Veteran scholar and critic Henry Sussman deploys anecdote, reportage, and memoir to lament and scrutinize the rise of anti-intellectualism in the past few decades. How are we to reckon with the decline of impartiality and sharp increase in self-interested interference in politic, legal, and cultural spheres; the normalization of pathological narcissism in public life; and the blanket dismissal of scientific findings and their counterparts in the humanities and social sciences?

In retracing his own intellectual and experiential steps, Sussman revisits many of his lasting inspirations, including Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Douglas R. Hofstadter, Immanuel Kant, and J. Hillis Miller. The result is an intellectual meditation on ‘the great dismissal,’ in public and political life, of venerable and vital humanistic traditions, ethics, and ways of thinking.