SOURCE: “All and Nothing: The Unreal World of Cornel West,” in The New Republic, March 6, 1995, pp. 31-6.

In the following essay, Wieseltier provides an extended negative critique of West's social theory, philosophy, and rhetorical style. According to Wieseltier, “West's work is noisy, tedious, slippery, … sectarian, humorless, pedantic and self-endeared.”

I.

Where are the public intellectuals? The question is asked everywhere in America, but it is not merely an American question. It has been a long time, after all, since calm was preferred to crisis as the proper mood of the mind. For the Marxist tradition in particular, crisis is all there is, and calm is only crisis denied. Modern intellectuals roil to be real. Why think, if nothing is breaking up and nothing is breaking down, if intellectuals (or “cultural workers,” as Cornel West likes to call them) cannot become public intellectuals? And then history obliges, and the...