The House of Intellect

by Jacques Barzun

In this international bestseller, originally published in 1959, Jacques Barzun, acclaimed author of From Dawn to Decadence, takes on the whole intellectual -- or pseudo-intellectual -- world, attacking it for its betrayal of Intellect. "Intellect is despised and neglected," Barzun says, "yet intellectuals are well paid and riding high." He details this great betrayal in such areas as public administrations, communications, conversation and home life, education, business, and scholarship.

In this edition's new Preface, Jacques Barzun discussess the intense -- and controversial -- reaction the world had to The House of Intellect.

Genres: Philosophy, Education, Nonfiction, History, Cultural, Essays, Sociology

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1959

About the author

Works of French-American educator, author, and historian Jacques Martin Barzun include Darwin, Marx, Wagner (see Charles Robert Darwin, Karl Marx, and Richard Wagner) (1941) and The American University (1968).

He presented ideas and culture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques...

Reviews

[Lobstergirl · Rating 2 out of 5]

The fact that I agree with Barzun on some of his complaints didn't make this any less of an irritating and sluggish read. His 1959 criticisms of the U.S. educational system seem timeless - a paragraph about a very high-achieving, self-confident, magna cum laude graduate of a leading university whom he nonetheless gives three failing grades in a row for her weekly historiography papers, causing her to weep distressedly because no professor had ever given her less than an A- before, could have been written about today's students - but Barzun's writing style has not aged well. Overall I found this book to be a morass.

[Ari · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a spectacular book. The premise is "our society no longer values sustained, disciplined, learned thought ("Intellect") as much as it used to and as much as it ought". The successive chapters trace the causes and effects of this decline. It is intensely polemical, but well grounded in the author's experience as as senior university administrator and public intellectual. The tone is by turns arch and reverential; I found myself repeatedly marking out especially lovely passages. But it's so very hard to know where to start or stop excerpting -- the mark of a well-crafted piece of prose.

"Intellect, far from being a cause of anxious agitation, should calm and compose the soul. It should preserve from the fatiguing indignation of the overpolitical and from the ideological drugs with which they repair exhaustion. Through its power to name and remember, it should safeguard the living minutes from the inanities of trumpery art. In dealing with would-be science, with education, with benevolent undertakings, with new religions and new thoughts, it should protect against facile enthusiasms, exaggerated estimates, and the disillusion to follow -- no small advantage in a time when so much effort goes into refurbishing ancient fraud and a new foolishness with a modish glamour; and when excessive information gives everyone the gullibility of the learned, far more dangerous than the gullibility of the innocent. For the innocent see things in their nakedness and call them by the only names they know. In a word, Intellect is the broom with which to clear the mind of cant."

[Harooon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intellect is what Jacques Barzun calls the social force that moves outwards from those people and activities and forms and habits of the mind. It is distinct from intelligence or intellectuals themselves, being the social product of those things. It is the whole range of institutions and thinkers which give the mind vitality and direction in civilisation - by which Barzun, for all intents and purposes, means western civilisation.

Intellect is the link between knowledge and action, the sort of “direct, responsible judgement” (245) that lets us see many elements, impressions, objects, and ideas in a tangible reality. It shows us which desires are worthy goals. It safeguards “the living minutes” from trumperies and quackeries, would-be science and new religion. And in “the impulse of art and religion, the love of colour and shape, song and storytelling”, it makes life on this rugged planet liveable.

Because Intellect is a social phenomenon, it is like a house, being fundamentally constructed and therefore in need of maintenance and upkeep. If not looked after, it will collapse.

Writing in 1959, Barzun saw Intellect being undermined by “art”, “science”, and “philanthropy” - these I put in quotes because Barzun is not criticising art, science, and philanthropy, only stating that they have their proper realms and work best when they have a healthy respect for each other. Life, as a whole, is far broader than any one of those one things. Barzun readily admits that. Dealing in generalities and abstractions, Intellect can only “take notes on the unstoppable flux”, while life “convinces by throbbing in your veins or panting in your face.” (163, 168).

This undermining was happening in public conduct, in private manners, in conversation, in the raising of children, and in the changing purpose of schooling - especially higher education, in which Barzun was involved for many years as a professor at Columbia College, New York. These changing norms were echoes of a shift from a hierarchical, elitist, republican civilisation towards one that was liberal and egalitarian, with power and legitimacy issuing from the fickle temperament of democratic mass-man.

