As in his previous book, New York Intellect (1987), it is part of Thomas Bender’s purpose in his new book on American intellectual life to take his fellow academic intellectuals to task for allowing themselves to get too far out of touch with the rest of the world. In making his case he demonstrates why they have done so. That is to say, he has taken a theme of considerable general interest, which is the fate of the educated public since the late nineteenth century, and he has written it up in such an impenetrably academic style that I would be astonished if more than half a dozen non-academics ever peep between its covers. His own version of his subject, for example, is the transition from “civic professionalism” to “disciplinary professionalism” among academics—by which he means that professors have for a century been more loyal to their professional mysteries than to their cities.

More seriously, he has left out all the most interesting stuff about such a subject. I am prepared to believe, as Bender insists throughout, that there was a Kuhnian paradigm shift involved in the development of the academic disciplines and that their structure was not “inherent in the immanent unfolding of modern knowledge,” but he never makes clear why I should believe it. I accept that science only gradually retreated from the public forum into the academy, where it became the property of a priestly caste (which brings up, by the way, my suggestion for