Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States

Periodic "crises" in our academic culture remind us that the organization of our intellectual life is a product of history--neither fixed by the logic of social development nor inherent in the nature of knowledge itself. At a time of much unease in academia and among the general public about the relation of intellect to public life, Thomas Bender explores both the nineteenth-century origins and the twentieth-century configurations of academic intellect in the United States.