Where have all the intellectuals gone?

Terry Eagleton's very good review of Frank Furedi's book Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? contains the following:

'One mark of the classical intellectual (more recently dubbed a "theorist") was that he or she refused to be pinned to a single discipline. Instead, the idea was to bring ideas critically to bear on social life as a whole.... In fact, a snap definition of an intellectual would be "more or less the opposite of an academic". Once society is considered too complex to be known as a whole, however, the idea of truth yields to both specialism and relativism.'

The only problem is that Eagleton's example of a contemporary intellectual is Polly Toynbee!

See also review by Dylan Evans in Guardian. Other reviews include Theodore Dalrymple in The Spectator and Noel Malcolm in The Telegraph.

There is an interview with Furedi about the book in Spiked. David Aaronovitch (I'll try and restrain myself) also discusses Furedi's book.