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The life and legacy of Irving Howe are significant not only because they represent the intellectual biography of a leading American literary-political figure of the twentieth-centuty, nor merely illuminate the historical period in which he wrote. Rather, they also bear relevance to the state of America in our own time, one in which our ideological polarization has reached extremes. This essay discusses the pertinence of Howe’s achievement for the present-day political situation, especially for the possibility that his work could contribute toward the revival of Left-liberalism in America. Just as Howe's political innocence was tested and matured into more nuanced understanding and deepened ambivalence, so might his mature work and example inspire a new generation of liberals to move beyond idealism and find a sober mix that balances principle and pragmatism.

The Worlds of Irving Howe: The Critical Legacy is a wide-ranging anthology of criticism devoted to the literary, cultural, and political work of the writer Irving Howe. The book offers a broad cross-section of critical and biographical writings about Howe. Collected here are assessments of Howe's work written by some of the most prominent intellectuals of the twentieth century, among them Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, C. Vann Woodward, Robert Coles, Daniel Bell, Malcolm Cowley, and Arthur Schlesinger. The critical estimates of Howe's major books, collected here and framed by a major biographical introduction by John Rodden, constitute a sharply focused lens through which readers can re-evaluate the legacy of one of American's leading intellectuals and thereby understand the main issues of twentieth-century Anglo-American cultural history. Contributors: Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, C. Vann Woodward, Newton Arvin, Charles Angoff, Edward Dahlberg, Isaac Rosenfeld, Richard Chase, H.D. Lasswell, Dennis Wrong, Michael Harrington, Christopher Lasch, Robert Coles, Daniel Bell, Malcolm Cowley, Arthur Schlesinger, Theodore Solotaroff, Clive James, Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and William Phillips, among others.

The Anatomy Lesson (1983) features Philip Roth's most extensive fictional treatment of Commentary, the magazine of Jewish affairs founded in 1945 and patronized by the American Jewish Committee. Before Roth's apparent break with Commentary in the wake of Irving Howe's and Norman Podhoretz's one-two punch to his career in the December 1972 issue, the magazine was part of Roth's emerging sense of a distinctly American Jewish intellectual identity while helping him separate from what he perceived to be his own limiting origins. A reconsideration of Roth's dealings with the magazine complicates the sharp distinction often made between Commentary's sometimes romanticized history as a bastion of postwar, left liberalism in the 1940s and 1950s, on the one hand, and its more familiar iteration as a flagship publication of neoconservatism in the 1970s and 1980s, on the other. Turning to Roth's fiction as an additional source of insight yields an aesthetic theory of fiction as a space for an analytical encounter with ambivalence.

Man of letters, political critic, public intellectual, Irving Howe was one of America's most exemplary and embattled writers. Since his death in 1993 at age 72, Howe's work and his personal example of commitment to high principle, both literary and political, have had a vigorous afterlife. This posthumous and capacious collection includes twenty-six essays that originally appeared in such publications as theNew York Review of Books, theNew Republic, and theNation. Taken together, they reveal the depth and breadth of Howe's enthusiasms and range over politics, literature, Judaism, and the tumults of American society.A Voice Still Heardis essential to the understanding of the passionate and skeptical spirit of this lucid writer. The book forms a bridge between the two parallel enterprises of culture and politics. It shows how politics justifies itself by culture, and how the latter prompts the former. Howe's voice is ever sharp, relentless, often scathingly funny, revealing Howe as that rarest of critics-a real reader and writer, one whose clarity of style is a result of his disciplined and candid mind.

This is the author's personal statement of his journey from a young utopian idealist to a chastened anti-utopian realist.

John Rodden summarizes the thrust of his work on modern intellectual life, the theme of which is that the uncertain future of the ``intellectual species`` warrants extended attention because it is inextricably tied to the ultimate fate of the critical intellectual itself. He presents himself as an aspirant to membership in the tradition of the literary-political intellectual represented by such writers as George Orwell, Albert Camus, Lionel Trilling, and Irving Howe. Their example confronts him with the question around which his own writings orbit, as the title of his essay poses it: \"The Intellectual Species: Evolution or Extinction?\"

A symposium about Lionel Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity participated by Robert Orrill, Robert Boyers, and Irving Howe is presented. Among others, Orrill says early in Sincerity and Authenticity, Professor Trilling concedes a certain ambivalence about his subject and about his approach to it. He sometimes feels when he reads Sophocles or Shakespeare or Homer, he tells \"that human nature never varies, that the moral life is unitary and its terms perennial and that only a busy, intruding pedantry could ever have suggested otherwise.\"

Did the events of September 11, 2001 “change the world,” signifying the birth of an incommensurable brave new world of heightened uncertainty and insecurity? No. That headline-grabbing claim lacks historical perspective. Rather, the Cold War has exerted a profound impact on how America wages the War on Terror simply because the intelligence, bureaucratic, and military-industrial institutions that have shaped U.S. strategy since 9/11 took their present shape during the Cold War. Indeed, dramatic differences between the circumstances of the Cold War era and the dangers confronting the twenty-first century prevail, among them the shift from “conventional” to digital warfare, and from ominous nation-states to “rogue” states and sects. But the respective challenges and constraints shared by the two periods also possess notable similarities. Both the obvious discontinuities and the more subtle continuities with the recent past require judicious assessment from us today. Just as American leaders before World War II needed to “unlearn” the lessons of isolationalism in the 1930s in order to fight World War II, so too do American policymakers today need to unlearn the lessons of conventional warfare—including “intelligence” warfare–in order to combat rogue states and terrorist cells in the twenty-first century.

Miller talks about his ambition of becoming one of New York's intellectuals. He believes that the best way to achieve such ambition is to have an article published in Partisan Review, which has been called the essential New York intellectual journal. Moreover, he shares how his doubts for becoming a part of Partisan Review started and how his interest in the works of his admired intellectuals, such as Irving Howe and Lionel Trilling, lessened in 1970s.

“The tragedy of the left is that, having achieved an unprecedented victory in helping stop an appalling war, it then proceeded to commit suicide.” So writes Todd Gitlin about the aftermath of the Vietnam War in this collection of writings that calls upon intellectuals on the left to once again engage American public life and resist the trappings of knee-jerk negativism, intellectual fads, and political orthodoxy. Gitlin argues for a renewed sense of patriotism based on the ideals of sacrifice, tough-minded criticism, and a willingness to look anew at the global role of the United States in the aftermath of 9/11. Merely criticizing and resisting the Bush administration will not do—the left must also imagine and propose an America reformed. Where then can the left turn? Gitlin celebrates the work of three prominent postwar intellectuals: David Riesman, C. Wright Mills, and Irving Howe. Their ambitious, assertive, and clearly written works serve as models for an intellectual engagement that forcefully addresses social issues and remains affirmative and comprehensive. Sharing many of the qualities of these thinkers’ works, Todd Gitlin’s blunt, frank analysis of the current state of the left and his willingness to challenge orthodoxies pave the way for a revival in leftist thought and a new liberal patriotism.