For example, intellectual conversation began to be seen as an exchange: “A delivers an opinion while B thinks of the one he will inject as soon as he decently can… we offer a formula and are offered another, but generally go off with our own.” (60). Barzun prefers the ideal of sifting: “to develop tenable positions by alternate statements, objections, modifications, examples, arguments, distinctions, expressed with the aid of the rhetorical arts…” (61).

This change happened because mass man, with his mass education, finds contradiction uneasy. In democratic society there are few universal sources of accepted authority. Each person is left to their own pursuit of meaning. He is therefore morally - totally - responsible for whatever garbage comes out of his mouth, so a good deal of his conversations seek harmony through agreement and anxiously forfend offence.

In political debates, “intellectual forms have been replaced by psychological ploys.” (57). Debates are undermined by an over-sensitivity to conflict: we are “quick to suspect hidden bias, to note an odd turn, to assess unconscious motives in spoken and written words.” (57).

Moreso than in 1959, I would say much of this continues to be true. How many political debates turn around one person trapping another into saying something unconscionable or indefensible? How often do journalists inject themselves into an interview or debate to spring the dreaded “gotcha” on the unprepared politician? Debates are about credibility and public relations, and only secondarily about politics or ideas.

The decline of political discourse is an eternal theme of democracy. Barzun does not feel the need to justify it beyond pointing to the highlight of the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debate, in which Lincoln and Douglas spoke directly to everyday people for 30-90 minutes at a time about complex moral and constitutional issues like slavery and federalism. I can’t imagine any politician today being able to speak off-the-cuff for that long, not without an army of communications and PR experts behind them. What would Barzun have made of the brawling spectacle that was the Trump-Clinton debates?

Democratic society has abdicated power in many spheres of life. Authority and discipline are intolerable concepts to mass-man, who disavows all hierarchies; power is only to be wielded by faceless bureaucracies, never vested in specific persons.

So we busily discuss, plan, and plot - but never do. Our professional lives are dominated by pseudo-work. Committees and working groups form to discuss problems. Deadlines, goals, and aspirations are set. Political round-tables analyse the hottest takes of the day. Chairs and panels talk around and around and around an issue without ever coming to a definite conclusion. We want services, platforms, forums - intermediate areas that merely convey substance, rather than creating it. The infinite hui is the order of the day.

Authority has also receded from the family. Barzun saw something inevitable - perhaps even admirable - in youth rebellion, but its “proper and useful antagonist” is paternitas, not society. Without this clash, “tortured self-consciousness” cannot give way to “a self-aware reason for living.” hence the phenomenon of juvenile delinquency: “The young enlist and fight, without asking of the ugly world they inherited whether anybody ever received it fresh, perfect, and beautiful.” (81).

In teaching, the loss of authority replaces “instruction” with “education”. This has a more humane, egalitarian, inclusive ring to it, but also demands less. Instruction requires that, by a certain point, the student demonstrates a basic level of competence in their subject: “this you must know, now and forever”. (123). This is not the be-all-end-all, but it is the point at which a student’s professional calling begins. Education, on the other hand, frets about relevance, emphasising methods and what we would today call critical thinking to try and equip students to handle any situation they might encounter in the messy flux of the real world.

I don’t see the dichotomy so starkly. Both kinds of learning - instruction and education - reinforce each other. But I do think Barzun’s broader point - that education has undermined instruction - is a fair one. Curricula are eternally revised, expanded, widened, stuffed with more concepts and learning outcomes. Frameworks, methods, and approaches are preferred to deep study on concrete topics.

Barzun’s point is a simple one: how can education prepare us for the real world better than the real world itself? The academic sphere is for learning academic things. Education is cherished not so much for its promise of spiritual self-emancipation so much as for being the universal pathway to a stable upper-middle-class life.

This merely turns education into an industry. The education system takes teachers and students and money as inputs, and produces graduates as outputs, cranking them out to meet the demand for knowledge workers. Systems of credits and courses and points “permit an education to be made out of interchangeable parts.” (142).

Are schools mere “equalizers of merit”, a lever that society pulls in order to close outcomes or raise incomes? Or are they where students learn the fundamentals and are helped and encouraged towards their calling?

