Looking back I see a thread of continuity in my writing projects. My first sustained piece of writing was my bachelor's thesis at Reed College. As an undergraduate at Reed I felt I wanted a career of writing about social thought and ideas. At the time I came under the misguided notion that, since Marx explained that all social thought is grounded in economics, I should study economics. I did, although it quickly became apparent to me that economics as a field had no interest in social thought. Because I thought of myself as a democratic socialist at the time, and had been introduced by my professors to the work of Oscar Lange, I wrote my bachelor's thesis (1977) on the development of the theory of market socialism. I wrote to Christopher Lasch and others and asked why no one in the New Left had been interested in it, and I discussed the response of Lasch and others in my final chapter. As I look back on my Reed thesis, it was the first of many installments I've written about figures who have a foot in two different camps: in this case a foot in socialist egalitarian thought and a foot in liberal market theory.

By the time I graduated from Reed I had become disenchanted with the intellectual opportunities open in the field of economics, the example of figures such as Robert Heilbroner and Robert Lekachman notwithstanding. So I entered the MA program in history at Columbia University. I went to Columbia because I vaguely realized that some of the liberal socialist names I had encountered in my study of market socialism (Sidney Hook and others) at one time had passed through the university. There I studied US intellectual history with Nathan Huggins, and with the direction of Rosalind Rosenberg wrote a master's thesis on the creation of Dissent magazine. I wrote on Dissent because I understood, again vaguely, that some of the writers who I had read on market socialism, and who were not economists, either wrote for Dissent or knew people who did. I was becoming intrigued by figures who were engaged with public issues, and were interdisciplinary in their outlook. They seemed to be scholars who also operated within a very public sphere. Dissent is where I located them. The master's thesis, which I wrote in 1979, was very weak, but I learned enough from it to continue formulating questions about figures such as Irving Howe and Sidney Hook. And for the second time I had written about thinkers with a foot in two camps: here, Dissenters who were both scholars (specialists writing for their professional peers) and intellectuals (generalists who wrote for the public at large). And again, as in my earlier Reed thesis, they were figures with a foot in the socialist camp and a foot in the liberal camp.

After I received my MA from Columbia in 1979 I remained in New York for a couple of years—working at Barnes and Noble as it was just beginning to expand, and then spending time as an editorial intern at the Nation magazine. But I quickly came to feel that I wouldn't be taken seriously writing about cultural and political topics unless I continued my graduate work.

So in 1981 I entered the History of American Civilization Program at Harvard for doctoral work. There I wrote the dissertation that later became Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in PostwarAmerica (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). As in my bachelor's and master's theses, I was fascinated by those who straddled borders, who saw themselves as both liberals and socialists, who operated as both scholars in the university and intellectuals in general magazines, who were both archival researchers and contemporary civic activists, who found their function both in the cultural past and the cultural present. I noticed that intellectual figures such as this, partly because of their activist outlook, often embraced the ideas of philosophical pragmatism. My book on the New York Intellectuals—those who orbited around Dissent, Commentary, politics, Partisan Review, Encounter, the Public Interest, and other related publications—became an analysis of the intellectual life and function. What separated the role of intellectuals (generalists and partisan activists) from scholars ("neutral" archival specialists)? How and why were intellectual communities established? What held them together? What was the most useful definition of an intellectual? And, as in the case of the New York Intellectuals, why have intellectuals often decided to support a liberal pragmatism instead of a messianic ideology? I received my PhD at Harvard in 1987 and remained teaching there another three years in the History and Literature program.

