Maria José Canelo

February, 2011

Even though Carey McWilliams remains fairly unknown, his activism and critical thinking span nearly fifty years of United States’ history and culture. A lawyer, cultural critic, writer, journalist and social historian, and also the editor of the left-wing magazine Nation for over two decades, McWilliams’s critique identifies him easily as a public intellectual. He combined his legal experience with cultural criticism and committed himself to the reinvention of legal concepts and practices, which is one of the aspects I stress in this paper. In this, I see him as anticipating, among others, very actual debates, such as that on legal activism. While presenting a broad overview of his criticism of culture, this paper will attempt a closer look into the development of what he called his ‘legal imagination’.