The question is not about kindness, but about instruction: is the school a place of teaching or of psychologizing? Is it to prolong vicariously the parents’ love of innocence and act out their dream of a good society, or is it to impart literacy? And are we to wait till after the PhD to get it? When, finally, is the school to sort out types of mind, and, assuming that all can read, write, and count, enable each kind to acquire the facts and principles relevant to their calling and their tastes? (141).

Barzun has kind words for European-style selection, wherein students are streamed into different kinds of schools based on their affinities. In 1959, the grammar schools were still widespread in England. This was the academic track, but there was also a technical track for more hands-on subjects. Barzun preferred this kind of system to the American one, which has its origin in the need to socialise young boys and girls into good, democratic Americans.

Nowadays grammar schools are seen as vestiges of elitism. I don’t think Barzun would deny the charge of being an elitist; standards are, after all, what allow us to look up to experts with confidence. But he is very clear that Intellect must stay in his own lane. His is a liberal elitism, not a caste of philosopher-kings. The ideal stance on Intellect pushes it in two directions at once, diminishing it socially, but cherishing it personally. So for instance we ought to cleave Intellect from politics, with the tempestuous nations of France and South America being examples of what happens when politicking elevates itself to lofty high regard on the back of big ideas.

Intellect flourishes when it resists the whimsies of temperament and has a healthy disdain for worldly power. But we should not confuse this disdain for Intellect itself, as art has done. Art, writes Barzun, is now “reaction in spite of seeming to be innovation.” It “no longer claims attention for its clear meaning or its particular form, but simply for its general property of being art, which today means denouncing the universal wrong.” (168). This, ironically, is a surrender to worldly forces: it does not turn its back on power, but merely persuades it to serve a different cause.

One view of the humanities begins and ends with the slogan, “the critic and conscience of society.” This is like the artist who tries to wield power through denouncing the universal wrong. It denies any special relevance of the humanities to our inner life, and hides us from its discoveries; “meaning” is something we expect to find for ourselves, and don’t feel comfortable sharing - lest your meaning turn out to be different from mine. On this view, the humanities matter only insofar as their powers can be conscripted to right wrongs and incite the masses to discontent.

Society has torn down the castles in which eggheads and scribblers once hid away. For funding and upkeep, Intellect has had to become a business - or beg philanthropy. Linking education to pecuniary gain like this is a dangerous gamble. Barzun issues a chilly warning about the now universal practice of borrowing money for a university education. He called this “venture capital for social change,” (200), a practice that would ultimately cement our view of education as merely a financial investment in one’s social mobility. Yet beyond nostalgia for the patronage system of old Europe, he offers no alternatives.

By forcing schools and universities to fend for themselves - and thereby linking them to pecuniary gain - education has become like a business or a factory. Students pay and show up and expect to get something out of it - not just an education, but a life experience. And university administrators - who outnumber the actual professors - are hesitant not to give the students what they paid for. It’s little surprise that enrolments in the humanities around the world are declining, with some universities slashing their departments; the value of humanities was never in its promise of fabulous wealth, but sadly that is what education requires it to offer.

The students suffer too. They are lumped with a big loan that is not always easy to pay off. In New Zealand, most have to work part-time to afford their living costs, which means they aren’t devoting their full attention to their studies. Universities say you should be studying full-time, but most aren’t. It’s one of those fictions we all keep up to invest what we’re doing with some kind of significance beyond dollars.

This has only been exacerbated in the strange age of coronavirus. A “lecture” is now a Zoom call. Each person has their screen turned off, and is too shy to answer questions. They are probably multi-tasking in another window while their bored lecturer reads his slides off verbatim into his webcam.

Some go the next step and try to automate the lecturers away. It’s nice to know that this has always been the case: Barzun lampoons those who believed we could just replace professors with VCRs. Baffling as that sounds, it’s no less silly than the reality for my 11 year old sister today, who is not taught a subject in a classroom, but rather completes a self-directed course of study in an open office (let’s call the “classroom of tomorrow” what it really is). How can a child possibly know what to teach herself? Barzun might see this as another case of the abdication of authority: educators that are too scared to definitively tell their students what they need to know.

