What Are Intellectuals Good For

Nonfiction. Politics. Literary Criticism. WHAT ARE INTELLECTUALS GOOD FOR? appraises a large gallery of twentieth-century intellectuals, including Randolph Bourne, Dwight Macdonald, Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, Isaiah Berlin, William F. Buckley Jr., Allan Bloom, Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, Christopher Lasch, Edward Said, Ellen Willis, and Christopher Hitchens. It also includes two essays on intellectuals and politics and concludes with one on moral consequences of our species cyber-evolution. George Scialabba, a columnist for the Boston Globe and contributor to the Boston Review, Dissent, the American Prospect, and the Nation, is admired by a circle of discerning readers. WHAT ARE INTELLECTUALS GOOD FOR?, his second essay collection, brings his voice to a larger audience. Scott McLemee, the Intellectual Affairs columnist of InsideHigherEd, has contributed a foreword.

"Scialabba writes with marvelous fluency and conversational ease and is a gifted expositor of the ideas of friend and foe alike." Bookforum

"George Scialabba shows, with his combined eloquence and modesty, that this critical intellectual faculty can transcend the prisoner's dilemma." Christopher Hitchens

"George Scialabba has, over the years, delivered perhaps the most reliably acute cultural commentary to be found anywhere on the ethical left....[H]is work gives pleasure as it enlightens." Norman Rush

"Scialabba writes as if he's trying by sheer example value to will a smarter, more honest, more aesthetically and morally sensitive Left into being. Such a Left would replace the one whose twentieth-century failures — of omission and commission — bedevil this book, and which leads him to ask the question: What are intellectuals good for? One thing they're not good for, argues Scialabba, is constructing secular substitutes for religion." Philip Christman, Identity Theory (Read the entire Identity Theory review)

What Are Intellectuals Good For? appraises a large gallery of twentieth-century intellectuals, including Randolph Bourne, Dwight Macdonald, Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, Isaiah Berlin, William F. Buckley Jr., Allan Bloom, Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, Christopher Lasch, Edward Said, Ellen Willis, and Christopher Hitchens.

It also includes two essays on intellectuals and politics and concludes with one on moral consequences of our species cyber-evolution.

George Scialabba, a columnist for the Boston Globe and contributor to the Boston Review, Dissent, the American Prospect, and the Nation, is admired by a circle of discerning readers. What Are Intellectuals Good For?, his second essay collection, brings his voice to a larger audience.

Scott McLemee, the Intellectual Affairs columnist of InsideHigherEd, has contributed a foreword.