Lionel Trilling is probably as famous now as he was twenty years ago, but unless I am much mistaken, his reputation is nowhere near as high as it was in the fifties, the years of The Liberal Imagination and The Opposing Self…. Back then, if this country had a leading literary critic, or, more precisely, a leading literary spokesman, it was Trilling. He was at the center of a number of concentric circles important to the literary intellectual life of the country…. He was one of the best-known "New York intellectuals," by which was usually meant "Columbia" or "the Partisan Review crowd," a group sufficiently coherent in its cultural and political centrality that its enemies, especially the younger ones, always knew who to attack when they wanted to strike their father dead.

Those days are long gone. Liberalism no longer has a near monopoly on intelligence…. [Trilling's] is...