Irving Howe: A Leftism of Reason
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Irving Howe: A Leftism of Reason Fred Siegel
Accepted: 9 September 2020 # The National Association of Scholars 2020
The mid-1970s were a bleak time in America, even bleaker if you lived in New York City, which teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. The war in Vietnam was over, but post-Watergate, the country was mired in cynicism, animosity, and apocalyptic forebodings. One of the few thinkers who managed to think his way through the miasma was Irving Howe, the storyteller of ideas. Irving Howe, for those who haven’t had the pleasure of knowing him, was at times a gruff man who seemed to end telephone conversations in mid-sentence. A devoted socialist and a marvelous Yiddishist, he was most strikingly a penetrating writer and wide ranging public intellectual. Born in 1920, Howe passed away in 1993, making this year the one-hundredth anniversary of his birth. Howe is probably best known to the general public for his 1976 bestselling World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the Eastern European Jews to America and the Life they Found and Made, an engaging and magisterial work documenting Jewish immigrant life in America. More narrowly, he was a central figure in that group known colloquially as the “New York intellectuals,” which shaped mid-twentieth century American intellectual life through its cluster of “little magazines”: Partisan Review, a quarterly; Commentary a monthly, and Dissent a socialist quarterly Howe founded in 1954. They were largely first generation Jews (though there were some quite prominent non-Jews among them) and included writer Alfred Kazin, historian Richard Hofstadter, essayists Hannah Arendt, Irving Kristol, and Norman Podhoretz, art critics Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg, and literary critics Lionel Trilling, Lionel Abel and Leslie Fiedler.
Fred Siegel is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor to City Journal. Siegel is also a professor of history, emeritus at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and a scholar-inresidence at Saint Francis College; [email protected]
F. Siegel
The New York Intellectuals Explained In a 1969 essay written for Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, Howe wrote that the New York Intellectuals were what resulted when the intellectual energy accumulated by generations of downtrodden Eastern European Jews suddenly broke free in the first American generation, like “a tightly gathered spring, trembling with unused force.” Howe himself was an exemplar of that energy and insight. The New York intellectuals were once an exemplary but now obsolete meld of literary modernism and anti-Communist leftism. It is “a style,” writes Adam Kirsch, “that excels in lucid abstraction, forensic vigor, historical perspective and strength of conviction.” Sad to say, the New York intellectuals have had no heirs. To a degree, they have been succeeded by dry as dust academic theorists who helped foster the campus cult of political correctness. I first met Irving in the mid-1970s while I was working on my Ph.D. thesis, a study of the econ
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