Radical Legacies

What use is thinking? This study addresses the ways in which modern American thinkers have intervened in the public sphere and attempted to mediate relations between social and political institutions and cultural and intellectual production. Chapters on both well-known and neglected public intellectuals address problems of critical dissent during wartime, the contemporary crisis of the humanities under neoliberalism, and the perils of consumer culture and popular taste, arguing that any "use-value" theory of intellectual production is limiting.