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Mind Loss
| Article
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19292 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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6 / 1991 |
2,920 Words |
| Author
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Larry D. Nachman
Larry D. Nachman is professor of political science at the
College of Staten Island, CUNY, and is a frequent contributor
to Commentary and Salmagundi. He is completing a book on
psychoanalysis and social theory. |
THE CYNICAL SOCIETY
The Culture of Politics and the Politics
of Culture in American Life
Jeffrey C. Goldfarb
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991
216 pp., $22.50
In the last two decades, as American liberals have moved to the left, the American voter has moved to the right. Even further to the left are American intellectuals whose current dominance of American colleges and universities has not brought them any closer to convincing the electorate to accept their vision of the world. Moreover, that dominance of the academy has meant that many intellectuals do not, in their daily lives, have to defend their positions against fundamental criticism. Conservatives, and even centrists, are relatively rare in the American academy. Intellectuals of the Left have become accustomed to participation in a narrow debate that rarely touches first principles and that frequently fails to meet even elementary standards of proof and evidence. There are, to be sure, many formidable intellectuals on the Left. One thinks of Irving Howe, Michael Walzer, James Miller, Christopher Lasch, and Eugene Genovese. But much of what passes for "politically correct" today is dreary and repetitive. By its very institutional success, American radicalism has lost much of its intellectual audacity and originality.
Jeffrey Goldfarb's The Cynical Society is not a very good book. It is, however, interesting in its flaws. This work of a sociologist is of sociological interest. It exemplifies, I think, much of what is lacking in the contemporary academic Left.
Do conservatives believe what they say?
American politics and culture are corrupted, Goldfarb contends, by cynicism. He writes:
I believe that the single most pressing challenge facing American democracy today is widespread public cynicism. ... Cynicism in our world is a form of legitimation through disbelief. There exists an odd but by now common practice. Leaders use rhetorics which neither they nor their constituents believe.
Goldfarb's principal targets are William Bennett, E.B. Hirsch, Jr., Allan Bloom, and Ronald Reagan, but his charge that the positions they present to
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