Abstract

For a number of reasons having to do with the timing of its founding, its geographic location, its frequency, its interdisciplinary character, and most of all the parochialism of American academic life, The New York Review of Books has become the most prestigious American intellectual magazine. As such, it has also become the voice of what there is of an academic establishment and thus the victim of an uncritical conservative conformism unaware of its political role as the apologist for whatever the status quo of any given time.

Today, the hegemonic ideology happens to be a self-righteous liberalism which, still gloating over the demise of its Cold War nemesis, refuses to entertain the possibility that it too is an historical product with a beginning and an end.