Abstract

When I entered graduate school in the fall of 1966, planning to study American intellectual history and perhaps intellectuals specifically, all the talk among the more advanced graduate students was a recently published book, The New Radicalism in America, 1889–1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type, by Christopher Lasch. I read it eagerly, but I was not sure what to make of it. The author, Christopher Lasch, offered a very complex analysis of intellectuals’ lives and their social location—or lack of it. It gave as much space to their psychological needs as to their ideas. That seemed to diminish them. Just what did he intend? I wondered.