WHERE HAVE ALL THE INTELLECTUALS GONE?: CONFRONTING 21ST CENTURY PHILISTINISM PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Frank Furedi | 208 pages | 09 Dec 2006 | Bloomsbury Publishing PLC | 9780826490964 | English | London, United Kingdom Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? | The American Conservative Buy It Now. Add to cart. About this product Product Information The intellectual is an endangered species. In place of such figures as Bertrand Russell, Raymond Williams or Hannah Arendt - people with genuine learning, breadth of vision and a concern for public issues - we now have only facile pundits, think-tank apologists, and spin doctors. In the age of the knowledge economy, we have somehow managed to combine the widest ever participation in higher education with the most dumbed-down of cultures In this urgent and passionate book, Frank Furedi explains the essential contribution of intellectuals both to culture and to democracy - and why we need to recreate a public sphere in which intellectuals and the general public can talk to each other again. Additional Product Features Dewey Edition. Show More Show Less. Any Condition Any Condition. No ratings or reviews yet No ratings or reviews yet. Be the first to write a review. Best Selling in Nonfiction See all. Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey Hardcover 5. In the age of the knowledge economy, we have somehow managed to combine the widest ever participation in higher education with the most dumbed-down of cultures. In this urgent and passionate book, Frank Furedi explains the essential contribution of intellectuals both to culture and to democracy - and why we need to recreate a public sphere in which intellectuals and the general public can talk to each other again. Furedi's book has been welcomed by serious thinkers on both sides of the political divide, such as Eagleton on the left and philosopher Roger Scruton on the right. Title mention. He is also a tireless campaigner against the philistinism that infects academia You can unsubscribe from newsletters at any time by clicking the unsubscribe link in any newsletter. For information on how we process your data, read our Privacy Policy. This website uses cookies to improve user experience. The Enemy Within?: Intellectuals, Violence, and the “Postmodern Condition” | SpringerLink The RCP has traversed one of the longest ideological journeys in British politics, moving from the hard-left through several incarnations into a broad collection of organisations on the libertarian right wing, including Spiked Online and the Institute of Ideas. Furedi continues to be a leading figure in this network of organisations, characterised by a vigorous anti-environmentalist, pro-GM stance, known as the LM group. Aside from his academic work, he is freqently quoted in the media as an expert on how our society has become obsessed with risk. He writes regularly for Spiked online , and has written several books on the subject, with titles such as Paranoid Parenting , Therapy Culture , and Culture of Fear. He wrote an article about risk culture post September 11, one of only two papers published by Global Futures. Furedi has also written under the name of Linda Ryan [1]. He was born in Hungary in In our age of universal primary and secondary education, compounded by mass education at the college and university levels, perhaps a quarter of the population have a claim to call themselves intellectuals of a sort, and to some degree or another. To describe someone as an intellectual is not to identify his occupation but rather the social class, determined by his education, to which he belongs. The same goes, of course, for his friends, family, and audience: they know what he should be thinking and saying—and what they ought to hear from him, aloud and in print—even before it occurs to him to think and say it. As a young man, I was immensely confident that mass propaganda, including mass education, could never succeed in conditioning hundreds of millions of people to think and react, not just on command but reflexively, in predetermined ways. I have never been more wrong about anything—excepting, perhaps, my adolescent confusion of conservatism with Republicanism. Indeed, the program of indoctrination has succeeded to the point where the brainwashed masses, victims all of somnambulistic hypnopaedia, are convinced themselves that they truly are educated people! The situation brings to mind Stan Laurel in the role of the handyman at Oxford who starts talking and acting like a college don after receiving a blow to the head from a descending window sash. The new, bantam-grade eggheads have been effectively conditioned to reject both the message and the messenger whenever and wherever they fail to match exactly with every received expectation and preconception. For this reason, the pressures exerted upon serious men and women of intellect to conform to the demands made upon them are simply terrific. Partisans in the so-called Culture War have been insisting for a quarter- century now that every intellectual choose his side, declare himself for Progress or Reaction, Enlightenment or Ignorance, Humanity or Inhumanity, Superstition or Religion, the Glorious Future or the Benighted Past, Freedom or Slavery. In this war, neutrality on the part of any member of the intellectual class has become intolerable. Society is riven by apocalyptic civil war so the argument runs , the Forces for Good being pitted once and for all against the Forces of Evil. And so, quaint old rules regulating public discourse in the high bourgeois era, and still quainter standards of thought, logic, knowledge, and truth developed from classical times, are not irrelevant only, they are positively subversive of the war effort. Whatever Truth might turn out to be in the long run, in the short term it is whatever wins the war on terms most favorable to the victor. Truth, for the time being, is simply effective propaganda, whose confection and dissemination is recognized to be the true work of the intellectual, whether one is talking about Alan Dershowitz or William Kristol. Obviously, this, again, is nothing new under the sun. Even so, the notion of the man of intellect as truth-teller has never been as ignored and discredited as in this opening decade of the 21st century. The modern intellectual is encouraged to abandon and dishonor his true metier by temptations of the negative as well as of the positive sort. Either way, they are formidable inducements. On the one hand, there is the nearly certain prospect that the determination to tell the truth as he sees it, always and everywhere, will lose him close and important friends, alienate powerful people, deprive him of influence, put a luxurious and even, perhaps, comfortable life beyond his means, and end by making him a pariah among his fellow men. On the other, there is the only somewhat less certain chance that a readiness to tell the truth as the world sees it —or wants it seen—will win him fortune, fame, praise, intimacy with the rich and powerful, and, very likely, a degree of power itself. Never have the rewards inherent in the intellectual life loomed so stupendously; never has the failure to acquire them appeared so disappointing and ignominious. Why, in a world that so frankly and shamelessly believes in nothing beyond success, should the man of intellect squander his life in defense of that something in which no one but ignoramuses and hypocrites professes to believe and that has only scorn, contempt, impotence, and relative poverty to offer as reward? So far I have had in mind the choice confronted by public intellectuals, yet the same goes for painters, poets, novelists, composers, screenplay writers, sculptors, architects, philosophers, theologians, men of the cloth. The pseudo-intellectual, the pandering entertainer passing himself off as an artist, like the rich man gets his reward on earth. We need not concern ourselves here with him. Far more dangerous than temptation to the man of genuine intellect is the threat of demoralization the modern world offers him. The temptation is as natural as it is tragical. It must be resisted, and there is one way, and only one, to do it. That is for the conscientious intellectual to make a serious examination, not of himself alone, but of the nature and meaning of the pursuit to which he has been called. This is no easy job. Frank Furedi (Author of Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?) In place of such figures as Bertrand Russell, Raymond Williams or Hannah Arendt - people with genuine learning, breadth of vision and a concern for public issues - we now have only facile pundits, think-tank apologists, and spin doctors. In the age of the knowledge economy, we have somehow managed to combine the widest ever The intellectual is an endangered species. In the age of the knowledge economy, we have somehow managed to combine the widest ever participation in higher education with the most dumbed-down of cultures. In this urgent and passionate book, Frank Furedi explains the essential contribution of intellectuals both to culture and to democracy - and why we need to recreate a public sphere in which intellectuals and the general public can talk to each other again. Get A Copy. Paperback , Second Edition , pages. Published December 9th by Bloomsbury Academic first published More Details Original Title. Other Editions Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. Someone said to me, "University professors shouldn't be expected to teach critical thinking. That's the job of the parents, after all. What do you think? Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. May 26, Ferda Nihat Koksoy rated it really liked it Shelves: philosophy.