Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics

"Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics is a wonderful and long overdue book. It stakes out very important ground in challenging the various theoreticist evasions from postmodernism, fetishization of Arendt, Zizek, Foucault and others that have propelled and perfumed the articulation of an academic leftism that imagines itself to have transcended obsolete notions class struggle as an epistemic category. These discrete studies, and the book as a whole, should be core reading both for those interested in the thinkers and trends the chapters examine and for anyone interested seriously in left theory and practice and the intellectual history of the last generation of academic leftism." - Adolph Reed, Jr., Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics is a challenge to contemporary radical politics and political thought.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.