Lakoff draws persuasive biographical conclusions from his assessment of America as a Civilization and its impact. Lerner, he writes, "must have known that defending liberal America would cost him the polemical niche he had carved out for himself," that he'd be accused of having sold out. Though historians like Samuel Eliot Morison were "unstinting in their praise," others complained that the book lacked edge. Lakoff himself, confirming that his allegiance to Lerner extends only so far, confesses his preference for the nervier views of his later teacher Louis Hartz about America's "liberal tradition." Hartz, in The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), argued that because Americans were spared feudalism and both absorbed and apotheosized a "Lockean ethos," they grew inoculated against extremist ideologies--a judgment Lerner remained too skeptical to share.

Checkered responses, in any event, greeted Lerner's career as a whole. In the course of it, as Lakoff reports, Lerner drew praise from figures as diverse as Noel Coward, I.F. Stone, Charlie Chaplin, Felix Frankfurter and Hannah Arendt. At the same time, Lakoff records harsh criticisms of Lerner by journalist Sydney Harris, who skewered his style, and Ramparts, which mocked his "Slow Lerner" politics.

Nonetheless, Lerner wrote his one great book "less for contemporaries than for the next generation," his biographer contends. This recent reader would argue for its continued vitality precisely because it transcends the narrow explanatory habit of overprofessionalized American historians. Somewhat inadvertently, Lakoff rightly situates Lerner--in his one magisterial volume--as the author of the best pragmatist intellectual history of the United States: a narrative that insists twists of American history emerged from complex, textured problems in real life, not from a script driven by one powerful idea.

A consensus on the man, at any rate, seems more elusive. At times, Lerner comes off as a sexist exploiter of women and a braggart. Men, on the other hand, he gently mentored. During his academic years at Williams, and twenty-five postwar as a chaired professor of American studies at Brandeis, he nurtured such students as James MacGregor Burns and Martin Peretz, both of whom remained close to him. At Lerner's memorial service, Peretz eulogized him as a "mixture of gaiety with gravitas, mischief with illumination."

Lakoff ends urging us not to dismiss Lerner for his "eclecticism," not to make him pay a price "for being a generalist," even if Lerner himself "had a nagging sense that he had not done enough important work, having put too much into newspaper journalism and not enough into more enduring forms of writing."

That he never became Isaiah Berlin is clear. Lerner's own self-analysis helps explain why he suffers secondary status to Lippmann, whom he denounced in the thirties as a "reactionary" but saluted upon death for giving political columnists "a sense of our intellectual role." Lippmann surely wrote a greater number of important books, Public Opinion and A Preface to Morals among them. His application of Freudian ideas to politics and intense focus on mass opinion in political theory offered original perspectives Lerner rarely matched.

Yet Lakoff's biography, particularly the rich context it erects around the author of America as a Civilization, shows the gap in their reputations to be too great. Lerner's candor and ethnic authenticity contrast favorably with Lippmann's intellectual reticence, his infamous suppression of his Jewishness. Lerner's willingness to cross swords with power over decades shines beside Lippmann's lifelong campaign to be chief theoretician of the Establishment. Lerner's empathetic support for collective security, a phrase he popularized, appeals more than Lippmann's cold realism about America's interests. Finally, Lerner's version of American exceptionalism's appeal, at the end of a century in which our cultural hold on other countries is doubted by none, makes more sense than Lippmann's cosmopolitan allegiance to European models of explanation. If Lippmann remained the deeper philosophical thinker about liberal tradition, Lerner was the more authentic Americanist, confronting his country, like Kazin, with all organs working.

A 1963 New Yorker cartoon, published during the newspaper strike that closed every New York daily except the Post, captured Lerner's plight on the sideline of culture. It showed a commuter car full of conservative businessmen, denied their usual fare, unhappily reading the Post. One grumbles, "Who is this Max Lerner?"

Lakoff confronts the contemporary version of that question and answers it forcefully: a thinker worth remembering as both case study and exemplar of rude truths. Another answer is: the author of America as a Civilization, the intellectual history Dewey might have written if, strange thought, he'd been Max Lerner.

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