public intellectual

Still there must be academics out there who can hold their own at least against the current lot of self-styled public intellectuals we are made to suffer day in and day out.

Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Laureate, Christopher Okigbo, Ace writer, Chinua Achebe, Nardine Gordimer, another Nobel Laureate, Ali Mazrui the foremost historian, Billy Dudley, Claude Ake, Iya Abubakar, Ishaya Audu, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Ayan Hirsi Alli, Bolanle Awe, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Toyin Falola, Ayi Kwei Armah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and many others became public intellectuals who spoke to the people, stood in the vanguard of people's movements and became heroes.

In contrast to public intellectuals, thought leaders gain fame as single-idea merchants.

Should all intellectuals or academics be public intellectuals?

It is true, of course, that a case could be made for relooking at Alasdair MacIntrye's "Lost Sociology" as Neil Davidson does, and it is certainly work remembering the pioneering public intellectual work of South African feminist write and social theorist Olive Schreiner as Liz Stanley suggests.

However, as Marshall and Atherton outline in their introduction to this theme issue, 'Situating Public Intellectuals', where once the pronouncements of the public intellectual might have been encountered in a newspaper or on television, today a public intellectual is more likely to participate in public debate via their Twitter account or by giving a TED talk.

His book The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker, reprinted in its tenth anniversary edition in 2014, is the quintessential work of a public intellectual because it is an unapologetic analysis of and tribute to intelligence in the non-academic world.

The book is a delight to read, as Joeckel progresses through a carefully constructed series of definitions and assertions toward understanding Lewis as a public intellectual.

I remember being somewhat stung by her comments, and joined the others in shaking my head at the lackluster state of our public intellectual life.

Inspired by the American iconoclast Dwight Macdonald, the idea of the public intellectual was first popularized, I believe, by the great sociologist C.

Tobias Endler, How To Be A Superpower: The Public Intellectual Debate on the Global Role of the United States after September 11 (Opladen: Barbara Budrich Publishers, 2012)

"Because Judt was a public intellectual who wrote extensively about other public intellectuals, his thoughts on his peers are doubly fascinating.

Controversy over the "decline" and "death" of the public intellectual came to Canada in the years after it entered the discourse of the U.S.

However, he has mistakenly grounded the idea of black public intellectual to the Great Depression, particularly in the public function of Frazier, Bunche, and Harris.

Nikolay Vasilev, a professor of philosophy at the Sofia University and a public intellectual and satirist, was a critic of the communist regime that ruled Bulgaria 1944-1989.