In this exciting and timely book, prestigious thinkers such as Edward Said, Jacqueline Rose, Bruce Robbins, and Stefan Collini discuss the role of writers and intellectuals today and in the past, examining the ways in which thought can be publicly expressed, and how it may relate or fail to relate to activism. Their combined responses represent a major and long overdue riposte to claims of a decline in public intellectual life. The volume significantly extends the historical range of most writing about intellectuals, exploring the relationship between thought, professionalism, and public action from Hellenistic late antiquity onward. Other essays in this collection are immediately contemporary in focus, addressing the ways in which the idea of the public intellectual is being reformed today in different political and national contexts and in different media, including film and the visual arts.