*** I had the opportunity to first publish this review essay in Reviews in American History toward the tail end of the Bush II administration, and right as the 2008 financial crisis ruined the country. I brushed it up a bit for presenting it below***

Strange Species: The Boomer University Intellectual

Matt Bokovoy

Eric Lott. The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual. New York: Basic Books, 2006. xi + 260 pp. $26.00.

      “As historians, we do take opposing positions, but we seem to be united on one thing: a reluctance to debate” controversial topics in American history. So says Richard White recently, president of the Organization of American Historians (OAH). Worried about scholarly timidity and “a prickly over-professionalization,” White notices there has been “a culture of caution – that has begun to influence all of us. We have become each other’s hostages” in a university system that exists to minimize controversy, and where a new genteel ethic rewards cautious historical interpretations and scholarly demeanor. “Politics” has been shorn from informed historical critique, and academics hide behind the authority of credentials. On the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the OAH, White believes, “In a profession where we should wear our wounds proudly and confront our critics gladly, we prefer to be safe and guarded and fear that we have enemies who can cost us our reputations – We should celebrate scholars who draw strong reactions,” he worries. “Instead, we shy away from them.” Certainly, this development is not new regarding the place of intellectuals within both the American university system and society-at-large. The critical writings and political stances of academics have consistently elicited internal and external pressures since the post-Civil War emergence of the modern university, especially during times of conservatism, social upheaval, war, or anti-intellectualism. Writing more than forty years ago, Laurence Veysey explained how university administrators worked to maintain the integrity of their institutions, where dignity “was a jealous master. It required, first of all, a certain solemnity of countenance; it frowned upon the humor born of irreverence – Still more importantly,” noted Veysey, “dignity urged that the institution, no matter how torn with dissent, appear united and harmonious to all who look upon it from the outside. – If unfavorable publicity prevented such a posture, then dignity insisted that the leadership take visibly stern measures against the threat to its authority.” Much like the recent past, the early modern university “had little room for trouble-makers in its midst.” Provocative historical writing today, notes one scholar of the profession, usually leads to undue scrutiny by special interest groups, dismissal from the university, or both. Whether this is a problem of “quality” of product in public intellectual work or not, historical criticism can become relevant only when present questions of political concern lend understanding to the past.[1]

Eric Lott’s The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual examines the generational gap in the American academy during the last fifteen years with fighting words and bold claims, revealing an impaired radicalism on the academic Left he calls “boomeritis.” Lott charges university-affiliated and independent, boomer scholars with wimpy progressive and reformist thinking in his construction of recent intellectual history, such as Richard Rorty, Todd Gitlin, Paul Berman, Michael Lind, Martha Nussbaum, Paul Berman, Stanley Crouch, Greil Marcus, Sean Wilentz, Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., among others. Boomer intellectuals write and speak “in the service of a new ideal of social democratic reform” and “lament the rise of ‘divisive’ new social movements – often described as ‘identity politics’ or the ‘cultural left’ – and the decline of a liberal Americanism that is in most of its versions explicitly nationalist, racially revanchist, and at best Clintonian in its address to social class” (pg. 2). The author finds the radical spirit of university intellectuals reared during the 1960s and 1970s lacking in critical vision, defining the condition as “little more than political complacency with a relatively youthful face” where one can “see boomer liberalism in all its aspects as a kind of ‘progressive osteoarthritis’ of the mind – a boneheaded degeneration of the radical spirit and one of the chief obstacles to a reconstruction of social and political life in the twenty-first century” (pg. 2). Even though Lott finds himself a cohort of the baby boom generation, scholarly circles under age forty will likely respond with quiet enthusiasm to the author’s accusations disguised as informed criticism. This may be true because the book speaks to the transformation of scholarly imperatives in the university system and a younger generation’s distance from – and direct inheritance of – the legacies of 1960s radical intellectuals.

