Suchergebnisse

In these six essays--delivered on the BBC as the prestigious Reith Lectures--Edward Said addresses the ways in which the intellectual can best serve society in the light of a heavily compromised media and of special interest groups who are protected at the cost of larger community concerns. Said suggests a recasting of the intellectual's vision to resist the lures of power, money, and specialization. In these pieces, Said eloquently illustrates his arguments by drawing on such writers as Antonio Gramsci, Jean-Paul Sartre, Regis Debray, Julien Benda, and Theodore Adorno, and by discussing current events and celebrated figures in the world of science and politics: Robert Oppenheimer, Henry Kissinger, Dan Quayle, Vietnam and the Gulf War. Said sees the modern intellectual as an editor, journalist, academic, or political adviser--in other words, a highly specialized professional--who has moved from a position of independence to an alliance with powerful corporate, institutional, or governmental organizations. He concludes that it is the exile-immigrant, the expatriate, and the amateur who must uphold the traditional role of the intellectual as the voice of integrity and courage, able to speak out against those in power.

Reprinted from _The Seven Arts_, June 1917. ; Mode of access: Internet. ; Labadie Pamphlet Collection.

A review essay on: Paul Hollander's Political Pilgrims (New York: Oxford U Press, 1981); Regis Debray's Teachers, Writers, Celebrities (London: New Left Books, 1981); & Alvin Gouldner's The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (see IRPS No. 8/81c00020, & see listings in IRPS No. 34). Hollander's work is judged an important study of Western intellectuals who have visited & then written favorably on Communist nations. The work is seriously flawed by Hollander's neoconservative bias & antipathy for the Left, feminism, & 1960s counterculture. Debray's work, however, is a theoretically sophisticated study of the way French intellectuals function within the national cultural-production system. He views recent intellectual life as falling into three major degenerative cycles -- the U (1880-1930), publishing (1920-1960), & media (1968-present) cycles -- & offers a "conservative-radical defense of the integrity of autonomous human thought & undistorted communication." Gouldner's work is a debate-provoking analysis of the morally ambiguous nature of knowledge (ie, both liberating & socially determined), in the context of the theory that a new opinion-shaping SC is emerging in advanced industrial society. However, it is cautioned that the study of intellectuals & cultural capital is an inherently limited way to treat power & belief. R. Wright

Khrushchev's secret speech of February 1956 threw the moral and political world of East Central Europe's intellectuals into turmoil. One of the most secure belief systems ever devised was suddenly revealed to be the ideological justification for crimes of a massive scale. Several generations of Communists groped for orientation, and radical change seemed inevitable. East Germany's intellectuals were no exception in their expectations and desires for change. Students of the GDR have always understood 1956 as one of formidable intellectual challenge to the Ulbricht regime, and the opening of SED and Stasi archives has strengthened this view, revealing an unrest that pervaded the ranks of students, writers, teachers, and much of the Party cadre.

This classic study of Europe in the 1920s resonates today. It examines how intellectuals abandoned their attachment to the traditional philosophical and scholarly ideals. It also describes the attack on the Enlightenment ideal of universal humanity and the concomitant glorification of various ideologies, as intellectuals betrayed their unique role in society. The implications for intellectual life today are transparent, and this long unavailable classic of European thought should interest all those who teach and who preach human sciences