Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics is a challenge to contemporary radical politics and political thought. This collection of essays critiques the dominant trends and figures on the left that have distorted the legacy of progressive politics, arguing that they have moved politics away from issues of class and economic power toward a preoccupation with culture and identity. The contributors discuss this new radicalism from the perspective of a more rational form of leftism capable of reviving interest in a more politically relevant form of politics.

Alison Assiter, University of the West of England, UK Warren Breckman, University of Pennsylvania, USA John Clark, Loyola University, USA Shadia Drury, University of Regina, Canada Russell Jacoby, University of California, Los Angeles, USA Alan Johson, Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre, UK Tom Rockmore, Duquesne University, USA John Sanbonmatsu, Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, USA Joseph M. Schwartz, Temple University, USA

1. Shadia Drury: The Postmodern Face of American Exceptionalism
2. John Sanbonmatsu: Postmodernism and the Corruption of the Critical Intelligentsia
3. Michael J. Thompson: Inventing the 'Political': Arendt, Anti-Politics and the Deliberative Turn in Contemporary Political Theory
4. Alan Johnson: Slavoj Zizek's Linksfaschismus
5. Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker: Illusory Alternatives: Neo-Anarchism's Disengaged and Reactionary Leftism
6. Russell Jacoby: Skimming the Surface: Stanley Fish and the Politics of Self-Promotion
7. Joseph M. Schwartz: Being Post-Modern While Late Modernity Burned: On the Apolitical Nature of Contemporary Self-Defined 'Radical' Political Theory
8. Tom Rockmore: Habermas, Critical Theory and Political Economy
9. John Clark: The Spectacle Looks Back Into You: The Situationists and the Aporias of the Left
10. Warren Breckman: The Power and the Void: Radical Democracy, Postmarxism and the Machiavellian Moment
11. Alison Assiter: In Defense of Universalism