Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: On Time 1 Nowhere Left to Go 2 Root Causes 3 Iraq: The Hard Road to Debacle 4 Cultural Studies and Political Crisis5 What Is This "Cultural" in Cultural Studies? Conclusion: Equality and Freedom Notes Works cited Index About the Author

Promotional Information

A devastating account of the American left during wartime, and at war with itself

About the Author

Michael Bérubé is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature and Director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Penn State University. In 2012, he served as the President of the Modern Language Association. He is the author of several books, including Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies (NYU Press, 1997), The Left at War (NYU Press, 2009), What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?: Classroom Politics and “ Bias” in Higher Education (2006), and Life as We Know It: A Father, A Family, and an Exceptional Child (1996).

Reviews

"Indefatigably clear-minded and relentlessly researched, Berube's The Left at War offers an invaluable excavation of just what has gone wrong, and occasionally right, with the academic/intellectual left in America. Anyone concerned with its future will be relying on this work for many years to come." Eric Alterman, author of Why We're Liberals "A rigorous, hard-hitting, and impressively detailed critique and account of the United States left during wartime - and at war with itself. It is far and away the most thoroughly reasoned and researched brief for a middle way between a predictably anti-imperialist left and a revoltingly hawkish liberalism, and in this it is immensely useful both as a guide to recent debates and as a sort of internationalist handbook. Rousing, engrossing, principled, and brave." Eric Lott, author of The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual "Berube is the kind of critic, and the kind of advocate, that the Left desperately needs. I sometimes disagree with him, and then I argue with him in my head. I strongly recommend this practice: read him, learn from him, argue with him. It is a wonderfully bracing experience." Michael Walzer, editor, Dissent Magazine "Berube's new book delivers an incredibly timely message of tough love to the American Left. On issue after issue - from Afghanistan to Iraq to the domestic front - he separates progressive myth from progressive reality. In the process he distinguishes good reasoning from bad among the major political writers of the last generation and gives us a fresh agenda for future work." Cary Nelson, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign "An incisive critique of the excesses of the political and academic left. Berube is uniquely positioned to diagnose the relationship between policy debates over the Iraq War and the fate of cultural studies in United States. The result is a fog-clearing argument for a new left internationalism centered on human rights and supranational institutions, and a timely reconsideration of Stuart Hall's rich analysis of the rise of Thatcherism in England. This is an important and bracing book." Amanda Anderson, author of The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory "[P]rovides robust intellectual arguments for how to reshape leftist thought into a powerful, constructive and measurably successful political philosophy...his effort not only identifies left-wing excesses and elevates its more viable and strategically sound currents, but puts critical thinking back into vogue on both sides of the political spectrum." Publisher's Weekly, 28th Sept 2009