Michael Ignatieff, writing at the blog for the New York Review of Books, looks at Great Power Diplomacy and Syria and has some rather dire observations: Continue reading A sobering verdict on Russia and China from Prof. Ignatieff
The last two individuals that the Liberal Party of Canada put up as candidates to be the country’s prime minister were both, by most definitions of the phrase, public intellectuals. And both were savaged by their chief opponents, the Conservative Party of Canada, precisely because they were public intellectuals.
In their French-language attack ads leading up to and during the 2008 federal election, the Conservatives sneered at “professor” Stéphane Dion. Again, in 2011, Michael Ignatieff’s academic credentials and long career as a public intellectual was not, so far as the Conservatives were concerned, an asset for someone hoping to be prime minister but instead was something to be laughed at and derided. Continue reading The Public Intellectual: A good or a bad thing?