Public Intellectuals in the Global Arena: Professors or Pundits?

By Michael C. Desch

What is a public intellectual? Where are they to be found? What accounts for the lament today that public intellectuals are either few in number or, worse, irrelevant? While there is a small literature on the role of public intellectuals, it is organized around various thinkers rather than focusing on different countries or the unique opportunities and challenges inherent in varied disciplines or professions. In Public Intellectuals in the Global Arena, Michael C. Desch has gathered a group of contributors to offer a timely and far-reaching reassessment of the role of public intellectuals in a variety of Western and non-Western settings. The contributors delineate the centrality of historical consciousness, philosophical self-understanding, and ethical imperatives for any intelligentsia who presume to speak the truth to power. The first section provides in-depth studies of the role of public intellectuals in a variety of countries or regions, including the United States, Latin America, China, and the Islamic world. The essays in the second section take up the question of why public intellectuals vary so widely across different disciplines. These chapters chronicle changes in the disciplines of philosophy and economics, changes that "have combined to dethrone the former and elevate the latter as the preeminent homes of public intellectuals in the academy." Also included are chapters that consider the evolving roles of the natural scientist, the former diplomat, and the blogger as public intellectuals. The final section provides concluding perspectives about the duties of public intellectuals in the twenty-first century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9780268100278

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PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS

An Introduction

MICHAEL C. DESCH

STATEMENT OF PROBLEM

What roles do public intellectuals—persons who exert a large influence in the contemporary society of their country through their thought, writing, or speaking—play in various countries around the world and by virtue of their different disciplinary and professional backgrounds?

There is, to be sure, a small literature on the role of public intellectuals in general, but it is organized around various thinkers rather than focused on different countries in a comparative framework or on the unique opportunities and challenges inherent in different disciplines or professions.¹ Indeed, in his comprehensive treatment of the U.S. public intellectual scene, Richard Posner notes that a cardinal omission [in the literature] is the situation of the public intellectual today in countries other than the United States. In his view, such a study would be a fascinating project.²

The literature on their role in some specific countries is larger, but by no means comprehensive. Their role in the United States, both historically and in contemporary affairs, is pretty well covered.³ The problem is that this literature comes to very different and radically inconsistent conclusions as to whether public intellectuals actually influence the public.⁴ Coverage of other countries is spotty: France, not surprisingly, is well covered;⁵ the rest of Europe and other parts of the world are not.⁶ Moreover, these other studies also tend to be time-bound and focus on particular periods and eras.⁷ Finally, there have been a handful of efforts to gauge the effectiveness of public intellectuals, but the focus has been more abstract and general than what we have in mind.⁸ There are a handful of books that attempt a more comprehensive approach, but to our knowledge none do precisely what we do in this volume.⁹ Given all of this, we agree with Posner that the phenomena of the public intellectual deserves more attention from sociologists, economists, philosophers, and other students of intellectual and expressive activity than it has received.¹⁰

THIS VOLUME

Given this lacuna, and the reasonable assumptions that (1) public intellectuals play different roles in different countries, disciplines, and professions and that (2) these variations need to be systematically understood, we initiated this project to produce a volume that considers the role of the public intellectual around the world and across the disciplines today. Our overarching objectives are twofold: (1) to achieve a better general understanding of the phenomenon of public intellectualism and (2) to shed light on the U.S. experience, in particular, through a comparative context and an examination of its place within the different scholarly disciplines and professions.

Specifically, we divide our volume into three sections. In the first, Public Intellectuals in a Comparative Context, we offer a series of indepth studies of the role of public intellectuals in the United States and a variety of important countries or regions of the world, including China, Latin America, and the Arab world. Next, in Public Intellectuals across Disciplines, we offer a series of studies that might provide insight into why the public intellectual varies so widely across the disciplines. Here we have chapters on changes in the disciplines of philosophy and economics, which have combined to dethrone the former and elevate the latter as the preeminent home of public intellectuals in the academy. We also have chapters considering the evolving roles of the natural scientist, the former diplomat, and the blogger as public intellectuals. Finally, our third section, Reflections, contains some overarching thoughts on the public intellectual from a one-time skeptic, a skeptic of the skeptic, an advocate of thinking about the changing place of public intellectuals in the academy from a moral perspective, and then a synthetic conclusion.

