The Radical Renewal

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Does the United States have an overseas empire, and if so, how does its existence affect American culture? To what extent does our economy depend on exorbitant levels of military spending? These questions should be on the national political agenda, asserts Birnbaum, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center. To reorient the terms of public debate, the author scans the social sciences for ideas that might influence the dawning post-Reagan era. Marred by a pedantic style, his reappraisal of the black and feminist movements, Herbert Marcuse, psychoanalysis, Keynes, the New Deal and the New Left will mainly interest scholars. After 200 pages of dense analysis, Birnbaum concludes that the intellectual framework of ``a new social project . . . may take a shape we cannot now say much about.'' He buttresses such heady arguments with 61 pages of bibliographical notes. (June)

Library Journal

Birnbaum (Georgetown University) joins the hunt for dark patterns in American intellectual life. Like Alan Bloom ( The Closing of the American Mind , LJ 5/1/87) and Russell Jacoby ( The Last Intellectuals , LJ 9/1/87), he doubts that social theory is simply the outcome of free, scholarly decisions of academics. Historical patterns determine many ideas, and relations with government and business often rule. Yet Birnbaum does not find Bloom's relativist corruption and faults Jacoby for overemphasizing pendantry and remoteness. Indeed, communitarian traditions remain influential, and the idea of a ``republic of virtue'' is still possible. Birnbaum's discussion is a good specimen of a popular genre, but by now readers must be noticing that American intellectual life is rich and complex, and the samples in these books are limited. Leslie Armour, Univ. of Ottawa, Canada