In his book Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? Confronting 21st Century, published in 2004, sociologist Frank Furedi laments the absence of stimulating intellectual debates in Western universities, and the disappearance of the intellectual’s public role as a leader of ideas.1 Furedi is not the only one to make this observation; many academics regularly announce the end of the era of the intellectual in France as in the rest of Europe. Furedi attributes this decline of the intellectual to the pernicious influence of postmodernism and the commodification of culture. Such influences have also undermined respect for authority, the subject, the author, the university, education and the book. The pursuit of “truth” has been replaced by the cultural market that evaluates intellectual “products” by their profitability, relevance to personal “needs” and to a perverted pseudo-knowledge that has become an automaton in service to a machine. The decline of the intellectual in the West also affects all claims to authority and “elitist” claims; the challenges to values and truths posed by postmodernism and its militants have forced intellectuals to abandon their intellectual authority and to lay low, producing meaningless knowledge in the face of the cult of the banal.2