ABSTRACT
Victor Hugo's wife concluded her story of his life with the following passage: To become a pair de France you had to belong to one of the categories from which the King took his choice. A generation of outstanding European thinkers emerged out of the rubble of World War II. It was a group unparalleled in their probing of an age that had produced totalitarianism as a political norm, and the Holocaust as its supreme nightmarish achievement. Figures ranging from George Lichtheim, Ignazio Silone, Raymond Aron, Andrei Amalrik, among many others, found a home in Encounter. François Bondy's political essays extended from George Kennan to Benito Mussolini. Bondy was that rare unattached intellectual, "free of every totalitarian temptation" and, as Lasky notes, unfailing in his devotion to the liberties and civilities of a humane social order. The absurdity of many of the links between literature and the Establishment, between so-called culture and the state is too easy to criticize.
