ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book presents nations and nationalism, traditions and traditionalism, professions and professionalism, powers and their institutions, and ultimately gods and their latter-day prophets. Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of Edward Said's theorizing of the exilic intellectual is the decontextualization of critical judgment whereby no sociology of knowledge can actually explain the intellectual away. The exilic condition, as Said defines it, supersedes ethnic and religious sectarianism only through a flexing of historical memories through an essentially ironic mode of being. Said's critique of Orientalism, is so thoroughly identified with him that in the domain of civic discourse it has scarce any connection to the discipline of the sociology of knowledge that by about a century predates the publication of Said's masterwork. The first thing that Said does is that he expands the spectrum of compromising forces that endanger the autonomous judgment of the intellectual.
