“Return with me now to the lusty days of yore,” writes Ron Rosenbaum in his newest Slate column …

… when engagé public intellectuals battled it out over Trotskyism, anarcho-syndicalism, and just who betrayed whom in the bloody streets of Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War—and later in the savage pages of The Partisan Review, where those battles were refought. Sometimes the intense seriousness of the intellectual combat can sound overstrained in retrospect (cf. the Woody Allen joke about Commentary and Dissent merging to form Dysentery). But in fact these were foundational postwar arguments, waged by some of the sharpest thinkers in print as they clashed over urgent questions about the future of totalitarianism and democracy.

Now, says Rosenbaum, a new book forthcoming from Melville House, Paul Berman‘s Flight of the Intellectuals, “recalls these heady days in a book that is likely to provoke an intense controversy among public intellectuals.”

Rosenbaum say “the most contentious assertion” in the book is made against journalists “who rushed to the defense of Salman Rushdie when he was threatened with death for a novel deemed blasphemously irreverent to Islam,” but who have since “failed to offer wholehearted support to Muslim dissidents today, people such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born author and Muslim apostate, whose lives are similarly threatened,” and which “represents a deeply troubling abandonment of Enlightenment values in the face of recurrent threats to freedom of expression.”

The book “will likely provoke bouts of rage, praise, and condemnation in print and online,” says Rosenbaum, “… an intellectual thriller in the form of a polemic,” that just might ” will start intellectuals talking, and not just about each other.”