The View Through the Bullet-Proof Perspex

Abstract

The intellectuals of capitalist society are not bashful about theorizing about themselves. Far from it. For most of them a certain amount of self-admiration counts as work, and it pays therefore to be introspective in public. Such reflection leads to a steady if narrow stream of intellectual biography, methodology, sociology of knowledge, and criticism. Most of it tends to flatter intellectuality in general, if not every particular thinker, and to have all the fidelity of a self-portrait by Narcissus. There is no reason, really, to expect much else.

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