The editors bring together a wide variety of noted scholars to discuss the characteristics, nature, and role of public thinkers. By looking at scholarly life in the West, this work explores the relationship between thought and action, ideas and events, reason and history.

Whether intellectuals are counter-cultural escapists corrupting the young or secular prophets leading us to prosperity, they are a fixture of modern political life. In The Public Intellectual: Between Philosophy and Politics, Arthur M. Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, and M. Richard Zinman bring together a wide variety of noted scholars to discuss the characteristics, nature, and role of public thinkers. By looking at scholarly life in the West, this work explores the relationship between thought and action, ideas and events, reason and history.

Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 THEORY
Chapter 3 The Rise of the Public Intellectual
Chapter 4 What is an Intellectual?
Chapter 5 A Platonic Perspective on the Idea of the Public Intellectual
Chapter 6 The Idea of the Public Intellectual in the Age of the Enlightenment
Chapter 7 Rousseau's Critique of the Public Intellectual in the Age of the Enlightenment
Chapter 8 The Founding Fathers and the Creation of Public Opinion
Chapter 9 The Public Intellectual in the Twentieth Century
Chapter 10 The Changing Role of the Public Intellectual in American History
Chapter 11 The Decline of the Public Intellectual and the Rise of the Pundit
Chapter 12 The Public Intellectual and the Experience of Totalitarianism
Chapter 13 The Peripheral Insider: Raymond Aron and the Wages of Reason
Chapter 14 Gray is Beautiful
Chapter 15 PRACTICE
Chapter 16 The Professional Scholar as Public Intellectual: Reflections Prompted by Karl Mannheim, Robert K. Merton, and C. Wright Mills
Chapter 17 Public Philosophy and International Feminism
Chapter 18 Wit Irony Fun Games