Yet I noticed, as I finished the book in 1988, how few historians usually were active in the intellectual community. Oh, sure, there were Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and a few others. But not many. The intellectual community instead was littered with sociologists, literary critics, and a scattering of others. So I decided to write about Henry Steele Commager, who was one of the few historians who functioned as a recognized public intellectual. My second book was published as Henry Steele Commager: Midcentury Liberalism and the History of the Present (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). Why, I wondered in the book, did Commager take a different path than most of his scholarly colleagues? Had it harmed his scholarship? Further, it seemed to me, as I continued my research, that many of the historians who performed as intellectuals were somehow related to the American studies movement or to the field of intellectual history—perhaps because of the interdisciplinary approach of those fields, which is congenial to intellectual, activist work. (Michael Denning, for example, has pointed out that American studies functioned as a substitute Marxism in the 1930s.) Most of the midcentury American studies figures—such as Commager, F.O. Matthiessen, Henry Nash Smith, and others—were assumed by my colleagues to be retrograde conservatives. Yet as I learned more about them, I became convinced that they were the prominent liberals and leftists of their day, often more usefully active than current postmodernist radicals today. Commager and many other in his generation were culturally conservative but politically very liberal. They were cultural "conservatives" because they were raised in a different cultural ethic than the cultural revolution in the 1960s produced. The 1960s cultural outlook, at first very foreign to the midcentury liberals, was produced by the civil rights movement; the changing work, education and status of women; a more anthropologically grounded sense of culture; the rise of social history and history from the bottom up; and rise of youth culture that destroyed the traditional authority in society. The older generation was culturally conservative in the sense that they had trouble understanding and embracing an ethic that was radically different than they had known. But although Commager and others were outspoken political liberals, they have been labeled conservatives by those who have written in the last forty years. One of my reasons for writing the book was to put that political record straight. Thus part of my book was to follow the example of Commager as an activist intellectual, and part of it was to try to chart the relationship between the politics of Commager's generation and my own. Again, this book was about Commager and other related figures who straddled fields. Commager's identity was both a partisan activist intellectual (especially as a journalist and traveling lecturer) and a scholar (a professor, teacher, and professional historian).

In the end, my book on Commager, I suppose, is a reassessment of the ideas of the 1940s and 1950s—or at least some aspects of that large group of ideas. While I don't support all of the ideas or values at midcentury, I believe that we should be more discriminating about what parts of that period we reject, and we should be more open to see whether there are useful commitments of the era that we can integrate into our own value system. I hope that, in this way, Commager's example might point the way to a reconciliation between generations. What are these values we might want to embrace? One is the rather unique contribution of Commager: the mixing of a scholarly career with an intellectual, activist interaction with contemporary public issues. Commager shared this activist approach with only a few of his colleagues, such as Allan Nevins and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., as I point out in a chapter included in John Diggins, ed., The Liberal Persuasion: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and the Challenge of the American Past (Princeton University Press, 1997). Another value we would profit by resurrecting is to try to create a public dialogue with our historical writing. In addition to addressing public issues, we might also think of telling stories again, writing in a literate narrative that would engage the common reader. That is, we might want to see that history is read on the subway again. Finally, we might consider encouraging the liberal concept of a shared cultural identity, while at the same time taking care to encourage subcultural differences.

In 2002 I published an article about the political culture surrounding the debate over sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. It focuses particularly on a group of Boston area professors and graduate students, who called themselves the Sociobiology Study Group (SSG), and their intellectual and political activism against those such as E.O. Wilson who were proponents of sociobiology. This piece looks at the SSG as an example of the culture war in the final quarter of the twentieth century that occurred on the science side of campuses as well as on the humanities and social science side. For more than a century, since the time of Darwin's work, there has been a fundamental disagreement about how to account for human behavior and ideas. One side has maintained that human nature is a product of God's creation, as many Christians argue, or that it is the province of a sacred and intuitive soul, as many romantics believe. The other side explains human behavior and ideas as a product of biological selection (Darwinists), or behavioral reinforcement (Skinner and the behaviorists), or genetic inheritance (sociobiologists). The debate over the nature of human nature has been part of the changing cultural politics of the past century. I'm convinced that the culture wars of recent decades are connected to the tension in American society that reaches back more than a century. This conflict has shown itself in the debate over human nature, in the fight over whether to teach evolution or creationism in the schools, in the hostility toward behaviorism, and in the opposition to urban and modern industrial values in this country. And again I wrote, in this article as I did in my books, about scholars who were performing as intellectuals: in this case, scientists who are involved in a public debate about how we should account for the creation of culture and ideas.

Then in 2004 I had an essay in Matthew Cotter's edited volume Sidney Hook Reconsidered (Prometheus Books, 1994), a collection of essays first delivered at a conference of the same name at CUNY Graduate Center in October 2002. There I shared a panel with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Nathan Glazer, Joe Dorman, and Tibor Machan. In my talk and the resulting essay, I argued that Hook's brand of midcentury liberalism—well, let's call it Cold War liberalism—in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 2001 became more relevant than it had in the past fifty years. Scrappy polemicist that he was, Hook believed in protecting the values of liberalism. He certainly demonstrated that in a career in which he was the scourge of communists, the church, and absolutists of every stripe. The lesson he learned and then turned to practice was that the famous tolerance of liberalism should not be extended to the intolerant endlessly, especially if in doing so it threatened liberal society and liberal values.We need to understand our adversaries, Hook argued, but, as in the case of Hitler, hatred of an enemy might be justified even if we comprehend them. Toleration is important to freedom, Hook wrote, but it is not as important as freedom itself. In the aftermath of 9.11 liberals need to decide whether Hook was right or wrong.

