The Lure of Novelty and the Disappearance of the Public Intellectual: Thoughts on the Culture Wars

Abstract

Scholarly discourse has become a chaos of contending viewpoints, due in large part to the growing influence of multiculturalism, deconstruction, and postmodernism. These movements impede efforts to connect the disciplines and to bridge the chasm between the academy and the general public. Going beyond a fashionable postmodern skepticism, and building up a resistance to intellectual faddism in general, will require resisting the marketdriven lure of novelty, re-emphasizing rigorous integrative concepts and methods, and fostering the embryonic communitarianism of the intellect that exists beneath the agitated surface of contemporary academic life.