ABSTRACT

After an introduction to the major issues confronting intellectuals, this book explores the various aspects of the intellectual's role including:
* philosophers and academics who have tried to define the function of the intellectual
* how intellectuals have assumed the status of the conscience of the nation and the voice of the oppressed
* the interaction of intellectuals with Marxism
* the place of the intellectual in American society
Covering regions as diverse as Israel, Algeria, Britain, Ireland, central Europe and America, this collection considers the question of whether the intellectual can still lay claim to the language of truth. In answering, this study tells us much about the modern world in which we live.
Coverage includes the following thinkers: Gramsci, Weber, Yeats, Auden, Levy, Mailer, Walzer, Marx and many more.

chapter |21 pages

The century of the intellectual

From the Dreyfus Affair to Salman Rushdie

part |63 pages

Insiders and outsiders

chapter |20 pages

The intellectual as social critic

Antonio Gramsci and Michael Walzer

chapter |20 pages

Between autonomy and responsibility

Max Weber on scholars, academics and intellectuals

chapter |21 pages

Of treason, blindness and silence

Dilemmas of the intellectual in modern France

part |60 pages

Priestly interventions

chapter |18 pages

Between the word and the land

Intellectuals and the State in Israel

chapter |27 pages

A product of history, not a cause?

Yeats, the ‘Auden generation', and the politics of poetry, 1891–1939

part |76 pages

Slavonic jesters

chapter |20 pages

Revolutionaries and dissidents

The role of the Russian intellectual in the downfall of Tsarism and Communism

chapter |28 pages

Intellectuals and socialism

Making and breaking the proletariat

part |77 pages

American agnostics

chapter |23 pages

Freedom, commitment and Marxism

The predicament of independent intellectuals in the United States, 1910–41

chapter |23 pages

The tragic predicament

Post-war American intellectuals, acceptance and mass culture

chapter |15 pages

Are intellectuals a dying species?

War and the Ivory Tower in the postmodern age 1

part |13 pages

Epilogue