In the spring of 2004, Rob Tempio, an editor at Routledge, asked me if I would put together a volume of the New York Intellectuals' essays. I had met Rob at the Sidney Hook conference at CUNY (above), and he and Robert Talisse had co-edited Sidney Hook on Pragmatism, Democracy, and Freedom (Prometheus, 2002). In response to Rob's request, it occurred to me that the New York Intellectuals in the wake of 9-11 were now more relevant than they had been in half a century. America now faced real enemies again, and absolutist threats from abroad. The New York Intellectuals were some of the liberals who had confronted the dangers in the decades from the 1940s to the 1960s, and if today we would not necessarily want to follow every recommendation they made (and there were diverse opinions among them), they are important thinkers for us to consult. Another reason to reconsider the worth of the New York group's liberalism is that intervening between their time and the present was the pervasive influence of poststructualism and postmodernism, which was exceedingly good on creating a multicultural society and looking to those on the margin of culture but also threw over many values (respect for majorities, love of country) central to the history of liberalism. Liberalism was not helped by the public's perception that the academic cultural left and liberals were the same group. Now that the intellectual power of postmodernism is in decline (I'm writing this in June 2007), liberal intellectual culture needs to revive itself under values both new and old. Liberals could do worse than look back to the New York Intellectuals to remember what liberal culture was before the postmodern academic left took power several decades ago. As some of them admitted in their later years, the history of the New York group's own decisions serves as a lesson about what to avoid as well as what to adopt. In 2007 The New York Intellectuals Reader was released. It is the first anthology of the writings of the New York Intellectuals. There have been earlier collections of essays based around particular magazines such as Partisan Review, Commentary, and Dissent, but never a volume on the group itself.

Also in the spring of 2007 Liberalism for a New Century (University of California Press), a book I co-edited with Kevin Mattson, hit the bookstores. Like The New York Intellectuals Reader, it is a book to help people think about the history and meaning of liberalism. Should American liberalism emphasize particular values and commitments in the wake of September 11? Are there values associated with past forms of liberalism--during the New Deal or at midcentury--that should be revived now? Currently, are there opportunities for liberal leadership that did not exist a few years ago? When Mattson and I first designed this volume, we posed the following question. "From the 1930s to the mid-1960s, Americans were relatively happy with liberalism. In the past forty years, however, liberalism has been mistrusted and sometimes has been simply the L-word. Was this because liberalism changed or the American people changed?" This volume was meant to address that question without establishing a consensus among the contributors. The idea was that each participant would write on a theme, and look to the liberalism of a particular time of their choice within the past century for a lesson about what liberalism has done right or wrong. Each essayist was encouraged to have their piece be prescriptive about how contemporary liberalism should reorient itself. The result is a collection of essays--almost all of them written for this book, from 14 historians and journalists who have spent their careers writing about liberalism and its history--addressing the current needs of liberalism by looking at the history of its successes and failures. The book begins with a foreword by E.J. Dionne, an introduction by Neil Jumonville and Kevin Mattson, and then has essays by Peter Berkowitz, John Patrick Diggins, Jennifer Burns, Alan Brinkley, Neil Jumonville, Kevin Mattson, Michael Kazin, Michael Ruse, Mona Harrington, Amy Sullivan, Alan Wolfe, Danny Postel, and Michael Tomasky.

As I look back, the continuities in my interests are clear to me. From the beginning I have been interested (no doubt from my undergraduate study of the history of economic thought) in the theory, structure, method, history, and meaning of liberalism. Within that setting I've written about the mixing of scholarly roles (archival, "objective," specialized, and peer-refereed) and intellectual roles (activist, partisan, generalist, and journalistic) — about which I wrote in my works on the New York Intellectuals, on Henry Steele Commager, and in my article on scientists involved in the politics of human nature. Another way to illustrate my study of the intersection of intellectual and scholarly functions is to point out that, in all of my writings since my masters thesis on Dissent, I have written about scholars who have been activists in the field of ideas: magazine or journal editors such as Irving Howe, Sidney Hook, and Dwight Macdonald; essayists such as Commager and Allan Nevins; scientists who have been involved in political and cultural debates; and historians who are involved with the intellectual politics of liberalism. As an intellectual historian I have written exclusively about the twentieth century, often focusing on what I call midcentury (1940s-1960s), and I've focused on the intersection between politics and culture--often politics and literature.