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The Sealed Envelope: Toward an Intelligent Utopia
Hardcover
PhilosophyLetters & EssaysGeneral Political Science
Publisher Price: $32.50
ISBN13: 9780300282399
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: Jan 20 2026
Pages: 296
Weight: 1.05
Height: 1.20 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.60
Language: English
An award-winning author argues for the necessity of cultural critics and intellectuals to American democracy
This incisive collection of essays investigates the moral imagination of modernism and our intellectual and political inheritance. George Scialabba offers a series of portraits of, and arguments with, American and European thinkers of the past hundred years, ranging from conservatives such as John Gray, William Buckley, and Jonathan Haidt to radicals such as Dwight Macdonald, Christopher Hitchens, and Bill McKibben.In our moment of democracy under siege, with intellectual work popularly derided as only for elites, Scialabba champions such thinkers as Richard Rorty, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Christopher Lasch, with their emphasis on democratic political culture and their faith in the capacities of ordinary people and the importance of intellectual work. This collection passes on these values in a sealed envelope, as Rilke says of love between selfish lovers, for future generations to use in crafting their own intelligent utopia.
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