Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States

Thomas Bender explores both the nineteenth-century origins and the twentieth-century configurations of academic intellect in the United States.

Periodic "crises" in our academic culture remind us that the organization of our intellectual life is a product of history―neither fixed by the logic of social development nor inherent in the nature of knowledge itself. At a time of much unease in academia and among the general public about the relation of intellect to public life, Thomas Bender explores both the nineteenth-century origins and the twentieth-century configurations of academic intellect in the United States.

Intellect and Public Life pays special attention to the changing relationship of academic to urban culture. Examining the historical tensions faced by intellectuals who aspired to be at once academics and citizens, Bender traces the growing commitment of intellectuals to professional expertise and autonomy. He finds, as well, a historical pattern of academic withdrawal from the public discussion of matters of general concern. Yet the volume concludes on a hopeful note. With the demise of the classical republican notion of the public, Bender contends, there has emerged a more pluralistic notion of the public that―combined with the revival of interest in pragmatic theories of truth―may offer the possibility of a richer collaboration of democracy and intellect.

Thomas Bender is University Professor of the Humanities and a professor of history at New York University. He is the author of Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century America, winner of the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize of the Organization of American Historians; New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time; Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States; and Community and Social Change in America; all published by Johns Hopkins.