It has already been remarked in these pages that it has been left, by and large, to the political Left to write the recent history of American intellectual life.[1] Opponents of the Left and defectors from its many political factions may loom very large as figures of consequence in that history, and more than a few of these opponents and defectors have written the memoirs and autobiographies upon which so many recent histories of American intellectual life are based. But the actual histories and most of the analyses of these histories have been the work of academics who, in one degree or another, are the intellectual heirs of the New Left that achieved, in conjunction with the counterculture, such an immense and baleful influence on American life in the Sixties and that has remained a powerful—and now, alas, an institutionalized—force in both the culture and politics of the present day.

There are no doubt many reasons why the Left has met with so little resistance in commandeering this history, which is in so many ways the history of the Left’s moral and intellectual betrayal of its own stated ideals. One reason, certainly, is that the historical profession in this country has itself very largely become a kind of intellectual satrapy of the political Left. For the larger reason, however, we must look beyond the boundaries of the historical profession—to the daunting fact that the ideas of the New Left, currently attired in the raiment of middle-class respectability,