     The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual resembles a manic, scholarly lament rather than well-wrought criticism of the Clinton and Bush Era intellectual scene. The author proposes to critique the boomer intellectual retreat on African American social justice movements, liberalized radicalism, the perils of cosmopolitan nationalism, and liberal support for the Iraq War and economic globalization. Lott lays out a three-part topology to group boomer intellectuals, following “an organizational commitment: to identify these apparently various minds as a front in order to better combat them.” For Lott, argument about the role of the intellectual left could take a lifetime, so he finds his efforts “as a warrant to take out bourgeois thinkers in the relatively autonomous realm of debate and polemic” (pg. 17). He calls these tendencies neoliberal historicism, neoliberal Marxism, and neoliberal culturalism that stand as so many modest proposals of boomer liberalism shorn from the history of radicalism. With fists raised, Lott proclaims with a lack of seriousness, “I smell boomer blood” (pg. 22). What the author actually unravels in The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual is a generational shift within the academy, where the history of social and economic class has been subsumed by younger scholars of race and ethnicity, sexuality and gender, and the relationship of “culture” to political and economic power. And this development worries the New Left, boomer intellectuals and has become the basis of their public criticism: a type of intellectual cannibalism where Zeus eats his young so that no heirs would contest his power.

The author examines the legacies and transformation of New Left intellectuals, and their move away from formerly radical positions in public intellectual debate. His main purpose aims to “help clear the air of certain false prophesies and propose some ideas for a fresh conception of radical democracy in the United States” (pg. 3). Products of a lifetime spent in the American university first as students and finally as professors, it is no wonder some New Leftist’s radical and youthful activism changed to reformist institutionally-based proposals. This is the problem of generations and age, a tempering of vision due to experience and the rewards of success within university bureaucracies. Lott portrays Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (1998) as little more than a contentious reform tract more prone to attacking the academic Left than proposing radical, social and political change. The author believes Rorty “conveniently presents himself as a liberal martyr drowned out by noisy know-nothing leftists who just don’t get that intellectuals, boosted by the kind of national pride found in Lincoln or Whitman, should focus on policy rather than speculative debate, on economic inequality rather than what Rorty calls ‘stigma’ (race, for example), and on practical reform rather than radicalism” (pg. 30). Rorty offers little more than the plans devised by Clinton’s centrist, Democratic Leadership Council during the 1990s.

Lott finds a “similar political Cassandrism dressed up as tough-minded intellectual responsibility” as he turns to Paul Berman and Todd Gitlin, arguably two high-profile New Left intellectuals (pg. 31). The author brings the social critic Berman to task for his belittling historical revisionism focused on the excesses of the New Left and ethnic-based social movements in his book A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 (1996), as well as Gitlin’s The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars ( 1995) that blames scholars of racial and ethnic identity, and its politics, for destroying the legacy of the New Left with unrealistic academic radicalism. Lott uncovers the mea culpa of an aging intellectual generation, noting that Berman merely thinks “such radicalism lives today in a variety of new social struggles around race, sex, class, disability, and many others,” and that Berman “finds these too mere ‘revolutions of self,’” therefore, there are no intellectual heirs to the New Left (pg. 32). Similar to Berman, Lott examines how Gitlin denigrates the scholarship of political autonomy found within multiculturalism, identity politics, and new social movements rather than “demonstrate how that autonomy cripples the left, which would at least necessitate taking new social struggles seriously” (pp. 38-39). Berman and Gitlin share a special disdain for the Black Power Movement, blaming the Black Panthers’ militant rhetoric and racial separatism for the destruction of the New Left. As with so much selective memory and lack of scholarly insight, Peniel Joseph has recently shown the legacy of Black Power to be quite the opposite despite the movement’s problems, steeped squarely within the American radical tradition of the 1930s civil rights movement, and connected to women’s and gay rights movements at its demise.[2]

Incapable of believing that new social movements after 1968 embraced radical humanism, New Left public intellectuals like Gitlin and Berman view new social movements project as abandoning a “univeralist left” for smaller prizes. One wonders where to lay the blame, on the assimilation of university-based New Left intellectuals into the comforts ofo institutional life or on new research trajectories in the modern university. Historian Robin Kelley argues the failure of Gitlin’s generation to “conceive of these social movements as essential to the emancipation of the whole remains the fundamental stumbling block to building a deep and lasting class-based politics.” In a similar vein, literary critic Timothy Brennan alleges leftist intellectual debate from 1975 to 1980 shifted from a commitment to social democratic politics to a commitment to political identities. He believes both tendencies require integration for effective leftist politics. The shift from a universalist left to a separatist left, however, had little to do with debates among university-based Left intellectuals. The new legal climate in the United States after civil rights created the legal infrastructure and federal programs needed to ensure economic and racial equality. Agencies of the federal government defined individuals and social groups by markers of race. The terms of debate on the intellectual Left became shaped by society’s acknowledgment that historic recompense for racial discrimination and inequality required delving into questions of identity and culture. And there was nothing necessarily disingenuous, as scholars like Gitlin and Berman have claimed, about this turn of events.[3]

