| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Leon Fink. Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Democratic Commitment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1997. Pp. x, 374. $39.95.

The term "democratic intellectual" is, if not an oxymoron, at least packed with tension. Intellectuals are people who, by virtue of their learning, leisure, and other acquired advantages, think they know better than others. As such, they have a tendency toward contempt for those less privileged than themselves, whom they are inclined to call the "masses." How is it, then, that intellectuals who claim to know better than most people—and who, across a limited range of matters, do indeed know better than most people—might effectively bind themselves to democratic politics, the authoritative rule of the very masses to whom they are inclined to condescend? This was a particularly fraught question for American intellectuals in the first third of this century, and Leon Fink has gathered a collection of portraits of figures, familiar and unfamiliar, who wrestled with it. A diverse lot of reformers, they shared what Fink calls a "paradoxical vocation," that of "a social critic committed at once to identification with the whole of the people and an elitist whose own mores and life situation would prove somewhat alienating from the very public he or she had chosen to serve" (p. 5). . . .

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