9781611683691
Distributed for Dartmouth College Press
A More Conservative Place
Intellectual Culture in the Bush Era
Identifying the historical antecedents of President George W. Bush’s imperial ambitions and the sources of the reactionary thought and politics that underlie them, Paul A. Bové shows how neoconservatism represents a singular danger to democracy. At the same time, he criticizes the equally disheartening inability of the academic Left to oppose neoconservatives and its tendency to mirror their views instead. Divorced from historical knowledge and intellectual rigor, the neocon mindset reflects a cultural and historical amnesia that feeds on ignorance and conformity. Exposing the threats to national survival inherent in the alliance of right-wing politics and academic tribalism, Bové emphasizes the need to reconnect with the powers of imagination and the complexity of human historical experience. With urgency and passion, Bové shows how the neocons have succeeded in cowing or coopting academic intellectuals and how language has been used and abused for the maintenance and extension of an undemocratic regime.
Table of Contents
Preface • Acknowledgments • A Retrospective Introduction • American Universalism and Its Democracy • Area Studies Revisited • The American State Allegorizes the Ruins • Can American Studies Be “Area Studies”? • Critical Poetics: American Resources for Theorizing America • Curiosity in The Education of Henry Adams • Can We Judge the Humanities by Their Future as a Course of Study? • Humanities and the Changing Role of Worldly Engagement The Ineluctability of American Empire • Rights Discourse in the Age of U.S.-China Trade • Historical Humanist, American Style • The Intellectual as a Contemporary Phenomenon • The End of Thinking: Intellectual Failure in the New World Order • Why the Neocons Hate Henry Adams • Notes • Index