Intellectuals in Politics and Academia

“Everything that Russell Jacoby writes is well worth reading. He’s smart, independent, lively, well-informed and alive with the joy of intellectual combat. Agree with him or not—he makes you think and think hard about any and every subject he takes up.”

—Mark Edmundson, Professor of English, University of Virginia, USA

“For over fifty years, Russell Jacoby has been one of our most relentlessly contrarian critics. In lucid and punchy—ok, often snarky—prose, he has lamented the decline of genuine intellectuals, exposed the pretenses of academia, and challenged pieties on both the right and left, while all the time refusing to give up on utopian ideals. Gathering his scattershot efforts into one resounding blast of critical energy, Intellectuals in Politics and Academia is easy to argue with, but hard to put down”.

—Martin Jay Ehrman, Professor of European History Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley, USA

“Russell Jacoby is one of America’s very finest essayists and this collection shows his masterly combination of style and substance. His illuminating investigations of leading thinkers and his biting critique of academic conceits are alone worth the price of the book. Its range is exceptional and, as always, Jacoby shows respect for the utopian imagination and those intellectuals who defend it. These essays are provocative and, just as important, a great read. Don’t miss this book!”

—Stephen Eric Bronner, Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Comparative Literature, and German Studies, Rutgers University, USA

This book addresses the fate of intellectuals in modern culture and politics. Russell Jacoby’s seminal The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (1987, 2000) introduced the term “public intellectual” and gave rise to heated controversy. Here Jacoby assesses contemporary public intellectuals, their profound failings and limited achievements. The book includes biting appraisals of well-known intellectuals, such as Noam Chomsky, Hannah Arendt, and Bernard-Henri Lévy, as well as interventions on violence, utopia and multiculturalism.

Russell Jacoby is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, USA, and the author of the author of nine books, including Repression of Psychoanalysis (1983), Bloodlust (2011), and most recently On Diversity (2020).