The decline of Intellect has made teachers less valuable. They not only have a (relatively) low pay, but also a (relatively) low standing in society. “Research” professors get far less glory than “teaching” professors, with these being seen as two different career paths, rather than two facets of the same thing.

Sure we admire the work of teachers, but we are hardly willing to let them carry it out. They are not only expected to be teachers, but also daycarers, role-models, first-line therapists, social workers, and parent figures. Civil servants and politicians can only alleviate their burdens with more funding, more education, more learning outcomes. If this succeeds, it is only in increasing throughput; the industrial character of education stays the same. “If education were milk we should never imagine that we could increase the supply by adding water… governments expect to buy research and ideas in the same way as it buys soap and chairs.” (204, 206).

Our studies continue to splinter into numerous sub-fields and sub-disciplines, which Barzun called “the gangrene of specialisation”. This temptation replaces the creative work of Intellect with the obsessive-compulsive rhythm of a sewing machine. For while truth draws upon facts, figures, and research, its gaze is ultimately fixed on the interconnected whole. Specialisation, on the other hand, is a kind of pedantry, a morbid anxiety of small error and imprecision:

What critics and specialists do to one another, with all the certitude that a reference library inspires, seems like upholding the standards of accuracy, but in fact accuracy is only tangentially concerned. For accuracy is of the whole as well as of detail, and the fear of error - as against the zeal for truth - yields only a lesser correctness, desirable no doubt, but insufficient and sometimes negligible. (249).

The same mindset governs our speech, conversation, and debates. People are deathly afraid of giving offence or risking a slightly too-narrow claim. Words have all the hard corners smoothed off, so as not to hurt anyone with the sharp ends, or offer any surface for an opponent to grasp.

Barzun gives a humorous example of a train announcement: “Luncheon is being served. Please take your transportation with you.” (237). “Transportation” here means “ticket”, but a more general term was chosen because some people have tickets, some cash, some passes, etc. “Therefore, thinks the pedant, if we say: ‘Take your ticket with you',’ somebody may think ‘I have no ticket,’ and will be unable to carry out the instruction.” (237).

Such writing is not just clumsy, it damages our thoughts. “Depth, surface, unity, technique are not mere aspects of an unchanging core of thought. They are the incarnations of thought itself.” (37). Nowadays we tend to think the opposite, that our words are mere symbolic representations of ideas, which in themselves have no special powers of discovery. I am whole-heartedly with Barzun on this one: writing, both its act and its final shape and form, helps to order our thoughts and settle our minds. Indeed, that’s why I write book reviews.

A modern reader is likely to see The House of Intellect as being in the same vein as Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind or Lukianoff and Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind. It can be read as an early entry in the culture wars, but its scope is far broader, with Barzun seeing the fate of Intellect linked to the overall trajectory of western civilisation. In this it foreshadows From Dawn Till Decadence.

Barzun sometimes leans on his erudition where more facts or figures would have lent greater substance to his argument. Many of his examples are drawn from personal correspondence or the New York Times. These are too light and specific for the society-wide claims being made, though they are helpful counter-weights to Barzun’s annoying tendency to personify every abstract noun as some great force of history: not just art, philanthropy, or intellect, but Art, Philanthropy, Intellect… I question what the book gained from this kind of framing. It’s not even a useful mnemonic, since a good deal of its content has nothing to do with these.

Barzun’s grumpiness runs away on him. He lambasts how, when the TV show Sunrise Semester invited viewers to read Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, bookstores in New York were “raided” for copies. “Here was a marvelous but difficult, inhospitable book being scrambled for in utter ignorance of its contents.” (13). I struggle to find anything wrong with this. Even if you come to the classics as a matter of intellectual fashion, you still have to take the first step to pick them up.

Other tedious asides overpower his main argument with arcane and snobby hot-takes on aesthetics. For example, in defending the importance of the written form, he claims the Gelehrte style of writing in German “not only hampered its literature, but both the prose and the literature helped ruin German politics and thought.” (244). This mysterious point is never explained; like Barzun’s equally tenuous claim that Latin American instability is due to its marriage of Intellect and politics, it is little more than a distracting caricature.

