Start Reading What Are Intellectuals Good For? Engineered By George Scialabba Released As Bound Copy

intelligent, and fairminded essays from a critic who sees himself in the tradition of the New York Intellectuals, Yet he's also aware that these writers had their limitations, so he recommends the work of a number of great writers outside that tradition: Richard Rorty, Christopher Lasch, Noam Chomsky, Pasolini, etc.
A challenging yet deeply pleasurable collection of book reviews, Want a cold splash in the face of intellectual pessimism Check out the essay on The New Inquiry entitled sitelinkHow Bad Is It.


I don't know how I stumbled across it probably someone on Facebook linked to it, but then the essay sat open in a browser tab for several days, and I lost track of where it came from.
First response was head towards TLDR, but the opening paragraph immediately struck a cord, Well over a decade ago I started pondering the question of whether the astonishing collection of troubles the world is accumulating could result in a collapse of civilization a new dark ages, essentially.
The fall of the United States would obviously be necessary for that to occur, and might even be sufficient, given one's conclusions regarding the fragility of the global economy.


The essay is only provides a taste of that, and actually the three books he cites by sitelinkMorris Berman are the obvious followup.
But Schilabba's essay is so clearly and pleasantly written, than I hope to squeeze his book of essays into my overstuffed reading queue.


Update: D'uh of course, the person that pointed me to the original essay was sitelinkTrevor,
Reading this book is like taking a short course not only in the work of the most important contemporary intellectuals, but in the Western philosophical and literary canon itself.
Scialabba might be the best book critic in the country right now, and his writing exemplifies the power of clear and finely wrought prose.
I hope to be able to write half as well about books and ideas before I die, I expected this to be a booklength attempt answering the title question, but that's confined to one essay at the start, which was a bit disappointing.


Scialabba's breadth of reading and coherent moral framework which I largely share make him a trustworthy companion in reading the intellectuals he profiles.
Unfortunately, I've only read a small fraction of them I'm sure I'd have gotten more out of the book if I was already more familiar with the subjects.
Electrifying. Im grateful for George Scialabba, In this collection, he promotes public intellectuals and exquisite writing, He writes in favor of economic equality and the defense of democracy against corporate and state power, And in the process, hes introduced me to a couple dozen fascinating thinkers with some of the best nonfiction prose Ive ever read.


Scialabba better be a stellar writeran interviewer in The Times Higher Education asks, “So, given a choice, does Scialabba prefer bad writers who are politically congenial or good writers whose politics he dislikes” Scialabba replied, “I'm going to offer a simplified and peremptory answer.
Better good writers with bad politics than bad writers with good politics, The former teach us how to think and feel and imagine the latter merely what to think, Knowing how to think is incomparably more important, Unless most people know how to think, there can't be genuine democracy, ” sitelink timeshighereducation. co. uk

I love this response, but I didnt at first, It took me a long time of mulling it over before I decided to agree with him, Lots of Scialabbas insights, like that on good writing, challenged my own ideas, stayed with me, and stimulated new insights.
And as a result, Ive paid closer attention to the presentation of writersboth those with good and bad politics, Bad writingand bad speaking, by the waydoes nothing to advance good ideas and good ideals, In fact, I wonder if some of my educated leftist friends are politically inactive partly because of being repelled or repulsed from bad communicators of leftist ideas.


On the subject of bad writing, Scialabba is most critical of Edward Saids Orientalism, convincingly arguing that he overreaches his analysis Scialabba presents considerable evidence against Saids claims and that his writing is atrocious Scialabba provides damning quotes.
I havent read Orientalism, and very well may choose not to, thanks to Scialabbas review,

However, I have read Saids work on Palestine, which is both well written and monumentally important, Scialabba convincingly challenges the political utility of Saids esoteric literary arguments, But he is

way off in his weird and halfassed accusation that Said was exclusively concerned with these arguments without also being politically engaged, when one considers Saids important role in the cause to liberate Palestine.
Indeed, in an excellent online discussion hosted by Crooked Timber sitelink org/category/geo , Michael Berube rightfully argues:

