Only a Voice: Essays

by George Scialabba

Essays on politics, power, and culture from one of America’s most eminent critics

In Only a Voice , George Scialabba examines the chasm between modernity's promise of progress and the sobering reality of our present day through studies of the most influential public intellectuals of our time.

In Scialabba's hands, literary criticism becomes a powerful tool for expressing political passion and demonstrating the generative power of argument and an inquisitive mind. Drawing together a diverse group of thinkers, artists, activists, and philosophers-including Edward Said, D. H. Lawrence, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ellen Willis, and Noam Chomsky-Scialabba tours western intellectual history to find that no matter the stakes, critical thought remains a necessary precondition for politics.

Every writer, Scialabba writes, faces the choice of whether "to tilt at the state and capital or ignore them" – and the world now is too dire not to choose the former.

Genres: Essays, Philosophy, Nonfiction

304 pages, Hardcover

Published August 15, 2023

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Essentially a themed collection drawn from nearly forty years of work, each essay examining a writer’s response to let’s call it “modernity,” the project of enlightenment liberalism. This gives the book a strong sense of unity but also means some points are repeated across the decades, sometimes nearly verbatim—unfair to ding him for it, maybe, as it wouldn’t have felt that way reading each piece as it was published, but the sameness is there nevertheless and it gets a little hectoring.

Scialabba’s reputation for elegance is a bit overblown; the prose is workmanlike and extremely competent but he would be well in he middle of the pack among the midcentury stylists he spends much of the book discussing (and to his credit he knows it). I found myself appreciating his mastery of the nuts and bolts of criticism: summary, paraphrase, refuting a claim with careful quotation. Many essays would serve as great introductions to their subjects. He is slightly out of his depth among newer trends in cultural politics; he lands some solid points against broader idpol trends but biffs a weird little critique of “cancel culture.” But those are sidebars, in the main an impressive core sample of an extremely consistent career.

[Russell Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of Scialabba's writings is something of a retrospective, and includes 11 of the same critical reviews that was in his 2009 collection. (He also includes the lesser of the two pieces from that previous book on Christopher Lasch, which was an unfortunately choice on his or his editor's part, I think.) By assembling this collection, though, the historical range and intellectual framing of the book is stronger than in his last one; here, he very explicitly (or at least as explicit as Scialabba's essays ever allow; a true essayist and a true liberal, he is always leaving his sentences, and his judgments, open for reconsideration) organizes his survey of the intellectual landscape first by looking at critics of modernity (T.S. Eliot, Leo Strauss, Ivan Illich, Wendell Berry, etc.) or at least those whose writings reveal its limitations (Adam Smith, Isaiah Berlin, etc.), then by looking at leftists and how they've made their peace (if they have) with modernity (Irving How, Victor Serge, etc.), then finally by considering liberal critics thinking through it all (Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, etc.). But all of this just scratches the surface. Almost without exception, every one of his essays reveal a man of a certain conservative, even elitist sensibility, who is committed for all the right reasons to what the Enlightenment and progressive liberalism have accomplished, but is too smart not to want to understand and too principled a liberal not to remain open to being convinced by the critics of those things. He isn't what I would call a "left conservative," but he does sketch out the intellectual parameters of that sensibility superbly, if unintentionally, well.

[Santi Ruiz · Rating 4 out of 5]

every essay is like *deeply thoughtful, articulate reading of a luminary* *record scratch* *now if it wasn’t for that blasted Dick Cheney and the oil execs!

Or as Joey put it, “This book with essays about artistic, political, and philosophical geniuses is dedicated to Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader”

[Greg Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scialabba is a wonderful reader: effusive about his favorites, but also willing to try and sieve out some wisdom from others who struck out. He's a very well-read guy, reaching back across dozens of thinkers and pinning himself in the grand dialogue that's been going on for centuries. And most of all, he's a clear and lucid writer, enough that I felt enraptured even while juggling a five-month-old baby and other modern distractions.

The book reminds me of Clive James' Cultural Amnesia, and makes me want to go back and finish reading that.

[Julien L · Rating 4 out of 5]

What's great about Scialabba's essays is that he gives equal amounts of respect and/or deference to the figures he writes about, even if he might disagree with them politically. A series of essays that examine key intellectual thinkers, writers, politicians, etc. and use them to explore political/philosophical ideas with a clear-headedness and lucidity of style. They also function nicely as bits of biography, and one could see the whole collection as a history of his intellectual development. In a world of one-sided extremes, Only a Voice provides a refreshingly measured take on things.

[William Baumeister]

Introduced me to a lot of new names. Last Men and Women and the Isaiah Berlin essay are very good

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

He really is one of the great contemporary minds. He's read everything, digested it thoroughly, and he manages to respond in such lucid ways-- prose-wise and morally and politically-- that even if you're not up on your, say, Illich or Pasolini or Lasch you feel like you've worn a new groove in your brain so that you can at least think about them in a useful way going forward.

And as much as he's a radical, a deep admirer of Chomsky and Nader, at the same time he's admirably calm and composed and doesn't forget that in a crucial sense writing really is one person talking to another person.

It would be more stars but this is more like a greatest hits collection, where I've already read a few of his books over the years, so not too much new for me.

But if you want a sensible, erudite, morally focused look at some of what's on offer for 20th Century intellectual history this would be the ideal place.

Give it to your nephew or niece who just graduated high school or college and wants to be a writer.