BOOK REVIEW ESSAY Geography's New Public Intellectuals?

In what sense is it appropriate ... that the professor should be a‘‘public’’ figure? (Robin Barrow 2004:223)What is a public intellectual? Does geography have any? And does itmatter? These questions are all pertinent to the three books underreview here. In A Brief History of Neoliberalism (by David Harvey),The Endgame of Globalization (by Neil Smith) and Afflicted Powers(by Retort, a quartet of Bay Area ‘‘antagonists to capital and empire’’that includes Michael Watts) there is, I suggest, a deliberate attemptbeing made by the authors to position themselves as public intellec-tuals. Not that any of them would feel comfortable using the term as aself-descriptor: to lay claim to the signifier ‘‘public intellectual’’ runsthe risk of sounding insufferably pompous while opening oneself tounfavourable comparison with the ‘‘real’’ public intellectuals of yester-year like George Orwell or Jean-Paul Sartre. What’s more, evengeographers (never mind the wider ‘‘public’’) would find the ideathat they now have several ‘‘PIs’’ in their number absurd: for surelythe discipline remains far too marginal to produce figures with theself-confidence and the intellectual capital to intervene authoritativelyin wider public debates (Ward forthcoming). Yet in these threebooks, I want to argue, we see some of human geography’s mostinfluential left-wing voices addressing themselves to a far wider audi-ence than the academic one so familiar with their many previouswritings. Neither pompous nor absurd, this trio of attempts to engagea broader readership is important, but not for the parochial reasonthat the books under review might both alter and heighten publicperceptions of what academic geography is about. As I will explain, ABrief History of Neoliberalism, The Endgame of Globalization andAfflicted Powers are ‘‘public’’ interventions in a very specific sense(part of this relates to the distinctively American context of their