David McInerney, who runs Intervention has sent some interesting material. One article is Warren Montag's 'The Pressure of the Street: Habermas's Fear of the Masses'. It recalls my time in academia well.

Montag starts his article by acknowledging the effectiviness of Habermas's intervention in the field of contemporary philosophy that draw a line of demarcation separating philosophy from literary criticism. He says that this "genre distinction" was crucial, given the growing preeminence in the 1980s of works (usually in French) that, although written by individuals whose institutional training and function would appear to qualify them as philosophers, could be excluded from study on the grounds they were actually specimens of literary criticism and could not accurately be classified as philosophical. He adds:

Such works might take as their object philosophical concepts, just as they might advance analyses of philosophical texts. They did so, however, in the manner of literary criticism as Habermas conceives it: they not only concerned themselves with the history rather than the truth (and it is well known that the former can only "relativize" the latter) of concepts and the rhetoric rather than the logic of even the recognized texts of the philosophical canon, but themselves, as analyses, exhibited the primacy of rhetoric over rationality and therefore of ornament over argument. Authentic philosophy, in contrast, follows rational procedures in studying the logical structure of arguments rather than the rhetorical tropes in which they might be expressed.

I remember it well. So began my disillusionment with academic philosophy. The boundary between literary criticism and philosophy should be undemined to open the way to the rigorous knowledge of history, including the historical circumstances that make possible a given philosophical text, and to grasp how philosophical text came to be what it is in its actuality and to explain what it presents to us, contradictions and all.