The 'critique of intellectuals' refers to a genre of normative discourse that holds intellectuals accountable for the consequences of their ideas. A curious feature of the contemporary, especially American, variant of this genre is its focus on intellectuals who were aligned with such world-historic losers as Hitler and Stalin. Why are Cold War US intellectuals not held to a similar standard of scrutiny, even though they turn out to have been aligned with the world-historic winners? In addressing this general question, some self-serving tendencies of intellectual history are observed, in particular the asymmetry between the ease with which intellectuals are credited with the good consequences of their ideas and the difficulty with which they are blamed for the bad consequences. This asymmetry is particularly noted in Richard Rorty, whose pragmatism treats past ideas as a legacy intended for the (American) reader's benefit. As a corrective, I advocate, in Paul Ricoeur's terms, a 'hermeneutic of suspicion' that treats intellectual life as fraught with danger, as our adoption of ideas always amounts to passing judgement over those who have borne them in the past.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Chapter
Junia Ferreira Furtado;
(2021)
O outro lado do império: estrangeirados luso‑brasileiros e as minas da América portuguesa
(/isis/citation/CBB069266265/)
Book
John J. Stuhr;
(2022)
No Professor's Lectures Can Save Us: William James's Pragmatism, Radical Empiricism, and Pluralism
(/isis/citation/CBB512993699/)
Article
Francesco Luzzini;
(2018)
Bibliographical Distortions, Distortive Habits: Contextualizing Italian Publications in the History of Science
(/isis/citation/CBB924784770/)
Article
Francesco Luzzini;
(2019)
Distorsioni bibliografiche e storture etiche. Le pubblicazioni di storia della scienza nel contesto italiano
(/isis/citation/CBB996363028/)
Article
Zayarnyuk, Andriy;
(2014)
On the Possibility of Peasant Intellectuals: The Case of the Ukrainians in Habsburg Galicia
(/isis/citation/CBB001550358/)
Book
William C. Lubenow;
(2015)
'Only Connect': Learned Societies in Nineteenth-Century Britain
(/isis/citation/CBB834604994/)
Article
Rafaela Zorzanelli;
Nancy Campbell;
(2020)
Interview with Nancy Campbell
(/isis/citation/CBB095682962/)
Article
Rafaela Zorzanelli;
(2020)
Drug Trajectories: Interviews with Researchers
(/isis/citation/CBB431664141/)
Chapter
C.S.L. Davies;
(2017)
Wilkins at Wadham
(/isis/citation/CBB395869999/)
Article
Guillaume Lancereau;
(2024)
Entre espace public et mondes privés: Les masculinités savantes aux origines de la discipline historique en France, 1870–1914
(/isis/citation/CBB696598575/)
Book
James Robert Wood;
(2018)
Anecdotes of Enlightenment: Human Nature from Locke to Wordsworth
(/isis/citation/CBB489155665/)
Book
Ori Sela;
(2018)
China's Philological Turn: Scholars, Textualism, and the Dao in the Eighteenth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB127543370/)
Article
Preston Stovall;
(2015)
Inference by Analogy and the Progress of Knowledge: From Reflection to Determination in Judgements of Natural Purpose
(/isis/citation/CBB346042760/)
Book
Beatrijs Vanacker;
Lieke van Deinsen;
(2022)
Portraits and Poses: Female Intellectual Authority, Agency and Authorship in Early Modern Europe
(/isis/citation/CBB487155702/)
Book
Beller, Steven.;
(2000)
Rethinking Vienna 1900
(/isis/citation/CBB000102544/)
Article
Özervarli, M. Sait;
(2007)
Alternative Approaches to Modernization in the Late Ottoman Period: Izmirli Ismai L Hakki's Religious Thought against Materialist Scientism
(/isis/citation/CBB001031144/)
Book
Hans Heinrich Blotevogel;
R. H. Vermij;
(1995)
Gerhard Mercator und die geistigen Strömungen des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts
(/isis/citation/CBB377370088/)
Book
Aronowitz, Stanley;
(2012)
Taking It Big: C. Wright Mills and the Making of Political Intellectuals
(/isis/citation/CBB001552065/)
Article
Pedersen, Jean Elisabeth;
(2014)
`Speaking Together Openly, Honestly and Profoundly': Men and Women as Public Intellectuals in Early-Twentieth-Century France
(/isis/citation/CBB001550127/)
Article
Anderson, Robert G. W.;
(2014)
How Workers Learnt Chemistry
(/isis/citation/CBB001510469/)
Be the first to comment!