Ideas and Power

The American Intellectual Elite, by Charles Kadushin. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. 395 pp.

The Long Dark Night of the Soul: The American Intellectual Left and the Vietnam War, by Sandy Vogelgesang. New York: Harper & Row. 249 pp.

The systematic study of that amorphous category of people called intellectuals presents more than the usual problems of definition. An intuitive grasp of the distinctiveness of the social role is relatively easy; it is rather more difficult to specify the role in a way that unambiguously distinguishes it from other social roles. An easy distinction is that intellectuals are concerned primarily with “ideas,” but does that mean that all college professors are also...