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Intellectuals
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Resources in the Connexions Library

Clicking on the title of an item takes you to the bibliographic page for the resource, which typically also contains an abstract, a link to the full text if it is available online, and links to related topics in the subject index. You can find items through the Title, Author, Subject, Chronological, Dewey, Library of Congress, and Format indexes.
Particularly recommended items are flagged with a red Connexions logo:

  1. Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2006
    An argument against what Collini calls the 'declinist thesis', the belief that contemporary intellectual life is getting increasingly dumbed down and stagnant. Declinists, Collini suggests, are in denial of reality and ignorant of history. Collini also skewers those who, like Edward Said, represent themselves as 'outsiders' while basking in the glamour of in-group recognition.
  2. Adventures in Marxism 
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1999
    Marshall Berman explores and rejoices in the emancipatory potential of Marxism.
  3. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air 
    The Experience of Modernity
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1982   Published: 1988
    Berman examines the clash of classes, histories, and clutures in the modern world, and ponders our prospects for coming to terms with the relationship between a liberating social and philosophical idealism and a complex, bureaucratic materialism.
  4. American Power and the New Mandarins
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1969
  5. Break Their Haughty Power 
    Resource Type: Internet WWW site
    Articles on capitalism, socialism, and revolution, from a left-Marxist perspective.
  6. Chomsky for Beginners
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1996
    An introduction to the life and works of Noam Chomsky.
  7. Chomsky on MisEducation
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2000
    Chomsky critiques the education system and discusses what education could be like in a democratic society.
  8. Chomsky on Post-Modernism 
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1995
    What I find in the writings of the post-modernists is extremely pretentious, but on examination, a lot of it is simply illiterate, based on extraordinary misreading of texts that I know well (sometimes, that I have written), argument that is appalling in its casual lack of elementary self-criticism, lots of statements that are trivial (though dressed up in complicated verbiage) or false; and a good deal of plain gibberish.
  9. Chomsky.Info 
    Resource Type: Internet WWW site
    The Noam Chomsky Web site.
  10. The Common Good
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1998
    Interviews with Noam Chomsky on the U.S. and the world.
  11. Culture of Complaint
    The Fraying of America
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1993
    Propaganda-talk, euphemism, and evasion are so much apart of American usage today that they cross all party lines and ideological divides. The art of not answering the question, of cloaking unpleasant realities in abstraction or sugar, is so perfectly endemic to Washington that we expect nothing else.
  12. Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2008
    A methodical deconstruction of Edward Said's Orientalism.
  13. Edward Said, Orientalism
    Reviewed by Malcolm Kerr
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1980
    The book contains many excellent sections and scores many telling points, but it is spoiled by overzealous prosecutorial argument in which Professor Said, in his eagerness to spin too large a web, leaps at conclusions and tries to throw everything but the kitchen sink into a preconceived frame of analysis. In charging the entire tradition of European and American Oriental studies with the sins of reductionism and caricature, he commits precisely the same error.
  14. Exiled in Paradise
    German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America From the 1930's to the Present
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1983
  15. Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1997   Published: 1998
    The authors criticize postmodernism in academia for its misuses of scientific and mathematical concepts in postmodern writing. Fashionable Nonsense examines two related topics: (1) The incompetent and pretentious usage of scientific concepts by a small group of influential philosophers and intellectuals; (2) the problems of cognitive relativism, the idea that "modern science is nothing more than a 'myth', a 'narration' or a 'social construction' among many others". The stated goal of the book is not to attack "philosophy, the humanities or the social sciences in general...[but] to warn those who work in them (especially students) against some manifest cases of charlatanism," and in particular to "deconstruct" the notion that some books and writers are difficult because they deal with profound and difficult ideas. "If the texts seem incomprehensible, it is for the excellent reason that they mean precisely nothing." The book includes long extracts from the works of Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Paul Virilio, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Luce Irigaray, Bruno Latour, and Jean Baudrillard who are considered by some to be leading academics of Continental philosophy, critical theory, psychoanalysis or social sciences. Sokal and Bricmont set out to show how those intellectuals have used concepts from the physical sciences and mathematics incorrectly. The extracts are intentionally rather long to avoid accusations of taking sentences out of context.
    Published in French as Impostures Intellectuelles and in the United Kingdom as Intellectual Impostures.
  16. For Lust of Knowing
    The Orientalists and their enemies
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2006
    A rebuttal of Edward Said which examines who the Orientalists were, how historically they advanced their disciplines, and what their achievements have been. Irwin calls Said’s book “a work of malignant charlatanry.”
  17. Forum: Canadian Life and Letters - 1920-1970
    Selections from the Canadian Forum
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1972
  18. Gestalt Therapy
    Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1951
  19. The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2009
    Arab scholars were exploring and extending the great works of the Persian, Hindu, and Greek civilizations. There were striking advances in the sciences and mathematics, but more fundamentally, the Arabs taught the importance of experimentation and rational thought. Eventually, through the efforts of men like Adelard, the accomplishments of the Arabs got through to the West, and shaped it.
  20. Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution 
    Volume I: State and Bureaucracy
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1977
    A wide-ranging and thorough exposition of Marx's views on democracy.
  21. The lying silence of those who know
    Holocaust Denied
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 2009
    In every war, Israel has had the same objective: the expulsion of the native people and the theft or more and more land.
  22. The Making of E.P. Thompson
    Marxism, Humanism, and History
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1981
  23. Manufacturing Consent 
    Resource Type: Film/Video
    First Published: 1992
