This text is a study of how a number of important 20th century European intellectuals came to support tyrannical regimes and totalitarian political ideas.

Power is the central organizing principle of all social life, from culture and education to stratification and taste. And there is no more prominent name in the analysis of power than that of noted sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Throughout his career, Bourdieu challenged the commonly held view that symbolic power—the power to dominate—is solely symbolic. He emphasized that symbolic power helps create and maintain social hierarchies, which form the very bedrock of political life. By the time of his death in 2002, Bourdieu had become a leading public intellectual, and his argument about the more subtle and influential ways that cultural resources and symbolic categories prevail in power arrangements and practices had gained broad recognition. In Symbolic Power, Politics, and Intellectuals, David L. Swartz delves deeply into Bourdieu’s work to show how central—but often overlooked—power and politics are to an understanding of sociology. Arguing that power and politics stand at the core of Bourdieu’s sociology, Swartz illuminates Bourdieu’s political project for the social sciences, as well as Bourdieu’s own political activism, explaining how sociology is not just science but also a crucial form of political engagement.

This wide-ranging collection of essays examines modern intellectuals and ideologues. Matthew Feldman calls attention to the substantial role played in post-Great War Europe and the United States by religions--both familiar monotheisms like Christianity and secular 'political faiths'--over the last century of upheaval.

Publishing tycoon Henry Luce famously championed many conservative causes, and his views as a capitalist and cold warrior were reflected in his glossy publications. Republican Luce aimed squarely for the Middle American masses, yet his magazines attracted intellectually and politically ambitious minds who were moved by the democratic aspirations of the New Deal and the left. Much of the best work of intellectuals such as James Agee, Archibald MacLeish, Daniel Bell, John Hersey, and Walker Evans owes a great debt to their experiences writing for Luce and his publications. Intellectuals Incorporated tells the story of the serious writers and artists who worked for Henry Luce and his magazines Time, Fortune, and Life between 1923 and 1960, the period when the relationship between intellectuals, the culture industry, and corporate capitalism assumed its modern form. Countering the notions that working for corporations means selling out and that the true life of the mind must be free from institutional ties, historian Robert Vanderlan explains how being embedded in the corporate culture industries was vital to the creative efforts of mid-century thinkers. Illuminating their struggles through careful research and biographical vignettes, Vanderlan shows how their contributions to literary journalism and the wider political culture would have been impossible outside Luce's media empire. By paying attention to how these writers and photographers balanced intellectual aspiration with journalistic perspiration, Intellectuals Incorporated advances the idea of the intellectual as a connected public figure who can engage and criticize organizations from within.

Because of Latin America's long history of military juntas, analysts who have studied regime change in the region have focused on political and military elites. In the recent case of Chile, however, the success of democratic transition can be credited in large part to the remarkable influence of intellectuals involved in public affairs. In Thinking Politics Jeffrey Puryear examines this unprecedented role played by intellectuals inChile's return to democracy. "Thinking Politics provides thorough coverage of an important but neglected topic by a uniquely qualified observer. Through his work with the Ford Foundation, Jeffrey Puryear had an unparalleled opportunity for an outside agent to witness the development of the social scientists of Chile and their impact on democratization. He tells the story well, he analyzes it in a way that could be relevant to other cases, and he presents the policy implications for support of the social sciences in less developed countries in a convincing manner." -- Paul W. Drake, University of California, San Diego "This first-rate work is accurate, original, and compelling. It addresses an important topic -- the relationship between ideas and politics -- that has seldom been analyzed in Latin America." -- JosA(c) JoaquA-n Brunner Ried, Facultad Latina Americana de Ciencias Sociales, Santiago, Chile.

What did French intellectuals have to say about Gaullism, the Cold War colonialism, the women's movement, and the events of May '68? David Drake examines the political commitment of intellectuals in France from Sartre and Camus to Bernard-Henri Lévy and Bourdieu. In this accessible study, he explores why there was a radical reassessment of the intellectual's role in the mid 1970s-80s and how a new generation engaged with Islam, racism, the Balkan Wars and the strikes of 1995.

C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) transformed the independent American Left in the 1940s and 1950s. Often challenging the established ideologies and approaches of fellow leftist thinkers, Mills was central to creating and developing the idea of the "public intellectual" in postwar America and laid the political foundations for the rise of the New Left in the 1960s. This book reconstructs this icon's formation and the new dimension of American political life that followed his work.