Longtime scholar and critic Henry Sussman deploys anecdote, reportage, memoir, and a pilgrimage to major intellectual stops along his trajectory in marshaling the disbelief and dismay prompted by the rise of anti-intellectualism in the past few decades and reflected most disturbingly in Donald Trump’s ascension to the US presidency.

All the usual suspects are present and accounted for: fragmentation and polarization of the public sphere, to some degree facilitated by digital communications and social media; the decline of impartiality and a sharp increase in self-interested interference in politic, legal, and cultural spheres; the normalization of pathological narcissism in public life; the blanket dismissal of scientific findings and their counterparts in the domain of the humanities and social sciences.

In retracing his own intellectual and experiential steps, Sussman revisits many of his lasting inspirations, including Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Douglas R. Hofstadter, Immanuel Kant, and J. Hillis Miller. The result is an intellectual meditation on ‘the great dismissal,’ in public and political life, of venerable and vital humanistic traditions, ethics, and ways of thinking.