Download or read book The Changing Role of the Public Intellectual written by Dolan Cummings and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-27 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ideas can define and transform society, but how healthy is intellectual life today? In a period when Big Brother refers not to George Orwell but to a reality TV show, and when bright young things are developing gameshow formats rather than scribbling essays; when thinkers join think tanks to design short-term government policy rather than reflecting on and challenging the status quo, and when the ever growing number of graduates seem more interested in job prospects than academic endeavour, is intellectual life in terminal decline? This book looks at the idea of the public intellectual, considering whether such thinkers are becoming an endangered species. It also looks at the legacy of relativism and ethical doubts about the pursuit of knowledge, and the effect of such developments on intellectual life. The final section considers the expansion of higher education and the changing role of the academic. Taken together, the essays in this collection form a comprehensive overview of the intellectual climate today, and the possibilities for the future. This volume was previously published as a special issue of the journal Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy (CRISPP).
Download or read book Reflections on Crisis written by Mary P. Corcoran and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Public Intellectuals written by Richard A. Posner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Public Intellectual written by Helen Small and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New essays by prestigious thinkers such as Edward Said, Bruce Robbins, Jacqueline Rose, and Stefan Collini on the public role of writers and intellectuals.
Download or read book The Public Intellectual written by Richard M. Zinman and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2004-09-01 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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: Between Philosophy and Politics, Arthur M. Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, and M. Richard Zinman bring together a wide variety of noted scholars to discuss the characteristics, nature, and role of public thinkers. By looking at scholarly life in the West, this work explores the relationship between thought and action, ideas and events, reason and history.
Download or read book The Social Scientist as Public Intellectual written by Charles F. Gattone and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2006-03-14 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the role of the social scientist in public affairs? How have changes in the structure of the university system and the culture of academia reshaped the opportunities and constraints facing contemporary scholars? The Social Scientist as Public Intellectual addresses these and other questions by reviewing the ideas of seminal thinkers in Europe and the United States, and relating their conclusions to today's world. In this book, Charles Gattone examines the analyses of Max Weber, Thorstein Veblen, Karl Mannheim, Joseph Schumpeter, C. Wright Mills, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Pierre Bourdieu, tracing their perspectives through two World wars, the Cold War, and into the present. Gattone situates the ideas of these authors in historical context, showing the ways the realities of their time - fascism , totalitarianism, the rise of bureaucratic institutions, and the expansion of industrial democracy - informed their assessments regarding the place of the intellectual in the political realm. He brings their work into the current context, addressing the difficulties involved in bridging the gap between the ideas of scholarly inquiry and the practical realities of politics, and examining the ways newer factors such as the mass media relate to the character and trajectories of popular sentiment. Gattone argues that although political and economic institutions continue to influence the course of academic knowledge, opportunities remain for social scientists to act independently and develop insight that can ultimately be of value to a wide spectrum of the population in the modern order. Rather than follow the habit of striving to satisfy the narrow demands of institutional supporters, Gattone suggests that social scientists have the potential to approach their work from the standpoint of a broader orientation, and address social issues as public intellectuals.
Download or read book New Public Spheres written by Dr Christiane Timmerman and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-12-28 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The public sphere provides a domain of social life in which public opinion is expressed by means of rational discourse and debate. Habermas linked its historical development to the coffee houses and journals in England, Parisian salons and German reading clubs. He described it as a bourgeois public sphere, where private people come together and where they turn from a politically disempowered bourgeoisie into an effective political agent - the public intellectual. With communication networks being diversified and expanded over time, the worldwide web has put pressure on traditional public spheres. These new informal and horizontal networks shaped by the internet create new contexts in which an anonymous and dispersed public may gather in political e-communities to reflect critically on societal issues. These de-centered modes of communication and influence-seeking change the role of the (traditional) public intellectual and - at first sight - seem to make their contributions less influential. What processes, therefore, influence changes within public spheres and how can intellectuals assert authority within them? Should we speak of different types of intellectuals, according to the different modes of public intellectual engagement? This ground-breaking volume gives a multi-disciplinary account of the way in which public intellectuals have constructed their role and position in the public sphere in the past, and how they try to voice public concerns and achieve authority again within those fragmented public spheres today.
