This book is a contribution to the history of the Cold War, Dr. Birnbaum having been a very audible critic of US policy. Even more, it is a study of the role of ideas in politics, and of the adventures and misadventures of three generations of public intellectuals in Europe and the US. The author, now the senior member of the Editorial Board of The Nation, was a founding editor of New Left Review, a member of the Editorial Board of Partisan Review, and a contributor to Trans-Atlantic debate. He is particularly proud of having been barred from the German Democratic Republic in 1986 for assisting some of the dissidents who eventually ended the regime. Dr. Birnbaum's direct experience of public affairs includes an appointment as Consultant, National Security Council, and advisory roles with the United Auto Workers and Senator Edward Kennedy. He has also been an advisor to the German Trade Union Federation and the Green and Social Democratic Parties, to the French Socialist Party and Spanish Socialist Party, and to the Secretariat for Non-Believers of the Holy See. The text includes portraits of Harvard contemporaries (McGeorge Bundy, Carl Kaysen, Henry Kissinger, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.) as well as of a spectrum of Europeans, including Willy Brandt. Isaiah Berlin, Clement Greenberg, Leszek Kolakowski, Henri Lefebvre, Dwight Macdonald, Herbert Marcuse, Iris Murdoch, William Phillips are equally remembered.
An influential social critic and a major social thinker, Norman Birnbaum has collected here, for the first time, a number of important essays. Written over the last twenty years, they range from the fate of sociology to the problematic end of Marxism. Two questions inspire these essays. If thinkers are prisoners of their political contexts, how can thought apprehend historical movement? Can moral imagination alter social constraints? Birnbaum sees sociology as historical and philosophical commentary, shaped by politics. In a close and subtle examination of the Marxist legacy, he makes an innovative analytical move and turns Marxism upon itself. His inquiry includes an essay on the Marxist theory of religion, an essay which is itself a contribution to the debate of society and spirituality. An inquiry into the antithesis of Marxism and psychoanalysis asks if any project of human self-transformation is still plausible. In an essay dated 1984, he anticipates the collapse of the Communist regimes and new conflicts in the West. In a stringent article written after the sixties, but which speaks to the nineties, Birnbaum considers the technocratic servitude of the liberal university. Finally, he describes the contradictory advice offered to President Mitterrand when he convened the world's intellectual vanguard in Paris in 1983. Birnbaum concludes, half in melancholy and half in hope, that the intellect's critical tasks are unending. Historians, political thinkers, sociologists, and theologians will find their central themes in this collection, as will students of modern culture. They are written, however not for the academy alone, but for a general public confronting continuous and profoundchange.
Here, Birnbaum traces the decline and fall of social reform in Europe and America. He shows, for example, that William Howard Taft railed against socialism, by which he meant anything restricting the market.
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