The Russian philosopher and cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin has traditionally been seen as the leading figure in the group of intellectuals known as the Bakhtin Circle. The writings of other members of the Circle are considered much less important than his work, while Bakhtin's achievement has been exaggerated in proportion to the downgrading of the thinkers with whom he associated in the 1920s. This volume, which includes new translations and studies of the work of the most important members of (...) the Circle, sets out to correct the distortions in the established representations of its activity. The original contributions to literary and linguistic theory made by Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev (but frequently credited to Bakhtin) are assessed, and the distinctiveness of their approaches is highlighted. (shrink)

I argue that as we move in the twenty-first century we need a new paradigm in global philosophy, which I call “interjacency.” Philosophical authenticity in an age of rapid globalization must take a new form, one which respects the fact that one’s intellectual location is to lie both among and between many worlds of thought. My argument will be that JanMohamed’s important typology for the border intellectual therefore needs to be supplemented; that, in addition to syncretic and specular border (...) class='Hi'>intellectuals, a third type must be recognized: the interjacent border intellectual. I detect early hints of a movement in this direction in the original philosophical writings of twentiethcentury philosophers in India, whose dominant paradigm of self-understanding nevertheless remained syncretism, transculturalism, and fusion, and have found more evident articulations in recent mixed-race philosophy and mestizo theory. Living in the cracks between cultures, it is increasingly evident, is a freeing and enabling way to live. (shrink)

Since Korea’s liberation from Japanese rule in 1945, history education has been shaped by nationalist and anti-communist ideologies that reinforced authoritarian regimes and perpetuated colonial and Cold War epistemologies. This study examines the role of South Korean history teachers, particularly those belonging to the National Association of History Teachers (NAHT), as postcolonial intellectuals striving to decolonize and democratize the history curriculum. It draws on the conceptualization of teachers as postcolonial intellectuals, informed by Henry Giroux’s notion of transformative (...) class='Hi'>intellectuals, Frantz Fanon’s critique of colonial subjectivity, and Edward Said’s analysis of imperial knowledge production. In addition, this study employs the framework of Asia as Method to investigate South Korean history teachers’ engagement in epistemic resistance and critical consciousness formation. It demonstrates how the NAHT challenged dominant historical narratives by promoting democratic citizenship education; integrating marginalized voices, such as those of women, workers, and colonized nations, into the curriculum; fostering peace education rooted in historical reconciliation and transnational solidarity; and decentering Western-centric perspectives to reframe the world history curriculum. The findings highlight the transformative potential of educators in postcolonial societies and offer insights for other societies seeking to decolonize the curriculum. (shrink)

This chapter addresses the comparative invisibility of contemporary Chinese women intellectuals in translation flows, focusing on the fields of the humanities and social sciences (HSS). It begins by characterizing the position of Chinese women intellectuals in their own original context and in the translation and circulation of Chinese HSS. I will show that Chinese women intellectuals have occupied a marginal position in the intellectual and academic field of mainland China in comparison to their male counterparts, which is (...) reflected in their lesser visibility in translation. Despite this situation, we find some exceptional cases of women intellectuals whose work has been translated and circulated in other languages. I will address what factors and in what conditions the work of contemporary Chinese women intellectuals have been translated into English in recent decades. For that, I will focus on a specific case study: The translation of the works of Dai Jinhua, a contemporary female cultural studies scholar and public intellectual based at Peking University whose works have been regularly translated and published in English. Her case will allow me to identify the conditions and mechanisms that allow or obstruct processes of translation and circulation. More precisely, I will show the value of social networks in enabling processes of translation. In that sense, this chapter does not only address the issue of invisibility but also intends to point to the social and intellectual practices that counter and challenge those same conditions of invisibility. (shrink)

Creativity and civil courage are major dimensions of an intellectual's authority and contribute towards the enrichment of democracy. This book develops a sociological account of civil courage and creative behaviour in order to enhance our understanding of the nature of intellectuals' involvement in society. Barbara A. Misztal employs both theoretical-analytic and empirical components to develop a typology of intellectuals who have shown civil courage and examines the biographies of twelve Nobel Peace Prize laureates, including Elie Wiesel, Andrei Sakharov (...) and Linus C. Pauling, to illustrate acts of courage which have embodied the values of civil society. She advances our understanding of the nature of intellectuals' public involvement and their contribution to social well-being. In the current climate of fear and insecurity, as governments are forced to deal with issues of increasing complexity, this is a pioneering sociological book with a highly original approach. (shrink)

This edited volume advances meaning-centered approaches to understanding the social construction of public intellectuals and their enduring influence on contemporary societies. The contributors reject reductionist perspectives that depict intellectuals and their ideas as mere byproducts of broader social forces. Instead, the volume champions a multidimensional approach that recognizes the semi-autonomy and causal power of intellectual discourses. At the core of this framework is the concept of dramatic intellectuals—figures who navigate collective anxieties and hopes, shaping public discourse through (...) master narratives of salvation and catastrophe, utopia and apocalypse. Through diverse case studies, the volume identifies key features of their master stories, including stark binaries, the social construction of meta-adversaries and meta-saviors, the mobilization of cultural traumas and ideological packs, and the Cassandra complex. Each chapter examines at least one pivotal dramatic intellectual within her cultural context, exploring how these figures shape public discourse and collective imagination. The volume covers a diverse range of intellectuals, including Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertrand Russell, Noam Chomsky, Arne Naess, Ingemar Hedenius, Ayn Rand, Otis Eugene “Gene” Ray, Pedro Almodóvar, Agustín Laje, Slavoj Žižek, Jordan Peterson, and Giorgio Agamben. Beyond detailed case studies, the book lays the groundwork for new research agendas in the sociology of intellectuals. This book will be essential reading for scholars of cultural sociology. -/- . (shrink)

The ‘critique of intellectuals’ refers to a genre of normative discourse that holds intellectuals accountable for the consequences of their ideas. A curious feature of the contemporary, especially American, variant of this genre is its focus on intellectuals who were aligned with such world-historic losers as Hitler and Stalin. Why are Cold War US intellectuals not held to a similar standard of scrutiny, even though they turn out to have been aligned with the world-historic winners? In (...) addressing this general question, some self-serving tendencies of intellectual history are observed, in particular the asymmetry between the ease with which intellectuals are credited with the good consequences of their ideas and the difficulty with which they are blamed for the bad consequences. This asymmetry is particularly noted in Richard Rorty, whose pragmatism treats past ideas as a legacy intended for the (American) reader’s benefit. As a corrective, I advocate, in Paul Ricoeur’s terms, a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ that treats intellectual life as fraught with danger, as our adoption of ideas always amounts to passing judgement over those who have borne them in the past. (shrink)

Politicka istorija druge Jugoslavije neprekidno je bila sakralna, a domen sekularizacije obuhvatao je mahom samo umetnost. Informbiro i razlaz sa SSSR-om otvorio je put ka vecoj slobodi u stvaralastvu, napustajuci ideju o kontroli umetnosti u vidu socrealizma. Trece stanoviste o knjizevnosti zastupao je Vladan Desnica.

In two recent works, Intellectuals and Power and General Theory of Victims, François Laruelle offers a critique of the public intellectual, including Jean-Paul Sartre, claiming such intellectuals have a disregard for victims of crimes against humanity. Laruelle insists that the victim has been left out of philosophy and displaced by an abstract pursuit of justice. He offers a non- philosophical approach that reverses the victim/intellectual dyad and calls for compassionate insurrection. In this paper, we probe Laruelle's critique of (...) the committed intellectual's obligations to victims, specifically, through an examination of Sartre's "A Plea for Intellectuals." We hope to show the value of Laruelle's theory on victims, crime and power for imagining future-oriented intellectuals. (shrink)

Michael A. PetersBeijing Normal University, Beijing, PR China;There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds– Gregory Bateson (1972, p. 492)While there are classical anteced...

The book discusses the role of intellectuals in the modern world. Bauman connects this with current analyses of modernity and post-modernity. The theme of the book is that the tasks of intellectuals change from being 'legislators' to 'interpreters' with the transition from modernity to post-modernity. The book discusses the role of intellectuals in the modern world. Bauman connects this with current analyses of modernity and post-modernity. The theme of the book is that the tasks of intellectuals (...) change from being 'legislators' to 'interpreters' with the transition from modernity to post-modernity. (shrink)

This article offers a perspective on how the proposed conceptualisation of the idea of displacement can be used to analyse processes of knowledge formation and transformation brought about by the movement of intellectuals in modernity. It develops a theoretical framework that considers the acts of cultural mediation and spatial displacement as key aspects for understanding the structures of knowledge and cultural interpretation produced in the formation of modernity. Making use of historical–sociological tools, it examines biographical information along with the (...) intellectual contributions of two female intellectuals, Flora Tristan (1803–1844) and Nísia Floresta (1810–1855). This contribution seeks to re-address the problem how to understand modernity from a decentred point of view. It procdeds by discussing how the history of modernity and its different cultural manifestations should be analysed with greater attention to practices of mediation and theoretical interpretations as developed by lesser-known intellectuals. Thus, the article also contributes to analysing the agency of women intellectuals in the history of modernity. (shrink)

