Abstract

The author raises several issues regarding cultural shifts over the last half-century that he believes were evaded in the Fall 2002 Partisan Review symposium that gives his article its title—including attitudes toward mass culture, the significance and aims of cultural studies, the roles and institutional affiliations of the conservative counterintelligentsia, and the question of intellectual honesty and civility—in the hope of fostering a more productive dialogue between right and left than has recently been the case.