• 1. Fin-de-siècle Socialism  2. Should Intellectual History take a Linguistic List? Reflections of the Habermas-Gadamer Debate  3. Hierarchy and the Humanities: The Radical Implications of a Conservative Ideal  4. Two Cheers for Paraphrase: The Confessions of a Synoptic Intellectual Historian  5. Vico and Western Marxism  6. Mass Culture and Aesthetic Redemption: The Debate between Max Horkheimer and Siegfried Kracauer  7. For Gouldner; Reflections on an Outlaw Marxist  8. Against Fragmentation against Itself: Contradictions and Anomalies in the Development of Gouldner's Theory  9. Habermas and Modernism  10. Habermas and Postmodernism  11. Blumenberg and Modernism: A Reflection on The Legitimacy of the Modern Age  12. Concluding Unhistorical Postscript.

'A number of historians and critics would like to believe that intellectual history is - or should be - a thing of the past, a mere vestige of an older `mentality' that has been displaced by the movement of society and its up-to-date analysis. In these essays Martin Jay gives the lie to this belief, for he offers proof of the continued vitality of intellectual history particularly when it is brought into contact with critical theory.'- Dominick LaCapra