New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time

by Thomas Bender

Remarkable history -- superb in research, insight, and interpretation... The book is full of fascinations. -- New Yorker

Genres: History, New York

448 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

Reviews

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

An impressive achievement. Bender traces the growth of a metropolitan intellectual culture in New York City from the colonial period to the mid-twentieth century. His survey briefly covers everyone from Cadwallader Colden to Edmund Wilson. (Oddly enough, but refreshingly, he avoids saying much about the "New York Intellectuals" themselves.) The story runs from the genteel amateurism of the Enlightenment, to the magazine culture of the early nineteenth century, to the rise of Progressive social science and the research institutions that entomb it, to the bohemianism of Greenwich Village. It ends in relative disappointment, with New York's magnificent arts culture largely divorced from its languishing postwar social criticism, while specialized universities hoard the city's intellectual resources.

While telling this story, Bender argues that New York possesses a unique intellectual tradition that is inextricable from the life of the city as a whole. This tradition has been at its most powerful when it has been most closely connected with the rest of the local milieu. Paradoxically, though, New York's character is determined largely by the fact that it has a spectacular harbor for commerce. Thus, the city's distinct local flavor comes from its foreignness; its Americanism comes from its cosmopolitanism (in marked contrast with, say, Boston or Chicago); and its intellectual fertility results from its complicity in the pursuit of gain. Thus, the city's intellectual culture has always existed in a very fruitful tension between the particular and the universal, the American and the European, and the professional and the public.

One odd thing about this survey is the fact that Bender, while arguing that New York is especially interesting as an intellectual climate, seems to think the city has never produced an entirely satisfying intellectual. John Dewey comes closest to his ideal -- a man who could thrive both as a specialist and as a public commentator, in and out of universities, and who was distinctly American (qua pragmatist) without being at all provincial. Edmund Wilson also comes close, with his ability to reach a wide public and to engage in careful study of literary particulars in order to evaluate society as a whole. The impression I get is that Bender finds the open-endedness of New York intellectual life both deeply frustrating and absolutely necessary. The essence of New York intellect, the reason that so many powerful minds have roosted in Manhattan, is that there is no single New York intellect.
Likewise, Bender champions both the locatedness and the cosmopolitanism of the New York intellectual -- cosmopolitanism being inextricable from the city's identity.

[Maurice]

A broad overview of the evolution of the intellectual environment of life in the city. It helped me place in the context of their time numerous authors and social commentators, many of whom were unknown to me.