The Second Mountain

Chapter 19, “Intellectual Commitments,” begins with Brooks’s description of his own, democratic socialist commitments as a young person. “I was committed to this kind of life: passionate intellectual engagement for the sake of justice and world historical change” (190). He describes his slow intellectual transformation after confrontations with Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, losing a debate with Milton Friedman, and getting employment with arch-conservative William F. Buckley. He comes to describe himself as a Burkean conservative. He then criticizes the modern “research” ideal of the university in favor of a humanistic approach and defends the value of “great books” and “Western Civ” (195). Brooks provides a set of intellectual virtues, each with its own short explanation. Intellectual life provides entry into multigenerational conversations, “a range of history’s moral ecologies,” perspectival understanding, intellectual courage, “emotional knowledge,” and ever-new objects of love and admiration (196-98). Brooks describes his indebtedness to professors at the University of Chicago who exposed him to masterpieces of history and created “an erotic atmosphere around them” (198). He ends by noting that “the educated life is a journey toward higher and higher love” (201).