How do intellectuals engage with and affect their publics? What is the role of the public intellectual in the new age of political uncertainties? What challenges face female intellectuals and those speaking from an ethnic, national or class position? This exciting collection responds to these questions by offering a broad-ranging account of the changing role of intellectuals in public life. The volume opens with provocative essays on the idea and role of the public intellectual from Alexander, Evans and Zulaika. Chapters from Rabinbach on intellectuals' responses to totalitarianism, Outhwaite on what it means to be a European intellectual, and Auer's discussion of the dissident intellectual in the collapse of communism lead onto vigorous debate of earlier points discussed through specific intellectual case studies from Tocqueville to Hayek. Intellectuals and their Publics will attract a broad readership interested in the role of the intellectual, with particular appeal for sociologists, political theorists and historians of ideas.

Introduction; One: Provocations; 1: Public Intellectuals and Civil Society; 2: Can Women Be Intellectuals?; 3: Terrorism and the Betrayal of the Intellectuals; Two: Complications; 4: European Civil Society and the European Intellectual: What Is, and How Does One Become, a European Intellectual?; 5: What Influence? Public Intellectuals, the State and Civil Society; 6: Public Intellectuals, East and West: Jan Pato?ka and Václav Havel in Contention with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Slavoj Zizek; 7: Public Intellectuals and Totalitarianism: A Century's Debate; Three: Case Studies; 8: Tocqueville as a Public Intellectual 1; 9: Tocqueville's Dark Shadow: Gustave de Beaumont as Public Sociologist and Intellectual Avant la Lettre; 10: French Sociologists and the Public Space of the Press: Thoughts Based on a Case Study (Le Monde, 1995-2002); 11: You Only See What You Reckon You Know: Max and Marianne Weber in the United States of America at the Turn of the Twentieth Century; 12: Towards a Sociology of Intellectual Styles of Thought: Differences and Similarities in the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno and Jürgen Habermas; 13: Women as Public Intellectuals: Kerstin Hesselgren and Alva Myrdal; 14: How Hayek Managed to Beat Lazarsfeld: The Different Perception of Two Sub-fields of Social Science 1; Three: Conclusion