American intellectual historian, long at UCLA, and one of the sharper American inheritors of the Frankfurt School tradition outside the seminar room. Jacoby belongs to the generation of U.S. leftists formed by the encounter with Marcuse and Adorno in the late 1960s; his career-long subject has been what happens to radical thought once it has no movement to belong to.
His first book, Social Amnesia (1975), attacked American ego psychology and humanistic therapy — Fromm, Horney, Laing, Rogers — as a retreat from Freud's darker insights into conformist self-help. It was the Frankfurt School turned against the American therapeutic culture with some venom. Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism (1981) is his direct contribution to the Western Marxism argument: a sympathetic but unsparing account of the tradition as shaped, at every point, by the political defeats of the interwar years — philosophically rich precisely because it was organizationally homeless. Read alongside Perry Anderson's Considerations, it is the American companion.
The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (1987) is the book that made him widely read. The generation of freelance essayists who wrote for general audiences — Edmund Wilson, Lewis Mumford, Dwight Macdonald, Irving Howe, Mary McCarthy — had no successors, Jacoby argued, because the postwar university had swallowed the next cohort, paying them to write specialist prose for each other in journals no general reader would open. The argument triggered a permanent "where are the public intellectuals?" genre; the phrase "public intellectual" owes much of its current currency to this book. Later: The End of Utopia (1999) and Picture Imperfect (2005), both defending utopian thought against its post-1989 liberal burial; Bloodlust (2011), on the peculiar intensity of violence among kin and neighbors.
Jacoby is not a system-builder, and his later books are more essayistic than argumentative. But the two durable contributions are the Frankfurt School diagnostic applied to American culture and the thesis that the academy, for all its radical vocabulary, is where the American left went to stop being heard.