Ideas can define and transform society, but how healthy is intellectual life today? In recent decades, many observers have expressed concern about the ‘dumbing down’ of culture, noting an increasing tendency toward specialisation within academia, and a resulting demise of ‘public intellectuals’ capable of writing for and engaging with a non-specialist audience. All of these claims are disputed, and the ensuing debates reveal much about contemporary society. The question, however, is not merely academic. The state of intellectual life is inextricably linked to cultural and political life more generally. For ideas to be more than just commodities, there must be a dynamic relationship between intellectuals and the public, and a degree of political room for maneouvre, so that ideas can make a difference to society.

Culture Wars takes a broad definition of public intellectuals: rather than seeing intellectuals as an exotic priesthood, we are interested in all serious thinkers who concern themselves with public life. Here, we review books, talks and television programmes that address the public as citizens as well as scholars and consumers. We are also interested in discussions about public intellectuals and related issues, from the role of popular philosophy to the meaning of academic freedom.

The wrong kind of freedom

The Trap: What Happened to our Dream of Freedom?, by Adam Curtis (first shown on BBC2, March 2007)

The conclusion of Adam Curtis’ three-part BBC series is that liberal democracies have diminished our humanity, not by deliberately setting out as the Communists did to make a perfect society, but simply by organising around an impoverished notion of freedom.

Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain

Stefan Collini

The largely unnoticed elephant on the carpet in the contemporary debate about intellectuals, which is left undisturbed by Collini, is the end of the Cold War and the demise of ideological politics.

How Mumbo-jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions

Francis Wheen

Wheen is not at pains to justify his faith in the Enlightenment; he presents this book as a catalogue of modern errors, not as popular philosophy.

‘Let’s call it what it is: it’s queer’

Interview with Adriano Shaplin, the Riot Group

Shaplin disapproves of theatre that ‘immerses its audience in a prescriptive emotional reality’ and instructs them in moral responses by unravelling characters to reveal ‘fatal flaws’ and so on. This is why, having once championed violence as a means of asserting theatre’s physicality, he is now wary of its use for cathartic effect.

BAC-chat: critics, audiences and the importance of the café bar

Interview with David Jubb, artistic director, BAC

Jubb sees something absurd in the way we read a review in the Guardian, for example, with such reverence. Imagine fifty or sixty people going to the café bar after a show, he says, and instead of discussing the show with each other, listening while one expert holds forth.

Art, comedy, and defying the expectations of the critics

Interview with Stuart Silver, one half of Noble and Silver

‘We like that very personal feel, and that feel of blurring genres. One of the reasons for going into comedy was that we didn’t know what was going to happen there and we thought it would be a challenge.’

Looking forward to a ‘golden age’

How critics of 'declinism' are more conservative than they make out

The current prejudice, that criticisms of novel developments must imply a desire to return to the past, indicates a profound lack of imagination in contemporary society. Ideas don’t crash to Earth from outer space or appear in capsules from the future, but emerge from a critical engagement with the present informed by what happened and what was written in the past. This has nothing to do with ‘turning the clock back’ or ‘returning to the past’, a made-up version of reaction that obscures the fact that real conservatives are people who want to defend the status quo.

The Abolition of Liberty

Peter Hitchens

Had your house broken into? Been hustled by some cheeky teenagers? Been harassed by a new law that has made your job twice as hard? Tried to get the police or the courts to come to your rescue and fallen on your face?

Civil Society

Michael Edwards

Despite alluding to the vacuity of public debate, Edwards fails to address the problem head on.

What is knowledge?

Universities, the 'knowledge economy', and the real thing

The idea that teaching and research are in conflict corresponds with a particularly impoverished model of knowledge, which is revealed in the phrase ‘knowledge creation’. This presents universities as factories of knowledge competing with think-tanks and other private institutions.

Why is life so unfair?

Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy, by Susan Neiman

Some thinkers have always had ethical doubts about the pursuit of knowledge. Today these often take the form of concern about the consequences of technology, for example cloning. But Neiman pares things down to a single, more profound fear. If we understand the world and all its faults, are we then stuck with it? By explaining evil, do we justify it?