Author(s): Frank Furedi

Cultural Studies

Confronting 21st Century Philistinism The intellectual is an endangered species. In place of such people as Bertrand Russell, Raymond Williams or Hannah Arendt - people with genuine learning, breadth of vision and a concern for public issues - we now have only facile pundits, think tank apologists and spin doctors. In the age of the knowledge economy, we have somehow managed to combine the widest ever participation in higher education with the most dumbed-down of cultures. In this urgent and passionate book, Frank Furedi explains the essential contribution of intellectuals both to culture and to democracy - and why we need to recreate a public sphere in which intellectuals and the general public can talk to each other again. In this new edition, Furedi considers recent controversies on the role of the intellectuals, including a candid and hard-hitting analysis of the wide-ranging and contentious response to the publication of the first edition.