Eagleton on Furedi

Terry Eagleton has a review in the New Statesman of Frank Furedi's Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?. He begins by saying that 'the classical intellectual... seems to have shut up shop' and offers in partial explanation:

We inherit the idea of the intellectual from the 18th-century Enlightenment, which valued truth, universality and objectivity - all highly suspect notions in a postmodern age. As Furedi points out, these ideas used to be savaged by the political right, as they undercut appeals to prejudice, hierarchy and custom. Nowadays, in a choice historical irony, they are under assault from the cultural left.

He also says:

One mark of the classical intellectual... was that he or she refused to be pinned to a single discipline. Instead, the idea was to bring ideas critically to bear on social life as a whole... Once society is considered too complex to be known as a whole, however, the idea of truth yields to both specialism and relativism. Because you can now know only your own neck of the woods, the general critique as launched by the conventional intellectual collapses.

After this Terry's review reproduces, though not in quite the same terminology, a very 60s and Marcusian-style theme: of the absorption and taming of critical thought. It wasn't convincing back then, and I think it's even less convincing now. Whatever the shortcomings of contemporary intellectual and cultural life, it is not uni-dimensional. The terrain of criticism and opposition is as open as it has ever been. (Via The Importance of Disappointment.)