New York Intellectuals

As The New York Intellectuals , a group of mostly of is New York coming intellectuals called, who scored in the mid-20th century to the spokesmen of the anti-Stalinist left in the US. Their influence had a decisive influence on the American literary discourse since the late 1930s . The term itself was first coined by Irving Howe in 1968 .

development

The first generation of New York Intellectuals included authors and publicists who, in the mid-1930s, in the course of bitter directional debates within the Communist Party of the USA about the attitude to the New Deal and the evaluation of the Moscow trials , later under the influence of the German-Soviet The non-aggression pact with the party leadership and the Soviet Union broke. Many of them, following Max Shachtman , turned to Trotskyism . They included Phillip Rahv and William Phillips , editors of Partisan Review , which subsequently became the main mouthpiece of the group that Howe later referred to as the New York Intellectuals : writers and literary critics such as Lionel Trilling , Mary McCarthy , Saul Bellow , Delmore Schwartz , art critics like Clement Greenberg and political theorists like Dwight McDonald . The second generation of the New York Intellectuals includes authors who came to the Partisan Review and related papers such as The New Republic in the 1940s , in particular Irving Howe, Irving Kristol , Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell . After the Second World War and with the start of the Cold War , these authors, and with them their magazines, moved closer to the political center. They decisively shaped so-called consensus liberalism , a concept that combined liberal traditions of the Enlightenment , individualism , Keynesianism , pragmatism , liberal-democratic internationalism ( cosmopolitanism ) and finally opposition to totalitarianism . Some of them became masterminds of neoconservatism in the 1960s, especially Irving Kristol, while others like Irving Howe represented decidedly left-wing positions until their death.

influence

The influence of the New York Intellectuals was less noticeable in daily politics and political theory than in the culture and literature of the USA. In addition to the representatives of New Criticism , a strictly formalistic and hardly political current in literary theory, it was authors like Trilling and McCarthy who ensured the canonization of American modernity . While the New Critics proceeded according to strictly formalistic criteria, the New York Intellectuals often brought up the connection between literature and politics. The decisive literary debates that were carried out in papers such as the Partisan Review from this point of view included the dispute over the award of the Bollingen Prize to the poet Ezra Pound in 1947 or the evaluation of Arthur Koestler's novel Solar Eclipse .

further reading

• Alan M. Wald: The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s . University of North Carolina Press 1987, ISBN 0-8078-4169-2
• David Laskin: Partisans: Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals . University of Chicago Press 2001. ISBN 0-226-46893-3
• Neil Jumonville: Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Postwar America . University of California Press 1991. ISBN 0-520-06858-0

Individual evidence

1. ↑ On this Michael Hochgeschwender : Freedom on the offensive? The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Germans. Munich 1998, ISBN 3-486-56341-6 , pp. 68-86.