The Last Intellectuals [Paperback]

Russell Jacoby (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0465036252 | ISBN-13: 978-0465036257 | Publication Date: August 2000

This provocative book chronicles the disappearance of the "public intellectual" in America. For over thirty years, the cultural landscape has been dominated by the generation of Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, and John Kenneth Galbraith; no younger group has arisen to succeed them. Unlike earlier intellectuals who lived in urban bohemias and wrote for the educated public, today's thinkers have flocked to the universities, where the politics of tenure loom larger than the politics of culture. In an incisive and passionate polemic, Russell Jacoby examines how gentrification, suburbanization, and academic careerism have sapped the vitality of American intellectual life.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Writers and thinkers like Edmund Wilson and Lewis Mumford reached a diverse public, but today's intellectuals cluster in universities, producing monographs and articles read by a select few. Jacoby's thesis is that nonacademic intellectuals capable of a dialogue with a general, educated audience are an endangered species, nearly extinct. He notes that many 1960s New Leftists on campus were absorbed into the university, where they have produced a body of radical, feminist and neo-Marxist scholarship, but he finds their work "largely technical, unreadable, and unread." Jacoby, whose books include Social Amnesia and The Repression of Psychoanalysis, links the decline of urban bohemian intellectuals to rising rents and living expenses. He suggests that rather than count the high proportion of Jews among the radical intelligentsia, we should take note of how few Jewish intellectuals have remained dissenters. His tract is bound to provoke heated debate.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Where are the heirs of Edmund Wilson, Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, C. Wright Mills, Alfred Kazin, the "public intellectuals" who have enriched American life in our century? Nowhere, says Jacoby, who finds that intellectuals of the postwar generation address a diminished audienceone another. His diagnosis traces this blight to the withering of urban bohemia, to the shrinkage of writing outlets, and above all to the suffocating growth of academic careerism. No matter that literature and social criticism are treated to the exclusion of science and the arts. Or that Jacoby is mainly concerned with intellectuals on the left. Vigorous, witty, controversial, this analysis of America's "aging intellectual plant" is a fine example of the very sort of book Jacoby fears has vanished. Essential for college and many public libraries. Robert F. Nardini, M.L.S., Chichester, N.H.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (August 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465036252
• ISBN-13: 978-0465036257
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #350,830 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

41 of 55 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Narrative of Intellectual Defeat Lacks Rigour, June 22, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (Paperback)

A witty polemic but not a systematic analysis of the growing irrelevancy of criticism to the American public. Jacoby's strengths are his terse and punchy style, his wide reading, and his abilities to discern fine distinctions between several, often similar, schools of thought. The broad outlines of his argument make sense - that with the academization of the American Left in the early 1970s - American culture experienced a decline in the quality of public-oriented critical writing. The brilliance of Mumford, Edward Wilson, Veblen, and Dwight MacDonald sequed into that of medicore careerists appealing to whatever theoretical prejudices were fashionable to secure tenure. Jacoby provides a wonderfully concise examination of several key authors's work to demonstrate the increasing introvertedness of American letters especially in its tendencies to use obfuscatory language, to employ ever-narrowing bands of specialized opinion, and to address concerns that are mainly disciplinary in origin. The problem comes when you examine this argument up close: Mumford and Wilson were so special because they were a unique collection of unusually perceptive observers whose achievements were not spread among a broad academic culture. Veblen writes very clearly of this in "The Higher Learning" where, as early as 1918, he already observes many of the fallacies of academic-based research. It's hard to consider these great early 20th century writers as a generation (I doubt even they would've saw themselves as such) especially since Jacoby himself comments on the very distinctiveness of their accomplishments. Moreover, Jacoby is slippery when it comes to pinning down what he means precisely by a "public intellectual". Obviously, he mourns the loss of any truly Leftist poltical argument but doesn't seem to feel that conservative opinion merits the same sort of regard. Howevermuch one may want to sympathize with this, it's a failure on Jacoby's part to suggest that conservatives cannot themselves ! provide social criticism worthy of the name "public intellectual." Jacoby argues that conservative critics are rather one-sided polemicists themselves (his discussion on Daniel Bell is excellent on this point) but it's a bit myopic of him to argue that their ascendancy necessarily means that American culutre criticism is in inevitable decline or that a critical public sphere can only legitimately exist if it's staffed with Lefties. If anything, the book would've been far richer if he attempted to analyze how the American right asserted control over public discourse as the Left entrenched itself in the academies. This would have led to more interesting questions such as: how does this change affect the way we debate on certain issues? what perspectives are jettisoned and what are restored or introduced? At the very least, Jacoby's book provides a good introductory text to the history of 20th century American critical thinking and he hammers his ideas home with real conviction. It's very refreshing to see a liberal critic challenge the pomposities of his fellow brethren. I don't disagree his thesis but I would have preferred a more "dialectic" approach in this narrative of Lefty defeat.

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Perfect Book About Americanism, June 8, 2011

By 

JSmalls - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Last Intellectuals (Paperback)

This is one of the best non-fiction books I have ever read. It says more about American culture and intellectual development than just about anything I have read in the past five years. It is not to be missed by anyone seeking to understand how thinking works and why it has been diminished in society.