Intellectuals so the arguement goes, are an endangered species. Once at the centre of crucial debates about politics and culture, today they have forsaken their proud and public-spirited independence and retreated to academia where they pursue such esoteric subjects as post-modern aethetics and post-structuralist theory. The essays in this volume disputre this diagnosis and re-examine the controversy over the role of the intellectual in society. They place intellectuals in a specific historical context and evaluate their real and potential role in the circumstances that define our public life - the media, government bureaucracy, the new social movements. In so doing, these essays seek to find a new ground for the intellectual from where to carry out the responsibilities of public opposition. The volume is divided into sections to theory, interviews and historical cases.