How did a group of radicals at City College during the 1930s become the deeply influential political and cultural critics now known as the New York Intellectuals? Arguing The World is a portrait of Irving Kristol, Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, and Nathan Glazer, whose lifelong political arguments and disagreements, seeded in the free college’s library, drove them to take separate paths through the controversies of the Cold War to the college campuses in the 1960s and the conservative backlash hailed by Ronald Reagan's presidency in the 1980s. Irving Kristol became a founder of the neo-conservative movement; Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer, both critics of liberalism, found places nearer the political center; while Irving Howe, still committed to socialism, formed new political alliances in Democratic Socialists of America. Join director Joseph Dorman with historian Steve Brier and others as they discuss the ideas behind the film and the history of radicalism at CUNY.

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