A sociological account of civil courage and creative behaviour through the study of Nobel Peace Prize laureates.

In this timely book, the first comprehensive study of the modern American public intellectual--that individual who speaks to the public on issues of political or ideological moment--Richard Posner charts the decline of a venerable institution that included worthies from Socrates to John Dewey. With the rapid growth of the media in recent years, highly visible forums for discussion have multiplied, while greater academic specialization has yielded a growing number of narrowly trained scholars. Posner tracks these two trends to their inevitable intersection: a proliferation of modern academics commenting on topics outside their ken. The resulting scene--one of off-the-cuff pronouncements, erroneous predictions, and ignorant policy proposals--compares poorly with the performance of earlier public intellectuals, largely nonacademics whose erudition and breadth of knowledge were well suited to public discourse. Leveling a balanced attack on liberal and conservative pundits alike, Posner describes the styles and genres, constraints and incentives, of the activity of public intellectuals. He identifies a market for this activity--one with recognizable patterns and conventions but an absence of quality controls. And he offers modest proposals for improving the performance of this market--and the quality of public discussion in America today. This paperback edition contains a new preface and and a new epilogue.

In the midst of a divisive culture, public intellectuals speaking from an evangelical perspective have a critical role to play—within the church and beyond. Representing the church, higher education, journalism, and the nonprofit sector, these world-class scholars and practitioners cast a vision for intellectuals who promote human flourishing.

The influence of intellectuals is not only greater than in previous eras but also takes a very different form from that envisioned by those like Machiavelli and others who have wanted to directly influence rulers. It has not been by shaping the opinions or directing the actions of the holders of power that modern intellectuals have most influenced the course of events, but by shaping public opinion in ways that affect the actions of power holders in democratic societies, whether or not those power holders accept the general vision or the particular policies favored by intellectuals. Even government leaders with disdain or contempt for intellectuals have had to bend to the climate of opinion shaped by those intellectuals. Intellectuals and Society not only examines the track record of intellectuals in the things they have advocated but also analyzes the incentives and constraints under which their views and visions have emerged. One of the most surprising aspects of this study is how often intellectuals have been proved not only wrong, but grossly and disastrously wrong in their prescriptions for the ills of society -- and how little their views have changed in response to empirical evidence of the disasters entailed by those views.

Distinguished economists, political scientists, and legal experts discuss the implications of the increasingly globalized protection of intellectual property rights for the ability of countries to provide their citizens with such important public goods as basic research, education, public health, and environmental protection. Such items increasingly depend on the exercise of private rights over technical inputs and information goods, which could usher in a brave new world of accelerating technological innovation. However, higher and more harmonized levels of international intellectual property rights could also throw up high roadblocks in the path of follow-on innovation, competition and the attainment of social objectives. It is at best unclear who represents the public interest in negotiating forums dominated by powerful knowledge cartels. This is the first book to assess the public processes and inputs that an emerging transnational system of innovation will need to promote technical progress, economic growth and welfare for all participants.

Intellectuals and Race is a radical book in the original sense of one that goes to the root of the problem. The role of intellectuals in racial strife is explored in an international context that puts the American experience in a wholly new light. The views of individual intellectuals have spanned the spectrum, but the views of intellectuals as a whole have tended to cluster. Indeed, these views have clustered at one end of the spectrum in the early twentieth century and then clustered at the opposite end of the spectrum in the late twentieth century. Moreover, these radically different views of race in these two eras were held by intellectuals whose views on other issues were very similar in both eras. Intellectuals and Race is not, however, a book about history, even though it has much historical evidence, as well as demographic, geographic, economic and statistical evidence-- all of it directed toward testing the underlying assumptions about race that have prevailed at times among intellectuals in general, and especially intellectuals at the highest levels. Nor is this simply a theoretical exercise. The impact of intellectuals' ideas and crusades on the larger society, both past and present, is the ultimate concern. These ideas and crusades have ranged widely from racial theories of intelligence to eugenics to "social justice" and multiculturalism. In addition to in-depth examinations of these and other issues, Intellectuals and Race explores the incentives, the visions and the rationales that drive intellectuals at the highest levels to conclusions that have often turned out to be counterproductive and even disastrous, not only for particular racial or ethnic groups, but for societies as a whole.

Against a backdrop of a hegemonic, global economic arrangement that has spawned astounding disparities in wealth, this book foregrounds seventeen intellectuals who are engaged in resisting corporate values and in promoting social justice and human dignity. Ranging from socially engaged professors with a track record in grassroots involvement to popular educators, the interviewees challenge the manufactured consent produced by armies of intellectuals organic to dominant ideologies. Public Intellectuals, Radical Democracy and Social Movements reminds us that strategic silence and/or indifference reproduces a common sense arrangement where critical «reading of the world» (Freire, 1987) is relegated to the periphery.