This sort of inquiry is particularly appropriate for a Catholic university such as Notre Dame that values service more broadly to God and Country. Though hardly a proponent of strictly utilitarian education, cardinal and Oxford don John Henry Newman nonetheless persuasively argued that a cultivated intellect, because it is a good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace to every work and occupation which it undertakes, and enables us to be more useful, and to a greater number. There is a duty we owe to human society as such, to the state to which we belong, to the sphere in which we move, to the individuals toward whom we are variously related, and whom we successively encounter in life.¹¹

In the rest of this introduction, I first propose a more precise definition of our subject—public intellectuals. Next, I outline a very schematic history of the phenomena, not as the last word but rather to highlight how contested it is. Finally, I pose some specific questions, which our various chapters answer.

DEFINITION

What, precisely, is a public intellectual? This is a highly contested topic, with some arguing that there is no such thing. The concluding chapter in this volume by philosopher Vittorio Hösle is an insightful meditation on the deep issues associated with the deceptively simple taxonomical question of what we mean by public intellectual.

But for now, most of us would probably agree with the late Tony Judt that the French scholar and commentator Raymond Aron qualifies as one, perhaps the archetype of the species.¹² Ira Katznelson suggests C. Wright Mills as another exemplar of academic public intellectual, and again most of us would at least concede this designation as plausible.¹³ But to avoid simply applying Justice Potter Stewart’s methodology for identifying pornography to this task, we need a definition that goes beyond knowing a public intellectual when we see one.

Although Posner’s definition as someone seriously and competently interested in the things of the mind is straightforward and makes sense, it also conceals some deep questions about where such people fit in, what shapes their basic attitudes, and what precise roles they play in society.¹⁴

Because public intellectuals come from various organizations and institutions, most have some connection with academia, and thus the changing nature and function of the university are inextricably linked to any discussion of the changing role of public intellectuals, at least in the United States.

In terms of the motives of public intellectuals, Lionel Trilling argues that for most the decision to play that role is the result of "the impulse to make sure that the daemon and the subject are served, the impulse to insist that the activity of politics be united with the imagination under the aspect of the mind."¹⁵ In other words, public intellectualism is more of a vocation or a calling than simply a profession, though, of course, this may be changing.

Finally, Theodore H. White contrasts the classic—or pure—intellectual, [whose] distinctive passion commonly voices itself in tone of outrage or despair as he looks down from the ivory tower on the man-inaction and scolds the hypocrisy or compromise which action forces on dreams with what he calls, employing a martial metaphor, the new action-intellectuals [who] have transformed the ivory tower. For them, it is a forward observation post on the urgent front of the future—and they feel it is their duty to call down the heavy artillery of government now, on the targets that they alone can see moving in the distance.¹⁶ However, all of these definitional issues beg further elaboration and clarification, which many of our chapters offer.

HISTORY

Another issue that could bear deeper examination is the historical evolution of the institution of the public intellectual. Some people believe that public intellectualism is a long-standing institution, tracing its roots at least as far back as Plato’s philosopher-king. Along these lines, Harvard historian Richard Hofstadter notes the continuity from the great intellectuals of pagan antiquity, the doctors of the medieval universities, the scholars of the Renaissance, the philosophers of the Enlightenment, [who all] sought for a conjunction of knowledge and power and accepted its risks without optimism or naiveté. They hoped that knowledge would in fact be broadened by a conjunction with power, just as power might be civilized by its connection with knowledge.¹⁷

