Russell Jacoby's The Last Intellectuals (1987) is a book about how the humanities and social sciences professionalized and lost their grander vision. Essentiall

Russell Jacoby's The Last Intellectuals (1987) is a book about how the humanities and social sciences professionalized and lost their grander vision. Essentially Jacoby claims that gentrification and the expansion of academia killed the figure of the independent "public" intellectual. Some of the books he holds up as examples of intellectual (rather than academic) engagement are Jane Jacob's Death and Life of Great American Cities, William Whyte's Organization Man, C. Wright Mills' White Collar, Murray Bookchin's The Limits of the City, and Lewis Mumford's The City in History. I think most of these would be good candidates for "undead" status. A few years ago there was an interesting symposium revisiting the argument in light of changes in the public sphere: https://www.chronicle.com/specialreport/After-The-Last/16 https://www.chronicle.com/specialreport/After-The-Last/16