The roles of cosmopolitanism, liberal nationalism, black intellectuals, neoliberalism, radical social movements, and anti-Americanism preoccupy Lott in later chapters of The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual. Regarding David Hollinger’s Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (1995), Lott charges “it’s frankly a bourgeois fantasy to suppose an affirmation of cultural diversity could proceed in any meaningful sense beyond the reach of the disadvantage in and through which many U.S. cultural fractions have been formed” (pg. 51). Rather than offer evidence to counter Hollinger’s argument to move beyond political and biological racial categories, Lott ridicules him without knowledge of recent historical scholarship on race and politics, identity and community, to bolster his claims.[4] The author positions minor works in American and literary studies as evidence of “public intellectual work,” like Walter Benn Michael’s Our Country: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (1995) and Eric Sundquist’s To Wake the Nations: Race and the Making of American Literature (1993) that garnered limited, academic audiences only. Lott accuses Michael Eric Dyson, Cornel West, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. with tailoring their criticism to assuage white guilt over racial discrimination. The author thinks Dyson’s work “speaks without tooth to power” (pg. 102), implicates Gates for speaking out against “black anti-Semitism” in the op-ed pages of the New York Times (pg. 105), and excoriates Cornel West for his Christian-Marxist emphasis to oppose the “loss of hope and absence of meaning” and the “culture of nihilism” among black youth in America. West’s argument is “not only wrongheaded but purely ideological. It is difficult to overstate the danger of this virtually neoconservative perspective,” (pg. 114). Lott misses West’s concerns that beyond socio-structural limitations to black equality, the psychological effects of poverty and a life of diminished expectations immobilizes individuals. To explain political apathy in the United States, the author suggests fascination with Bill Clinton’s body “became the chief way of coming to grips with our relation to the state apparatus” (pg. 133). The argument that certain boomer intellectuals lack radical vision to transform society is alluring and likely true, yet Lott mobilizes little evidence or rhetorical skill to persuade the reader otherwise.

In the last two chapters, The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual proves more convincing in its evaluation of the work of Robin Kelley and the agony of accusations against the “cultural Left” found in the pages of Dissent Magazine and other liberal review venues before and after the invasion of Iraq in March 2002. Lott wonders whether holding “fast to their ‘60s beliefs did they [boomer intellectuals] ensure their own obsolescence in an age of queer, feminist, and other new(er) social movements?” (pg. 5). The author praises Kelley’s willingness to see local political resistance in the workplace and everyday life as forms of class politics based on racial identity and economic inequality. In works like Hammer and Hoe (1990) and Race Rebels (1994) “Kelley produces an array of skirmishes between black workers and whites’ overseers,” explains the author, “to indicate not only the untold ways in which workers fought back but what they fought about” (178). Kelley’s work resonates with the Post-War projects of independent French Marxists like Cornelius Castoriadis, Henri Lefebvre, and Michel de Certeau, all of whom wrote extensively about the working class, political autonomy outside of traditional trade union structures, consumer movements, and within the everyday life of worker leisure. Particularly striking here is the similarity to Castoriadis’ theory of worker autonomy during the wildcat auto strikes against the AFL-CIO union bureaucracy when he visited Detroit during the 1950s and fully developed this theory as a staple of working class organization under bureaucratic capitalisms. Lott rightly shows the social democratic possibilities of Kelley’s work against the dismissiveness of boomer intellectuals. The boomer intellectuals find no activist inspiration in this well-articulated tradition, likely due to the parochialism of boomer intellectuals locked in unaware, nationalist intellectual traditions. They would rather berate the “political fantasies” of the cultural Left for drawing on other national traditions despite the empirical basis of this work. Boomer intellectuals see little value in the home-grown writings of radical, social democratic critics like Carey McWilliams, who was venomously red-baited by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and other New York intellectuals during the 1950s and 1960s, or the writings in Common Ground (1940-1949), the publication of the Common Council for American Unity during World War Two.[5] For boomer intellectuals, followers of various internationalist traditions such as that of Castoriadis, Lefebvre, and others must reflect “academic radicalism,” despite the fact both philosophers’ theories derive from social action and political experience when they fought against German, Italian, and fascism in the underground resistance during World War Two. The experience influenced their critiques of Cold War bureaucratic capitalisms profoundly.[6]

