Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics: The Betrayal of Politics

by Michael J. Thompson (Editor), Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker (Editor)

Overview

Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics is a challenge to contemporary radical politics and political thought. This collection of essays critiques the dominant trends and figures on the left that have distorted the legacy of progressive politics, arguing that they have moved politics away from issues of class and economic power toward a preoccupation with culture and identity. The contributors discuss this new radicalism from the perspective of a more rational form of leftism capable of reviving interest in a more politically relevant form of politics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781137385154
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan US
Publication date:	10/06/2015
Series:	Political Philosophy and Public Purpose
Edition description:	1st ed. 2015
Pages:	281
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.03(d)

About the Author

Alison Assiter, University of the West of England, UK Warren Breckman, University of Pennsylvania, USA John Clark, Loyola University, USA Shadia Drury, University of Regina, Canada Russell Jacoby, University of California, Los Angeles, USA Alan Johson, Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre, UK Tom Rockmore, Duquesne University, USA John Sanbonmatsu, Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, USA Joseph M. Schwartz, Temple University, USA

Table of Contents

1. Shadia Drury: The Postmodern Face of American Exceptionalism
2. John Sanbonmatsu: Postmodernism and the Corruption of the Critical Intelligentsia
3. Michael J. Thompson: Inventing the 'Political': Arendt, Anti-Politics and the Deliberative Turn in Contemporary Political Theory
4. Alan Johnson: Slavoj Žižek's Linksfaschismus
5. Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker: Illusory Alternatives: Neo-Anarchism's Disengaged and Reactionary Leftism
6. Russell Jacoby: Skimming the Surface: Stanley Fish and the Politics of Self-Promotion
7. Joseph M. Schwartz: Being Post-Modern While Late Modernity Burned: On the Apolitical Nature of Contemporary Self-Defined 'Radical' Political Theory
8. Tom Rockmore: Habermas, Critical Theory and Political Economy
9. John Clark: The Spectacle Looks Back Into You: The Situationists and the Aporias of the Left
10. Warren Breckman: The Power and the Void: Radical Democracy, Postmarxism and the Machiavellian Moment
11. Alison Assiter: In Defense of Universalism

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics is a wonderful and long overdue book. It stakes out very important ground in challenging the various theoreticist evasions from postmodernism, fetishization of Arendt, Zizek, Foucault and others that have propelled and perfumed the articulation of an academic leftism that imagines itself to have transcended obsolete notions class struggle as an epistemic category. These discrete studies, and the book as a whole, should be core reading both for those interested in the thinkers and trends the chapters examine and for anyone interested seriously in left theory and practice and the intellectual history of the last generation of academic leftism." - Adolph Reed, Jr., Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Editorial Reviews

Smulewicz-Zucker and Thompson (both at Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture) offer a new edited volume of essays that examine what they call the subversion of progressive politics. The volume presents essays from noted writers such as Shadia Drury, Alan Johnson, Russell Jacoby, Joseph Schwartz, Tom Rockmore, John Clark, and others. … Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students and faculty.” (E. C. Sands, Choice, Vol. 54 (2), October, 2016)

From the Publisher