Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline

by Richard A. Posner

"public intellectuals"-intellectuals who opine to an educated public on questions of or inflected by a political or ideological concern.

Public-intellectual goods, I shall argue, are entertainment goods and solidarity goods as well as information goods; and

The depth of knowledge that specialization enables is purchased at the expense of breadth, while the working conditions of the modern university, in particular the principle of academic freedom backed by the tenure contract, make the intellectual's career a safe, comfortable one, which can breed aloofness and complacency.

The public intellectuals I shall mainly discuss are distinguished academics. Their difficulty in contributing to social betterment is the failure of a market rather than of individuals.

By symbolic goods I mean goods the principal content or function of which is expressive or informational: art, propaganda, journalism, and scholarship are all examples.14

Intellectuals are more respected in most western European and Latin American nations than they are in the United States and are therefore more likely to be solicited by the print and electronic media for comment on public matters.

"The emphasis is on a `mindset' more than anything else. [Intellectuals] are usually seen as generalists, rather than specialists, having a special concern with ideas which ultimately springs from disinterested sources (although this involvement with ideas may be part of their profession), as being-to varying degrees-creative, playful, sensitive, inquisitive, and somewhat impractical."

the intellectual applies general ideas to matters of public concern, working from the top down, theorizing about the abuses, corruptions, or injustices that he has discovered. He is not just a reporter or technician.

When we think of the great intellectuals of the twentieth century, such as John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Max Weber, Arthur Koestler, Edmund Wilson, and George Orwell,

The noun "intellectual" first gained widespread currency during the Dreyfus Affair, when Zola, Durkheim, Barres, Maurras, and other writers and thinkers participated actively in public debate over a tumultuous political issue.'

("a thinker with a public voice")," but part of that understanding is that the intellectual writes for a broader public than the scholar, the consultant, or the professional does, or even than many policy analysts do.

A number of academics who would very much like to communicate with the big public, doubtless including Hartman when he is writing outside his field, simply cannot or will not express themselves in simple prose.

Allan Bloom, despite his bestsellerdom, was in the border region too. It is unlikely that most of the people who bought The Closing of the American Mind could actually get through it, since most of the book is severely academic, and even esoteric,

The intellectual is more "applied," contemporary, and "result-oriented" than the scholar, but broader than the technician. Approximate synonyms for "intellectual" in this sense are "social critic"14 and "political intellectual."

An intermediate case, a kind of semipublic intellectual, is one who has a day job as a political or corporate consultant, a politician, or a judge or other government official," while writing on the side for a general audience. Thomas Jefferson, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Patrick Moynihan, and Newt Gingrich are examples of the public intellectual as politician. Kissinger, William Bennett, William Kristol, Moynihan (during the Nixon administration), Lawrence Summers, and William Galston are examples of public intellectuals as government officials."

The public intellectual has been with us for a very long time, even if we ignore the ancient world. His exemplars include Machiavelli, Milton, Locke, Voltaire, and Montesquieu, and his ideologist is Kant, who linked philosophy to politics through the argument that the only morally defensible politics is one based on reason.19

"whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be coopted by governments or corporations."27

It is "to question over and over again what is postulated as self-evident, to disturb people's mental habits, the way they do and think things, to dissipate what is familiar and accepted, to reexamine rules and institutions."" That is the stance symbolized by Socrates, who is to the public-intellectual community as Jesus is to Christianity: founder, outcast, martyr.;'

One of the chief sources of cultural pessimism is the tendency to compare the best of the past with the average of the present, because the passage of time operates to filter out the worst of the past.

When there is no academic consensus to report, the role of the journalist as translator is curtailed. He is reduced to reporting a fight, and the public wants to see the fighters.

"rhetoric is not committed to using good arguments."9 The test of good rhetoric is efficacy, not veracity.

likely he is to cheat." Knowing or sensing this, consumers will have a justifiably greater confidence in the quality of this seller's product. The relation to advertising comes from the fact that one way of sinking costs is to spend a lot of money creating a popular

Or we might put it that rhetoric is to symbolic goods as advertising is to ordinary goods; the classic devices of rhetoric are well understood by Madison Avenue.12

They are moral and immoral, kind and cruel, smart and stupid-yes, academics are often smart and stupid, and this may not be sufficiently recognized by the laity. They are particularly likely to be both smart and stupid in an era of specialization, when academic success is likely to crown not the person of broad general intelligence but rather the person with highly developed intellectual skills in a particular field,

It doesn't help that successful people tend to exaggerate their versatility; abnormal self-confidence is a frequent cause and almost invariable effect of great success.