The polarization of the American Left preoccupies Lott in the final chapter, where he details the verbal broadsides of Todd Gitlin, Paul Berman, Michael Kazin, and Christopher Hitchens against the anti-imperialist and activist far Left. Commenting on an opinion page feature Gitlin wrote for the New York Times in September 2002, where he criticized some on the far Left for standing behind anti-imperialism and not supporting humanitarian imperialism, Lott charges “any sense of hesitancy about a war on ‘terror’ is ascribed to a loony left; U.S. imperialism, if it isn’t seen as some left fabrication, seems peculiarly untroubling” (pg. 184). The author believes Paul Berman’s much discussed Terror and Liberalism (2004) “is downy soft on U.S. imperial ambitions – and he continues to defend the anti-totalitarian language of Cold War liberalism, now in the context of fundamentalist Islam” (pg. 199). Boomer intellectual criticism of the lunatic left conjures the diatribes of Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado and Richard Berthold of University of New Mexico, but it hardly characterizes the position of the American Left. Some leftist scholars questioned why Islamic fundamentalists would attack America; others embraced pacifism and calls for diplomacy as a principle for lack of military retaliation; while others saw the erosion and potential revocation of civil liberties on the horizon. In this respect, The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual has uncovered a tendency among boomer intellectuals to crowd the stage of public debate and pave over their previously held political positions in one fell swoop when their proposals become unpopular or simply wrong-headed.

The righteousness of conscience on the boomer left, found prominently within the pages of Dissent, likely had luminaries such as Randolph Bourne, Charles Beard, Jane Addams, and Merle Curti rolling in their graves. Jeffrey Isaac likened the stance of anti-imperialists and pacifists on the far Left as “a form of powerlessness; it is often a form of complicity in injustice – pacifism is always a potentially immoral stand.” Michael Walzer castigated in disingenuous fashion the supposed unsympathetic response of the far Left to 9/11. “Maybe the guilt produced by living in such a country and enjoying its privileges makes it impossible to sustain a decent (intelligent, responsible, morally nuanced) politics,” he said, “Maybe festering resentment, ingrown anger and self-hate are the inevitable result of the long years spent in fruitless opposition to the global reach of American power” without naming or critiquing the position of one, single writer. Michael Wreszin, the biographer of Dwight Macdonald, argued against this agony of the boomer intellectuals, noting “Walzer, among others, decries the ‘indecent’ left’s lack of sympathy for the victims of terrorist attacks. There is something drastically wrong with a political analysis that judges whether one has shown enough concern for the victims.” With Dissent writers’ strong on polemic but short on insight, Wreszin lamented, “From the offices of the White House to the chambers of Congress, we now hear demands that Americans speak with one voice. If that should happen, all is lost.” Michael Kazin responded: “A left that followed Wreszin’s lead would continue to be essentially what it was in the months right after the minions of Osama Bin Laden smashed into our lives: a movement of bitter iconoclasts and moral cynics.” History has proven Dissent wrong, of course. No matter, they will rewrite their former positions in future issues of the magazine to disguise their inabilities to offer insight on the pertinent issues. During World War Two, Louis Adamic, the Slovenian-American socialist, preferred the term “inclusive defense” for love of country. It was “a wide-flung and deep-reaching offensive for democracy within our own borders and our own individual makeups.” He believed the left should not advance an “against program – mere ‘anti-fascism,’ mere ‘anti-totalitarianism’ is insufficient” and “may itself result in fascism and totalitarianism.” Adamic knew well his Eighteenth Brumaire. To Dissent, Wreszin the World War Two veteran is wrong. The old adage, “beware those who have not known war” still holds true.[7]