But others agree with Arthur Melzer that public intellectualism is a modern development tied closely to more recent notions of progress.¹⁸ Students of the late political philosopher Leo Strauss, such as Michael Zuckert, who has a chapter in this volume, would no doubt endorse his interpretation of Plato’s Republic as teaching that, in his words, the emergence of a philosopher-king is not possible [or at best, extremely improbable] because of the philosophers’ unwillingness to rule.¹⁹ The reason that philosophers will not agree to rule is that they are, by definition, disengaged from the rest of society in the search for a truth that may or may not be politically salutary or even useful.²⁰ This is undoubtedly why Thomas Pangle contrasts philosophers with the sophists, perhaps the better historical analogue of our contemporary public intellectuals, who vulgarized, and what is worse, rendered confused, the earlier wisdom—by diluting, if not abandoning, the pure passion for knowledge, and by making knowledge, instead, into a tool or weapon for securing fame or fortune.²¹ Given that, one can understand why Paul Rahe concludes that in antiquity, statesmanship and philosophy remained distinct, and suggests that public intellectualism is a product of the Enlightenment.²²

The question, however, is this: How did the Enlightenment set the stage for public intellectualism? Perhaps the most common view is that the Enlightenment’s liberation of the mind from the tyranny of religious captivity and the advancement of science across the board in society set the stage for the marriage of intellect and rule. Along these lines, historian Marc Fumaroli traces the rise of the Republic of Letters, a post-Reformation secularization of the Roman Catholic notion of scholars united in a mystical body working together toward a common good whose significance is universal.²³ Many of these scholars, according to historian Anthony Grafton, also pursued their research largely, or even primarily, for partisan reasons: in order to ensure the triumph of a religion or ruling house, making them prototypical public intellectuals.²⁴

At the risk of proffering an unfashionably Americanocentric argument, one might hold up the American Founding Fathers as epitomizing this Enlightenment tradition of public intellectualism. As historian Gordon Wood reminds us, the Founders were not professional politicians, but rather aristocratic gentlemen, who combined classical learning with a sense of noblesse oblige that led them to abandon their farm or study to take up the reins of power.²⁵ In this view, the founding philosopher-kings were eclipsed in early nineteenth-century America as the result of the religious revival known as the Great Awakening, the development of a more popular Jacksonian democracy, and the rise of intellectual currents like transcendentalism, which harkened back to the Platonic notion of the disjuncture between politics and philosophy.²⁶

Complicating this stock Enlightenment narrative, which makes the secularization of the Christian intellectual tradition the sine qua non for combining the worlds of ideas and practice, is the Roman Catholic intellectual tradition, which not only sought to reconcile faith and reason in an earlier area but also offered a political-theological rationale for intellectual engagement with affairs of the world.²⁷ In his 1851 series of lectures on education in Ireland, Cardinal Newman lamented the consequences of the secularization and hyperspecialization of academic knowledge and offered a theologically informed brief for a broader education as the prerequisite for engagement with practical affairs.²⁸

Despite these possible pre- or post-Enlightenment sources of public intellectualism, it is nonetheless fair to say that secular intellectual currents and events have undeniably played a greater role in the emergence of what most of us recognize as the modern public intellectual. But what are they? Conservative thinker Russell Kirk, to my mind, implausibly argues that it is largely the intellectual legacy of Marxism.²⁹ A much more compelling case can be made that the primary ism undergirding modern public intellectualism is liberalism. And its most salient American manifestation was progressivism, which provided the intellectual foundation for engagement of scholars with policy—epitomized by Woodrow Wilson, institutionalized in the New Deal Brains Trust, and brought to its apogee by Adlai Stevenson’s eggheads and John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier.³⁰ This theme is explored at length in the chapters by Jeremi Suri, Andrew Bacevich, and, especially, Mark Lilla.

But the rise of modern public intellectualism is not exclusively the story of the history of ideas. Real-world events also served to broker the marriage between the world of ideas and political engagement. Some regard the seminal event as the Dreyfus Affair in France, which dragged intellectuals and other soldiers of ideas out of their studies and positioned them on the barricades to combat the forces of religious and ethnonationalist reaction in late nineteenth-century France.³¹ In contrast, a bit later America went through a less dramatic process of public intellectuals emerging in response to events. One striking example was Robert LaFollette, who as governor forged a close working relationship with the University of Wisconsin to address a host of real-world policy issues, which would set the stage for a more general engagement of American intellectuals with policy.³²

