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A book dealing with the "politics of ideas" in modern America is not of a kind that is usually reviewed in a psychoanalytic journal,
and its topic is not generally in the focus of analytic readers. This reviewer makes the assumption that the majority of the readers of this Quarterly will be as unfamiliar with the author and his works as I was and will therefore welcome an introduction. Norman Birnbaum is a sociologist who is currently University Professor at Georgetown University Law Center, after having taught at Amherst College, the New School for Social Research, the London School of Economics and Political Science, Oxford University, and the University of Strassburg. In addition to his academic activities he was a founding editor of New Left Review and was on the board of Partisan Review. He is currently on the boards of The Nation and Praxis and has been actively involved in the presidential campaigns of Edward Kennedy and Jesse Jackson, as well as having advised political parties, unions, and the peace movement in Western Europe. In his own words he has "always worked in the Marxist tradition and been active in radical politics" (p. xi). These are the vantage points from which he writes.
What Birnbaum is concerned about in this volume is the search for new ideas to confront and deal with America's current changed historical situation and problems of "the control of aggression, sexism, racism and alienation." He decries what he considers to be the "focus on the transient, the superficial and the immediate," not only by the media, elected officials, and appointed political administrators but by those from whom one might presumably expect more, such as religious leaders, historians, economists, political scientists, and intellectuals of all kinds in and out of academia. In describing this loss of focus and depth he attempts to present the reader with a history of the currents and crosscurrents of thought in America as they are brought to bear on these pr