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Palgrave Macmillan

Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics

The Betrayal of Politics

  • Book
  • © 2015

Overview

Editors:
  1. Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker
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  2. Michael J. Thompson
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    You can also search for this editor in PubMed   Google Scholar

Part of the book series: Political Philosophy and Public Purpose (POPHPUPU)

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Table of contents (12 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-vii
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  2. Introduction

    • Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker, Michael J. Thompson
    Pages 1-13

  3. The Postmodern Face of American Exceptionalism

    • Shadia Drury
    Pages 15-32

  4. Postmodernism and the Corruption of the Critical Intelligentsia

    • John Sanbonmatsu
    Pages 33-68

  5. Inventing the “Political”: Arendt, Antipolitics, and the Deliberative Turn in Contemporary Political Theory

    • Michael J. Thompson
    Pages 69-97

  6. Slavoj Žižek’s Linksfaschismus

    • Alan Johnson
    Pages 99-120

  7. Illusory Alternatives: Neo-Anarchism’s Disengaged and Reactionary Leftism

    • Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker
    Pages 121-147

  8. Skimming the Surface: Stanley Fish and the Politics of Self-Promotion

    • Russell Jacoby
    Pages 149-162

  9. Being Postmodern While Late Modernity Burned: On the Apolitical Nature of Contemporary Self-Defined “Radical” Political Theory

    • Joseph M. Schwartz
    Pages 163-190

  10. Habermas, Critical Theory, and Political Economy

    • Tom Rockmore
    Pages 191-210

  11. The Spectacle Looks Back into You: The Situationists and the Aporias of the Left

    • John Clark
    Pages 211-236

  12. The Power and the Void: Radical Democracy, Post-Marxism, and the Machiavellian Moment

    • Warren Breckman
    Pages 237-254

  13. In Defense of Universalism

    • Alison Assiter
    Pages 255-274

  14. Back Matter

    Pages 275-281
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Keywords

About this book

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.

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)

"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

About the authors

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

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