Academics as Public Intellectuals

Academics as Public Intellectuals PDF Author: Sven Eliaeson
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443807176
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
As public intellectuals academics formulate specialized knowledge to become understandable and relevant for people outside of the specialty. There are two main forms of such intellectual activity: dissemination and debating. Scientific knowledge is a cultural value in its own right and also of importance in public discourse. Due to the complexity of the challenges facing modern societies the intellectual role of individual academics and scholarly institutions is increasingly important with mass education and new media techniques expanding the public sphere. It has become more important that specialists popularize also for specialists in other fields. Challenges such as climate change or social integration requires knowledgeable citizens and broad public discourses integrating specialized knowledge from several disciplines. Contemporary challenges in Western Europe, Scandinavia and the US are discussed. The historical perspectives are followed back to early Modernity. The cases include contributions on Holberg, the Myrdals and Boas. There are contributions on the recent transformations “East of the Elbe” and the challenges facing scholars in Turkey and India. The main focus of the book is on social scientists but the issues discussed are of general interest for all kinds of academics and for people interested in the cultural and political relevance of science.

Public Intellectuals

Public Intellectuals PDF Author: Richard A. Posner
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674042271
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
In this timely book, the first comprehensive study of the modern American public intellectual--that individual who speaks to the public on issues of political or ideological moment--Richard Posner charts the decline of a venerable institution that included worthies from Socrates to John Dewey. With the rapid growth of the media in recent years, highly visible forums for discussion have multiplied, while greater academic specialization has yielded a growing number of narrowly trained scholars. Posner tracks these two trends to their inevitable intersection: a proliferation of modern academics commenting on topics outside their ken. The resulting scene--one of off-the-cuff pronouncements, erroneous predictions, and ignorant policy proposals--compares poorly with the performance of earlier public intellectuals, largely nonacademics whose erudition and breadth of knowledge were well suited to public discourse. Leveling a balanced attack on liberal and conservative pundits alike, Posner describes the styles and genres, constraints and incentives, of the activity of public intellectuals. He identifies a market for this activity--one with recognizable patterns and conventions but an absence of quality controls. And he offers modest proposals for improving the performance of this market--and the quality of public discussion in America today. This paperback edition contains a new preface and and a new epilogue.

Academics as Public Intellectuals

Academics as Public Intellectuals PDF Author: Sven Eliaeson
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443807176
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 315

Get Book Here

Book Description
As public intellectuals academics formulate specialized knowledge to become understandable and relevant for people outside of the specialty. There are two main forms of such intellectual activity: dissemination and debating. Scientific knowledge is a cultural value in its own right and also of importance in public discourse. Due to the complexity of the challenges facing modern societies the intellectual role of individual academics and scholarly institutions is increasingly important with mass education and new media techniques expanding the public sphere. It has become more important that specialists popularize also for specialists in other fields. Challenges such as climate change or social integration requires knowledgeable citizens and broad public discourses integrating specialized knowledge from several disciplines. Contemporary challenges in Western Europe, Scandinavia and the US are discussed. The historical perspectives are followed back to early Modernity. The cases include contributions on Holberg, the Myrdals and Boas. There are contributions on the recent transformations “East of the Elbe” and the challenges facing scholars in Turkey and India. The main focus of the book is on social scientists but the issues discussed are of general interest for all kinds of academics and for people interested in the cultural and political relevance of science.

Reflections on Crisis

Reflections on Crisis PDF Author: Mary P. Corcoran
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781908996060
Category : Crisis management
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This pocket-sized book brings together academic essays originally delivered at a Royal Irish Academy symposium held in 2008. This was the year the global financial crisis hit. This book reflects a bewilderment at the heart of Irish society as the public looked to journalists and academics for explanations and solutions to what went wrong. Broken into five essays by economists, social scientists and historians, the short volume teases out questions such as: can we think our way out of a crisis? At a time of economic collapse, do intellectuals have something to offer? Are the views of economists, novelists, playwrights, sociologists, historians, political scientists and civil servants dismissed and ignored? Is Irish society anti-intellectual? The emergence of the figure of the public intellectual in American society is considered in some detail, as the book makes a case for shared critical thinking, imagination and ideas as a basis for recovery.

Intellect and Public Life

Intellect and Public Life PDF Author: Thomas Bender
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801857843
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
At a time of much unease in academia and among the general public about the relation of intellect to public life, Thomas Bender explores both the 19th-century origins and the 20th-century configurations of academic intellect in the United States. "Bender's positive, generous civil voice injects a soothing dose of optimism into current academic debates . . . ".--AMERICAN QUARTERLY.

