The modern age began in earnest when ideas ceased to matter. Immanuel Kant, perhaps the greatest of all modern philosophers, made a rigorous distinction between what he called pure and practical reason. Pure reason investigated the world, while practical reason was a matter of moral and political action, but there was no longer any internal relation between the two. Some previous thinkers had assumed that there was a way of theorising about the world which impelled you to choose a way of acting upon it. To say "This is torture!" seemed to imply "Stop it". Now, however, theory was one thing and practice another. No doubt we shouldn't torture, but there was nothing we could glean from analysing the act of torture which told us that it was a bad thing. We were going to have to get our moral and political values from somewhere else.
By no means every modern philosopher signed up to this crippling division. Kant's argument was challenged by his mighty contemporary Hegel, who in turn influenced Marx. In any case, if Kant stands at the fountainhead of the modern age, so does the French Revolution which he abhorred - an event in which abstract ideas came alive on the streets of Paris. Even so, the distinction died hard. For later modern thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud, we could act effectively only by repressing true knowledge. True knowledge would drive us mad. We could not act, and reflect on our actions, at the same time, any more than some dim American presidents could simultaneously chew gum and walk.
"Academic" may well have, come to mean "other worldly". But the opposite of "academic" is not "worldly", in the bloodless Blairite sense of believing only in what is under your nose. It is "intellectual", in the sense of those activists of the mind, from Voltaire and Tom Paine to Edward Said and Susan Sontag, who seek to bring ideas critically to bear on a culture as a whole. The fact that such intellectuals are as derided by most academics as they are detested by most politicians suggest that they have got it roughly right.
Theory should not be the slave of practice. We need a society in which, as Bertolt Brecht remarked, thinking could become a "real sensuous pleasure", with no neurotic expectation of an immediate payoff. By keeping a wary distance from practical politics, intellectuals can be critical of them. There is no point in forever piously proclaiming the unity of theory and practice, as though you derived your opinions about Austro-Hungarian feudalism from selling socialist newspapers outside Marks & Spencer [a British super market].
On the other hand, nobody is more abstractly utopian than hard-nosed, street-wise pragmatists. Some of them cultivate a little philosophising on the side, or perpetrated a spot of it in their youth, but these academic speculations are not to be confused with the Real World. Their current bosses can forgive such adolescent indiscretions, secure in the knowledge that ideas don't matter anyway. As with bad breath, ideology is always what the other person has. Socialism and anti-racism are ideas; greed and inequality are just plain, honest-to-goodness facts of life.
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