Great Depression. They came out of affluent suburbs, for the most part. Their parents had made it. So the situation was quite different. I mean, we really feel we suffered deprivation unnecessarily because the system should have worked better than it did. Their resentment was much more ambitious. They wanted to change the world. Well, in the end, we decided we wanted to change the world, too, but I think we had better incentive to change the world than they did.
================
Todd Gitlin:
We weren't afraid of the Depression, and in fact, we were sort of tired of hearing about it from our parents. We were the children of the Cold War, not of fascism. We didn't feel the immigrant's sense of relief at having arrived in a country which was supportive, and where you could live. We were more easily revolted by the fatuousness, the plastic quality, the racism of the culture. The Bomb was a much worse danger to us than any Communist regime. We thought we were in an unprecedented historical situation. We thought the existence of the Bomb set us aside. The Bomb had driven a knife through history, and we were now faced with the possibility of the end of humanity, and therefore, no one who had been born much before us, no one who had a memory before Hiroshima, could possibly understand the anguish we felt.
=========================
Daniel Bell:
I've said repeatedly that people always hunger for an emotional creed. And therefore, there will always be a search for new ideologies to that extent. If one conceives of ideology as a kind of joining of a world map with a mission, there will always be these kinds of hungers. The crucial point I was trying to make was that up until the 18th century, roughly the French Revolution as a kind of symbolic turning point, most of the politics were basically cast in religious terms. You have religious wars. Even though there were political interests, the terminologies were religious. What you have after the French Revolution was a crossover, namely that terminology was now political, but often the impulses were religious: messianic, eschatological, apocalyptic. And what I was saying with The End of Ideology is that the impulse in which you now had purely a political terminology for these religious impulses was probably finished intellectually.
===============
Tom Hayden:
The phrase "participatory democracy" came from a professor of philosophy in Ann Arbor, Arnold Kaufman, who was kind of a mentor to many of us. I think it was a label that helped us enormously in trying to give some theoretical foundation to what we were talking about. All it really meant was a greater emphasis on direct democracy from the bottom up, instead of representative democracy where you rely more and more on incumbent politicians or bureaucrats to solve your problems for you. But it was also a style. It meant that movements were more important than bureaucracies, and people were more important than experts in generating the conditions for social change, and it meant that movement organizations should be participatory, rather than hierarchical. This put us squarely in the tradition of Native Americans, Quakers, Transcendentalists, Romantics, and all kinds of populist traditions in America. Our parents had built some material opportunities for success that the world hadn't seen, but had left us without identity or without a spiritual anchor in a world of trouble. Participatory democracy gave us a certain base to argue from, morally and politically.
=========================
Nathan Glazer:
The Vietnam War was a very painful, difficult situation, but when the young critics of the Vietnam War—and I was a critic all the way, from the very beginning to the very end, wrote articles, joined organizations, and so on—looked at the matter as some kind of attempt of American capitalism to save itself, I thought that this was just stupid. We {Old Leftists} thought the United States on the whole was a good society. It may have taken us a while to get to that point, but we did. We thought its political structure was right and we thought its economic structure was sound enough. We thought its opportunities for the poor and the underprivileged and minorities were extensive and were right and we thought it was moving in the right direction of extending these opportunities. When we saw this attack launched in the most extreme terms, we simply didn't understand what they were arguing about or what they were fighting about. The critique they launched of the United States was something we simply could not accept. And yet they had gone through a process whereby they had moved to this kind of extreme criticism, which then also began to extol violence as a way of getting rid of this terrible society.
=========================
Irving Howe:
We felt very strongly that by 1968 or so, the New Left people were not engaged in intellectual dialogue or debate or political struggle with us. They were out to destroy our bona fides. They were out to deny that we had a right to exist. The New Left spoke of confrontation. It was not as if they were confronting the board of directors of GM. They were confronting, most of the time, liberal professors. They were choosing very much their own targets. They were confronting precisely the people they should have been trying to form alliances with, who had in fact a certain sympathy with them, at least initially. We were against the Vietnam War, but we around Dissent had no illusions about the regime in North Vietnam. The differences became very sharp and very acute, and I had some bitter, difficult experiences on various campuses where I was booed by the New Left, which did not exactly develop into civility of discourse. Their confrontations were a form of sectarianism and they suggested a spirit of intolerance that would only end in self-destruction.
=========================
Todd Gitlin:
I think there was something going on which was maybe not so fully thought out—and it was part of a larger tendency, within the movement of those years—to think that we could go it alone. Because liberalism was fundamentally tainted, because institutions seemed fundamentally corrupt, because normal American life seemed so barbaric, or fatuous, or unsatisfying or unsexy, or stultifying that if you succeeded, in style, in culture, in way of life, in temperament, in relationships, that you could, in a sense, found yourself a new nation. And that nation would fight, as nations had traditionally fought, for self-determination. By toughing it out. I think there was this subterranean sense that it was possible to start the world all over again.
=========================
Irving Howe:
The most tragic consequence of the New Left was what it erased. There was a very great deal of idealism among tens of thousands of young people. Some of it remains, but a lot of it has been destroyed. A lot of it has died out and gone sour. It also, I think, created a very bad series of political backlashes. These kids had an extraordinary gift for knowing how to use and manipulate the American mass media. They were probably responsible in some sense or to some degree for the election of Richard Nixon. The New Left were the ones who created an atmosphere in which people reacted strongly against it and ultimately turned to the right.
February 25, 2017
We need these guys.
Read
March 26, 2010Arguing the World: The New York Intellectuals in Their Own Words by Joseph Dorman (2000)
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews