http://bactra.org/notebooks Cosma's Notebooks en http://bactra.org/notebooks/1994/10/03#russell-jacoby American intellectual historian and <a href="cultural-criticism.html">cultural critic</a>. <P><em>Questions.</em> Jacoby and <cite>Telos,</cite> i.e., what is someone who can write very well doing publishing in a journal like <em>that</em>? (Ans.: He was one of the early members of the <cite>Telos</cite> group, and at the time his prose was fully down to the journal's standard. <cite>Social Amnesia</cite> is unreadable.) What does he see in <a href=adorno.html>Adorno?</a> How accurate are his diagnoses of American intellectual life (near-totally bankrupt) and American education (collapsing while academic elites fiddle with peripheral ``culture wars'')? <P>Personal addendum. My father thinks he knew Jacoby, slightly, in the early 1970s in Cambridge, Mass., when my father was a graduate student and Jacoby (if that was him) was working in a radical bookstore. He even goes so far as to claim that he introduced Marx's <cite>Theories of Surplus Value</cite> to Jacoby, and so to Cambridge Marxism... <ul>Recommended: <li><cite>The Last Intellectuals</cite> <li><cite>Dogmatic Wisdom</cite> </ul> <ul>To read: <li><cite>Dialectics of Defeat</cite> (Western Marxism in the '80s) [Horrid.] <li><cite>The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy</cite> [forthcoming] </ul> <ul>Cf. <li>Patricia Keen, ``Building a Better Beowulf: The New Assualt on the Liberal Arts'', <cite>Lingua franca</cite> May-June 1993 </ul>