Table of Contents

Todd Gitlin, a founder in the early 1960s of the radical Students for a Democratic Society and now a professor at Columbia University, is appalled by the obscurantism of the academic left. His new book, a collection of essays titled The Intellectuals and the Flag, hopes to inspire a "new start for intellectual life on the left" because "Marxism and postmodernism ... are exhausted."

"As the revolutionary tide (of the 1960s) has gone out, a vanguard marooned without a rearguard has made the university into an asylum" cut off from the American people, Gitlin writes. Most left-wing criticism of American life, he notes, is written by people who are unable to identify with their fellow citizens. Echoing Michael Walzer's important essay, "Can There Be a Decent Left?" Gitlin wants "the critic" to share "membership with the criticized."

Over the years, Gitlin, who was trained as a sociologist, has evolved into an essayist of considerable force. His talents are put to their best use here in two of his essays: "The Postmodernist Mood" and "The Antipolitical Populism of Cultural Studies." Both deal with the selfmarginalization of university humanities departments.

Gitlin also has three essays on what he calls "Exemplary Intellectuals." The three are David Riesman, Irving Howe, and C. Wright Mills. Mills had the most influence in shaping Gitlin's worldview. Each of the three was a critic of American life while also being deeply attached to it. They all saw themselves as "men of reason" and wanted to work within the Enlightenment political tradition. The Howe chapter is a marvelous evocation of a man who, unlike contemporary academics, made every attempt to "partition" his politics from his literary criticism. But the three essays fit uneasily into the book. The Riesman chapter and the one on Mills, particularly, downplay the misconceptions that make these figures far less formidable in retrospect.

Gitlin is surefooted in identifying the problem. The left, he argues, took a wrong turn when it abandoned knowledge as its guiding light on the grounds that knowledge, as argued by theorists like Michael Foucault and Edward Said, was merely a masked form of power, and illegitimate power at that. "If discourse was central to power," Gitlin writes with a note of bitterness, "then the exposure and transformation of discourse was the left's central task, and academia would become indispensable ... the university would become the main battlefield in the struggle for power. ... Defeated in Washington, you could march (as a consolation prize) on the English department."

Gitlin recounts a conversation with a committed feminist who, like her fellow postmodernists, thought, as did the premodern scholastics, that there was no reality other than that constituted by "discourse." For the postmodernists who dominate many of our humanities departments, it is as if the scientific revolution never occurred. "The category of 'lived experience' was, from her point of view, an atavistic concealment; what one 'lived' was constituted by a discourse that had no more -- or less -- standing than any other system of discourse."

When asked, the feminist was unable to provide a reasoned justification for her own commitments. They could only be asserted as a matter of power and will. But her problem was more than personal. If, as Michel Foucault told the Berkeley faculty in 1983, "There is no universal criterion which permits us to say, this category of power relations are bad and those are good," then there is no way to prefer a liberal society to fascism, communism, or Islamism.

What that means, by extension, is that, as in the 1930s, many leftists either sympathize with an authoritarian alternative to liberalism or have a hard time explaining why a liberal society should be defended against its enemies. The upshot is that the "fundamentalist left" -- Gitlin's description -- is reduced to the role of a spectator jeering at the American team in its conflict with terrorism.

Gitlin, who wants the left to get off the sidelines, has no hesitation in asserting that "Islamism ... is a force in its own right" that long predates the creation of America and is not just "a reaction to the United States." In that vein, Gitlin is rightly tough on the failure of the Bush administration to create a new patriotism in the wake of 9/11. President Bush, he insists, should have built on Americans' strong sense of solidarity and support for him in the moment of crisis to create a consensus for moving us away from dependence on unstable sources of Middle Eastern oil, the profits from which are used to finance terrorism. In effect, he argues, the Bush approach, like that of the postmodernists, is self-defeating.

There is a good deal to disagree with in Gitlin's readable essays, but it's hard to argue with his insistence that unless leftists can do more than demonstrate contempt and ridicule, they will continue to deserve their place on the sidelines.

Fred Siegel is a professor at The Cooper Union and culture editor of BLUEPRINT