A Grand Tour - Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe-Toward the Revival of Higher Education - Review

National Review, Oct 1, 2001 by William F. Buckley Jr.

In a closing chapter, Hart writes of the "disinterested" norm. Unless you can analyze with strict, not to say reverential, concern for actuality, you are not to be trusted, because you are simply incomplete. It is only in his Afterword that he addresses directly current problems in the academy. "We have had fantastic egalitarian denials that one work can be superior to another." But he is optimistic that intellectual remobilization has made the position of literature "stronger than before." He discerns that much that goes on-perhaps we can say, has gone on-is an "antinomian dislike of rules, a rebellion against genuine learning and authority, an egalitarian abandonment of distinctions between the important and the unimportant."

In this relatively slim volume, Jeffrey Hart has told the freshman-and the graduate student-and the man and woman of affairs-how rich is the Western patrimony. This book merits a place in its library.