Stray phrases are sometimes more revealing than central points. Lynn Garafola in her intemperate review of my book calls me a ‘self-proclaimed leftist’. What she means is that I have not been licensed by her circles that deliver the official proclamations. She is incensed because I lack respect for their rituals and successes like New Yorker notice. In her list of public intellectuals I have failed to acknowledge, she includes October editor Rosalind Krauss, ‘an art critic so well-known that a New Yorker profile (on someone else) opened with a description of her living room’. I like that, but I’m a little puzzled by the reasoning. Is it Krauss’s living room that makes her a public intellectual? Or Janet Malcolm’s description of it in the New Yorker? Or both?

Garafola, a self-proclaimed critic, tries to deck me with an argument and her personal Roladex. She believes that history is a one-way street of progress and revolution. Anyone who reflects on what might be lost is guilty of romanticism and nostalgia; I want to ‘turn back the clock’ while she embraces a glorious future. She has learned that material conditions determine cultural life. To reflect on possibilities and pressures is to blame the victim. Might (aging) new left professors be wanting in some respect? They are victims of older intellectuals and a hostile world. The abattoir of history is an American campus; the victims are university professors. Their plight is tragic; their efforts heroic.

I stated in my preface: ‘My friends, generation, and self are not the heroes—or victims. I prize a younger left intelligentsia that I believe has surrendered too much. I take as a measuring rod an older generation of intellectuals whose work I often criticize’ (pp. xii–xiii). This inflames many reviewers who require unadulterated praise or condemnation. What? Younger intellectuals are not heroes? And older intellectuals have estimable qualities? Garafola writes that I want ‘an intelligentsia in the image of the New York intellectuals’ and she scorns my endless ‘romance’ for the Sidney Hooks, Norman Podhoretzes, Lionel Trillings. What book did she read? My chapter ‘New York, Jewish and Other Intellectuals’ directly tackles the New York group, and questions their contribution and radicalism. I ponder why so many of the New York Jewish intellectuals ‘hastily beat a retreat’ from radicalism (pp. 85–96). I expressly take issue with their inflated reputations (pp. 100–06). Trilling’s writings are ‘casual and familiar’; Hook has produced no original or coherent philosophical work. For all the hoopla, the New York intellectuals are not theoretically impressive. This does not fit into Garafola’s cardboard world; she can’t figure it out. If you criticize younger thinkers, you must idolize older ones. You are either for us—younger, bright, hip New York writers—or against us. She states that I ‘blame the New Left for the demise of American intellectual life’. She means: I do not simpy celebrate younger left thinkers.