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Public discussion of “the authoritarian personality” returned with the election of President Trump. This article traces the rise of that concept and broader study of mass society in American social science, with adaptations into composition studies from the 1960s to the 1990s—followed by their lamentable eclipse under a lethal combination of forces since then.

Lazere strongly endorses Paul G. Cook's essay as a step toward rehabilitation of E. D. Hirsch's reputation in English studies and disagrees with Adam Ellwanger's attempt to do the same for Allan Bloom. The coincidence of their books' appearance has caused Hirsch to be saddled with Bloom's debts.

Reviewed is Save the World on Your Own Time by Stanley Fish.

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.

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Proposes some ground rules for principled debating and then, from the standpoint of a leftist, evaluates two conservative critiques (Lynne Cheney’s “Telling the Truth” and John Wilson’s “The Myth of Political Correctness”) of academia in light of these ground rules.

n the overheated rhetoric of the culture wars, in which leftists and rightists seem to mimic each other in reviling their opponents as Orwellian twisters of the truth, and in an arena where the concept of objectivity is itself a contested issue, is it possible to delineate any objective criteria for judging the relative credibility of opposing arguments? By objective criteria I mean a set of ground rules that both sides would agree to abide by, at least in principle, and to which the extent of a writer's or speaker's compliance is demonstrable, to the satisfaction of those of good will on both sides. I do believe that following such principles of fair play can make it possible to engage in polemics-heatedly partisan argumentation-without lapsing into the irresponsible, onesided tactics of invective, and to persuade to one's side those on the other or on the fence who maintain an open mind and equal commitment to those principles. Toward this ideal, I propose the following:

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