The Sociology of Intellectual Life

Steve Fuller is a Professor of Sociology at Warwick University. Other titles of his include The New Sociological Imagination (SAGE, 2006), and popular The Intellectual (Icon Books, 2006).

Introduction PART ONE: THE PLACE OF INTELLECTUAL LIFE: THE UNIVERSITY The University as an Institutional Solution to the Problem of Knowledge The Alienability of Knowledge in our So-called Knowledge Society The Knowledge Society as Capitalism of the Third Order Will the University Survive the Era of Knowledge Management? Postmodernism as an Anti-university Movement Regaining the University's Critical Edge by Historicizing the Curriculum Affirmative Action as a Strategy for Redressing the Balance between Research and Teaching Academics Rediscover Their Soul: The Rebirth of 'Academic Freedom' PART TWO: THE STUFF OF INTELLECTUAL LIFE: PHILOSOPHY Epistemology as 'Always Already' Social Epistemology From Social Epistemology to the Sociology of Philosophy The Codification of Professional Prejudices? Interlude: Seeds of an Alternative Sociology of Philosophy Prolegomena to a Critical Sociology of Twentieth-century Anglophone Philosophy Analytic Philosophy's Ambivalence Toward the Empirical Sciences Professionalism as Differentiating American and British Philosophy Conclusion: Anglophone Philosophy as a Victim of Its Own Success PART THREE: THE PEOPLE OF INTELLECTUAL LIFE: INTELLECTUALS Can Intellectuals Survive If the Academy Is a No-fool Zone? How Intellectuals Became an Endangered Species in Our Times: The Trail of Psychologism A Genealogy of Anti-intellectualism: From Invisible Hand to Social Contagion Re-defining the Intellectual as an Agent of Distributive Justice The Critique of Intellectuals in a Time of Pragmatist Captivity Pierre Bourdieu: The Academic Sociologist as Public Intellectual PART FOUR: THE IMPROVISATIONAL NATURE OF INTELLECTUAL LIFE Academics Caught Between Plagiarism and Bullshit Bullshit: A Disease Whose Cure Is Always Worse The Scientific Method as a Search for the (Piled) Higher (and Deeper) Bullshit Conclusion: How to Improvise on the World-historic Stage

...an inspiring read for those who think that big ideas matter and intellectuals can change the world. Fuller's style is iconoclastic, but this is balanced by his erudition and his brilliant one-liners...Challanging and thought provoking, The Sociology of Intellectual Life is a rollicking defence of the possibilities and challanges of intellectual life in the modern university. Eleanor Townsley Contemporary Sociology Steve Fuller is an academic and a public intellectual. In this powerful and polemical book he addresses the contemporary problem that confronts so rare a beast: the absence of a public... Academics, he argues, must take up the role of 'educated thinking in public' if they are to inform social action. What he means is that they have to act to create a new public. The cost of inaction will not only be the death of the university but of intellectual life. This responsibility should weigh like a nightmare on the dull brains of academics in the 21st century Dennis Hayes Visiting Professor, Oxford Brookes University and the founder of Academics For Academic Freedom This text moves along easily and the reader is often genuinely impressed by Steve's learning and insight; there was a lot in here that I enjoyed Steve Yearley Professor of Sociology, University of Edinburgh Steve Fuller is a trip. His flamboyant style is crisp, simultaneously colloquial and insider-professional, wasting no time on polite euphemisms Randall Collins International Sociology Review of Books The Sociology of Intellectual Life is the latest salvo from Steve Fuller in his ongoing fight for a strongly prescriptive philosophy of science. Fuller's writing is pugnacious, passionate, and unabashedly political... smart and sophisticated, and we should feel lucky to have him in our midst, haranguing us for what he perceives to be our intellectual sins Jeff Kochan Metascience