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A review essay on a book by Lee Congdon, Exile and Social Thought: Hungarian Intellectuals in Germany and Austria 1919-1933 (Princeton: Princeton U Press, 1991 [see listing in IRPS No. 70]). Congdon's book offers an intellectual history of Hungarian thinkers & statesmen exiled in Austria & Germany from 1919 to 1933, focusing on such notables as Georg Lukacs, Oskar Jaszi, Karl Polanyi, Karl Mannheim, & G. K. Chesterton. Congdon criticizes Lukacs for his Stalinist leanings but praises him for his penetrating approach to literature & society, & claims Mannheim as heir to the intellectual legacy of Max Weber. Written from the perspective of the Hungarian anti-Soviet democratic Left, Congdon's book is praised for contextualizing the Hungarian avant gardes of the 1920s & for making the Magyarophone culture accessible to non-Hungarians. W. Howard

The role of intellectuals in politics today is seen as one of futile outsiders who are attempting to legitimize their loss of faith in the democratic process & lack of hope in making it work. Two examples illustrate the argument: the position on the savings & loan scandal taken by Larry Martz, contributing editor of Newsweek ("S & Ls: Blaming the Media," 25 June 1990) & popular culture theorist Andrew Ross of Princeton U (eg, Universal Abandon: The Politics of Postmodernism [no publication information provided]). It is hoped that the legacy of ten generations of leftist intellectuals in US politics will not be discarded as easily as members of the press & the professoriate have managed to do. M. Malas

The Israeli intellectual scene seems to exhibit a failure of leadership. The older generation has little to offer since it is still living on the intellectual capital of its Diaspora backgound & either regards present-day reality as a falling-off from its original moral values or has sunk into the relative security of running the machinery of statehood (whether in a kibbutz branch or a ministry). The younger generation, born or raised in Israel is torn between the Zionist vision on which it was brought up & the present-day reality which no longer fits it. This younger generation has also been raised as a part of the Western world, but has not yet come into its inheritance, except in the natural sci's. Disinherited of its Judaism it faces the responsibility of choosing a `usable past.' It feels that it has taken part in a great historic enterprise (the creation of the state) but does not have the imaginative power or the perspective in time to invent great myths about it. This is a transitional generation-aware that life is far more complex than its parents thought, but these stirrings of awareness have so far produced only confusion & gropings. J. A. Fishman.