The Social Scientist as Public Intellectual

The Social Scientist as Public Intellectual PDF Author: Charles F. Gattone
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742537934
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
In The Social Scientist as Public Intellectual, Charles Gattone addresses the question of the public role of the social scientist by reviewing the work of several key social thinkers, from Max Weber to Pierre Bourdieu. Drawing on the analyses of these scholars, Gattone argues that although political and economic institutions continue to influence the course of academic knowledge, opportunities remain for social scientists to act independently of these constraints, and approach their work as public intellectuals.

Letters to Power

Letters to Power PDF Author: Samuel McCormick
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 027105073X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
"Discusses the role of the intellectual in public life. Argues that the scarcity of public intellectuals among today's academics is a challenge to us to explore alternative, more subtle forms of political intelligence. Looks to ancient, medieval, and modern traditions of learned advocacy"--Provided by publisher.

Truth to Power

Truth to Power PDF Author: Karyn Hollis
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443822981
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
The notion that public intellectuals in the US are in decline has again become fashionable with their portrayal as trapped between Academe and the “real” world. The questions addressed by this volume are: How can the voices of scholars and erudite thinkers penetrate the globalized, corporate media and how does media receive and represent the contribution of intellectuals to the academic and public spheres, all the while recognizing what Paul Bové calls the “the nonidentity of intellectuals as a group.” Dedicated to the memory of Howard Zinn, whose life work is a model for intellectual engagement, this collection of intriguing articles with an introduction by the editors and a foreword by Henry A. Giroux presents new scholarship on the role of the intellectual in a society, and specifically in Academe, from many different perspectives. Indeed, intellectuals have been negotiating access to public discourse for centuries, but never have their opinions been more crucial to the public good, because of the privately owned media’s domination of public discourse. The inspiration for this volume comes also from Edward Said’s notion of intellectuals whose role is to “uncover and elucidate the contest, to challenge and defeat both an imposed silence and the normalized quiet of unseen power, wherever and whenever possible.”

Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers

Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers PDF Author: Edward J. López
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804783969
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers presents a simple, economic framework for understanding the systematic causes of political change. Wayne A. Leighton and Edward J. López take up three interrelated questions: Why do democracies generate policies that impose net costs on society? Why do such policies persist over long periods of time, even if they are known to be socially wasteful and better alternatives exist? And, why do certain wasteful policies eventually get repealed, while others endure? The authors examine these questions through familiar policies in contemporary American politics, but also draw on examples from around the world and throughout history. Assuming that incentives drive people's decisions, the book matches up three key ingredients—ideas, rules, and incentives—with the characters who make political waves: madmen in authority (such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Margaret Thatcher), intellectuals (like Jon Stewart and George Will), and academic scribblers (in the vein of Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes). Political change happens when these characters notice holes in the structure of ideas, institutions, and incentives, and then act as entrepreneurs to shake up the status quo.

The Age of Questions

The Age of Questions PDF Author: Holly Case
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691210373
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
A groundbreaking history of the Big Questions that dominated the nineteenth century In the early nineteenth century, a new age began: the age of questions. In the Eastern and Belgian questions, as much as in the slavery, worker, social, woman, and Jewish questions, contemporaries saw not interrogatives to be answered but problems to be solved. Alexis de Tocqueville, Victor Hugo, Karl Marx, Frederick Douglass, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and Adolf Hitler were among the many who put their pens to the task. The Age of Questions asks how the question form arose, what trajectory it followed, and why it provoked such feverish excitement for over a century. Was there a family resemblance between questions? Have they disappeared, or are they on the rise again in our time? In this pioneering book, Holly Case undertakes a stunningly original analysis, presenting, chapter by chapter, seven distinct arguments and frameworks for understanding the age. She considers whether it was marked by a progressive quest for emancipation (of women, slaves, Jews, laborers, and others); a steady, inexorable march toward genocide and the "Final Solution"; or a movement toward federation and the dissolution of boundaries. Or was it simply a farce, a false frenzy dreamed up by publicists eager to sell subscriptions? As the arguments clash, patterns emerge and sharpen until the age reveals its full and peculiar nature. Turning convention on its head with meticulous and astonishingly broad scholarship, The Age of Questions illuminates how patterns of thinking move history.

Public Intellectuals

Public Intellectuals PDF Author: Amitai Etzioni
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742542556
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Public Intellectuals: An Endangered Species? investigates the definition, role, and decline of public intellectuals in American society. Drawing from a wide range of commentaries and studies, this edited volume demonstrates the unique importance of public intellectuals and probes the timely question of how their voices can continue to be effective in our ever-changing social, academic and political climates. At a time when many argue that public intellectuals are dying out, the book addresses questions such as who qualifies as a public intellectual? Have their ranks thinned out and their qualities diminished? What is that special service that public intellectuals are supposed to render for the body politic? And, above all, is society being shortchanged?