Renowned leading intellectual Paul Berman conducts a searing examination into current intellectual trends, showing how some of the West's' best thinkers have fumbled badly in their efforts to grapple with Islamic ideas and how journalists have been reluctant to deal seriously with Islamist ideas and violence. In examining the legacy of these political traditions, Berman makes a striking contribution to the central debates about the Islamist movement and the reluctance of Western journalists and intellectuals to deal with the issues at hand.

In an elegantly written consideration of American attitudes towards Islamic thinkers, Paul Berman, one of America's leading intellectuals and champion for progressive thought, conducts a searing examination of the West's fumbling efforts to establish a healthy discourse with what is coined 'moderate Islam'. Berman engages with many of today's most important issues - contemporary anti-Semitism, anti-feminism and the presence of home grown fundamentalists - to present a stunning commentary on the media's inability to detect dangerous ideas in contemporary society.

Stupid is the new smart—but it wasn’t always so Popular culture has divorced itself from the life of the mind. Who has time for great books or deep thought when there is Jersey Shore to watch, a txt 2 respond 2, and World of Warcraft to play? At the same time, those who pursue the life of the mind have insulated themselves from popular culture. Speaking in insider jargon and writing unread books, intellectuals have locked themselves away in a ghetto of their own creation. It wasn’t always so. Blue Collar Intellectuals vividly captures a time in the twentieth century when the everyman aspired to high culture and when intellectuals descended from the ivory tower to speak to the everyman. Author Daniel J. Flynn profiles thinkers from working-class backgrounds who played a prominent role in American life by addressing their intellectual work to a mass audience. Blue Collar Intellectuals shows us how much everyone—intellectual and everyman alike—has suffered from mass culture’s crowding out of higher things and the elite’s failure to engage the masses.

He calls for a "new radicalism" and a "liberal American interventionism" to promote democratic values throughout the world - a vigorous new politics of American liberalism."--BOOK JACKET.

Political journalist Paul Berman recounts four episodes in the history of a generation: student radicalism of the years around 1968; the birth of gay liberation and modern identity politics; the anti-Communist trajectory in the Eastern bloc; and the ideals and self-criticism of thinkers in America and in France, who debated the meaning of these events. A "New York Times" Notable Book.

This book examines the contact relationships between U.S. presidents and America's intellectuals since 1960.

The intellectual and the popular: Irving Howe and John Waters, Susan Sontag and Ethel Rosenberg, Dwight MacDonald and Bill Cosby, Amiri Baraka and Mick Jagger, Andrea Dworkin and Grace Jones, Andy Warhol and Lenny Bruce. All feature in Andrew Ross's lively history and critique of modern American culture. Andrew Ross examines how and why the cultural authority of modern intellectuals is bound up with the changing face of popular taste in America. He argues that the making of "taste" is hardly an aesthetic activity, but rather an exercise in cultural power, policing and carefully redefining social relations between classes.