Writing about the academic culture wars, we have often had occasion to warn about the institutionalization of a 1960s-style radicalism. Although it is an inelegant mouthful, that polysyllabic phrase seemed the neatest formula for describing the disturbing transformation of cultural radicalism from a force besieging the establishment from the outside into a blithely accepted— even celebrated—aspect of the very establishment culture it had once sought to destroy. This project of redefinition—of the fringe as mainstream, the periphery as center, the deviant as normal—is enormously complex and has wrought still unfathomed changes in our society and way of looking at the world.

Indeed, a full inventory of such changes would amount to a chronicle of a revolution—a cultural revolution in which the moral and intellectual fruits of our civilization have been dangerously compromised by principles whose ful ...

This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchase