The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual [Hardcover]

Eric Lott (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 21, 2006

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.

Editorial Reviews

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 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.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (March 21, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465041868
• ISBN-13: 978-0465041862
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,297,023 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fairly Fierce, Fiercely Fair, May 2, 2006

By 

Panopticonman "panopticonman" (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual (Hardcover)

In THE DISAPPEARING LIBERAL INTELLECTUAL, Eric Lott makes a convincing argument that liberal intellectuals such as Richard Rorty, Todd Gitlin, Henry Louis Gates, and Michael Lind among others have attacked the libertarian multicultural left in order position their nationalistic brand of "boomer" liberalism as the best hope against the tide of red state conservatism. And that by doing so, they are doing the work of the right wing.

To a large extent, because the brand of liberalism endorsed by these writers is for most Americans what the left is understood to be, some readers may find Lott's distinction between liberal and left confusing at first. But for those who can make the necessary distinction, Lott offers a bracing, erudite criticism that is long overdue

As one who has read many of the writers and Mr. Lott examines, I find his judgments fair but also, where appropriate, unsparing. Indeed, Mr. Lott bends over backwards to give credit to many of these authors.

For instance, he gives Michael Lind due appreciation for his original thinking on Jefferson and his influence (negative) on American culture. He also credits Stanley Crouch for Crouch's dead-on assumption that American culture is African American culture, or at the very least, a Creole culture. Lott is dismissive, and rightly so, of Crouch's quasi-conservatism on political issues as they relate to race, finding him to be cranky and wrong-headed. But Lott is not mean-spirited in this criticism. He simply believes Crouch is wrong.

Lott maintains that the attempted marginalization of the radical left by these writers has been counterproductive to the stated goal of many of them: to get the necessary electoral heft to drive the right wing from power. He argues that by holding the left at arm's length they have unwittingly promoted the reactionary statism of the Bush administration.

Making this case by showing that their ascendance paralleled the rise of the Clinton administration, an administration which pursued a "triangulated" center, a course which in most ways promoted a watered-down Eisenhower era Republican agenda, Lott shows that the Clinton era was more than problematic for the left, that in fact it was disastrous.

He offers considerable evidence for his views through close readings of these author's works. Indeed, one only has to read a recent column by David Brooks in the New York Times in which he congratulated liberals for turning away from multiculturalism and toward a more adult "Trumanesque" nationalism to see how much territory these writers have surrendered to the right, and to see how correct Lott is.

Lott offers up as an example of a cogent left-wing critical voice Armond White, whose collection of essays on popular culture, THE RESISTANCE: TEN YEARS OF POP CULTURE THAT SHOOK THE WORLD is, as Lott suggests, the work of an original radical voice. I had not read White, An African American cultural critic whose works in the collection were mostly published in "The City Sun," a black newspaper in New York, until Lott's book convinced me that I should. White's film and music criticism ranges freely from Metallica to Madonna, Spielberg to Spike Lee, Michael Jackson to Public Enemy. Like Lott he is bracing, gutsy, and original.

In reading many of the works of the boomer liberals Lott discusses, I often found they gave me a sense of possibilities foreclosed, of options elided, of nostalgia for a vanished pre-radicalized 60s. If you've ever had the same reaction to these writers, I highly recommend reading Lott. His prose is dense, but ultimately rewarding, and every once in a while, unexpectedly, hilariously funny.