Anxious Intellects: Academic Professionals, Public Intellectuals, and Enlightenment Values

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A discussion of how critics from the right and the left have conceived of the intellectual’s role in a pluralised society, weighing intellectual authority against public democracy, universal against particularistic standards, and criticism against the respect of popular movements. John Michael asserts that these Enlightenment-born issues, although not resolvable, are the very grounds from which real intellectual work must proceed. As part of his investigation of intellectuals’ self-conceptions and their roles in society, Michael concentrates on several well-known contemporary African American intellectuals, including Henry Louis Gates Jr and Cornel West. To illuminate public debates over pedagogy and the role of university, he turns to the work of Todd Gitlin, Michael Berube, and Allan Bloom. In the second half of the book, Michael relies on three popular conceptions of the intellectual - as critic, scientist, and professional - to discuss the work of scholars Constance Penley, Henry Jenkins, the celebrated physicist Stephen Hawking, and others, insisting that ambivalence, anxiety, projection, identification, hybridity, and various forms of psychosocial complexity constitute the real meaning of enlightenment intellectuality.