The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual

A chronicle of intellectual life and a polemic against contemporary liberalism's accommodations of the conservative status quo, this work eviscerates the complacency that has seeped into the politics of the would-be vanguard of intellectual thought.

An award-winning scholar challenges the intellectuals of the baby boom generation to shake off a decade's worth of complacency and reclaim the mantle of social justice. What ever happened with that liberal intellectual "boom" of the 1980s and 1990s? In "The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual", Eric Lott - author of the prize-winning "Love and Theft" - shows that the charter members of the "new left" are suffering from a condition that he has dubbed "boomeritis". Too secure in their university appointments, lecture tours and book deals, the once rising stars of the liberal elite have drifted away from their radical moorings toward the political centre. At once a chronicle of recent intellectual life and a polemic against contemporary liberalism's accommodations of the conservative status quo, "The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual" eviscerates the complacency that has seeped into the politics of the would-be vanguard of intellectual thought. Lott issues a wake-up call to the great public intellectuals of the day and challenges them to reinvigorate political debate on campus, in their writing and on the airwaves.