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

by Thompson, Michael J.; Smulewicz-Zucker, Gregory

• ISBN13: 9781137385154
• ISBN10: 1137385154
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-09-10
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker is Managing Editor of Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture and teaches in philosophy and history at Baruch College, CUNY, USA. He has written for Dissent, New Politics, German Politics and Society, Critical Sociology, and Contributions to the History of Concepts. His most recent book is Strangers to Nature: Animal Lives and Human Ethics (2012) and he is the editor of the forthcoming The Politics of African Independence: A Reader.

Michael J. Thompson is Associate Professor of Political Theory at William Paterson University, USA. His forthcoming books are The Republican Reinvention of Radicalism and The Domestication of Critical Theory.

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