    A film about Noam Chomsky's ideas about the media, ideology, propaganda, and elite control of society's institutions.
  24. Marxism and Freedom 
    From 1776 to Today
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1958   Published: 1971
    Dunayevskaya argues that Marx's theory is the generalisation of the instinctive striving of the proletariat for a new social order, a truly human society.
  25. Ontological "Difference" and the Neo-Liberal War on the Social 
    Deconstruction and Deindustrialization
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 2001
    We have today legions of people with a smattering of knowledge turning out reams of books filled with buzz words that could be (and have been) produced by a computer program, and could be (and are) picked up in peer-group shop talk in a few months at the nearest humanities program or academic conference. Everyone these people don't like is trapped in a "gaze"; everyone "constitutes" their "identity" by "discourse"; to the fuddy-duddy "master narratives" that talk about such indelicate subjects as world accumulation these people counterpose "pastiche" and "bricolage", the very idea of being in any way systematic smacking of "totalitarianism"; it is blithely assumed that everyone except heterosexual white males now and for all time have been "subversives" (one wonders why we are still living under capitalism); a crippling relativism makes it somehow "imperial" to criticize public beheadings in Saudi Arabia or cliterodectomy practiced on five-year old girls in the Sudan.
  26. Postmodern Disrobed
    Review of Intellectual Impostures
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1998
    Sokal and Bricmont do an admirable job of exposing the daffy absurdity of postmodernism intellectuals.
  27. Postmodernism: Paralysed by postmodernism
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 2008
    A great deal of theory in the humanities and social sciences -- and not just postmodern theory -- involves the creating of a kind of conceptual "landscape" filled with these curious kinds of abstract objects -- "language", "power", "justice", "state", "culture", "government", "the polity", "the economy" and a host of others, which are viewed "theoretically" from somewhere way "outside" or "above" them. But it is just this way of looking at things -- from "on high" -- that makes it so difficult to see how people in the landscape are able to create and re-create the world in which they live, and are not simply trapped or formed by it.
    In fashionable postmodernist treatments of identity or subjectivity, language, as the ultimately hollow and imprisoning object, is put together with the notion that anybody who uses words must be committed to the standard definition of those words, to produce the conclusion that "language" determines the meaning of "identity" words such as man, woman, gay, straight, black, white, natural, normal -- and thus "constructs" (as it is said) human identity or subjectivity itself.
  28. Problems of Knowledge and Freedom
    The Russell Lectures
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1971   Published: 1972
    These lectures explore Russell's work on empiricism, morality, linguistics and politics.
  29. Raids and Reconstructions
    Essays on Politics, Crime, and Culture
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1976
    A collection of essays on culture and poltics.
  30. Rationality/Science 
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1995
    Chomsky writes: "It strikes me as remarkable that the left today should seek to deprive oppressed people not only of the joys of understanding and insight, but also of tools of emancipation, informing us that the "project of the Enlightenment" is dead, that we must abandon the "illusions" of science and rationality--a message that will gladden the hearts of the powerful, delighted to monopolize these instruments for their own use."
  31. Reading Orientalism
    Said and the unsaid
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2008
    An extensive discussion of Edward Said's influential 1978 polemic 'Orientalism'. Varisco mounts a sustained critique on Said's flawed methodology, his skewed and selective handling of literary evidence, his inadequate historical knowledge, and his distorted and tendentious conclusions.
  32. The Responsibility of Intellectuals 
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1967
    It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies.
  33. Said, Edward, Critical Notes on
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 2005
    Edward Said was admired by the anti-imperialist left for his courageous defence of Palestinian rights. However, Irfan Habib argues that unfortunately Said's scholarly work, notably his major work 'Orientalism,' was confused and sloppy to be point of being unethical.
  34. Edward Said's shadowy legacy 
    Tricky with argument, weak in languages, careless of facts: but, thirty years on, Said still dominates debate
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 2008
    So many academics want the arguments presented in Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) to be true. It discourages any kind of critical approach to Islam in Middle Eastern studies.
  35. Sceptical Essays
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1960
  36. Selections from the Prison Notebooks 
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1951   Published: 1973
    Gramsci's Notebooks cover a wide range of subjects including history, culture, politics, and philosophy.
  37. The Socialist Register 1974
    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    First Published: 1974
  38. The Socialist Register 1990
    The Retreat of the Intellectuals
    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    First Published: 1990
    Essays on the retreat away from socialism and Marxism by Left or formerly Left intellectuals.
  39. Speaking and Language
    Defence of Poetry
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1971   Published: 1972
    Goodman writes, "I do not think there can be a rule for the appropriate use of formal or vernacular language...The best is to try for a vernacular that molds itself to what is going on and to use it critically".
  40. Telling the Truth
    Socialist Register 2006
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2005
    A collection of essays that examines the difficulties of illuminating the degenerative and secretive nature of public life.
  41. The Trouble with Theory
    The Educational Costs of Postmodernism
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2008
    Postmodern theory has engaged the hearts and heads of the brightest students because of its apparent political and social radicalism. Yet Kitching writes: "At the heart of postmodernism is very poor, deeply confused, and misbegotten philosophy. As a result even the very best students who fall under its sway produce radically incoherent ideas about language, meaning, truth, and reality."
  42. Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals 
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1951   Published: 1962
  43. Wobblies & Zapatistas 
    Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism and Radical Theory
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2008
    Wobblies and Zapatistas offers readers an encounter between two generations and two traditions. Staughton Lynd and Andrej Grubacic meet in dialogue in an effort to bring together the anarchist and Marxist traditions, to discuss the writing of history by those who make it, and to remind us of the idea that 'my country is the world'.


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