Thomas Sowell has a new book out called Intellectuals and Society (here's a precis from his National Review essay on the topic from January). It sounds like a remix of Mark Lilla's The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics, mixed with Hayek's "The Intellectuals and Socialism."  Those are pretty good source materials. And as someone who occasionally writes about this topic, I'm always intrigued by new arguments on this topic.

Sowell recently gave an interview to Investor's Business Daily that's worth excerpting, however:

IBD: How do you define intellectuals?

Sowell: I define intellectuals as persons whose occupations begin and end with ideas. I distinguish between intellectuals and other people who may have ideas but whose ideas end up producing some good or service, something that whether it's working or not working can be determined by third parties.

With intellectuals, one of the crucial factors is their work is largely judged by peer consensus, so it doesn't matter if their ideas work in the real world.

IBD: What incentives and constraints do intellectuals face?

Sowell: One of the incentives is that, to the extent that intellectuals stay in their specialty, they have little to gain in terms of either prestige or influence on events. Say, an authority in ancient Mayan civilization just writes about ancient Mayan civilization, then only other specialists in ancient Mayan civilization will know what he is talking about or even be aware of him.

So intellectuals have every incentive to go beyond their area of expertise and competence. But stepping beyond your area of competence is like stepping off a cliff — you may be a genius within that area, but an idiot outside it.

As far as the constraints, since their main constraint is peer consensus — that's a very weak constraint on the profession as a whole. Because what the peers believe as a group becomes the test of any new idea that comes along as to whether it's plausible or not.

I'm pretty sure that Sowell's answers contradict each other. If the primary means through which intellectuals assess their value is through peer assessment, then why is peer assessment such a weak constraint on intellectual activity?

Methinks Sowell is underestimating both the power of academic culture and the ways in which the marketplace of ideas has become more competitive. But this is certainly good fodder for debate.

What really caught my eye, however, was this section:

IBD: You say that intellectuals during Hitler's rise subordinated the mundane specifics of the nature of the German government to abstract principles about abstract nations, by which you meant the idea espoused at the time that "nations should be equal" and thus Germany had a right to rearm. Does that description apply to the Obama administration's approach to Iran?

Sowell: I hadn't thought of it, but it certainly does. In fact, there are other people who have said, "Some countries have nuclear weapons, why shouldn't other countries have nuclear weapons?" And they say it with an utter disregard for the nature of the countries and what those countries have been demonstrably doing for years and show every intention of doing in the future.

IBD: Do you think also that the Obama administration has abstract notions that you can negotiate with Iran the same way you can negotiate with, say, Australia?

Sowell: Oh, yes. And the question is not whether you should negotiate. We negotiate with all kinds of countries. The question is whether we think negotiations will be at all effective in carrying out what we want to do.

Give Sowell credit -- it's clear that he really hasn't thought about the question. Anyone who has paid any attention to the Obama administraion's Iran policy would be hard-pressed to characterize it as tolerant of Iran's right to arm itself with nuclear weapons. As Robert Kagan recently pointed out in FP:

Republicans may complain, along with many Democrats, that the administration has been too slow to support the Iranian opposition and took too long to pivot to sanctions. Yet some also realize that Obama's prolonged effort at engagement accomplished what George W. Bush never could: convincing most of the world, and most Democrats, that Iran is uninterested in any deal that threatens its nuclear weapons program. As a result, France, Britain, and even Germany appear more determined than at any time in the past decade to impose meaningful sanctions. A majority of Republicans, along with most Democrats, will support the administration as it toughens its approach to what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton now calls the "military dictatorship" in Tehran.

In other words, the Obama administration's actual policy towards Iran bears no resemblance whatsoever to Sowell's characterization of it.

One should not be completely surprised by this; Sowell is an economist by training and should not be expected to know much about American foreign policy, as it's beyond his area of expertise. I do find it a little rich, however, that Sowell has written a book complaining about what happens when intellectuals leave their knowledge reservation to opine about events of the day -- and then proceeds to commit that precise sin during his book promotion.

There are two possibilities here. Either Sowell has no capacity for irony, or he's cleverly trying to add data points to support his argument.

Maureen Dowd has a column today entitled "Stung by the Perfect Sting."  We're going to run much of this column through a little MoDo translator, partially inspired by Josh Chafetz's still-relevant discussion of the Immutable Laws of Maureen Dowd, and helped by a few other bloggers. 

Here we go....

If I read all the vile stuff about me on the Internet, I’d never come to work. I’d scamper off and live my dream of being a cocktail waitress in a militia bar in Wyoming.

If you’re written about in a nasty way, it looms much larger for you than for anyone else. Gossip goes in one ear and out the other unless you’re the subject. Then, nobody’s skin is thick enough.

Translation:  "I read everything about me on the Interwebs.  Everything.  And despite my bravado act, it hurts me sometimes.  I'm brave for putting up with it, though.  Ah, the first graf and I've already checked off the Fourth Immutable Law of Dowd:  'The particulars of my consumer-driven, self-involved life are of universal interest and reveal universal truths.' 

Say, the militia crack was pretty funny, right?  Right?"

“The velocity and volume on the Web are so great that nothing is forgotten and nothing is remembered,” says Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic. “The Internet is like closing time at a blue-collar bar in Boston. Everyone’s drunk and ugly and they’re going to pass out in a few minutes.”

Translation: "You know how, later on in this essay, I say that insulting individuals on the Internet is rude? That's only if you do it badly. If you insult broad swathes of people in a charming manner, that's just witty banter." 

