Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material / John E. O’Brien -- Overview / John E. O’Brien -- What is Critical Practice? / John E. O’Brien -- Voltaire: Setting the Role of Public Intellectual / John E. O’Brien -- Schiller: Reform Consciousness to Change the World / John E. O’Brien -- Foucault: The End of Evasion / John E. O’Brien -- Jean Baudrillard: Critical Practice as Core Extraction / John E. O’Brien -- Eagleton: Literary Critic – Literature or Criticism? / John E. O’Brien -- Hayden White: Historic Truth as Story Telling / John E. O’Brien -- Liberation: Project, Method, Object / John E. O’Brien -- Technical Note / John E. O’Brien -- Bibliography / John E. O’Brien -- Index / John E. O’Brien.

Using the historical-materialist method to unravel the promise and limits of critical practice since the Revolutionary Age, John E. O’Brien investigates the problems and prospects of cultural criticism for the 21st century through absorbing studies of the contested perspectives of Voltaire, Friedrich Schiller, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Terry Eagleton and Hayden White. In spite of recurrent crises due to a flawed Western political-economy, why is there so much critical intellectual activity with so little effect? Framing his study with the early work by Max Horkheimer, Luc Boltanski and Teresa Ebert, O’Brien's investigation of resistance in America and Europe challenges the bourgeois philosophy of history, pointing to the urgency of critique as mode of analysis and intervention.