With respect to the responsibility of intellectuals, there are still other, equally disturbing questions. Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions. In the Western world, at least, they have the power that comes from political liberty, from access to information and freedom of expression. For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth (...) lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us. The responsibilities of intellectuals, then, are much deeper than what Macdonald calls the " responsibility of people," given the unique privileges that intellectuals enjoy. (shrink)

From the summer of 2015 onwards the high influx of migrants and its effects have dominated the public debate in Europe. At first this influx posed mainly an administrative challenge in host countries such as Austria, Germany, and Sweden. Yet the seemingly incessant flow of migrants from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, seeking refuge from war or economic deprivation, soon sparked a heated controversy on the possibility of integrating people from very different cultural and religious backgrounds into European societies. (...) Security concerns following the Paris attacks of November 2015 fuelled support for right-wing parties and extremist movements all over Europe. Meanwhile, one EU member state after another introduced restrictive policies contravening the open border policy introduced by the Schengen Agreement in their attempt to shift the administrative burden of handling the migrant crisis onto neighbouring states. The growing anxiety around questions of identity and security was compounded by growing concerns about the economy and welfare. In this essay I delineate the role played by public intellectuals in the debate about this crisis. Drawing on Richard Posner’s broad definition of a public intellectual as someone who writes knowledgeably about ideas for a popular audience on matters of public concern, I focus on how German public intellectuals debated the questions of national identity and the role of the nation-state in the EU migration crisis. (shrink)

To understand critical activity, one must reflect on where this activity takes place - on the institutions of criticism that sustain it. Referred to by some as the ‘natural habitat’ of intellectuals, journals, as the institutionalized sites of theoretical discourse, are often overlooked. Examining the rise of the ‘review’ form of journal publication, from the early eighteenth to the early twenty-first centuries, this ground-breaking book offers a concentrated critique of the review form of journal publication as a medium for (...) political thought and action, as a decisive site for political judgment by the state’s conservers and critics. (shrink)

In the light of Markus’s notion of the decent society, this contribution examines the challenges facing public intellectuals in Australia’s contemporary political public sphere. It observes, firstly, that Australia has a distinctly Benthamite political culture that listens more to bureaucratic solutions than to metaphysics, history and arguments grounded in human rights. It explains, secondly, how public opinion gives voice to underlying norms and should thus be treated as the starting point for intellectual activism. Thirdly, the article looks into confusion (...) on the criteria for political deliberation in contemporary Australia. Consideration is then given to the growing constraints imposed on public intellectuals through various new forms of censorship and closure. The conclusion uses the gathering debates on adjustment to climate change to illustrate how public intellectual activism can break new ground. (shrink)

This concluding chapter offers reflections on the class location of Morton as a Communist intellectual and the associated ways his work has been both remembered and forgotten in scholarship. Particular attention is paid to the significance of Terry EagletonEagleton, Terry’s influential, polemical, and dismissive treatment of pre-1970s Marxist literary criticism, notably that associated with the CPGBCommunist Party of Great Britain (CPGB).

In this address to the president's plenary at the 2001 annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the author reflected on then recent international events and their possible implications for the research and teaching agendas of the social studies of science, technology, and medicine. He proposed the political engagement of science, technology, and society institutions and individual STS researchers while maintaining a strong commitment to the scholarly studies of science and technology. Drawing on the (...) work of René Gabriëls, the author elaborated a role for STS scholars as the new generation of “public intellectuals.”. (shrink)

Intellectuals all over the world are responsible for teaching the people of every nation the skill of creative, wise, scientific and logical thinking. They are obliged to explore our natural intellectual abilities to find the best issues in our actual and general situations by considering our human condition as a very difficult challenge formulated by God.Thanks to the modern means of communication all the followers of Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu and other religions have now the same experience of science, (...) world history and world calamities. Hence we can examine together our ancient religious texts and work jointly on their interpretation suitable for our times. This is a cooperation program for whose sake we can organize inter-religions and intercivilizations. (shrink)

Title: Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics Publisher: University of Minnesota Press ISBN: 0816618313 Author: Bruce Robbins Title: The Retreat of the Intellectuals: Socialist Register 1990 Publisher: Merlin Press ISBN: 0850363950 Author: Ralph Miliband, Leo Panitch, John Saville.

