James Miller is an American writer and academic. He is known for writing about Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...

, philosophy

Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

 as a way of life, social movements, popular culture, intellectual history, eighteenth century to the present; radical social theory and history of political philosophy. He currently teaches at The New School

The New School

The New School is a university in New York City, located mostly in Greenwich Village. From its founding in 1919 by progressive New York academics, and for most of its history, the university was known as the New School for Social Research. Between 1997 and 2005 it was known as New School University...

.

Biography

Born in 1947, James Miller is Chair of Liberal Studies and Professor of Politics at The New School. His latest book, Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche, has just been published by Farrar Straus and Giroux. He is the author of five other books: Flowers in the Dustbin: the Rise of Rock & Roll, 1947-1977, winner of an ASCAP-Deems Taylor award and a Ralph Gleason BMI award for best music book of 1999; The Passion of Michel Foucault (1993), an interpretive essay on the life of the French philosopher and a National Book Critics Circle Finalist for General Nonfiction, which has been translated into nine languages; Democracy is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (1987), an account of the American student movement of the 1960s, also a National Book Critics Circle Finalist for General Nonfiction; Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy (1984), a study of the origins of modern democracy; and History and Human Existence - From Marx to Merleau-Ponty, an analysis of Marx and the French existentialists.

The original editor of The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll (1976), he has written about music since the 1960s, when one of his early record reviews appeared in the third issue of Rolling Stone

Rolling Stone

Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...

 magazine. Subsequent pieces on music have appeared in The New Republic

The New Republic

The magazine has also published two articles concerning income inequality, largely criticizing conservative economists for their attempts to deny the existence or negative effect increasing income inequality is having on the United States...

, The New York Times

The New York Times

The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

 and Newsweek

Newsweek

Newsweek is an American weekly news magazine published in New York City. It is distributed throughout the United States and internationally. It is the second-largest news weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence...

, where he was a book reviewer and pop music critic between 1981 and 1990. Pieces on philosophy and history have appeared in The London Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review

The New York Times Book Review

The New York Times Book Review is a weekly paper-magazine supplement to The New York Times in which current non-fiction and fiction books are reviewed. It is one of the most influential and widely read book review publications in the industry. The offices are located near Times Square in New York...

. In 2000, the magazine Lingua Franca

Lingua Franca

Lingua Franca was an American magazine about intellectual and literary life in academia.-Founding:The magazine was founded in 1990 by Jeffrey Kittay, an editor and Professor of French Literature at Yale University...

 published his best-known essay, Is Bad Writing Necessary? George Orwell, Theodor Adorno, and the Politics of Language.

Besides publishing in such peer-reviewed academic journals as History and Theory and Political Theory, he has contributed to a variety of reference works, from Encyclopedia Britannica and A New Literary History of America

A New Literary History of America

A New Literary History of Americais a collection of essays edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors. Its roughly 200 essays span a range of topics that the editors selected as a sample of the different voices and perspectives on North America since the genesis of the European concept of a New World....

, published by Harvard in 2009, to the Dictionnaire de Philosophie Morale edited by Monique Canto-Sperber

Monique Canto-Sperber

Monique Canto-Sperber is a French philosopher. She was born on May, 14th, 1954 Her works, translated in several languages, are focused on ethics and contemporary political issues...

 in 1996.

From 2000 to 2008, he edited Daedalus

Daedalus (journal)

Dædalus is a peer-reviewed academic journal founded in 1955 as the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. It is published by MIT Press on behalf of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Each issue addresses a theme with essays on the arts, sciences, and humanities. Special...

, the journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, an NEH Fellow twice, and in 2006-2007 he was a Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. A native of Chicago

Chicago

Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...

, he was educated at Pomona College

Pomona College

Pomona College is a private, residential, liberal arts college in Claremont, California. Founded in 1887 in Pomona, California by a group of Congregationalists, the college moved to Claremont in 1889 to the site of a hotel, retaining its name. The school enrolls 1,548 students.The founding member...

 in California, and at Brandeis University

Brandeis University

Brandeis University is an American private research university with a liberal arts focus. It is located in the southwestern corner of Waltham, Massachusetts, nine miles west of Boston. The University has an enrollment of approximately 3,200 undergraduate and 2,100 graduate students. In 2011, it...

, where he received a Ph.D. in the History of Ideas in 1976.

Works

• editor, Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock'n'Roll (1976)
• History and Human Existence--From Marx to Merleau-Ponty (1982)
• Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy (1984)
• Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (1987)
• The Passion of Michel Foucault (1993)
• Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947-1977 (1999)
• Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche (2011)

Essays

• The Abyss of Philosophy: Rousseau's Concept of Freedom
• El Paso
• In Praise of Recklessness
• Return of the Weathermen
• Is Bad Writing Necessary?: George Orwell, Theodor Adorno, and the Politics of Language

External links