After ‘The Last Intellectuals’

In The Last Intellectuals (1987) Russell Jacoby argued that the iconic crop of midcentury public intellectuals — Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald, Edmund Wilson — had given way to a younger generation of scholars devoted to highly specialized knowledge, the obscure jargon of narrow disciplines, and the bureaucratic demands of university careers. They were, in effect, a "missing generation" — and led to a diminished public discourse and a diminished culture at large. More...