The culture wars at the beginning of the twenty-first century have their roots in earlier conflicts within the intellectual elite. These, in turn, are framed by a wider tradition of populist anti-intellectualism, whose advocates associated the intellectual elite with a European, “un-American” culture.

Within the intellectual elite at the turn of the twentieth century—men like John Dewey, Randolph Bourne, Thorstein Veblen, Herbert Croly and W.E.B. Du Bois (all of whom drew on ideas from either Germany or Britain)—divisions arose about the extent to which an intellectual tradition should be forged that was more responsive to the experiences of Americans living in a society shaped by large influxes of immigrants and the presence of African Americans amidst a majority European population. For the first half of the twentieth century New York City remained the bastion of intellectuals with satellites in Harvard, Yale and the other Ivy League colleges.

Both the progressive era and the New Deal witnessed the collaboration between government and intellectuals, and the rise of government and foundation-supported think tanks for developing public policy. The late 1930s witnessed the coming to the US of many European intellectuals escaping the Nazis, many of whom were Jewish, as well as some Marxists. The intellectual milieu was shaped also by the arrival of leftist thinkers like C.L.R. James and other African and Caribbean immigrants who saw the United States as reinvigorated by the Popular Front and by its potential as a worldwide anticolonial power. These intellectuals had significant influence, especially in universities and colleges, but this would be more than matched in American culture by the antiintellectualism embodied by the emerging McCarthyism in the 1940s.

During the early years of the Cold War, many left-leaning intellectuals like Max Eastman, Sidney Hook, Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson veered away from Marxism and socialism, endorsing purges of communists and Popular Front leftists. Into the vacuum rushed resurgent liberal optimism, embodied in modernization theory One of the standard bearers of this theory was W.W. Rostow, whose “non-communist manifesto” (Stages of Economic Growth, 1960) was endorsed within the Kennedy administration and by the foundationsupported development agencies. Other sociologists, like E. Franklin Frazier and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and urban analysts like Lewis Mumford, who developed modernization-inflected social theories, also proved very influential among policy-makers.

The 1960s saw the beginnings of the culture wars with significant fragmentation occurring within the intellectual elite. First came the rise of the New Left critique (for example, Herbert Marcuse and Noam Chomsky) of the militaryindustrial complex, the countercultural, beatinspired critiques of suburbia and the “organization man,” along with the SDS-led assault on the university as a tool of the establishment. Then African American intellectuals (for example, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka and Ralph Ellison began to receive more widespread attention in tandem with the growing Black Power impulse and the campaigns for black-studies programs on college campuses around the country. Feminist intellectuals, likewise, emerged out of the women’s movement, invigorated by Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique (1963), but also reacting to the misogyny they witnessed within the New Left. Robin Morgan’s 1970 anthology of the women’s liberation movement, Sisterhood is Powerful, pointed towards a radical feminism that gained strength during the 1970s.

Simultaneously conservative intellectuals began to coalesce around the John Birch Society and William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review, infusing the Republican Party with new energy especially the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater and the California gubernatorial campaigns of Ronald Reagan. These new Republicans, seeing themselves as part of a “silent” or “moral” majority drew strength from backlash against the Civil Rights movement, busing, legalization of abortion and what they saw as the lack of patriotism of the left, spawning neo-conservatives within the women’s movement, like Phyllis Schlafly, and black conservatives, like Thomas Sowell.

Further shifts away from class to identity politics occurred in the 1980s with the demise of the Soviet Union. Francis Fukayama announced, prematurely “the end of history” and the triumph of capitalism, the proof of which ought to have been found in the success of Harvard economists in bringing Russia into the world economy At the same time, cultural politics continued, animated by Afrocentrism, and the emergence of new immigrant populations, Asian Americans and Hispanics, who began to organize politically to combat discrimination and exclusion. Calls were made for the development of ethnic and multicultural studies, along with new Latino/a and Asian American studies programs matching the firmly established African American studies programs.

In the 1990s, new layers were added to these cultural wars. Divisions began to emerge between advocates of traditional methodologies and disciplines (such as Arthur Schlesinger, Joyce Appleby, etc.) and those taking the Foucauldian turn to poststructuralism and postmodernism (for example, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha). The political positions taken by intellectuals on either side of this divide have varied from the conservative to the class-based intellectuals of the more traditional school, and from the politically quiescent and academy-focused to the left leaning and politically engaged among postmodernists.

During the 1990s, also, the term “public intellectual” gained widespread currency.

With its echoes of the Gramscian organic intellectual this has been an attractive concept for American intellectuals, who, since the progressive era, have been more politically engaged than their European counterparts. Unlike the largely white sociologists of the 1950s, however, many of the new public intellectuals have emerged within the ethnic and African American studies programs, and have been very visible in centrist magazines from the New Republic to Vanity Fair. Some public intellectuals have received withering criticism for being celebrity intellectuals, pulling down salaries sometimes more than double those of their peers, and for helping to establish a veritable free-agency system within universities that are prepared to negotiate huge contracts to secure the latest talent.

While the complaints have been widespread, they have been most bitter in response to the newfound prominence of African American intellectuals, who, until the 1950s, had been largely excluded from the leading universities in the country But the success of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., bell hooks and Cornel West has not been greeted with approval even from all African Americans. In the Village Voice, for example, Adolph Reed (also a black public intellectual) has accused such intellectuals of being the progeny of Booker T. Washington. But, with the publication of his similarly conceived assault on W.E.B. Du Bois (1997), Washington’s main political opponent, Reed has left the fin-de-siècle intellectual with that old dilemma: what is to be done?