The Decline of the Intellectual - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1560007435 ISBN 13: 9781560007432

Publisher: Routledge, 1994

Synopsis

In perhaps his most famous book, The Decline of the Intellectual, Thomas Molnar launches into a fundamental critique of the intellectual class. He sees it as a group that had lost its way, collapsing a sense of vision into political activism, social engineering, and culture manipulation, and abandoning the writing, philosophizing, and scholarship that had occupied their predecessors. Universities began to produce factory-like, faceless citizens, as the job market became the arbiter of education and culture. Today's professors are recruited from this group of job seekers, and hence, have a shared indifference toward learning.

Molnar likens present-day intellectuals to the earlier Marxists who elaborated their Utopian model in the Communist party. The campus intellectuals' objective is to transform the university into a replica and a laboratory of the ideal society. Colleges and universities thus become sources of propaganda of various political, financial, cultural, and ideological trends, not only among students, but professors as well. The thirty years separating editions have done nothing to weaken such a critical appraisal.

In his new introduction, Molnar writes that the decline of intellectuals has extended outside of the campus to the arts, the public discourse, and the robotization caused by technology. On the initial publication of this work, Frank S. Meyer wrote in Modern Age, "Thomas Molnar's book is not only true; it is intellectually exciting and it will remain a necessary handbook for anyone interested in the decisive problem of the 20th century." The Decline of the Intellectual is essential reading for sociologists, political scientists, educators, and university officials. It is the basis of present-day critiques of the academic world.

About this title

About the Author:

Thomas Molnar (1921-2010) was professor of philosophy of religion at the University of Budapest, Hungary. He is the author of over forty books (in both English and French), including God and the Knowledge of Reality; The Decline of the Intellectual; Africa: A Political Travelogue; and The Counter-Revolution.

Review:

"This book represents a significant contribution to the current debate concerning the vitality of inherited political ideologies of Marxism, liberalism, conservatism, and fascism."

--Irving Louis Horowitz, American Journal of Sociology

"This book represents a significant contribution to the current debate concerning the vitality of inherited political ideologies of Marxism, liberalism, conservatism, and fascism."

--Irving Louis Horowitz, American Journal of Sociology

-This book represents a significant contribution to the current debate concerning the vitality of inherited political ideologies of Marxism, liberalism, conservatism, and fascism.-

--Irving Louis Horowitz, American Journal of Sociology

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 1560007435
• ISBN 13: 9781560007432
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 390
• Editor: Molnar Thomas