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The Last Philosophes
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10838 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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7 / 1986 |
3,814 Words |
| Author
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Robert Nisbet
Robert Nisbet is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise
Institute. His most recent book was Conservativism (University
of Minnesota Press, 1986). |
PRODIGAL SONS: THE NEW YORK INTELLECTUALS AND THEIR WORLD
Alexander Bloom
New York: Oxford University Press, 1986
461 pp., $24.95
When the cultural annals of this century are completed, a prominent place in them will surely be held by the intellectuals Alexander Bloom deals with in this book. Mr. Bloom refers to his intellectuals as "prodigal sons," which they doubtless are. But I prefer to think of them as philosophes, as perhaps the last manifestation of a genus that began in eighteenth-century Paris with such names as Voltaire, Rousseau, D'Alembert, and Diderot among its very brightest lights, that continued in almost exponential development through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, yielding such progeny as Saint-Simon, Fourier, Kossuth, Herzen, and Belinsky in the nineteenth, and Philip Rahv, Sidney Hook, Dwight Macdonald, Irving Kristol, Norman Rodhoretz, and Irving Howe in the twentieth century, the last named among the principals of this book.
The French philosophes were consecrated to the undermining of the ancien regime in Europe and to the destruction of the Christian Church. The goals of this genus of intellectual would change through the two centuries following the eighteenth, to include monarchy, aristocracy, capitalism, private property, imperialism, nationalism, and the bourgeoisie. But the posture of combatant assumed by the first generation of philosophes never changed, and has not changed to this very moment. Paris was the original and sole spawning ground of true philosophes, but their nesting places began to do the whole world by the end of the nineteenth century, to be found from London to Beijing.
America, until the early twentieth century was denied--or spared, as one chooses--any reasonably authentic philosophes. By the end of the first decade, though, they were beginning to emerge from the ranks, as the saga of Greenwich Village, journals like The Masses, and writers such as Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, H. L. Mencken, James Huneker, and John Reed tells us. There were many others, especially through the two decades between the world wars. None, however, have proved to be quite as important in this century in the United States as those whose lives and ideas furnish the substance of Alexander Bloom's excellent and generally fascinating book. This group of philosophes came into being in the final years of the 1930s, largely united by common devotion, and sparkling contribution, to The Partisan Review, edited by Philip Rahv and William Phillips,
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