What are the theoretical parameters that produce the category public intellectual? By pondering the conceptual elements that inform the term, this book offers not just a political critique, but a sense of the new challenges its meanings present. This collection complicates the notion of public intellectual while arguing for its continued urgency in communities formal and informal, institutional and abstract. While it is not quite accurate to say public intellectuals have disappeared entirely, it is clear they function differently in an age of global neoliberalism and techno-digital overdrive. Today the idea of the public intellectual bears only the slightest resemblance to what it was fifty or even twenty-five years ago. The essays in this collection provide a number of different ways to imagine the fate of public intellectuals and offers a thorough exploration of the commonplace ideologies and politics associated with them.

Introduction: Before the Beginning, After the End: Toward the New Public Intellectual; Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Peter HitchcockPART I: NEOLIBERALISM, EDUCATION, AND COMMITMENT1. Writing the Public Good Back Into Education: Reclaiming the Role of the Public Intellectual; Henry A. Giroux2. The Public Sphere Can be Fun: Political Pedagogy in Neoliberal Times; Sophia McClennen3. Teaching Literature, Teaching Commitment; Paul Allen MillerPART II: DEMOCRACY, COMMUNITY, AND GLOBALIZATION4. The Inorganic Intellectual and the Reinvention of the Communal:A Provocation; Christian Moraru5. This Death Which Is Not One: The Postcolonial Author as Public Intellectual; Nicole Simek6. Intellectuals and Democracy: Ambivalence, Sovereignty, Translation; John Michael 7. The Future of the Intellectuals: Was Alvin Gouldner Right?; John McGowanPART III: LEGITIMATION, PUBLICS, AND PHILOSOPHY8. Immediation and Responsibility; Peter Hitchcock9. What's 'New' about Public Intellectuals Today?; David Palumbo-Liu 10. The Double Bind of the Intellectual: Toward a Hermeneutics of Skepticism; Zahi Zalloua11. Bringing Intellect to the Soapbox: An Exchange; Simon Critchley