Warring Societies (and Intellectuals)

Intellectuals and New Technologies

Critical intellectuals were traditionally those who utilized their skills of speaking and writing to denounce injustices and abuses of power, and to fight for truth, justice, progress, and other positive values. In the words of Jean-Paul Sartre (1974: 285), "the duty of the intellectual is to denounce injustice wherever it occurs." The modern critical intellectual's field of action was what Hab...

Diaspora , Intellectuals , and the State

NO AREA OF PUBLIC CONSCIENCE ILLUST"TES THE ANXIOUS MEETING of state policy and cultural mythology more than illegal immigration. As once-con#dent national polities in Europe and the United States su$er a series of economic shocks, a backlash has gathered momentum, targeting the imported labor that in many ways symbolizes the so% core of the old regimes’ economic foundations. A variety of extre...

Intellectuals and the Rise of Mass Politics

Terrorism and health: the responsibility of intellectuals?

Agents, Spectators, and Social Hope. Richard Rorty and American Intellectuals

Rorty wrote his Achieving Our Country as a philosopher, intellectual, academic and citizen, and each of these perspectives leads to a different emphasis in reading his book, and to a different story (and ‘storytelling’ is one of the themes of the book). The emergent pictures vary: the philosopher tells a story of the growing isolation and cultural sterility of analytic philosophy in the United ...