Author: Russell Jacoby
Publisher: Basic Books
Keywords: intellectuals, last
Number of Pages: 304
Published: 2000-08
List price: $20.00
ISBN-10: 0465036252
ISBN-13: 9780465036257

"Russell Jacoby’s brilliant analysis of our diminished intellectual life is, in itself, a hopeful sign: may he flourish." -Gore Vidal This provocative book chronicles the disappearance of the "public intellectual" in America. For over thirty years, the cultural landscape has been dominated by the generation of Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, and John Kenneth Galbraith; no younger group has arisen to succeed them. Unlike earlier intellectuals who lived in urban bohemias and wrote for the educated public, today’s thinkers have flocked to the universities, where the politics of tenure l

Author: Frank Furedi
Publisher: Continuum
Keywords: intellectuals
Number of Pages: 176
Published: 2005-10-17
List price: $23.95
ISBN-10: 0826488218
ISBN-13: 9780826488213

In his latest book, Frank Furedi argues that genuine intellectuals have largely disappeared from the public sphere - paradoxically, given that we supposedly live in a knowledge economy supported by an expanding higher education sector. The result is that potential intellectuals have taken up other, narrower, roles e.g. lobbyists, policy-advisers. This has impoverished public life. Furedi identifies the causes of this decline; the bureaucratisation of the university; reverse snobbishness; obsession with inclusiveness and relevance at all costs. In the final chapter he suggest where we should go

Author: Thomas Sowell
Publisher: Basic Book
Keywords: society, intellectuals
Number of Pages: 416
Published: 2010-01-05
List price: $29.95
ISBN-10: 046501948X
ISBN-13: 9780465019489

The influence of intellectuals is not only greater than in previous eras but also takes a very different form from that envisioned by those like Machiavelli and others who have wanted to directly influence rulers. It has not been by shaping the opinions or directing the actions of the holders of power that modern intellectuals have most influenced the course of events, but by shaping public opinion in ways that affect the actions of power holders in democratic societies, whether or not those power holders accept the general vision or the particular policies favored by intellectuals. Even gover

Author: Paul Berman
Publisher: Melville House
Keywords: intellectuals, flight
Number of Pages: 304
Published: 2010-04-27
List price: $26.00
ISBN-10: 1933633514
ISBN-13: 9781933633510

Twenty years ago, Ayatollah Khomeini called for the assassination of Salman Rushdie—and writers around the world instinctively rallied to Rushdie’s defense. Today, according to writer Paul Berman, “Rushdie has metastasized into an entire social class”—an ever-growing group of sharp-tongued critics of Islamist extremism, especially critics from Muslim backgrounds, who survive only because of pseudonyms and police protection. And yet, instead of being applauded, the Rushdies of today (people like Ayan Hirsi Ali and Ibn Warraq) often find themselves dismissed as “strident” or as no

Author: Ali Gheissari
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Keywords: century, twentieth, intellectuals, iranian
Number of Pages: 263
Published: 1997
List price: $19.95
ISBN-10: 0292728042
ISBN-13: 9780292728042

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, Iranian intellectuals have been preoccupied by issues of political and social reform, Iran’s relation with the modern West, and autocracy, or arbitrary rule. Drawing from a close reading of a broad array of primary sources, this book offers a thematic account of the Iranian intelligentsia from the Constitutional movement of 1905 to the post-1979 revolution. Ali Gheissari shows how in Iran, as in many other countries, intellectuals have been the prime mediators between the forces of tradition and modernity and have contributed significantly to

Author: Andras Bozoki
Publisher: Central European University Pre
Keywords: europe, central, politics, intellectuals
Number of Pages: 292
Published: 1998-12-01
List price: $21.95
ISBN-10: 9639116211
ISBN-13: 9789639116214

Discussing the role of intellectuals in the political transition of the late 1980s and early 1990s and their participation in the political life of the new democracies of Central Europe, this text presents essays from authors who discuss the eight countries in the region. In the introduction, the editor gives a historical overview of the tradition of the political involvement of intellectuals in these countries, especially in the nineteenth century. The chapters which follow describe the typical political and social attitude of Central European intellectuals, including writers, poets, artists,

Author: Stefan Collini
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Keywords: britain, intellectuals, minds, absent
Number of Pages: 536
Published: 2006-04-27
List price: $65.00
ISBN-10: 0199291055
ISBN-13: 9780199291052

The first full-length account of "the question of intellectuals" in twentieth-century Britain. Leading intellectual historian and cultural commentator Stefan Collini challenges the myth that there are no "real" intellectuals in Britain and offers a persuasive analysis of ’the intellectual’ as a concept as well as detailed discussions of influential figures such as T.S. Eliot, George Orwell, and Edward Said.