This little detour through intellectual history brings us to the American intelligentsia and to Jonathan Rauch’s inquisitors. In the past half century or so, the intelligentsia, especially its academic portion, has adopted an increasingly adversarial stance toward the surrounding society. This position is not because the intelligentsia has uniformly embraced historicism, hard or soft or in between. It is, however, because a substantial portion of the intelligentsia has adopted two assumptions. One is that this portion has a unique understanding of what constitutes progress, meaning what
...more
