Scholarship And Freedom Geoffrey Galt Harpham by Geoffrey Galt Harpham 9780674245013, 0674245016 instant download after payment.

A powerful argument that scholars both model liberty--in particular, freedom of thought--and demand it on behalf of the larger society. The big lie about scholars is that they reside in ivory towers. If scholars were actually disconnected from society, they wouldn't be such frequent targets of attack. Geoffrey Galt Harpham argues that it is because intellectuals are engaged in a worldly--even revolutionary--practice of free inquiry that the world so often fights back. The scholar's radicalism, Harpham contends, lies in constant skepticism toward received wisdom. Scholars build on the work of the past, but they do so with the goal of displacing it by creating new knowledge on the basis of respect for evidence. Scholarship therefore is closely tied to notions of responsibility, accountability, and freedom from unjustified authority--civic virtues essential to a liberal political order. It is no wonder, then, that scholarship has played an important role in political and social movements and that intellectuals are often persecuted by authoritarian regimes and other illiberal forces. Scholarship and Freedom underscores this point by examining the lives and careers of three thinkers: W. E. B. Du Bois, who serves as an example of scholarly character formation; South African Bernard Lategan, whose New Testament studies became entangled in the struggle to overthrow apartheid; and Linda Nochlin, whose essay "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" almost single-handedly founded the discourse of feminist art history and illustrates the capacity of scholarship both to destroy and to create. Each of these scholars wrestled with evidence until they were compelled to adopt new beliefs, and each deployed the instrument of scholarship on behalf of an emancipatory agenda.
ISBN : 9780674245013