Intellectuals Between Dissociation and Dissenting. A Commentary on Two Essays by Pier Paolo Pasolini and Christopher Lasch.

Útdráttur

Scritti corsari (1975) was the last work of Pier Paolo Pasolini published during his lifetime. This collection of short essays focuses on political and cultural issues which characterized Italy in the early 1970s. The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1995) is a collection of short essays which was published after Christopher Lasch’s death, in 1994, and it can be considered the summary of Lasch’s thought. It is an analysis of American society in the 1990s. Obviously, Pasolini and Lasch come from completely different backgrounds and cultural assumptions. Nevertheless in both the authors it is possible to find references applicable to the ‘globalized’ world of recent years. Pasolini and Lasch, from different societies and periods, define it in similar ways – by stigmatizing and engaging in controversy with the academia and the ‘official’ cultural establishment – and question the identity and function of intellectuals and their role within a society in which pluralism, tolerance and permissiveness have turned into reactionary rather then progressive matters.