“It is one of the curiosities of neoconservatism that it has continued to see itself as representing an embattled minority even in its hours of triumph.” So writes Peter Brooks, a professor of French and comparative literature at Yale, in a recent issue of the London Times Literary Supplement (August 30, 1996). Needless to say, this tenured member of the Yale faculty wasn’t speaking of any recent neoconservative “hours of triumph” in the lecture halls and classrooms of his own campus, where, to the extent that a neoconservative influence may be discernible at all, it does indeed survive as “an embattled minority” position.

No, what seemed to be roiling this academic eminence, himself a champion of all the radical ideologies that have lately come to corrupt the study of the humanities at Yale, was something he wished to avoid being explicit about, lest he be seen to allude to the ...

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