Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics (Volume 2)

by Bruce Robbins (Editor)

Intellectuals, we are told, are an endangered species. Once at the center of crucial debates about politics and culture, today they have forsaken their proud and public-spirited independence and retreated into the shelter of the academy, the inconsequence of postmodern aesthetics, the rarefactions of poststructuralist theory. Once free-floating and oppositional, they have now been grounded.

The essays in Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics, dispute this diagnosis, rethinking the heritage of controversy over intellectuals in the light of the Bennett-Bloom backlash. Unafraid to place intellectuals in specific historical context, they do not defend an illusory autonomy but analyze and evaluate the situatedness of intellectuals, their real and potential role in the circumstances that define our public life: the media, government bureaucracy, the university, the “new social movements.” In these circumstances they seek new grounding for the responsibilities of public opposition.

Genres: Essays, Academia

408 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Bruce Robbins is the author of Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (NYU, 1999), The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction from Below (Columbia, 1986; Duke pb 1993) and Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (Verso, 1993). He has edited Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics (Minnesota, 1990) and The Phantom Public Sphere (Minnesota, 1993) and co-edited Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minnesota, 1998). He was co-editor of the journal Social Text from 1991 to 2000. His most recent book is Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State (Princeton, 2009).