The Political Responsibility of Intellectuals addresses the many problems in defining the relationship of intellectuals to the society in which they live. In what respects are they responsible for, and to, that society? Should they seek to act as independent arbiters of the values explicitly or implicity espoused by those around them? Should they seek to advise those in public life about the way in which they should act, or should they withdraw from any form of political involvement? (...) And how should their preoccupations with truth and language find practical expression? The contributors to this volume seek to provide tentative answers to these questions. They come from a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from economics to linguistics and sociology to philosophy, and are drawn from both America and Eastern and Western Europe. The volume is given a particular interest by recent political upheavals in Eastern Europe, where many intellectuals have been confronted with sharply practical, sometimes dramatic, choices about their role in the political arena. (shrink)

The World Congress of Intellectuals in Defence of Peace in Wrocław (1948) can be seen as the symbolic beginning of the Cold War in the ideological sphere. It was not easy for the West to find a response to this. It was not until two years later that the Congress in Defence of Cultural Freedom was held in West Berlin. It is worth recalling this controversy in the context of the ongoing conflict between the ‘Free World’ and ‘Totalitarianism’.

This book reveals the sense in which our postmodern societies are characterized by the obscene absence of the intellectual. The modern intellectual--who had once been associated with humanism and enlightenment—has in our day been replaced by media stars, talking heads, and technical experts. At issue is the ongoing crisis of democracy, under the aegis of the société du spectacle and its vast networks of politically-induced idiocy, industrially-produced biocide, and militarily-provoked genocide. Spectacle fills the resulting moral and intellectual vacuum with electronic (...) technologies of control, punishment, and destruction. This postmodern tyranny reduces intelligence to mechanistic, positivist, and grammatological models of inquiry, while increasing the segmentation, fragmentation, and dissolution of human existence. The apotheosis of the spectacle explains the intellectual void that lies at the heart of our postmodern decadence; it also accounts for the need to recuperate the humanist values of enlightenment promoted by the modern intellectual tradition. (shrink)

What is intellectual humility? In this essay, we aim to answer this question by assessing several contemporary accounts of intellectual humility, developing our own account, offering two reasons for our account, and meeting two objections and solving one puzzle.

Humanity stands at a crossroad. One path leads toward barbarism: it is an existence within a predatory financialized capitalism with widened class divisions, crushing debt, and exacerbated social oppressions.

This book offers an unprecedented account of recent and future developments in the sociology of intellectuals. It presents a critical exchange between two leading contemporary social theorists, Patrick Baert and Simon Susen, advancing debates at the cutting edge of scholarship on the changing role of intellectuals in the increasingly interconnected societies of the twenty-first century. The discussion centres on Baert's most recent contribution to this field of inquiry, The Existentialist Moment: The Rise of Sartre as a Public Intellectual (...) (2015), demonstrating that it has opened up hitherto barely explored avenues for the sociological study of intellectuals. The authors also provide an overview of various alternative approaches that are available for understanding the sociology of intellectuals, such as those of Pierre Bourdieu, Randall Collins and Neil Gross. In doing so, they grapple with the question of the extent to which intellectuals can play a positive and empowering role in shaping the current and future development of society. This insightful book will appeal to students and scholars of the humanities and social sciences, particularly to those interested in social theory and the history of intellectual thought. (shrink)

Research into the sociology of intellectual life reveals numerous appeals to the public conscience of intellectuals. The way in which concepts such as ‘the public intellectual’ or ‘intellectual life’ are discussed, however, conceals a long history of biased thinking about thinking as an elite endeavour with prohibitive requirements for entry. This article argues that this tendency prioritizes the intellectual realm over the public sphere, and betrays any claims to public relevance unless a broader definition of what counts as intellectual (...) life is introduced. By calling for a shift from the notion of public intellectuals to Jane Jacobs’ (1961) idea of the ‘public character’, a publicly situated and affect-laden conception of intellectual life is articulated with the aim of redefining intellectual life as an ordinary, collective pursuit, rather than the prerogative of a few extraordinary individuals, as well as restoring the role of the senses in theoretical discussions on the life of the mind. The theoretical scope of this article therefore is to cast the net wider in the search for meanings of what public intellectual life is, can or may be in a larger context than ‘intellectualist’ discussions currently allow. (shrink)

In the article, the author shows how the government and the opposition interact in the political process. Actors representing opposition constantly produce political texts illustrating their alternative views. The existence of the opposition subject in a critical state in regards to the existing institutions of power is historically predetermined, which proves an active reflection from prominent theorists of political thought. A free dialogue of the government and the opposition is hardly possible in every single political system. In the case of (...) totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, this dialogue may be difficult. The consequences of free will for the subject of opposition can be quite severe. The author analyzes the political discourse of opposition as exemplified by the Soviet culture. The author is interested in the metaphors of opposition and their political context, which seems to be an inevitable condition and framework limiting creativity of one or another intellectual. The author studies a number of texts of the Soviet culture representatives, who used metaphors of opposition, and had a reputation of troublemakers. Such position of an intellectual generates sanctions of the repressive machine and predetermines very specific forms of presenting texts of opposition and apophasis. For convincing his own arguments, the author constantly turns to the heritage of the USSR representatives of unofficial culture in. (shrink)

In an age of growing academic specialisation, one, moreover, in which experts and expertise are habitually derided in a ‘post-truth’ era, the notion of the ‘public intellectual’ has come to be wide...