“It is simply implausible to accuse Edward Said of evading real politicsAnd so Scialabba does not throw that pitch instead, he sets, winds up, delivers and stops himself at the last moment, admitting that Said plunged into political debate more than most and leveling the accusation instead at Saids epigoni.
Theyre the ones who are giving at the office, yet for their lapses Said is apparently to blame, This, I think, is not quite cricket”,

This oversight is a glaring one, in part because, in Berubes words “one has to be impressed with Scialabbas uncanny ability to inhabit the books and writers he reviewsBut whats most impressive, I think, is the scrupulous fairness that Scialabba brings to the task of reviewing”.


The inhabitance that Berube describes really shines in this collectionyou get a sense that at times, Scialabba better understands the ideas of the thinkers he reviews than they do! I also find Scialabba to be incredibly fair, as he is generous to writers with whom he disagrees politically.
This evenhandedness approaches weakness, as Nicholas Sabloff points out in his review of the book in the Common , as his judgments are sometimes modest all the more so surprising, then, is his diss on Said.


Besides Said, Scialabba reviews a range of intellectuals, from Irving Howe to Christopher Hitchens, As a collection, Scialabbas reviews and essays create a fascinating discussion of the value and changing position of the public intellectual.
He shows us that the historical role of the public intellectual was defined by someone whose “primary training and frame of reference were the humanities, usually literature or philosophy, and that they habitually, even if often implicitly, employed values and ideals derived from the humanities to criticize contemporary politics.
They were generalists: they drew, from a generally shared body of culture, principles of general applicability and applied them to facts generally available”.


Why literature Scialabba answers this when he writes, “The beginning of political decency and rationality is to recognize others similarity in important respects to oneself that is, to identify imaginatively.
Which is what one does when reading fiction, Literature is, in this sense, practice for civic life”, Scialabba refers to Lionel Trillings point that the “firstorder moral virtues” of progressives like solidarity, compassion, justice are dangerous without the sort of secondorder intellectual moral virtues from literature.
He explains that “Literature can teach this, perhaps because it has no political designs on us, or because stories get around psychological defenses that often defeat arguments, or because rhythm, harmony, symmetry, and other aesthetic qualities induce a deeper attentiveness”.
I find this kind of a discussion of the role of the humanities to be fascinating, Id also like to believe its true,

But Scialabba explains to us that the Old Leftstyle of intellectual described above has largely disappeared, and largely by necessity.
First of all, with greater access to more information, it is much more difficult to be a generalist today, and even more so in the Internet age that arrived shortly after most of these essays.
Secondly, intellectuals have become professionalized, snatched up by universities, dependent on institutions for their livelihood, and therefore, also, specialized, Third, as hegemony evolved in the United States and gave rise to a sort of antipublic intellectualthose who are employed to propagandize on behalf of the state or corporations, there also arose the need for the more muckraking factfinder intellectuals like Chomsky who by no means is literary! who nevertheless serve an important function of fighting back against this propaganda.
Scialabba soberly notes that this may be an inevitable and even desirable change, and furthermore that there is still a noble value, if different, in the contemporary intellectuals work.
He sums it up best here:

“Consider the legacy of such as Stone, Nader, Chomsky, and Cockburn: endless engagements with current deceits causing or threatening immediate suffering to a great many actual people.
Unlike earlier public intellectuals, they have not written for the ages, but for present efficacy, And the price, which they have accepted in all seriousness, will be exacted: their writings will not live, But their example will”.

An unaffiliated sort of democratic socialist orientation much of it inherited from the “classic” “Old Left” intellectuals in the tradition of Dissent magazine informs Scialabbas reviews of the works of the “old” and “new” intellectuals alike.
We come to understand Scialabbas position that if workers can gain economic power, they can make other needed gains, A dignified economic existence is primary, Like his hero Rorty, he believes that the cultural battles that are largely fought in the academy do nothing to advance the cause of those who suffer most in our country.
In his introduction to the book, Scott McLemee sums up Scialabbas politics:

“Reconciling the skeptical pragmatism of Richard Rorty and the geopolitical worldview of Noam Chomsky is not a simple projectRarely do you find them treated as two sides of one ideological coin.
But that seems like a reasonably accurate description of Scialabbas sense of the possible, I he were to write a manifesto, it would probably call for more economic equality, the dismantling of the American military industrial complex, and the end of metaphysics” xiii!

