The last intellectuals

The last intellectuals PDF Author: Russell Jacoby
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description

The last intellectuals

The last intellectuals PDF Author: Russell Jacoby
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description


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.

Intellectuals and Race

Intellectuals and Race PDF Author: Thomas Sowell
Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)
ISBN: 0465058728
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Intellectuals and Race is a radical book in the original sense of one that goes to the root of the problem. The role of intellectuals in racial strife is explored in an international context that puts the American experience in a wholly new light. The views of individual intellectuals have spanned the spectrum, but the views of intellectuals as a whole have tended to cluster. Indeed, these views have clustered at one end of the spectrum in the early twentieth century and then clustered at the opposite end of the spectrum in the late twentieth century. Moreover, these radically different views of race in these two eras were held by intellectuals whose views on other issues were very similar in both eras. Intellectuals and Race is not, however, a book about history, even though it has much historical evidence, as well as demographic, geographic, economic and statistical evidence-- all of it directed toward testing the underlying assumptions about race that have prevailed at times among intellectuals in general, and especially intellectuals at the highest levels. Nor is this simply a theoretical exercise. The impact of intellectuals' ideas and crusades on the larger society, both past and present, is the ultimate concern. These ideas and crusades have ranged widely from racial theories of intelligence to eugenics to "social justice" and multiculturalism. In addition to in-depth examinations of these and other issues, Intellectuals and Race explores the incentives, the visions and the rationales that drive intellectuals at the highest levels to conclusions that have often turned out to be counterproductive and even disastrous, not only for particular racial or ethnic groups, but for societies as a whole.

Intellectuals and Society

Intellectuals and Society PDF Author: Thomas Sowell
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465031102
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
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 government leaders with disdain or contempt for intellectuals have had to bend to the climate of opinion shaped by those intellectuals. Intellectuals and Society not only examines the track record of intellectuals in the things they have advocated but also analyzes the incentives and constraints under which their views and visions have emerged. One of the most surprising aspects of this study is how often intellectuals have been proved not only wrong, but grossly and disastrously wrong in their prescriptions for the ills of society -- and how little their views have changed in response to empirical evidence of the disasters entailed by those views.

Intellectuals

Intellectuals PDF Author: Paul Johnson
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061871478
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
"Johnson revels in all the wicked things these great thinkers have done...great fun to read." — New York Times Book Review A fascinating portrait of the minds that have shaped the modern world. In an intriguing series of case studies, Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Brecht, Sartre, Edmund Wilson, Victor Gollancz, Lillian Hellman, Cyril Connolly, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Kenneth Tynan, and Noam Chomsky, among others, are revealed as intellectuals both brilliant and contradictory, magnetic and dangerous.

Representations of the Intellectual

Representations of the Intellectual PDF Author: Edward W. Said
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307829626
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
In these six essays--delivered on the BBC as the prestigious Reith Lectures--Edward Said addresses the ways in which the intellectual can best serve society in the light of a heavily compromised media and of special interest groups who are protected at the cost of larger community concerns. Said suggests a recasting of the intellectual's vision to resist the lures of power, money, and specialization. In these pieces, Said eloquently illustrates his arguments by drawing on such writers as Antonio Gramsci, Jean-Paul Sartre, Regis Debray, Julien Benda, and Theodore Adorno, and by discussing current events and celebrated figures in the world of science and politics: Robert Oppenheimer, Henry Kissinger, Dan Quayle, Vietnam and the Gulf War. Said sees the modern intellectual as an editor, journalist, academic, or political adviser--in other words, a highly specialized professional--who has moved from a position of independence to an alliance with powerful corporate, institutional, or governmental organizations. He concludes that it is the exile-immigrant, the expatriate, and the amateur who must uphold the traditional role of the intellectual as the voice of integrity and courage, able to speak out against those in power.

Arguing the World

Arguing the World PDF Author: Joseph Dorman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226158143
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Joseph Dorman's film Arguing the World won New York Magazine's Best New York Documentary award in 1999 as well as the Peabody Award in 1999. His work has also appeared on The Discovery Channel, CBS, and CNN, and has been nominated for two Emmy Awards. Joseph Dorman's acclaimed documentary, Arguing the World, included stunning interviews with Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, and Nathan Glazer. Now with a new preface, Dorman converted the film into this book that includes an overview of the New York Intellectuals and a chapter on the future of the public intellectual. Expertly spliced together from the film and new material, this book gives the sense that these men are still engaged in their fiery debates that targeted everything from the Depression to McCarthyism to the rise of the New Left through the Age of Reagan.

The New York Intellectuals, Thirtieth Anniversary Edition

The New York Intellectuals, Thirtieth Anniversary Edition PDF Author: Alan M. Wald
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 146963595X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 503

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Book Description
For a generation, Alan M. Wald's The New York Intellectuals has stood as the authoritative account of an often misunderstood chapter in the history of a celebrated tradition among literary radicals in the United States. His passionate investigation of over half a century of dissident Marxist thought, Jewish internationalism, fervent political activism, and the complex art of the literary imagination is enriched by more than one hundred personal interviews, unparalleled primary research, and critical interpretations of novels and short stories depicting the inner lives of committed writers and thinkers. Wald's commanding biographical portraits of rebel outsiders who mostly became insiders retains its resonance today and includes commentary on Max Eastman, Elliot Cohen, Lionel Trilling, Sidney Hook, Tess Slesinger, Philip Rahv, Mary McCarthy, James T. Farrell, Irving Kristol, Irving Howe, Hannah Arendt, and more. With a new preface by the author that tracks the rebounding influence of these intellectuals in the era of Occupy and Bernie Sanders, this anniversary edition shows that the trajectory and ideological ordeals of the New York intellectual Left still matters today.

Alexis de Tocqueville and American Intellectuals

Alexis de Tocqueville and American Intellectuals PDF Author: Matthew J. Mancini
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742523449
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Comprehensive in its chronology, the works it discusses, and the commentators it critically examines, Alexis de Tocqueville and American Intellectuals tells the surprising story of Tocqueville's reception in American thought and culture from the time of his 1831 visit to the United States to the turn of the twenty-first century.

No Respect

No Respect PDF Author: Andrew Ross
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135200491
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
The intellectual and the popular: Irving Howe and John Waters, Susan Sontag and Ethel Rosenberg, Dwight MacDonald and Bill Cosby, Amiri Baraka and Mick Jagger, Andrea Dworkin and Grace Jones, Andy Warhol and Lenny Bruce. All feature in Andrew Ross's lively history and critique of modern American culture. Andrew Ross examines how and why the cultural authority of modern intellectuals is bound up with the changing face of popular taste in America. He argues that the making of "taste" is hardly an aesthetic activity, but rather an exercise in cultural power, policing and carefully redefining social relations between classes.