Introduction: The Mausoleum of the Mind

Put down your negroni, hang up your Prada handbag and pick up a paperback. Smart is the new hot. — Jess Cartner-Morley, The Guardian, 22 March 2026

Authoritarianism has always thrived on the dismissal of expertise as elitism, of procedure as dull, of facts as irrelevant. — paraphrasing the editorial consensus of the post-2016 democratic-theory literature

The two moments

This book begins from the juxtaposition of two scenes that, between 2016 and 2026, came to define the cultural texture of late liberal democracy in its anglophone metropoles.

In the first, an elected national government wages open war on the institutions of public reason. By the spring of 2025 the second Trump administration has frozen federal research funding to Cornell ($1bn), Northwestern ($790m), the University of Pennsylvania ($175m), Brown ($510m) and threatened $9bn at Harvard; deployed Title VI investigations as instruments of ideological control; proposed a ‘Compact for Academic Excellence’ under which universities would exchange viewpoint mandates for federal benefits; and launched a social-media surveillance programme styled Catch and Revoke against international students. By November of that year a settlement at Northwestern transfers $75m to the federal government in exchange for restored funding and policy concessions. The administration’s adviser on higher education, Christopher Rufo, names the strategic objective plainly: to plunge American universities into ‘existential terror’.

Sources for the figures and quotations:

In the second scene, a pop star with 88 million Instagram followers poses in a velvet hotel suite with a copy of Just Kids; a supermodel hides her face behind Camus before the Paris Fashion Week photographers; Dior sells a £2,400 tote bag embossed with Madame Bovary; the British Library hosts an avant-garde pop musician delivering a keynote on the ‘dumbing-down’ of public life; #BookTok accumulates 320 billion views; Substack monetises ‘intellectual seriousness’ as personality plus expertise.

The cultural commentary of the period typically reads these two scenes as opposed. Politics is dumbing down; culture is wising up. Anti-intellectualism rules from above; intellectualism returns as underground style. As one widely circulated piece puts it (2026), ‘in pop culture, clever is the new cool’ — a counter-current, presumably, to the political tide. This book argues that the framing is mistaken.

The thesis

Performative intellectualism and political anti-intellectualism are not opposed responses to the same crisis. They are correlative expressions of a single transformation: the marketisation of public reason under platform capitalism, and the correlative erosion of the institutional infrastructures — universities, free press, public schooling, independent civil service — through which deliberative liberal democracy historically reproduced itself.

Under the conditions of this transformation:

  1. The institutional homes of intellectual life are dismantled or captured — by direct authoritarian assault (US 2025–26; Hungary post-2010; Türkiye post-2016) and by the slower attrition of public funding, ideological capture and managerial hollowing characteristic of neoliberal university governance.

  2. The economy of attention is privatised: the discursive substrate on which public reason depended is replaced by an attention economy whose imperatives — engagement, virality, affective intensity — are constitutively hostile to the slow, error-correcting, institutionally-mediated practices that constitute genuine intellectual work (Citton, 2017; Williams, 2018; Zuboff, 2019).

  3. Intellect is recoded as a sign and circulated as a luxury good. Not as a hostile substitute for genuine intellectual life but as its mausoleum: a space in which the artefacts of a practice are reverently preserved precisely because the practice itself has ceased to be widely sustainable.

The mausoleum is the central image of the book. A mausoleum is not a denial of what it commemorates; it is, on the contrary, a meticulous preservation of its surface. But the body inside is dead. To call contemporary performative intellectualism mausoleic is not to deny that some readers genuinely read, that some pop stars genuinely think, or that some Substack essays are genuinely good — many do, are and are. The claim is structural. What circulates as visible, monetisable, status-conferring “intellectualism” is precisely that fraction of intellectual life which can be detached from its institutional infrastructure and reattached to the economy of attention as branded surface. What cannot be so detached — slow collective inquiry, contestation among trained peers, the laborious maintenance of inherited disciplinary archives — is exactly what is being defunded, attacked or simply neglected in the same period.

Key concepts

  • Performative intellectualism: A communicative practice in which the appearance of expertise—specialised vocabulary, rapid citation, and performative displays of erudition—is prioritised over evidential rigour and substantive argumentation; it functions chiefly to signal status, gatekeep audiences and secure cultural authority rather than to advance verifiable knowledge.

