Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics

The Betrayal of Politics

Michael J. Thompson, Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker, Michael J. Thompson, Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781349570478
  9781137385154
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137381606
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics is a challenge to contemporary radical politics and political thought. This collection of essays critiques the dominant trends and figures on the left that have distorted the legacy of progressive politics, arguing that they have moved politics away from issues of class and economic power toward a preoccupation with culture and identity. The contributors discuss this new radicalism from the perspective of a more rational form of leftism capable of reviving interest in a more politically relevant form of politics.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Postmodern Face of American Exceptionalism
• 2 Postmodernism and the Corruption of the Critical Intelligentsia
• 3 Inventing the “Political”: Arendt, Antipolitics, and the Deliberative Turn in Contemporary Political Theory
• 4 Slavoj Žižek’s Linksfaschismus
• 5 Illusory Alternatives: Neo-Anarchism’s Disengaged and Reactionary Leftism
• 6 Skimming the Surface: Stanley Fish and the Politics of Self-Promotion
• 7 Being Postmodern While Late Modernity Burned: On the Apolitical Nature of Contemporary Self-Defined “Radical” Political Theory
• 8 Habermas, Critical Theory, and Political Economy
• 9 The Spectacle Looks Back into You: The Situationists and the Aporias of the Left
• 10 The Power and the Void: Radical Democracy, Post-Marxism, and the Machiavellian Moment
• 11 In Defense of Universalism
• Notes on Contributors
• Index