Employing the tools of biographical sociology, this paper analyses the life narratives of two East European intellectuals: Hungarian-born Ágnes Heller and Polish-born Andrzej Walicki. Both scholars, whose trajectories display striking parallels, emigrated first to Australia and then to the United States, returning only in old age to their countries of origin. Their academic paths are interpreted through the concept of the ‘deep story’, understood as the emotional core of a worldview. Although Heller and Walicki left for different reasons, both (...) were academic sojourners – individuals who longed for their homelands, never fully integrated into the university cultures of the receiving countries, and grappled with cultural contact and political entanglements beyond academia. This paper contributes to intellectual history by examining homegrown academic success, expulsion, attempts at ‘homemaking’ abroad, and eventual return, while also offering insight into humanities careers that remain deeply rooted in national cultures and embedded within broader intellectual traditions. (shrink)

이 논문은 정인보의 저작 『陽明學演論』(이하 演論)에 주목하여 이 책 속에서 정인보가 어떻게 중국 명말청초기의 지식인들을 인식하고 평가했는지를 살펴보고자 하였다. 1933년 정인보는 해박한 양명학에 관한 지식을 가지고 동아일보에 『演論』을 게재한다. 이 『演論』은 민족주의 사학자이면서 동시에 국학 연구자로서 왕성한 활동을 하던 시기에 집필한 것으로 국민의식 고취라는 사명을 담은 저작이었다. 따라서 『演論』에 보이는 양명학의 전개과정은 다름 아닌 ‘양명학 정신의 전개사’ 혹은 ‘양명학 정신사’였다고 볼 수 있다. 이 논문에서 다룬 제5장 「陽明門徒 及 繼起한 諸賢」이 바로 그러한 특징을 확연히 보여주고 있는데, 양명학의 실천정신과 ‘절의(節義)’는 정인보가 (...) 중국 명말청초기의 지식인들을 이해하고 인식하는 두 가지 핵심코드였다. 그 때문에 제5장에 한정해서 보면, 사상적 내용이나 학문 방법상의 문제에 초점을 맞추었기 보다는 그들의 삶의 에피소드가 더욱 부각되고 있다. 삶의 에피소드도 일상생활에서의 삶의 태도는 물론이고 망국의 위기에 처한 지식인이 마땅히 행해야 할 모범으로서 ‘節義’에 중점을 두고 있는 것이다. 여기에는 민족적 위기의 시대에 실천하고 행동하는 지식인의 출현을 갈망한 정인보의 소망이 담겨있다고도 볼 수 있다. 그래서 이 논문은 『演論』의 전체 내용 가운데 제5장 「陽明門徒 及 繼起한 諸賢」을 실마리로 하여 거기에서 정인보가 논평을 가한 중국 명말청초기의 유자들, 즉 중국 근세사상사에서 주자학과 양명학을 통합하고 절충하려고 시도했던 대표적 유자인 유종주와 두 명의 문인 및 황종희(黃宗羲, 1610-1695), 손기봉(孫奇逢, 1584-1675), 이옹(李顒, 1627-1705) 등에 초점을 맞춰 이들에 대한 정인보의 이해와 인식의 양상을 탐구한 것이다. 이 논문의 구성은 전체 4장으로 되어있으며, 제1장에서는 문제제기와 함께 논문 전체의 방향성을 제시하였다. 본론으로 들어가 제2장의 첫 번째에서는 『연론』 제5장의 구성과 그 의의에 관해 분석하였고 두 번째는 정인보의 언설을 근거로 하여 구체적으로 유종주상(像)과 그 문인(門人)들에 대한 이해를 검토하였다. 본론의 제3장에서는 명말청초의 삼대유(三大儒)로 불리는 손기봉과 황종희 및 이옹에 대해 집중적으로 논의하면서 그 이해와 인식의 단서로서 그들의 인생과 학문의 배경에 존재했던 양명학 정신과 ‘절의(節義)’와 ‘충절(忠節)’이라는 것을 지적하였다. (shrink)