Irving Howe’s “This Age of Conformity,” talks about intellectuals, and how they view capitalism, and cultural conformism. Howe first talks about capitalism and how intellectuals saw this as hope with the New Deal coming in to play. Howe then talks about the two central policies of the New Deal, which were social legislation and state intervention in economic life, and how the intellectuals lacked criticism towards it. Later on, Howe talks about cultural conformism, the avant-garde, and how it has become “obsolete or irrelevant.” Howe then talks about the history of the avant-garde, how it was established, what their goal was, which was “facing the quality of our culture,” how it was disestablished over the twenty-five to thirty years since
