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Am I defining public intellectuals down?
Posted By Daniel W. Drezner
Thursday, June 12, 2008 - 8:34 PM
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Drezner’s impulse is to be inclusive: if you’ve written a serious book that has attracted a modicum of general attention, you seem to qualify as a public intellectual. I would be more restrictive, and I’d go back to the original New York Intellectuals for guidance. Broadly, they viewed the public intellectual as someone deeply committed to the life of the mind and to its impact on the society at large. Irving Howe refers to the pursuit of “the idea of centrality” among the writers he knew, and the yearning “to embrace . . . the spirit of the age.” That is, public intellectuals were free-floating and unattached generalists speaking out on every topic that came their way (though most important for the New York Intellectuals was the intersection of literature and politics). They might be journalists or academics, but only because they had to eat. At the most fundamental level, ideas for them were not building blocks to a career. Rather, careers were the material foundation that allowed them to define and express their ideas. It hardly needs to be said that this stance produced an inevitable tension between academic life, with its occupational demands for specialization, and opinionated public intellectuals refusing to be pigeon-holed.... The problem I have with Drezner’s list is that it fails to capture any of this tension, and therefore misses, I believe, something essential in the meaning of “public intellectual.” Drezner includes, for instance, Fareed Zakaria and Samantha Power. I yield to few in my admiration for these two writers, but for them to be considered public intellectuals in the old New York Intellectual sense — with its commitment to cultural “centrality” — I think they would have to demonstrate greater breadth than they have so far displayed. Zakaria would have to write, say, a thoughtful essay on the novels of Philip Roth and Power a book on the history of the blues.One could contest whether Gewen is being fair to either Zakaria or Power (the former had a wine column in Slate for a few years; the latter contributed to a book about baseball) but let's get to the larger point. Are this generation's public intellectuals "speaking out on every topic that [comes] their way"? I partially responded to this in an earlier post. To sum up:
[A]s a general rule public intellectuals are less likely to have penetrating insights when they’re talking about subject in which they have no extant knowledge. This doesn’t vitiate the role of the public intellectual: as the specialization of knowledge has progressed, it becomes more difficult for the same person to flourish in their specialized field and make that knowledge accessible to the public. This does create a market niche, however, for "second order intellectuals" to emerge, bridging the gap between first order intellectuals and the informed public.... To conclude then — if we’re living in a world where there are more public intellectuals, but they’re more responsive to criticism and less willing to venture way beyond their areas of competence — well, then let me dance on the grave of “mega-public intellectuals.”There's two other points to be made , however. First, how public does an intellectual need to be to merit discussion of someone as a "public intellectual"? It's not like Irving Howe or Dwight MacDonald merited large readerships with their Partisan Review contributions. Furthermore, a quick perusal of Howe's "Age of Conformity" reveals a distinct snobbery towards intellectuals that embraced a wider audience. In the here and now, people like Russell Jacoby and David Brooks would count Jane Jacobs or William Whyte as being public intellectuals, even though they were not in the Partisan Review crowd. I fear Gewen is now being too restrictive in his definition, in that I'm not sure how "public" the New York Intellectual crowd really was. The second point is that Gewen's example raises a bias in the way some think about the public intellectual species. As I noted in my essay:
In the current era, a lot more public intellectuals possess social science rather than humanities backgrounds. In Richard Posner’s list of top public intellectuals, there are twice as many social scientists as humanities professors.[1] In the Foreign Policy list, economists and political scientists outnumber artists and novelists by a ratio of four to one. Economics has supplanted literary criticism as the “universal methodology” of public intellectuals.
[1] Posner, Public Intellectuals, p. 207 and 215.
Here's the bias: in the past, when literary critics traversed into the fields of social science, they were seen as public intellectuals. Why, when social scientists return the favor -- like Tyler Cowen, Richard Posner or Gary Becker -- are they viewed as arrivistes and/or methodological imperialists?
A useful exercise is to set aside both humanists and social scientists and ask which natural scientists are (or have been) public intellectuals. If the answer is none, or close to it, as I think it would be under Gewen's definition, the whole concept begins to look pretty flimsy.
"in the past, when literary critics traversed into the fields of social science, they were seen as public intellectuals. Why, when social scientists return the favor – like Tyler Cowen, Richard Posner or Gary Becker – are they viewed as arrivistes and/or methodological imperialists?"
Here's the deal: over the last few decades literary critics have worked very hard to demarcate their field and to establish difficult-to-trespass boundaries, much as natural scientists and then social scientists have done. Impenetrable jargon has been an important part of this political project. So has the development of approaches so that anyone who likes, say, Jane Austen, wouldn't want to read academic studies of Austen.
Similarly, modern art excludes representative art, modern poetry excludes rhymes, and so on. These projects are intended to exclude people who don't make these arts their profession.
Social scientists who trespass threaten this project. Thus, they threaten what few financial and intellectual resources the humanities have been able to claim. So there.
[...] Am I defining public intellectuals down? [...]
Fareed Zakaria as an intellectual? Please!! He is, if that includes aiding and abeting imperialistc misadventures. He doesn't even know the history of the Middle East. Then again, we have been dumbing intellect down the past 20 years.
I'm going to put together some half-remembered scraps of fact and half-baked ideas (hey, this is a blog, right?) and let everyone else shoot me down.
The earlier public intellectuals grew up and worked in a period of great social change, and one of their main concerns was to understand and if possible to shape the changing social narratives of their era and the narrative of that changing. To do this, they needed deep or powerful (whichever metaphor you like) insights, and believed or intuited that to get them they needed to look at their society from many angles, rather than just a few. Traditional historical analysis would be useful, and so would Marxist insights, but surprising and controversial changes in popular culture - the "history of the blues" - might be even more revealing, as would comparisons from the nonWestern world. So they set out to be Renaissance men and women.
Most of the current public intellectuals, say those between about 30 and about 45, have grown up in a period of relative stability, where the central narratives of the culture were not felt to be in question. Someone who says "Let me show how American patriarchy causes suffering among men as well as women" accepts patriarchy as a part of the American narrative in a way that some who asks "What does patriarchy mean and do in American society today, as opposed to thirty years ago, and what is it likely to mean and do thirty years from now?" does not.
The current intellectuals (public and otherwise) saw their task as to sift through the big toolbox of "insights" they had inherited from their predecessors and test which ones actually worked well over time and what they were actually good for and which ones were crap sold by very persuasive infomercials . This implied specialization and attention to detail as opposed to generalization and Big Ideas.
Which is a long way of saying that earlier and current public intellectuals are trying to do different things at different times, that obviously they use different strategies to do so, and one isn't necessarily better than the other. However, I think that studying the older pubints is still important. The economic, social, and technological tectonic plates are shifting under our feet faster than they have for decades, and we are going to need new deep insights to cope.
A small point: one of the reasons I hate these discussions is that any right-wing intellectual listed usually gets met with derision: Hayek? Why Ezra Klein could think circles around him! David Hume? A second-rater compared to Wolcott! I don't see this happening regarding left-wing intellectuals (though I admit my reading in this area is not great), perhaps because a lot of right-wingers don't see intellectuals to be as valuable as left-wingers do.
The answer to your last question is simple. Almost to the (wo)man, social scientists are ignorant, parochial philistines. End of story.
Daniel W. Drezner is professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
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