Yet despite these faults, Barzun is an extremely elegant writer with many profound observations. Intellect, as he describes it, hardly exists anymore - if, indeed, it ever did. Yet he makes a compelling case for it as an ideal, and shows us how precious intellectual life is. In that regard, The House of Intellect is a well-crafted point of comparison with today. Even for 1959, Barzun is something of a delightful anachronism, a telescope into a faraway age of genius and gentleman.

[Dustyn Hessie · Rating 4 out of 5]

People are calling THIS book pretentious? I don't understand. These concepts are as easy to grasp as any other... In fact, I'd say the writing is superb, in that, I got something out of almost every page of it.

Barzun's stance is basically that intellectuals (philosophers, artists, vanguard practitioners, etc.) are facing a difficult dilemma, especially in academia: In one corner the intellectual can coerce into academia and become another government tool, albeit, a financially stable and social one; and in the other corner, the intellectual can manifest his/her own destiny and face the risk of being scorned by an institutionalized public that has been taught to coax these historically eccentric hyper-intellectuals into coercion, and risk the financial benefits of being owned by the government. That is an extremely important principal that has become only more of a problem since the date of publication.

Barzun warned us an impending endemic of a pseudo-democratic-anti-intellectualism-society and now we have one.

If American human creativity wants to have any place in this world in the future America must foster it's talents wisely. Barzun hits most things right on the mark in terms of this problem.

My personal response to it that I know people who have children at an early age (and drug-abusers, and even ex-prisoners) -- they have more housing/welfare opportunities that say, a struggling autonomous intellectual, or a gifted artist. Or worse yet, there are millions and millions of people who've based their lives on coercion and maintain the pretense of a dull character. Yet, they are granted a job on spot because of their uncritical demeanors. Intellectuals are critical and delve into the history of things and try to understand them: hence, an unwillingness to work for lackluster companies, or unethical institutions (most jobs fall under one of these categories, sadly).

Overall, this book was easily digestible. But, I read a sizable amount of philosophy. Barzun has some of the most fluid writing I've ever encountered in philosophy (more so than Foucault, Chomsky or Derrida especially). And not only that, but his ideas are good, but not always feasible (in this book he stated that the Top 5 percent should be sheltered in universities -- FIRST and FOREMOST -- as if that were an ideal situation... -- (but that's a rare exception)).

[Tom Pepper · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a frightening book, but worth reading if you want to understand the kind of thinking that went into creating the disastrous school system we have today. Barzun was fairly influential in American education, as the provost of Columbia, and his book Teacher in America is still popular with educators today. So it's good to get a look at the kind of disturbing fascistic ideas that underly his educational theories.

Barzun wants to maintain a distinction between "intellect" and "intelligence," with the former meaning something like the ability of the ruling class to produce a hegemonic ideology. The goal of "intellect," he tells us, is to enable some people to escape "duties such as fighting and tilling the soil," and to leave such unpleasantness to what he refers to as the "untutored masses." The great enemies of "intellect" are art, science, democracy, increased literacy, and human kindness. If we could just get rid of those, and bring back servants (he is very distressed that intellectuals have to do things like prepare their own breakfast) then the world would be restored to the glory days of 19th-century England, when the poor knew their place and only the very wealthy could publish books and run for political office!

This all helps make more sense of the mess American education is in--educators idolized this guy for decades (some still do). "Intelligence," then, is just technical problem-solving ability, useful to make workers more productive but not to be confused with "intellect," which must produce the general shared beliefs and values that the "untutored masses" should accept without question--ideas which must be kept impervious to threats from scientific truth, political and economic thought, and the unfortunate desire of more and more people to "join the Great Conversation," which is the privilege of the powerful and those ideologues who work for them. No wonder teachers today mostly confuse doing math fast with "critical thought."

As I said, a scary book, since Barzun was in a position of influence in higher education for so many years. But worth looking at to understand the thinking that got us where we are today.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Summary: A discussion of the decline of the intellect and its causes.

It is fashionable in higher educational circles these days to decry the decline of intellectual life. Jacques Barzun, a patrician educator, professor of history and Dean at Columbia was doing that in 1959. What was striking to me was the continuity between what he wrote and our situation over sixty years later.

