The engaged public intellectual concept serves as a moral gauge for cultural politics

Evidence

The significance and function of intellectuals in American society has been the source of controversy for much of the twentieth century. Questions concerning the meaning, role, and responsibilities of intellectuals are part of an often contentious tradition in scholarly work, often spilling over into the popular press. The theoretical literature is rich with commentaries about the role of the intellectual and offers a minefield of insights from writers that include Emile Durkheim, Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, Alvin Gouldner, Noam Chomsky, and more recently Russell Jacoby, Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, Edward W. Said, Carol Becker, Stanley Aronowitz, and others (see Giroux, 1988, 1995a, 1995b; Aronowitz and Giroux, 1993). For many of these theorists, especially from Gramsci on, debates regarding the role of the intellectual have often functioned as part of a broader discourse about recovering the space of the political and deepening the possibilities for creating multiple, democratic public spheres. In part, the concept of the critically engaged intellectual has served as a moral referent for gauging the limits and possibilities for cultural politics within dominant social and economic formations. Derided and praised, intellectuals have occupied that in-between space of politics and culture with its ever changing demand for committed social engagement, and its simultaneous trap of cooption. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2610

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘critically engaged intellectual’ as a moral referent for cultural politics and a tradition rooted in Gramsci onward.