ABSTRACT
Identity involves the acceptance of both a label applied to oneself and the cherishing of an aspiration to uphold, affirm, and justify the label. The intellectuals of yore, their identities forged out of left-wing political and modernist literary interests, did not see themselves as addressing a wide public. They wrote for one another just as contemporary academics write for their colleagues, as Jacoby complains. That yesterday’s intellectuals wrote better and reasoned more sharply and less pretentiously than today’s professors is in part, but only in part, due to the baleful influence of the academy and its intellectual routines. Sociology used to attract intellectuals of the orientation because of the seeming boundlessness and generality of its subject matter— one recalls Dan Bell as a graduate student announcing to a senior professor that he was a “specialist in generalizations.”.
