ANDREW FERGUSON: Memoirs of a Closet Conservative.

He gives the same pithy (and accurate) explanatory treatment to Freud, the “free love” movement, the rise of racial politics, and much else, across a wide range. For 50 years [Martin] Peretz taught at Harvard in a baggy discipline called “Social Studies,” a variant on the history of ideas. I envy his students.

Like a lot of professors, Peretz’s true interest was politics. He became an activist early on. His prominence and effectiveness were guaranteed by his marriage to an heiress named Anne Labouisse, whose family was “astoundingly, alienatingly rich.” Their money, however, was not so alienating that he refused to spend it. Candidates and causes flocked to him as if he were a milch cow with a thousand teats. (Perhaps this explains the unbuttoned shirts.) Starting as a radical in the 1950s, he gradually worked his way rightward, almost to the center, and eventually, on most subjects, well beyond.

A watershed moment came in 1967 when he organized a left-wing lollapalooza called the National Conference for New Politics that could have been scripted by Tom Wolfe. The leaders met at Peretz’s seaside mansion on Cape Cod (natch) and were instantly at each other’s throats (also natch). Later, the conference keynoter, Martin Luther King, was heckled by the black caucus, whose leader took the stage and proclaimed himself “dictator.” A rabbi announced that all white men should be “castrated” because of slavery. The conference dissolved in an acid bath of anti-Semitism, but not before Peretz had an instructive peek into the future of the left.

And his own future, when the then-young turks of the Journolist viciously attacked him as a racist (but of course) in 2009: JournoList Revealed! Inside the Secret Liberal Media Email Cabal.