Author's Response

It might be useful to review the conditions which led to the writing of the paper before referring directly to the discussants' comments. It was in 1963 that I began the paper and the so-called Two Cultures cleft had been widened and deepened by a spectacularly bitter debate—only the year before—between F. R. Leavis and C. P. Snow. (Dr. Wald, incidentally, who asserts that the “attitudes between the fields were never as bitter as Bennis makes them out to be” might take a look at the pages of The Spectator and judge for himself.) There was, in addition, a mounting literature about the Two Cultures issue flooding the intellectual quarterlies and I found most of them interesting but inevitably treating the problem on solely cultural grounds and ignoring the possibilities that the chronicity of the debate (persisting at least two centuries) might imply that certain personality determinants could also be playing a role.

So there was a basic intellectual issue at stake: could one make a plausible case for the Two Cultures split on the basis of two diverging personalities? And if so, what could possibly be the etiological factors involved?

But, in addition to this intellectual drive, there was an equally strong emotional drive, which I am sure had an important impact on the final version of the paper. My wife was then pregnant with our first child and with insight, available only retrospectively, I am certain that this fact partly accounts for the single-mindedness of the hypothesis.

It might also be interesting for the readers to know that the paper frightened me after it was written, so much so that I refused to publish it even though it had been written specifically for the “Journal of Social Issues.” I was editing a special number of that journal on the Two Cultures issue, but instead of including it at that time, I felt sure that it must be concealed from public view until I could distinguish my unparalleled intellectual zeal which I experienced in the course of writing