This seems relevant. Wilfred McClay reviews Todd Gitlin’s The Intellectuals and the Flag, a critique, from the left, of the left’s intellectual malaise and the academic world that it dominates.
“The left embraced the smug disassociation from existing society epitomized in the sweeping call by Herbert Marcuse for a ‘Great Refusal’ of the confining ideals and crass manipulations of the modern capitalist political economy. But the embrace of Marcuse’s slogan has amounted in practice to a ‘great withdrawal,’ a narcissistic retreat into self-proclaimed ‘marginality,’ an obsession with ever more minute forms of identity politics and the infinite ‘problematizing’ of ‘truth,’ a reflexive opposition to America and the West, and an immurement in ‘theories’ whose radicalism is so pure that they never quite touch down to earth – follies all underwritten and protected by the perquisites and comforts of academia.”
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