What ever happened with that liberal intellectual "boom" of the 1980s and 1990s? In The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual , Eric Lott- author of the prizewinning Love and Theft - shows that the charter members of the "new left" are suffering from a condition that he has dubbed "boomeritis." Too secure in their university appointments, lecture tours, and book deals, the once rising stars of the liberal elite- including Richard Rorty, Todd Gitlin, Michael Lind, Paul Berman, Greil Marcus, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.- have drifted away from their radical moorings toward the political centre. At once a chronicle of recent intellectual life and a polemic against contemporary liberalism's accommodations of the conservative status quo, The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual eviscerates the complacency that has seeped into the politics of the would-be vanguard of American intellectual thought. Lott issues a wake-up call to the great public intellectuals of our day and challenges them to reinvigorate political debate on campus, in their writing, and on the airwaves.
