Below is something I've been working on at school. Since McMaster has essentially eaten up all my time for the past few months, I thought it might be good to post some of my work to prove I am still alive (don't people usually go bungee jumping for that same reason?). So here is my analysis of the film Arguing the World.
Arguing the World: A Marxist Analysis of the New York Intellectuals
Wesley Kellar
The film Arguing the World follows the lives of four New York intellectuals from their modest childhoods, through their early experiences with academia and their subsequent careers as influential thinkers and social commentators. This paper will begin with a summary of the film, paying special attention to the early school days of Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Irving Howe and Irving Kristol, and the subsequent changes in their respective theoretical subscriptions. Following this, the film will be analyzed with reference to material relevant to the study of sociological theory, with particular focus paid to parallels with the life of Marx and connections to the Marxist paradigm. In so doing, this essay will prove the utility of the Marxist theoretical framework in the study of sociology and the world.
This section summarizing the experiences of the four New York intellectuals draws entirely from the film Arguing the World (Dorman 1998). The film begins with a discussion of the childhood of each of the four characters profiled. Each was a Jewish child growing up in New York, experiencing the burdens of poverty and discrimination. Bell came from the lower east side, Glazer was raised in the Bronx to a working-class family, Howe recalls a difficult move to the East Bronx and a resulting drop in socioeconomic status, and Kristol relates that he barely noticed his poverty in Brooklyn, because everyone he knew was also poor. These trying economic circumstances helped lay the foundation for the brilliant careers that followed. The result of their lack of money was that all four young men attended the City University of New York (CUNY), a relative dumping ground for the “smart poor” (Dorman 1998).
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