  • Political anti‑intellectualism: A strategic public posture that delegitimises experts and knowledge institutions (universities, research bodies, professional agencies) by portraying them as elitist, biased or hostile to the public; it is enacted through rhetoric, policy instruments and institutional pressures that weaken epistemic authority and substitute partisan loyalty for independent expertise.

Three questions

The argument unfolds across three questions, one per part of the book.

Q1. What is the political crisis of public reason in 2025–2026?

Part I reconstructs the political moment. 1  A Short Genealogy of Anti-Intellectualism traces the long history of anti-intellectualism in liberal-democratic societies from Hofstadter through to the ‘cultural backlash’ literature of the late 2010s (Hofstadter, 1963; Nichols, 2017; Norris and Inglehart, 2019). 2  The Competitive-Authoritarian Moment turns to the present. Drawing on the late-2025 reformulation by Levitsky, Way and Ziblatt of the United States’ regime trajectory as one of competitive authoritarianism, on Applebaum’s account of Autocracy, Inc. as a transnational kleptocratic network, and on the V-Dem 2025 Democracy Report, the chapter shows how the assault on universities is a structural feature rather than an incidental excess of the new authoritarianism (Applebaum, 2024; Levitsky and Way, 2025; V-Dem Institute, 2025). 3  The Attention Economy and the Displacement of Public Reason then argues that this political crisis is inseparable from the attention-economic crisis: that the infrastructures of public reason cannot survive an information environment whose constitutive imperative is engagement extraction.

Q2. How has intellect been recoded as cultural surface?

Part II turns to the cultural side of the same transformation. 4  Performative Intellectualism: From BookTok to the Bottega Catwalk examines the BookTok phenomenon, the Substack literary economy, the literary turn in fashion campaigns and the rise of ‘smart-as-aesthetic’ as forms of performative reading (Driscoll and Rehberg Sedo, 2019; Jerasa, 2025; Steiner, 2024). 5  Cultural Capital, Gender and the Marketisation of Intellect reads these phenomena through Bourdieu’s apparatus of cultural capital, attending specifically to the conversion of embodied into objectified and finally commodified cultural capital, and to the gendered asymmetries through which ‘smart-as-sexy’ negotiates patriarchal binaries (Banet-Weiser, 2018; Bourdieu, 1984; Gill, 2017). 6  AI and the Automation of Intellectual Labour introduces a dimension that the cultural commentary has largely missed: the role of generative artificial intelligence in re-engineering the very labour of reading, writing and thinking that performative intellectualism aestheticises (Hari, 2022; Hayles, 2023; Wolf, 2018).

Q3. What would reconstruction require?

Part III is normative. 7  Education as Battleground: Universities, Schools, and the Politics of Curiosity takes the contemporary university as the institutional test case for a theory of public reason adequate to the period. Drawing on the work of Wendy Brown, Henry Giroux, Zena Hitz and Martha Nussbaum, and on the 2025–2026 record of universities that resisted federal coercion (Harvard, MIT, Brown, USC, Penn, Virginia, Dartmouth) versus those that settled, the chapter develops a structural argument: intellectual life is inhabited, not consumed, and inhabitation requires materially supported, institutionally protected and democratically distributed conditions (Brown, 2023; Giroux, 2022; Hitz, 2020; Nussbaum, 2010). 8  Conclusion: Leaving the Mausoleum concludes by returning to the image of the mausoleum: what would it mean to leave it?

Method and limits

The methodological apparatus — disciplinary location, empirical strategy, temporal and geographical frames, citation conventions, bibliographic strategy, drafting support, visual materials — is set out in Appendix A — Methodological Note.

A final disclosure. This book is not neutral about its subject. It takes for granted that the erosion of liberal-democratic and constitutional ideals — of justice, equality, freedom and the public practice of reason — is a loss; that the privileged minorities who benefit from that erosion are a sociologically identifiable class; and that the academic vocation, even at its most professionally degraded, is among the resources available for naming and resisting that loss. Readers who find this commitment unscholarly are invited to find a different book.