The humanities are central in today's academic turbulence and in the cultural crisis of which it is a manifestation. The crisis, with its long genealogy and manifold issues in society and the academy, is real enough. The heritage of an age of individualism in which many traditional forms of authority had survived is passing through the ordeal of irrelevance. In exaggerated reaction to the communitarian requirements of society, not to mention industrial society, this heritage is not simply found wanting but is pronounced to be corrupting, misleading or irrelevant. The disparity between institutions, values and received ideas and the needs of society is so great that past experience may also be dismissed as irrelevant for what some will ponderously call “the end of the neolithic age.” Ill-equipped and confused we face the problem of adaptation and innovation required by the encounter of civilizations in our world.