It may be a good thing to know and cite leading authorities, but the paradox is that the reason someone like Marx becomes an authority is because of their ability to break with the authorities of their own time and formulate a new problematic within which to think and act. It has to be said that much of this work has tenuous and distant relations to social movements and sites of struggle. There is a tradeoff between intellectual rigor, power and coherence and capacity to engage directly in the issues of the hour. In a more subtle way, there’s a hardening of the division of labor, wherein general intellects lose touch with other kinds of labor, even intellectual labor, or even other kinds of work in the same universities, such as in the sciences, engineering and design.