The Lady and the Luftmensch

Why do we still care about the New York Intellectuals? Partly, perhaps, because they embodied, conceivably for the last time in American history, a venerable modern ideal, practiced also by the philosophes and praised by Goethe and Marx: vielseitigkeit or manysidedness. Their versatility was astonishing. “The intellectual,” Irving Howe wrote in “This Age of Conformity” (1954), doubtless with his fellow New Yorkers in mind, “is a man who writes about subjects outside his field. He has no field.” Their apparent mastery in pronouncing on both culture and politics, and in relating one set of judgments to the other, now seems as attractive as it does unattainable. In the Age of Information...