      The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual follows in the long tradition of the American jeremiad in many respects. The historian Russell Jacoby had previously riled the academy with his 1987 book The Last Intellectuals: Politics and Culture in the Age of Academe. Jacoby equated the professionalism and scholarly antiquarianism of the university with the gentrification of the American city, the decline of urban bohemia that cultivated independent critics and scholars, and the uneasiness of institutional censorship during the Reagan years. Nearing the twentieth anniversary of publication, Jacoby’s durable book called for a more open, daring, and independent engagement of scholarship with public life. He argued the free-thinking intellectual had “been supplanted by high-tech intellectuals, consultants and professors – anonymous souls, who may be competent, and more than competent, but who do not enrich public life.”[8] The book caused a major stir because his argument rang true. It rankled professional historians who sensed a Trojan horse among their ranks. In Intellect and Public Life, Thomas Bender charged Jacoby’s book was “a careless, ill-conceived, and perhaps even irresponsible book,” but noted that scholarly irrelevance and careerism constituted worrisome trends for university-based intellectuals.[9]

Jacoby documented a quiet censorship and uneasy comfort behind the university barricade during the 1980s. Lott reveals similar trends, finding behind the barricade uninspired criticism, plum commercial publishing contracts for mostly vapid trade books, a bully pulpit in the mass media where scholars are experts of everything, and increasing institutional rewards for contributing nothing of real value to the public debate. Jacoby pinpointed correctly the demise of public intellectuals with changes in the modern university, especially the structure of incentive regarding compensation and promotion. He explained, “New Left intellectuals acquired the benefits” of university employment such as “regular salaries, long vacations, and the freedom to write, and sometimes teach, what they wanted.” But this steady arrangement came with a price: “Vast insecurities beset the academic enterprise. One’s future depended on a complex set of judgements made by colleagues and administrators. Academic freedom itself was fragile, its principles often ignored.” Lott merely berates boomer intellectuals for reaping the structures of reward and status in the new corporate university. Nor does the author engage the ideas of boomer intellectuals well, and embarks upon an intellectual project largely of his own making. Lott does usefully suggest, however, why baby boom intellectuals did a “political about-face” and came “home to centrism tail between the legs” (pg. 5).

But are boomer intellectuals really more influential than the cultural Left they bemoan? Perhaps not. Laurence Veysey explained the “price of structure” for intellectuals during the early years of the modern university. As a product of institutional prestige and incentive, “only a handful of American professors in this period were as influential as they liked to think. Most faculty researches stand unopened on the shelves of university libraries a half-century later, since in the interim nearly every field has turned its attention to newer problems of inquiry.” Peter Novick has explained well the plight of radicalism in the historical profession and university, for the “very acceptance of radical historians as legitimate participants in a pluralistic professional discourse carried with it the likelihood that particular aspects of their work would be assimilated in a way which defused its bite” due to the relationship between institutional acceptance and the structure of scholarly incentives. The majority of authors who publish timely and selling public intellectual work reside outside the main confines of academe, writers like Mike Davis, Liza Featherstone, Thomas Frank, Doug Henwood, and Christian Parenti among others.[10]

Perhaps the aging conservatism among select New Left, public intellectuals signals their move off the historical stage and the twilight of their ideals. Or maybe the Old Left and new social movement intellectuals, like the bond of grandparents and grandchildren, have one common enemy: the child-parent. Russell Jacoby notices how the “utopian spirit – a sense that the future could transcend the present – has vanished” from the work produced by academics today. Finding importance in new work on race and ethnicity, gender, disability, and LGBT in the U.S. academy, Jacoby also reveals a lack of a larger, political vision driving such work, where “politics becomes simply a series of slogans about marginalization, power, discourse and representation. These terms address real problems, but they fail to specify any particular politics. Marginal groups want power or representation, but how or why does this reflect cultural differences or an alternative vision?” Jacoby notes the very reformist and mainstream basis of political proposals in this work, akin to an inclusive bureaucratic capitalism within a broader neoliberal order. Richard White admitted recently that “Public intellectuals are certainly public; it is the intellectual part that worries me” regarding a screed written by Todd Gitlin in Raritan Review. White believes the “best public interventions by scholars are when the stars align and a matter of urgent public interest corresponds to topics to which we have been giving considerable thought and research.” “Then we have a responsibility to speak out no matter how unpopular our positions might be,” counsels White. “The worst moments are when we become pundits – experts on everything, masters of the superficial, purveyors of opinion for opinion’s sake.” Jacoby finds among university intellectuals “collapsing intellectual visions and ambitions – radicals have lost their bite and liberals their backbone.” In our recent climate of war and national conservatism, young professors have little incentive to speak to the public, and feel the quiet censure by their tenure committees and Deans, neoconservative special-interest groups, and university administrators and donors. Most scholarship stays safely within the parameters of professional peer review of publications, subfield discursive communities, institutional incentives, and scholarly “objectivity.”[11]

