Carey McWilliams, the Public Intellectual: Reflections on his work on citizenship and culture

Abstract

Even though Carey McWilliams remains fairly unknown, his activism and critical thinking span nearly fifty years of United States’ history and culture. A lawyer, cultural critic, writer, journalist and social historian, and also the editor of the left-wing magazine Nation for over two decades, McWilliams’s critique identifies him easily as a public intellectual. He combined his legal experience with cultural criticism and committed himself to the reinvention of legal concepts and practices, which is one of the aspects I stress in this paper. In this, I see him as anticipating, among others, very actual debates, such as that on legal activism. While presenting a broad overview of his criticism of culture, this paper will attempt a closer look into the development of what he called his ‘legal imagination’.