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John
H. Summers,
Every Fury on Earth
A PenMark Press Book
The
essays in this volume, in subject, vary from trends in
higher education to the histories of sex scandals and
dreaming in American politics; from the radical left in San
Francisco to the utopian ego driving information technology;
from the intellectual biographies of James Agee and Richard
Hofstadter to Christopher Hitchens and C. Wright Mills. No
one theme or person or subject dominates. Although the
essays are in spirit critical, they do not advance the
interests of any party or group or milieu.
The author invites readers to regard the essays as the result
of a sensibility that wants to make knowledge available for
intellectual self-defense. In this regard, the subjects
selected themselves, each of them having puzzled, angered,
or startled him in the decade since 1998 when he began
writing for publication. He had turned away from the rural
conservatism of his youth, which held violence and tradition
to be the motors of history, only to find himself
superfluous, delivered neither to the Old Left nor the New
Left, but, instead, to no Left at all. Becoming radically
aware of politics and culture in the Age of Reagan absolved
him of the old cycle of illusion and disillusion, but only
because there were no longer any illusions on offer, no
ideologies or clear standards of political belief by which
to measure himself.
How, then, is it possible to believe in the transcendent or
progressive power of ideas while disbelieving in authority?
This is the question presented in the epigraph and featured
in the title. The author hopes that, in bringing the
question to bear on these subjects, he has not taken the
easy way out.
The Author and Publisher Share
an essay from this collection. (Requires Adobe Acrobat
Reader™)
Click on the acronym to read
"The Deciders."
TAPS
Contents
I History as Vocation
History as Vocation
The Hitchens Effect
The Toughest Job
Graduate Economics
Noam Chomsky and Academic History
The End of Sociology?
II History as Criticism
James Agee, The Anarchist Sublime
What Happened to Sex Scandals?
The San Francisco Left
A Note on Anti-Americanism
In Dreams Begin Politics
Remembering Richard Hofstadter
Personal Pragmatism
Information Junkies
III History as Biography
The Big Discourse
The Deciders
No-Man’s-Land: C. Wright Mills in England
The Epigone’s Embrace
Acknowledgements
Reviewers' comments
zzz
“Like C. Wright Mills, about whom he writes frequently, John
H. Summers attacks power and hypocrisy. His essays are
smart, edgy and angry. They harbor a new talent. May he
flourish!”
—Russell Jacoby
teaches at UCLA and is the author of
The Last Intellectuals
and
The End of Utopia.
zzz
“To encounter a voice as grave, penetrating, and fearless as
the one that emerges in this collection is genuinely
exciting.
Every Fury on Earth
is full of sharp and original insights about contemporary
American intellectual life; and even better, full of high
promise.”
—George Scialabba
is the author of
Divided Mind
and
What Are Intellectuals Good For?
zzz
“John
Summers is a welcome new voice in the chorus of American
cultural criticism. If, as he says, the anarchism he favors
takes illumination as its aspiration, then he has honored it
with these essays of remarkable candle power. And a fury not
easily deflected by the presiding enemies of the human
soul.”
—Robert
Westbrook
is the author of
Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth.
zzz
“With lucidity, deft use of scholarly detail, and a keen
critical eye,
Every Fury on Earth
maps some key coordinates of American intellectual history.
The collected essays on the disciplines of history, academic
labor, and especially on radical intellectuals remind us of
the possibilities of the intellectual vocation. In
particular, Summers shines renewed light on C. Wright Mills,
combining prodigious archival work with the narrative skill
of a novelist. Summers follows in the tradition of the
mid-century intellectuals he covers—Richard Hofstadter,
James Agee, and Mills—in purveying ideas, writers, and their
social milieu to a broad public. Rather than turning inwards
to academic debates, he draws scholarly research outwards.
Summers represents a distinctive new intellectual voice
re-evaluating what is living and what is dead in the
American tradition of radical thought.”
—Jeffrey J. Williams
is co-editor of
The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism
and editor of
the minnesota review.
zzz
“…. Readers will likely find themselves agreeing and arguing
with Summers in equal measure as he addresses themes ranging
from the history of pragmatism, anarchism, and political
scandals to working conditions in the contemporary
university. This collection is a fine example of engaged
historical inquiry and a spirited—indeed,
vehement—intellectual provocation.”
—Casey N. Blake teaches at Columbia University
The Author
John H. Summers is Lecturer on American Studies at Columbia
University. He also teaches in the Honors Program at Boston
College, where he is Visiting Scholar in the Boisi Center
for Religion and American Public Life.
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