The increasing specialization of knowledge has also made it more difficult for an intellectual who can write for a general audience to obtain the credentials that will impress that audience. He will first have to become an academic specialist.

Eco-catastrophist Paul Ehrlich demonstrated his commitment to fighting overpopulation by having himself sterilized after fathering one child.'

There is a decided degree of intolerance of conservative, but not of liberal or even extreme left-wing, views and speakers,29 while the covert but widespread discrimination in favor of blacks and women in faculty hiring constitutes a diffuse but cumulatively significant discrimination against white male academics.

"limitation to specialized work, with a renunciation of the Faustian universality of man which it involves, is a condition of any valuable work in the modern world,""

The principal cost of supplying public-intellectual services is the opportunity cost of the individual's time.

proportion of Jewish public intellectuals, is that fascism is anti-intellectual while communism is based on "scientific" theories. Communism, and Marxism more generally, is a book-based creed, like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It provides rich opportunities, therefore, for exegesis and learned elaboration.47

The absurd public-intellectual slogan "speaking truth to power" epitomizes this arrogance, as well as exaggerates the public intellectual's courage. Public intellectuals in the United States and other democratic nations incur no risk in abusing politicians, and do not realize that politicians have their own truths, truths without which nothing can be accomplished in the political world.

Truth to power

Holmes was a moderate skeptic, who believed that as a practical matter truth was a consensus that emerged from letting competing ideas duke it out in the court of public opinion rather than something that a judge or a board of censors could determine.

But as knowledge expands and becomes increasingly compartmentalized, the broadly educated public, the public whose average member used to be called the "general reader," shrinks.

Writing for an incurably undiscriminating public, the modern public intellectual is likely to find his readers mostly among persons predisposed to agree with him. According to Bayes's Theorem and common sense alike, as between two equally persuasive debaters you'll side with the one with whom your priors agree. The modern public intellectual is more likely to solidify than to dissipate prejudices.

Mr. Auden's brand of amoralism is only possible if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled. So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.2

Chomsky intimates that the sole effect of World War II was to create an American empire every bit as evil as the fascist powers that the United States and its allies had conquered.'

Chomsky's writings are peppered with such dicta as that the United States is "the center of international terrorism"9 and that "corporations are just as totalitarian as Bolshevism and fascism.""

Chomsky is an anarcho-pacifist. His embrace of that creed-which he treats as self-evidently correct and so doesn't attempt to defend-illustrates the academic public intellectual's common mistake of confusing political with personal ethics."

Stephen Jay Gould has tried to do to the "soft" field of theology, arguing that science and religion occupy nonoverlapping domains-fact in the case of science, value in the case of religion."

Science cannot establish that science is a higher authority than the Bible. Gould isn't even aware of this as an issue.

Gould calls the belief that IQ exists "reification," on the ground that you cannot point to anything in the brain as IQ.

If their debate were confined to scholarly journals rather than spilling over into the public arena, it would be recognized for what it is when the political overtones are removed: a technical disagreement that cannot be, or at least has yet to be, definitively resolved.

The heritable component of IQ might be the same across races, yet if the environmental conditions of blacks were far less propitious than those of the other races there would be a systematic racial difference in IQ.

My purpose is to draw the reader's attention to the casualness with which evidence is handled in much public-intellectual work because of the absence of the usual gatekeepers who filter and police academic publication.

The result is almost the same: a booming prosperity which, as postwar Germany illustrates, feeds not on the abundance of material goods or on anything stable and given but on the process of production and consumption itself.""

the belief that sex, so long as it's consensual, ought never to be subject to moral scrutiny at all,"75

"All the Independent Counsel's charges thus far derive entirely from a President's lies about his own sex life ... Lying about one's sex life is not a monstrous crime ... Gentlemen always lie about their sex lives. Only a cad tells the truth about his love affairs."76

Both allowed their disagreement over sexual morality to obscure the conduct actually at issue-conduct to which sex was merely the catalyst-involving various obstructions of justice; reckless disregard for the dignity of the presidency; repeated lying to aides, Cabinet members...

Kant believed "we may never state outright that we will tell the truth when we have no intention of doing so. Oaths, for example, must be taken and kept with the utmost seriousness."89 Clinton had denied his relationship with Lewinsky under oath.