The culture hero of our business civilization was the self-made man, a man of action, not one of trained intellect. - Merle Eugene Curti

American respect for business, and the businessman's inadequate appreciation of the intellectual, have by tradition been pretty generally taken for granted. One historian has gone so far as to say that whenever business sits in the driver's seat, as it did in the 1920's and as it does today, the distrust of the intellectual is both epidemic and dominant.

The ivory tower can become a pretty dull place, and rather unproductive, too.

While appraising all aspects of the past, including myths, we must at the same time uphold the critical function that is the basis of all scholarship, indeed, of civilization itself. For this we also need to recognize clearly the sources of irrationality in history, in our culture, in ourselves.