First published in The Wire In the decades after the Second World War, American academia settled into a language of managerial reason, empirical caution, and institutional confidence. It was within this challenging intellectual climate that Michael Parenti emerged as a Marxist scholar who treated politics as a living structure influenced by class, power, and historical struggle. His work carried forward a tradition of critical thought that ran from Marx and Gramsci to C. Wright Mills, insisting that scholarship remain accountable to social reality rather than professional comfort. Parenti lived in [...]