Impossible Loyalties

M t / ~Y TOPIC is the responsibilities owed to society by the academic humanist; that is to say, by the professor of literature, of language, of philosophy, and, in some cases, of history. My outlook may strike readers of differing convictions as excessively conservative. Some may even find it reminiscent in temper of a headline alleged to have appeared a good many years ago in the London Times: THREAT OF PROGRESS AVERTED. I resign myself the more readily to being regarded as a quietist, however, when I consider the view which those advocating the necessity of social commitment have always taken of the humanities. Nearly a hundred years ago, Frederic Harrison, an English disciple of the founding father of sociology Auguste Comte, asked Matthew Arnold how the humanism of the essays which eventually became Culture and Anarchy could possibly be brought to bear on the pressing problems of practical life

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