Those are my people, I protested, but I knew what he meant. That’s why I was interested in the Case of the Blond Model and the Malicious Blogger.

Translation: "Hah!  Less than a third of the way through, and I've already checked off the First Immutable Law of Dowd: 'All political phenomena can be reduced to caricatures of the personalities involved.' Suck on that, Tom Friedman!!" 

It began eight months ago when Liskula Cohen, a 37-year-old model and Australian Vogue cover girl, was surprised to find herself winning a “Skankiest in NYC” award from an anonymous blogger. The online tormentor put up noxious commentary on Google’s blogger.com, calling Cohen a “skank,” a “ho” and an “old hag” who “may have been hot 10 years ago.”

Cohen says she’s “a lover, not a fighter.” But the model had stood up for herself before. In 2007, at a New York club, she tried to stop a man named Samir Dervisevic who wanted to drink from the vodka bottle on her table. He hit her in the face with the bottle and gouged a hole “the size of a quarter,” as she put it, requiring plastic surgery.

Translation: "Did you like how I subtly compared the physical attacker to the blogger? That was pretty deft of me, right?" 

This time, she punched the virtual bully in the face, filing a defamation suit to force Google to give up the blogger’s e-mail. And she won.

“The words ‘skank,’ ‘skanky’ and ‘ho’ carry a negative implication of sexual promiscuity,” wrote Justice Joan Madden of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, rejecting the Anonymous Blogger’s assertion that blogs are a modern soapbox designed for opinions, rants and invective.

The judge cited a Virginia court decision that the Internet’s “virtually unlimited, inexpensive and almost immediate means of communication” with the masses means “the dangers of its misuse cannot be ignored. The protection of the right to communicate anonymously must be balanced against the need to assure that those persons who choose to abuse the opportunities presented by this medium can be made to answer for such transgressions.”

Cyberbullies, she wrote, cannot hide “behind an illusory shield of purported First Amendment rights.”

Translation: "A judge is on my side!  I'm going to quote her at length!"

[Side note here:  will individuals also be able to sue those who write anonymously about them on bathroom walls soon?--DD]

The Internet was supposed to be the prolix paradise where there would be no more gatekeepers and everyone would finally have their say. We would express ourselves freely at any level, high or low, with no inhibitions.

Yet in this infinite realm of truth-telling, many want to hide. Who are these people prepared to tell you what they think, but not who they are? What is the mentality that lets them get in our face while wearing a mask? Shredding somebody’s character before the entire world and not being held accountable seems like the perfect sting.

Pseudonyms have a noble history. Revolutionaries in France, founding fathers and Soviet dissidents used them. The great poet Fernando Pessoa used heteronyms to write in different styles and even to review the work composed under his other names.

As Hugo Black wrote in 1960, “It is plain that anonymity has sometimes been assumed for the most constructive purposes.”

But on the Internet, it’s often less about being constructive and more about being cowardly.

Translation:  "I bet no one knew about this phenomenon before I discovered it today.  God, my insights into this -- some anonymous blogging is good, some bad -- are really stunning." 

Dowd conveniently ignores a few important facts. First, there are power disparities going on here. If, say, the New York Times published a story calling Cohen a "skank," I can see the need for a lawsuit. Same thing if the Huffington Post had done it. But who the hell read this post before the lawsuit commanded everyon'es attention? As Laura McKenna puts it:

This just feels like a lot of whining to me. If you're on the opinion page of the New York Times, you have to be able to take the heat. It's part of the game. If you're not up for it, then I've got a waitress job for you.

Second, in Dowd's closing grafs she manages to conflate and tar all anonymous commentary because some act rudely on the Internet. This is the functional equivalent of me saying that because George Will is occasionally shoddy with his fact-checking, the entire op-ed profession is worthless and slanderous. Attacking an entire medium because of what some individuals are doing seems logically incoherent to me -- and yet far too many media commentators do this when talking about the blogosphere. 

In my experience, anonymous or not, the quality of one's insights and shrewdness of one's observations are the things that tend to push a blogger up through the ranks. 

If only that were still true of New York Times columnists. 

UPDATE: For more on the legal intricacies of the motivating case, see this Dan Solove post. 

Via Andrew Sullivan, I see that Thomas P.M. Barnett is a wee bit nervous about the impending release of his book: 

I am not feeling very optimistic about the book's reception. I just don't sense any buzz. Maybe that's because I'm living in Indiana under a foot and a half of snow, but it does haunt me. Far more than passing kidney stones, I feel like waiting on a book release is like a woman waiting for labor--mostly it's dread and regret and the inability to get a decent night's sleep.

I know that's being self-absorbed, but--again--that's why it's like heading toward labor: there is this all-consuming sense of an onrush of something either very good or very bad and you have a hard time sensing the possibility of anything in between those two extremes.

As someone who is also waiting on a book to come out, I sympathize with Barnett's pain.  I suspect, however, that his agita is actually worse than a garden-variety book author. 

This has to do with the nature of book publishing and the state of the world.  When publishing a book, all international relations authors not named Bob Woodward must endure a 3-12 month window during which the book is copyedited, typeset, and then published.  During this period, an author can make limited changes to the text -- but nothing significant. 

This gap doesn't matter all that much -- unless, of course, one is writing about world politics in a time of flux.  In that case, authors feel like a hostage to current events.  And because of the financial crisis, I've read an awful lot of first chapters recently that seemed out of date the moment they were published. 

These are all topics that Henry Farrell and I cover in our latest bloggingheads diavlog.  Go check it out!

The New York Times saw fit to excerpt the diavlog here.