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Russell Jacoby is one of the most influential intellectuals who came out of the New Left engagement with critical theory in America. Now teaching at UCLA, Jacoby has penned a number of books and articles on the history of both Marxism (2002) and radical psychoanalysis (Jacoby 1975; Jacoby 1986), a range of social criticism on the decline of both education and utopia (; Jacoby 2000; ) and, earlier in his career, he produced dense works of Frankfurt School style social theorizing published in Telos, a major center for critical theory in America (for example, see Jacoby 1971; Jacoby 1975; Jacoby 1980;). Most importantly, he is the author of The Last Intellectuals , a brilliant polemical text that almost single handedly kick- started a debate about the role of the intellectual in a North American culture dominated by the research university and the academy.
Sociologists have written a massive literature on the role and function of the intellectual (Collini 2006; ; Gouldner 1979; Kadushin 1974; ), but no-one succeeded as Jacoby did in taking an obscure term like the “public intellectual” that had been thrown around vaguely by the literary critic Irving Howe and the sociologist C.Wright Mills in the 1950s and early 1960s, and then refining and developing its meaning in order to create a serious and spirited debate in the public sphere about the responsibility of the intellectual. There are plenty of polemics and manifestos that re-assert the need to speak truth to power (; Chomsky 1967) but Jacoby offered an original analysis of the problem not simply an inspirational call for a solution, although he did that as well. Jacoby's claim that American intellectual life had been damaged even impoverished since the 1960s because of the dominance of the academic field, gave rise to a massive amount of academic scholarship, travelled into the journalistic field and helped create and shape new and productive discussions about the role of the professors in modern American society.
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