John McGowan (1953-- ) is the John W. and Anna H. Hanes Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
His work is situated at the intersection of political philosophy, cultural studies, and literary criticism.
[2] McGowan's Postmodernism and its Critics provides a guide to a range of postmodern thinkers (Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, and Edward Said among others) while also criticizing their anarchistic politics in the name of a robust communitarian understanding of democracy.
He pursues that account of democracy in four subsequent books: the first on Hannah Arendt's productive critique of today's diminished understanding of politics; the second on the role of intellectuals in contemporary society; the third his articulation of the principal values and commitments of the "American liberalism" of FDR and John Dewey, and the fourth his return to the pragmatist philosophical tradition to offer the case for liberal democracy.
McGowan blogs at his personal website, Public Intelligence.