Download or read book Public Intellectuals written by Amitai Etzioni and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2006 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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?
Download or read book The New Public Intellectual written by Jeffrey R. Di Leo and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the theoretical parameters that produce the category public intellectual? By pondering the conceptual elements that inform the term, this book offers not just a political critique, but a sense of the new challenges its meanings present. This collection complicates the notion of public intellectual while arguing for its continued urgency in communities formal and informal, institutional and abstract. While it is not quite accurate to say public intellectuals have disappeared entirely, it is clear they function differently in an age of global neoliberalism and techno-digital overdrive. Today the idea of the public intellectual bears only the slightest resemblance to what it was fifty or even twenty-five years ago. The essays in this collection provide a number of different ways to imagine the fate of public intellectuals and offers a thorough exploration of the commonplace ideologies and politics associated with them.
Download or read book Thinking in Public written by Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2019-06-07 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long before we began to speak of "public intellectuals," the ideas of "the public" and "the intellectual" raised consternation among many European philosophers and political theorists. Thinking in Public examines the ambivalence these linked ideas provoked in the generation of European Jewish thinkers born around 1900. By comparing the lives and works of Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, and Leo Strauss, who grew up in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair and studied with the philosopher—and sometime National Socialist—Martin Heidegger, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft offers a strikingly new perspective on the relationship between philosophers and politics. Rather than celebrate or condemn the figure of the intellectual, Wurgaft argues that the stories we tell about intellectuals and their publics are useful barometers of our political hopes and fears. What ideas about philosophy itself, and about the public's capacity for reasoned discussion, are contained in these stories? And what work do we think philosophers and other thinkers can and should accomplish in the world beyond the classroom? The differences between Arendt, Levinas, and Strauss were great, but Wurgaft shows that all three came to believe that the question of the social role of the philosopher was the question of their century. The figure of the intellectual was not an ideal to be emulated but rather a provocation inviting these three thinkers to ask whether truth and politics could ever be harmonized, whether philosophy was a fundamentally worldly or unworldly practice.
Download or read book The Responsibility of Intellectuals written by Noam Chomsky and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2017-11-07 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected by Newsweek as one of “14 nonfiction books you’ll want to read this fall” Fifty years after it first appeared, one of Noam Chomsky’s greatest essays will be published for the first time as a timely stand-alone book, with a new preface by the author As a nineteen-year-old undergraduate in 1947, Noam Chomsky was deeply affected by articles about the responsibility of intellectuals written by Dwight Macdonald, an editor of Partisan Review and then of Politics. Twenty years later, as the Vietnam War was escalating, Chomsky turned to the question himself, noting that "intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments" and to analyze their "often hidden intentions." Originally published in the New York Review of Books, Chomsky's essay eviscerated the "hypocritical moralism of the past" (such as when Woodrow Wilson set out to teach Latin Americans "the art of good government") and exposed the shameful policies in Vietnam and the role of intellectuals in justifying it. Also included in this volume is the brilliant "The Responsibility of Intellectuals Redux," written on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, which makes the case for using privilege to challenge the state. As relevant now as it was in 1967, The Responsibility of Intellectuals reminds us that "privilege yields opportunity and opportunity confers responsibilities." All of us have choices, even in desperate times.
Download or read book Public Intellectuals and the Common Good written by Todd C. Ream and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the midst of a divisive culture, public intellectuals speaking from an evangelical perspective have a critical role to play—within the church and beyond. Representing the church, higher education, journalism, and the nonprofit sector, these world-class scholars and practitioners cast a vision for intellectuals who promote human flourishing.
