Intellect and Public Life

Thomas Bender is Dean for the Humanities, Faculty of Arts and Science, University Professor of the Humanities, and professor of history at New York University. He is the author of Toward an Urban Vision, Community and Social Change in America, New York Intellect, and Budapest and New York: Studies in Metropolitan Transformation, 1870-1930.

Thomas Bender is our foremost cartographer of the intellect, the Mercator of the American mind. New York History A finely wrought picture of academic life before disciplinary professionalization. -- Daniel T. Rogers History of Education Quarterly In this excellent collection... Bender's essays suggest an ingenious account, both intellectual and spatial, of the growth of professional society. -- Peter Scott Times Higher Education Supplement The topic is a fascinating one, which is studied here with stimulating brevity and perception. -- Rosemary Park Change Bender's positive, generous, civil voice injects a soothing dose of optimism into current academic debates, and his invocation of 'public culture' delivers a needed antidote to the spurious concept that shares the same initial consonants. -- Mary Ryan, American Quarterly [A] sparkling and insightful volume. Canadian Review of American Studies

• PrefaceAcknowledgments Part I: Nineteenth-Century Origins of Academic CultureChapter 1. The Cultures of Intellectual Life: The City and the ProfessionsChapter 2. Science and the Culture of American CommunitiesChapter 3. The Erosion of Public Culture: Cities, Discourses, and Professional DisciplinesPart II: Twentieth-Century PatternsChapter 4. E.R.A. Seligman and the Vocation of Social ScienceChapter 5. The Emergence of the New York Intellectuals: Modernism, Cosmopolitanism, and NationalismChapter 6. The Historian and Public Life: Charles A. Beard and the CityChapter 7. Lionel Trilling and American CulturePart III: Conclusions and ReconsiderationsChapter 8. Academic Knowledge and Political Democracy in the Age of the University EpilogueNotesIndex