The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual - Hardcover

Lott, Eric

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0465041868 ISBN 13: 9780465041862

Publisher: Basic Books, 2006

Synopsis

What ever happened with that liberal intellectual "boom" of the 1980s and 1990s? In The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual, Eric Lott--author of the prizewinning Love and Theft--shows that the charter members of the "new left" are suffering from a condition that he has dubbed "boomeritis." Too secure in their university appointments, lecture tours, and book deals, the once rising stars of the liberal elite--including Richard Rorty, Todd Gitlin, Michael Lind, Paul Berman, Greil Marcus, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.--have drifted away from their radical moorings toward the political center. At once a chronicle of recent intellectual life and a polemic against contemporary liberalism's accommodations of the conservative status quo, The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual eviscerates the complacency that has seeped into the politics of the would-be vanguard of American intellectual thought. Lott issues a wake-up call to the great public intellectuals of our day and challenges them to reinvigorate political debate on campus, in their writing, and on the airwaves.

About this title

About the Author:

Eric Lott is a Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of the award-winning Love and Theft: Blackface, Minstrelsy, and the American Working Class, which won the 1994 Avery O. Craven Award from OAH, the first annual MLA Prize for a First Book, and the 1994 Outstanding Book on the Subject of Human Rights by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights. Lott's writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the Village Voice, The Nation, Transition, and American Quarterly. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

From Publishers Weekly:

A gutsy salvo against the neoliberal intellectual establishment, Lott's manifesto will probably go down in scholarly circles as a benchmark text for sheer deconstructive virulence. Aiming indiscriminately at "boomer liberals," the "color-blind club," the "Old Boy's Left" and "cosmopolitan-nationalists," University of Virginia professor Lott (Love and Theft) rails against liberal intellectuals who don't embrace contemporary identity politics. In Lott's view, such intellectuals (from Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to Todd Gitlin) are, at best, guilty of a "weak Ellisonianism"; most, however, are "squeamish," ineffectual sellouts. Lott devotes nearly an entire chapter to Michael Lind, whose intellect he clearly admires. Yet, he says, Lind's dismissal of "cultural" politics and adherence to "strategic essentialism" make him "a throwback in visionary's clothes." Lott provides little more than a snapshot of some thinkers from the "vital center"; his work is more academic showpiece than serious survey of the challenges confronting the left. "Highlighting the contradictions between pluralist and cosmopolitan allegiances obscured by the multicultural umbrella," he observes, "Hollinger rejects what Sollors has termed the 'pure pluralism' of ethnic and black studies, substituting cosmopolitanism for a multiculturalism he regards as something like a superseded step between an oblivious universalism and an enlightened hybridism." Such dense writing decrees that Lott's book will have little resonance outside academe. (Apr.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0465041868
• ISBN 13: 9780465041862
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272