Scialabba is not delusional about the prospects for American socialism, but he offers a modest call for its continued, dogged, advocacy, and Ill end with this quote:

“Howe has anxiously but unflinchingly demanded: Can one still specify what the vision of socialism means or should mean After Stalinism and Maoism, its obvious what socialism doesnt mean.
Less obviously, perhaps, but just as surely, it doesnt mean merely the electoral triumph of a socialist party, as Mitterands painful experience shows.
The only way to answer Howes question is to gather up fragments from the traditioncries of protest and invocations of solidarity, heroic lives and utopian fantasies, analytic strands and programmatic patchesand fuse them imaginatively.
The resulting unity will be only temporary the ideal will need to be reimagined in every generation, But this is how traditions live”,
I hesitated betweenandfor this but had to go within the end, This book makes for compulsive reading and he's a really wonderful stylist, The quality of the argument is more mixed, but there's definitely plenty of insights in here that are engaging, thoughtprovoking, informative, helpful, etc, alongside some undercurrents of silliness, perhaps best exemplified by his claim that Rorty is a better philosopher than Plato.
I suspect him of being a bit reddit about religion and someone who carries 'religious trauma', but that's more an implicit than explicit part of the book.
It's interesting to read someone who has such a different view of the world than I do more than I expected, I guess, despite definite points of agreement.
He really does believe in things like transhumanism and utopia, though of course with many humane qualifications thrown into his approval of those concepts.
His intellectual generosity is really remarkable though it does occasionally fail him and it's fascinating to watch him navigate his agreements and disagreements with those who are both more to the right of him and those more to the especially cultural left of him.
Looking forward to reading this book after hearing the NPR interview about the book and its author, A collection of joyful, lifeaffirming, nuanced and smart essays from a deeply humane writer, The writer is like a movie critic, but for political theory, making this a great intro to a set of political theories.
It got me excited to dive into Isaiah Berlin and Christopher Lasch again, It exemplified the Left Conservative outlook against hierarchy and exclusion, disturbed by rampant capitalism, but devoted to old virtues like community and virtue and craft that deserves to have a louder voice today.
Only resisting a five star review because it gets esoteric at times and won't be good for someone just getting started in contemporary political thought a bit of background is necessary.
George Scialabba is fascinating because his work really is difficult to characterize, On one hand, he's reviewing books, but his reviews tend to encompass authors and their oeuvres, rather than just solitary works, allowing him to place things in context and give a sense of their lives as a whole.
But more importantly, he's interested in the the ideas themselves, and so instead of summarizes is quite happy to argue with, both against and alongside, those he writes about.
What this means for his readers is a collection which is fascinating in itself, and serves as a convenient springboard for future reading.


As you read his reviews, a picture starts forming of Scialabba himself, He's a dejected leftist, both because of the loss of credibility for communism in the last century, and because "the people" seem quite happy with their state of affairs for the most part.
He thinks there are two paths ahead then, either simply agree with Richard Rorty one of his heroes that

we may have to concede to Nietzsche that democratic societies have no higher aim than what he called “the last men”the people who have “their little pleasures for the day and their little pleasures for the night.
”

or hold out hope for a utopian future, even if it isn't possible in our lifetime or even the next, since a utopian project will require far greater social trust and far better human beings than we can dream of for now.
And Scialabba wants to believe in this latter path,

But to recognize that perfection won't arrive for us isn't to yield to the darkness, and he puts forward instead an ideal to strive for truth telling, no matter how unpopular, no matter how against the grain of our fartoocomfortablewithmassproduction culture.
He admits that the people who do this aren't particular successful personally or often for their projects, and yet by exploring the lives and works of people who can be thought to have lived this way, he makes a powerful case for their brand of heroism.
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