Books in brief.(Cry Havoc: The Great American Bring Down and How it Happened)(The Art of Victory: Strategies for Personal Success and Global Survival in a Changing World)(Book review)

WHY do conservatives seek, as the famous phrase has it, to stand athwart history yelling Stop? Because they are horrified by the sight of society coming undone. They have witnessed the breakdown of the family, the withering of liberal-arts education, the constriction of economic freedom, the corrosion of aesthetic standards, soaring crime rates, drug addiction ... the list is as familiar as it is dismaying.

Ralph de Toledano, a key figure in the founding generation of this magazine, was there to see it all. In Cry Havoc: The Great American Bring-Down and How It Happened (Anthem, 254 pp., $18), he lays out a chilling history of Western decline. In his capable hands, the story is dramatic: With the sympathy and support of an international Communist infrastructure, neo-Marxist intellectuals working within the West's own academic institutions produced and injected the intellectual poison that would slowly atrophy the vital organs of Western civilization. Tradition, religion, morality, and the family--all of these were cast as obstacles to progress, bulwarks of an old order that had to be crushed and cleared away.

Toledano traces the rise of the Frankfurt School from its Soviet-inspired roots in Germany through its migration to Columbia University, and from there its projection of the noxious "critical theory" into the mainstream of Anglophone academe. The intellectuals who led this movement lived by the Marxian principle that the aim of the academic is not merely to study the world, but to change it. Toledano shows just how terribly successful they have been.

Cry Havoc illustrates that, while political and military matters dominated the headlines of the Cold War, an equally important battle was being fought for control of the intellectual ...