This chapter explores how the essay, with its unlimited subject matter and the flexibility to address diverse audiences and ideas, provides public intellectuals with an invaluable and effective means of educating and challenging readers. It takes George Orwell as the model of the modern British public intellectual, someone whose interactive development as an intellectual and an essayist was fostered through numerous intellectual periodicals and magazines. It shows how four more recent essayists – Christopher Hitchens, Tony Judt, Tariq Ali, and Mary Beard – adapt the Orwellian approach as polemicist and outsider. In distinct ways, public intellectuals extend and enliven the contemporary public sphere, ensuring that the essay remains critical to the collective exchange of opinion.

This chapter considers Rushdie’s columns, essays, and criticism to investigate the wider social, cultural, and political landscape with which his works engage. A prolific essayist, Rushdie has commented on key moments and events. These range from his own position as a diasporic Indian living in Britain to subcontinental politics, such as the assassination of Indira Gandhi, violence in Kashmir, and new emergent forms of racism in Britain. The chapter focuses especially on the collections, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 and Step Across This Line: Collected Non-Fiction, 1992–2002, and columns and pieces he has written subsequently, and considers Rushdie’s role in internationalizing British literature and academia and his contributions to debates on race in Britain.

Though many see the 1950s–1970s as the height of Mailer’s career, he remained a fixture in the literary world – and on best-seller lists – for decades afterward. During the last decade of his life, Mailer offers some of his sharpest and most poignant cultural commentaries, offering a critical appraisal of the American political system and the country’s political leaders, examining the way recent presidential administrations continue to feed the imperialist myth of an American empire, and weighing in on the subject of patriotism and American exceptionalism after 9/11. At this writing, it has been 13 years since his passing, and in some ways his early writings seem to be gaining in relevance, his nonfictional pieces serving as eerie predictions of contemporary issues, and have been referenced frequently in recent years.

This essay examines Thomas Kuhn’s education and collaboration with Harvard President James Bryant Conant to consider his evolving view of relations between scholarship and politics. Aspects of Kuhn’s unpublished Lowell Lectures of 1951, correspondence with Philipp Frank from 1952, and Kuhn’s thoughts about general education from 1955 are examined to illustrate Kuhn’s intellectual movement away from the political interests and engagements of his youth and away from the salutary civic roles that Conant intended history of science to play in American education. Kuhn’s conception of what counts as methodological study of science and his conception of scientific communities, firmly separated and insulated from the sociology of public life, are upheld as central for understanding how, despite Kuhn’s formative relationship with the public-intellectual Conant, Kuhn evolved in the 1950s a style of professional scholarship about science that reached its fruition in the Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

This chapter by Elias Khoury, who is one of the most important living Arabic novelists and a perennial candidate for the Nobel prize in literature, is adapted from an essay first published in the cultural supplement Mulḥaq, in the Lebanese newspaper al-Nahār, in 1997. The chapter, which has as its starting point a description of Sa’dallah Wannous’ funeral as a means of explicating his significance as a playwright and public intellectual, offers a particularly vivid portrait of Wannous. It includes descriptions of Khoury’s first reading of An Evening’s Entertainment for the Fifth of June in the cultural journal al-Mawāqif in Beirut in 1968, a meeting with Wannous in Paris at Farouk Mardam-Bey’s house, and of being informed of Wannous’ premature death in 1997 on May 15, which, in the Arab world, is Nakba Day, the ‘day of catastrophe,’ when the state of Israel was created.

The introduction situates the book’s argument within scholarly debates on poetic authority in the late Middle Ages and especially in fourteenth-century Italy. It frames the book’s narrative by inviting readers to think historically about the role of poets and poetry in the public sphere. By understanding in its historical context how poet-scholars first argued for their own relevance centuries ago, we may better conceive new roles for literature in the changing landscape of public discourse. While an etiology of the figure of the public intellectual or an archaeology of the public humanities are goals beyond the scope of this book, its argument supports and contributes to debates on these topics.

Seán O’Faoláin is the embodiment in twentieth-century Irish cultural life of a version of the European public intellectual. A commentator on Irish and world affairs, he responded frequently to the political directives of the mid-century decades, pushing against the pressures towards insularity and clerical nationalism and recruiting literary culture to his cause. Co-founder of the influential journal The Bell, he was also a journalist and essayist, the author of fiction, several major biographies, travel writer and literary critic. Across this eclectic oeuvre O’Faoláin advanced his sense of a world in which the writer worked to maintain connections with English and Continental culture, claiming for Ireland a European position. In the 1940s his voice was perhaps at its most impressive and diverse, culminating in the publication in 1947 of The Irish: A Character Study, his vibrant diagnosis of the emerging nation. This chapter reassesses O’Faoláin’s role as a European public intellectual in a time of global crisis, drawing new comparisons between O’Faoláin and a diverse array of contemporary commentators including Jean-Paul Sartre, George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Karl Popper and Hannah Arendt.