Amazon.co.uk Review

The near-total triumph of free market capitalism around the world has put a damper on utopian visions, leading many politicians and activists to believe that radical change is impossible, that at best one can hope for slight modifications of the status quo. For Russell Jacoby, this attitude is not so much the result of practicality as it is the product of exhaustion and he argues that, as a society, we can do much better. The End of Utopia is an uncompromising look at the intellectual caliber of late 20th-century liberal and leftist politics, particularly within the academy. He portrays the class of professional intellectuals as insiders adopting the pose of marginality and lambasts the current practicioners of "cultural studies" in particular for their tendency toward banal "analysis" of mass culture in tortured, jargon-laced prose. (In contrast, he holds up Dwight MacDonald, Theodor Adorno and Matthew Arnold as writers who could address mass culture in plain language yet with deep, critical intelligence.) And he proposes that multiculturalism may be little more than a last ditch attempt at differentiation within the one, dominant culture. "What is to be done?" he asks after cataloguing this state of affairs. "The question, routinely addressed to all critics, insists on a practicality inimical to utopianism. Nothing is to be done. Yet that does not mean nothing is to be thought or imagined or dreamed." The End of Utopia shows to what extent the dreams have been abandoned, with the means of rekindling them yet within grasp. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

拉塞尔•雅各比（Russell Jacoby） 加州大学洛杉矶分校的历史学教授。著作涉及历史、政治和文化批评，包括《最后的知识分子：学院时代的美国文化》（The Last Intellectuals: Amercian Culture in the Age of Academe）、《社会健忘症：对墨守成规的心理学之批判》（Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology）以及《不完美的图像：论反乌托邦时代的乌托邦思想》（Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age）等。

译者简介：

姚建彬 1972年出生。中国人民大学文学博士。北京师范大学副教授；现在英国剑桥大学做为期一年的访问学者。研究兴趣涉及乌托邦文学及西方乌托邦思想史、中西比较文学、西方马克思主义文艺美学。