     The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual although provocative in argument is poor overall in execution and clarity. Should scholars take the book seriously under these circumstances? Perhaps so, even if the combative tone is not one’s style. Lott’s book received sharp rebukes similar to reviews of Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals almost twenty years ago. Nonetheless, the generational shift and intellectual odyssey within the New Left proves an irresistible and promising topic for further investigation and debate to understand the neoliberal intellectual mind.

NOTES

[1] Richard White, “What Are We Afraid Of?,” OAH Newsletter 34, no. 3 (August 2006): 3; Laurence Veysey, The Emergence of the American University, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 381-382; On investigations of controversial scholars, left and right, in the recent past, see Jon Weiner, Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud, and Politics in the Ivory Tower, (New York: The New Press, 2005). Historians on the left, argues Weiner, attract more scrutiny than conservatives; On the issue of “quality” in the public intellectual marketplace, see Richard Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 83-127.

[2] Peniel Joseph, Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America, (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006).

[3] Robin Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 110: Timothy Brennan, Wars of Position: Cultural Politics Left and Right, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), ix, 147-169.

[4] The list could be exhaustive, see Nancy Shoemaker, American Indian Population Recovery in the Twentieth Century, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999); Matthew Whitaker, Race Work: The Rise of Civil Rights in the Urban West, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005); George Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); James Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

[5] Peter Richardson, American Prophet: The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 198-200; Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century, (London: Verso, 1996), 445-454.

[6] See Cornelius Castoriadis, Political and Social Writings, vol. 2, David Ames Curtis, trans. and ed., (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988) and The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey, (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1975); See also C.L.R. James, Grace Lee, and Pierre Chaulieu (Cornelius Castoriadis), Facing Reality, (1958; reprint, Detroit: Berwick/ed, 1974); Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 1, trans. by John Moore, (1947; London: Verso, 1991) and Critique of Everyday Life: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, vol. 2, trans. by John Moore, (1961; London: Verso, 2002); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Certeau was influenced by Lefebvre’s work, and brought the volumes of the Critique towards social science through structural linguistics.

[7] Jeffrey Isaac, “Ends, Means, and Politics,” and Michael Walzer, “Can There Be a Decent Left,” Dissent (Spring 2002): 19-20, 35-36; Michael Wreszin, “Confessions of an Anti-American” and Michael Kazin, “Response,” Dissent (Spring 2003): 85, 87; Louis Adamic, “This Crisis is an Opportunity,” Common Ground 1.1 (Autumn 1940): 62-63.

[8] Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: Politics and Culture in the Age of Academe, (New York: Basic Books, 1987), x.

[9] Thomas Bender, Intellect and Public Life, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 172n1.

[10] Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals, 118; Veysey, The Emergence of the American University, 335; Novick, That Noble Dream, 459: Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, (London: Verso, 2006) and The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu, (New York: The New Press, 2005); Liza Featherstone, Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Worker’s Rights at Wal-Mart, (New York: Basic Books, 2004); Doug Henwood, After the New Economy, (New York: The New Press, 2003); Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004); Christian Parenti, The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq, (New York: The New Press, 2004).

[11] Richard White, “Are Public History and Public Intellectuals in Danger of Becoming Oxymorons?,” OAH Newsletter 34, no. 4 (November 2006): 3; Russell Jacoby, The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy, (New York: Basic Books, 1999), xi-xii, 40-41.