Barzun would define intellect as the basics of communication from the alphabet to the conventions of the clear articulation and argumentation of idea, disciplinary ideas and habits and more. He explains his idea of intellect as follows:

“That part of the world I call the House of the Intellect embraces at least three groups of subjects: the persons who consciously and methodically employ the mind; the forms and habits governing the activities in which the mind is so employed; and the conditions under which these people and activities exist. “

He goes on to explain the “house” metaphor:

“I would speak of the realm of the mind–limited and untamed–but I say the House of the Intellect, because it is an establishment, requiring appurtenances and prescribing conventions.”

He begins by contending that there are three enemies facing the intellect. When artistic sensibilities intrude into intellectual life, aesthetic sense obscures the discursive character of intellectual articulation. When the language of science intrudes, its precision and specificity intrudes into the unity of knowledge. Philanthropy as he uses it is opens education to a wide audience, regardless of fitness (which comes off as elitist, one of my problems with this part of his argument).

He describes the pseudo-intellectualism of public discourse and our polite, cultured conventions of conversation that prevent serious discussions of ideas (although some polite conventions and manners might be needed in our own day). He describes education as without instruction, observing the use of television for instruction (if only he knew) and instruction without authority. He is one of the earliest to recognize the conversion of education into business and college leadership into bureaucracies. And he points out how intellectual pedantry has influenced every discipline, and far beyond–even President Eisenhower declaims, “Marshal Zhukov and I operated together very closely” rather than saying “worked.”

Barzun makes an argument for power and pretension intruding into the work of the intellect. What is concerning is that he also sweeps up the broadening of American education into his critique. I was one of those who benefited by that “broadening,” or as he would call it, “philanthropy.” I would not naturally have enjoyed access to these opportunities, growing up in a lower middle, working class neighborhood. In another era, I might have been excluded from “the house of the Intellect.”

Nevertheless, Barzun poses some important questions. Today, it is the hegemony of STEM fields over those disciplines that classically taught clarity of thought and expression. He guts the jargon-laden discourse of many academic disciplines. He questions the academic fads that often substitute for the instruction that cultivates the intellect. He exposes the conventions of public and personal conversation that thwart intellectual life (I’d love to see what he would do with social media).

Barzun is an educator from another era, and while I cannot endorse some of his ideas, he also holds up a mirror to contemporary educational practice, asking, “why are we doing this?” He was a kind of educational prophet. If you can find a used copy of this online, and care about education, I think you will find this a thought-provoking read.

[Bryan--The Bee’s Knees · Rating 4 out of 5]

*I wrote this review for Amazon about 8 years ago--evidently I was full of a lot of hot air at the time. I still agree with the review though.*

As someone who would like to live in the 'House of Intellect' - but is probably more suited to the wood shed of Intellect - my diversions have often been outside the mainstream. Occasionally, I've been able to interest my family and friends in these pursuits, which they may have initially discounted as boring or dull. This has led me to believe that much of the resistance against a celebration of Intellect today is rooted in its presentation. Generally speaking (and very generally), some people who have the power to foster a culture that places a premium on Intellect may actually instead surround it with barriers, as if to keep it the property of their exclusive group. In this way, certain 'intellectuals' have spawned a habit of 'anti-intellectualism'.

Or so it's seemed that way to me - I suppose there are many factors. But it was with great interest I read about Mr. Barzun's book, The House of Intellect, along with its original subtitle, How Intellect, the prime force in Western civilization, is being destroyed by our culture in the name of Art, Science, and Philanthropy. Honestly, I think my initial interest was simply a desire to read someone who would confirm my assumptions about the state of Intellect today. It isn't as though I think activity in Intellect has vanished, but as a member of the non-collegiate, blue-collar pragmatist crowd, I feel bombarded by media that is not only hostile toward the mind, but purposely seeks to render it comatose. So it was a pleasing idea to seek shelter in 'The House of Intellect', and to come in out of the vacuous, insulting rain of celebrity culture and ideological blather.

Mr. Barzun must have looked out on a similar situation when he began writing his book, which was published in 1959 - although I'd wager that the assault against Intellect has only intensified, perhaps even by orders of magnitude. That the author describes an era - one that seems positively exalted by today's intellectual standards - in terms uniquely fitted to the present slightly diminishes the urgency of his reasoning, though not its accuracy. To my mind, Mr. Barzun amply explains his theories stated in his subtitle, and then expands the idea to cover cultural and societal obstacles to advancing Intellect, such as public opinion, manners in conversation, philanthropic foundations, and education. In each of these sections, I found a lot to agree with, though this is probably like preaching to the choir. Unfortunately, I also felt that if someone were predisposed to take the opposite side of Mr. Barzun's arguments, they might notice his occasional use of straw man arguments, and a tendency to generalize.

