The last sixty years have witnessed a steady stream of critiques targeting intellectuals for supplying rationales—on either a direct or indirect basis—for the brutal totalitarian regimes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. Even as the specter of overt totalitarian rule has faded, European intellectuals have continued to trade charges and countercharges over the perennial threat of what the French polemicist Jean-François Revel famously labeled “the totalitarian temptation.”

Writers on the American scene have shared this sense of hazard—most notably Richard Wolin and the late Tony Judt, who have