Word: podhoretzes
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...anti-Communist, Podhoretz supported the American intiative in foreign affairs. As a liberal, he was shocked by America's continued prosperity which many had expected to disappear after the war, and was forced grudgingly into the conclusion that "America works...
...explain this growing disillusionment, Podhoretz points the reader to Paul Goodman's late '50's work, Growing Up Absurd, a book that influenced both Podhoretz and the nation. Goodman places the blame for public malaise on the dehumanizing construction of American institutions. He calls for a society that allows for the mazimum fulfillment of individual potential. But it was not specifically the doctrines of this new utopianism that attracted Podhoretz, but rather its relative optimism--Goodman's conviction that American society had not irreperably decayed...
...decade turned, and the intellectuals debated the repercussions of the Cold War, the attention of the American public turned to the rumblings of the Civil Rights movement. Podhoretz, age 30, became editor of Commentary, and immediately focused its attention on social questions. Breaking Ranks reflects this stress: Podhoretz talks about James Baldwin's the Fire Next Time and his own My Negro Problem--and Ours, offering a fascinating discussion of the accusations and threats which accompanied the movement toward integration...
While by the early '60's Podhoretz still admired the humane values and vision that Students for a Democratic Society and other radical groups continued to promulgate, he had begun to believe that their appraisal of American cultural decay was exaggerated, unwarranted and dangerous. Podhoretz' complete divorce from radicalism came after the riots at Berkeley in 1968. He decided that violence had been done to "language and ideas." The rational arguments of earlier radicalism had been replaced by "direct action" based on the assumption that "there was no longer anything to argue about except the choice of means...
...Podhoretz suggests that a responsible intellectual is one who teaches us to distrust other intellectuals' ideas, and an irresponsible intellectual is one who doesn't know the limits of his function--who actually wants his ideas directly translated into a legislative program. He maintains that the intellectual's goal is ideally not the transformation of society but rather the "deepening of society's sense of things...the refinement of its consciousness, the enhancement of its cultural life...