Download or read book Public Intellectual written by Richard Falk and published by SCB Distributors. This book was released on 2021-02-01 with total page 586 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This intimate and penetrating account of a remarkable life is rich in insights about topics ranging from the academic world to global affairs to prospects for a livable society. A gripping story, with many lessons for a troubled world." NOAM CHOMSKY "Whether you are a peace activist or researcher, or you care about the earth and fellow human beings, Public Intellectual will enrich you intellectually and politically." DR. VANDANA SHIVA "Richard Falk is one of the few great public intellectuals and citizen pilgrims who has preserved his integrity and consistency in our dark and decadent times. This wise and powerful memoir is a gift that bestows us with a tear-soaked truth and blood-stained hope". DR. CORNEL WEST “Richard Falk recounts a life well spent trying to bend the arc of international law toward global justice. A Don Quixote tilting nobly at real dragons. His culminating vision of a better or even livable future—a ‘necessary utopia’—evokes with current urgency the slogan of Paris, May 1968: ‘Be realistic: demand the impossible.’”DANIEL ELLSBERG This political memoir reveals how Richard Falk became prominent in America and internationally as both a public intellectual and citizen pilgrim. Falk built a life of progressive commitment, highlighted by visits to North Vietnam where he met PM Pham Von Dong, to Iran during the Islamic Revolution after meeting Khomeini in Paris, to South Africa where he met with Nelson Mandela at the height of the struggle against apartheid, and frequently to Palestine and Israel. His memoir is studded with encounters with well-known public figures in law, academia, political activism and even Hollywood. Falk mentored the thesis of Robert Mueller, taught David Petraeus. His publications and activism describe various encounters with embedded American militarism, especially as expressed by governmental resistance to responsible efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons, and his United Nations efforts on behalf of the rights of the Palestinian people. In 2010 he was named Outstanding Public Scholar in Political Economy by the International Studies Association. He has been nominated annually for the Nobel Peace Prize since 2009
Download or read book Taking It Big written by Stanley Aronowitz and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012-07-10 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) was a pathbreaking intellectual who transformed the independent American Left in the 1940s and 1950s. Often challenging the established ideologies and approaches of fellow leftist thinkers, Mills was central to creating and developing the idea of the "public intellectual" in postwar America and laid the political foundations for the rise of the New Left in the 1960s. Written by Stanley Aronowitz, a leading sociologist and critic of American culture and politics, Taking It Big reconstructs this icon's formation and the new dimension of American political life that followed his work. Aronowitz revisits Mills's education and its role in shaping his outlook and intellectual restlessness. Mills defined himself as a maverick, and Aronowitz tests this claim (which has been challenged in recent years) against the work and thought of his contemporaries. Aronowitz describes Mills's growing circle of contacts among the New York Intellectuals and his efforts to reenergize the Left by encouraging a fundamentally new theoretical orientation centered on more ambitious critiques of U.S. society. Blurring the rigid boundaries among philosophy, history, and social theory and between traditional orthodoxies and the radical imagination, Mills became one of the most admired and controversial thinkers of his time and was instrumental in inspiring the student and antiwar movements of the 1960s. In this book, Aronowitz not only reclaims this critical thinker's reputation but also emphasizes his ongoing significance to debates on power in American democracy.
Download or read book J M Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual written by Jane Poyner and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual addresses the contribution Coetzee has made to contemporary literature, not least for the contentious forays his work makes into South African political discourse and the field of postcolonial studies.
Download or read book New Public Spheres written by Peter Thijssen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The public sphere provides a domain of social life in which public opinion is expressed by means of rational discourse and debate. Habermas linked its historical development to the coffee houses and journals in England, Parisian salons and German reading clubs. He described it as a bourgeois public sphere, where private people come together and where they turn from a politically disempowered bourgeoisie into an effective political agent - the public intellectual. With communication networks being diversified and expanded over time, the worldwide web has put pressure on traditional public spheres. These new informal and horizontal networks shaped by the internet create new contexts in which an anonymous and dispersed public may gather in political e-communities to reflect critically on societal issues. These de-centered modes of communication and influence-seeking change the role of the (traditional) public intellectual and - at first sight - seem to make their contributions less influential. What processes, therefore, influence changes within public spheres and how can intellectuals assert authority within them? Should we speak of different types of intellectuals, according to the different modes of public intellectual engagement? This ground-breaking volume gives a multi-disciplinary account of the way in which public intellectuals have constructed their role and position in the public sphere in the past, and how they try to voice public concerns and achieve authority again within those fragmented public spheres today.
Download or read book Writers as Public Intellectuals written by Odile Heynders and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-02-09 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book demonstrates how authors performing the role of a public intellectual discuss ideas and opinions regarding society while using literary strategies and devices in and beyond the text. Their assumed persona thereby reads the world as a book - interpreting it and offering alternative scenarios for understanding it.