Another, more delicate issue that Mr. Barzun hints at is the tactics necessary to build a House of Intellect. Although his book is not a tract, or a how-to, or even an intellectual's manifesto, it does provide, for comparison, alternative methods to the actions that have failed to sustain Intellect. These alternatives have a scent of Social Darwinism about them that may be uncomfortable for contemporary readers, although that doesn't make them any less viable. But let me be perfectly clear: Mr. Barzun is not advocating any course of action to rectify the state of Intellect. He simply outlines causes and conditions he believes led to its weakened representation in society, and then mentions possible responses to those conditions other than the prevailing blueprint.

Society took some of these 'course corrections' in subsequent years, for the sake of common sense and necessity. However, the majority of the problems Mr. Barzun saw fifty years ago are still with us - and that seems unlikely to change, either from the efforts of individuals or well-intentioned groups. That is probably for the best; societies that have attempted to 'engineer' a culture of Intellect (or perhaps intellectuals who have attempted to engineer societies of Intellect) can be extremely dangerous - a subject Mr. Barzun also addresses. Instead, it seems to me that Intellect is a fluid thing, ebbing and flowing at or below capacity according to the foundation a society prepares for it and according to that society's unconscious needs or wishes. The more successful a society has become, the less need it might feel toward enlarging its 'house of Intellect', and would be content to rely on past achievements. I would suspect our current state of Intellect is indicative of this.

Regardless, I found value in The House of Intellect beyond the commiseration I had expected. On the surface, Mr. Barzun's analysis of the contemporary state of Intellect is dry and bleak - maybe a bit hopeless, but on the personal level, there are simple things I can do to encourage and celebrate Intellect - and yet yield to moderation when it's called for - among my circle of family and friends. This seems of most value to me. Building a tradition of Intellect in society may be desirable and wished-for, but that is no replacement for having it at home.

[Debra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like all of Barzun's books, this is thought-provoking. I find myself agreeing with some of his premises and conclusions, and disagreeing with others on the same page. I am mulling over his thoughts on the danger of ideas in politics - there is something quite wrong about his evidence and conclusions, but I can't put my finger on it.

[Tyler Malone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful sentences and beautiful ideas.

[Patrick Richardson · Rating 5 out of 5]

An age old yet still much needed critique of American intellectualism. Read more to find out. Very cynical, and even more rewarding.

[Hotspur · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is essentially the first and better Closing of the American Mind. I found I agree with Mr. Barzun on all of his points. And I think he was prescient in his points, as most have only gotten worse with time. In fact, I think he'd be horrified at the current educational and intellectual climate.

My quibble, is that often-times Mr. Barzun's writing is a bit obtuse and it often takes him a stroll through many tangents to get to his central point. This is amusing, as he champions clarity in writing and thought.

[Kathy Kattenburg · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating read, although much of it is outdated. A lot has changed between 1959 and 2021. But that obviously is not a fault of the book.

[Lilia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful work of critique.

[Rashida Fazal]

The book is about the the problems faced by the intellectual and intellect itself. It is being destroyed by the intellectuals because they are not writing what they should owing to the restrictions imposed upon them by the institutions, philanthropists and the particular language and style of writing. Today, intellectuals much care about the style of writing than the search of truth.

[Joe Johnston · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this in grad school. Feh.

[Kfaas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Devastating examination of the presumptions of "Intellect" in opposition to--and often in collusion with--intelligence, art, politics...

[Jessie Harvey · Rating 2 out of 5]

A few good points get lost in the sea of pretension that this book is.

[Erik]

Recommended by James Schall in Another Sort of Learning, Chapter 3, as one of six books on learning and teaching.

[Morgan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many a good point are buried underneath the pretentious drivel. A nightmare to wade through, should have been condensed into a single essay.

[Ak Hauck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highly relevant ! I read this with a highlighter in hand.

[Eva · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author makes you think about common beliefs & dogmas perpetuated by the powers that be.