What Are Intellectuals Good For?
Wesley Yang
What Are Intellectuals Good For?
by George Scialabba
$15.00 List Price
Early in his new book of essays and reviews, George Scialabba declares himself a “utopian” and a “radical democrat,” though he concedes, parenthetically, that he owns up to this identification “on fewer days of the week than formerly.” It is the most succinct statement Scialabba provides of the sensibility governing What Are Intellectuals Good For?, which collects the work of more than two decades spent addressing the broadest philosophical and historical issues in five thousand words or fewer in the back pages of newspapers and magazines.
Scialabba is acutely conscious that the utopian impulse, having been held responsible for the worst atrocities of the twentieth century, is often derided these days. Still, qualified embraces such as the one above are Scialabba’s stock-in-trade. He stakes out a position, for
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