Name John McGowan Role Author | Education Georgetown University | |
 | ||
Books Pragmatist Politics: Making th, Postmodernism and Its Critics, Hannah Arendt: An Introduction, American Liberalism: An Interpr, Democracy's Children: Intellectu Similar People Ira Gershwin, Guy Bolton, George Gershwin | ||
John McGowan (1953-- ) is the John W. and Anna H. Hanes Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He served as the Director of UNC's Institute for the Arts and Humanities from 2006 to 2014 and the Director of UNC's Graduate School Royster Society of Fellows from 1998-2001. His work is situated at the intersection of political philosophy, cultural studies, and literary criticism. He is the author of six books and a co-editor of four more.
McGowan's Postmodernism and its Critics provides a guide to a range of postmodern thinkers (Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, and Edward Said among others) while also criticizing their anarchistic politics in the name of a robust communictarian understanding of democracy. He pursues that account of democracy in four subsequent books: the first on Hannah Arendt's productive critique of today's diminished understanding of politics; the second on the role of intellectuals in contemporary society; the third his articulation of the principle values and commitments of the "American liberalism" of FDR and John Dewey, and the fourth his return to the pragmatist philosophical tradition to offer the case for liberal democracy. In all these works, he is concerned with how democracy has been understood and in how it has been lived on the ground.
McGowan blogs at his personal website, Public Intelligence.
Current Publications include: