Intellectuals occupy a paradoxical position in contemporary American culture as they
struggle both to maintain their critical independence and to connect to the larger society. In …

A valuable counter to the Reagan-Bush-Bennett-Bloom backlash, these essays (by many of
the usual left suspects--Aronowitz, Said, Ehrenreich, et al.) analyze and evaluate the …

The period immediately following the Second World War was a time, observed Randall
Jarrell, when many American writers looked to the art of criticism as the representative act of …

This project began a while ago, in a very different form, in a restaurant that no longer exists.
What has endured throughout the process is a series of conversations with Andrew Ross, a …

In these impassioned and inspiring essays, based on his 1993 Reith Lectures, Edward Said
explores what it means to be an intellectual today. Are intellectuals merely the servants of …

Whether intellectuals are counter-cultural escapists corrupting the young or secular prophets
leading us to prosperity, they are a fixture of modern political life. In The Public Intellectual …

European history of the past century is full of examples of philosophers, writers, and scholars
who supported or excused the worst tyrannies of the age. How was this possible? How …

What does it mean to be both a professor of philosophy and a public intellectual in an age
when every CEO is hailed as an intellectual, every adman a visionary? When the opinions of …

Why did so many distinguished Western Intellectuals? from GB Shaw to JP Sartre, and.
closer to home, from Edmund Wilson to Susan Sontag? admire various communist systems …

How to lead the people and be one of them? What's a democratic intellectual to do? This
longstanding dilemma for the progressive intellectual, how to bridge the world of educated …