Most would agree that the apogee of American intellectuals’ participation in politics came with the Kennedy administration. Although the New Frontier hardly depopulated the groves of academe, it did thrust scholars into the policy limelight and for a time subtly transformed our tree-shaded campuses from transmitters of knowledge to brokerage houses of ideas.³³ In a glossy article in Look on what he termed the action intellectuals, journalist Theodore White wrote that with Camelot scholars have arrived at the junction of history where their role in politics demands definition. For it is as teachers, as cartographers only, that they must be seen. Their studies and surveys, however imperfect, are the only road maps of the future showing the hazy contours of a new landscape.³⁴

If the New Frontier marked the acme of intellectual engagement in policymaking, it also sounded the first stanzas of its swan song.³⁵ Indeed, the sad fate of the best and the brightest in the Kennedy administration, particularly their implication in the disastrous Vietnam decisions, represents a cautionary tale across the political spectrum about the perils of intellectuals meddling in the public sphere.³⁶ Apropos of these changing attitudes, journalist David Halberstam recounted a conversation between Lyndon Johnson and his political mentor, Sam Rayburn, the legendary Speaker of the House, in which the latter dammed the new president’s gushing about the intellectually brilliant cabinet he had inherited from his murdered predecessor: Well, Lyndon, you may be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say … but I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.³⁷

Given this history, it is not surprising that contemporary thinking about public intellectualism is so polarized between those who, along with Russell Jacoby, are nostalgic for the time before Camelot when intellectuals and policy regularly mixed, and those who today think we are on the dawn of a new renaissance of public intellectualism, ushered in by the Internet and mediated by the blogosphere. However, even scholars like Anthony Grafton, who find the lost Golden Age/New Dawn dichotomy overdrawn, nonetheless have to concede more to the pessimists than the optimists.³⁸ In a recent opinion piece on nuclear proliferation in the New York Times, physicist Lawrence M. Krauss laments that to our great peril, the scientific community has had little success in recent years influencing policy on global security.³⁹ This marks quite a change from the dawn of the nuclear age in which America’s atomic scientists had a seat at the policymaking table and a voice in our national public debates on these issues.⁴⁰

In addition to clarifying the history of the American and other public intellectual cases, we also need some more conceptual work to explain the variation in the role and effectiveness of public intellectuals across time and space. Do secular trends—modernity, the Enlightenment, even postmodernism—explain these patterns?⁴¹ Conversely, does the influence of public intellectuals wax and wane as a result of cyclical trends, as Hofstadter suggests, with the emergence of particular policy problems, the engagement of intellectuals with them (both inside and outside of government), and the discontent and disappointment that inevitably comes as theory and practice clash, as they invariably do?⁴² The chapters in this volume shed light on all of these questions.

SPECIFIC QUESTIONS

Do policymakers or the public really listen to public intellectuals?

This might seem an odd question with which to begin a project on public intellectualism, because a logical presumption of the investigation is that they do, at least at some times and on particular issues. But the question needs to be answered, because a recent investigation of the topic came to the conclusion that there is little evidence that public intellectuals are highly influential.⁴³

There are two explanations for why this could be the case. First, one could argue, as Posner does, that real-world events have a much greater impact on public opinion than academic theories do.⁴⁴ Second, one could maintain, as historian Bruce Kuklick does, for example, that the ideas of intellectuals merely serve policymakers as rationales or window dressing for doing things they want to do on other grounds, such as ideology or bureaucratic vested interest.⁴⁵

But it is possible that Posner’s bold conclusion overstates the matter. Perhaps the influence of public intellectuals does vary by historical period, issue area, discipline, or country in important ways. For example, even while sharing some elements of Posner’s jaundiced view, Thomas Sowell admits that Posner may be right about the influence of individual public intellectuals, but he still believes that, in aggregate, they have a greater impact.⁴⁶ This claim that the effect of public intellectuals as a group is greater than the influence of individuals certainly bears further investigation, which many of the contributions to this volume address.

Another way to qualify Posner’s conclusion would be to disaggregate the policy process in a more detailed way, as political scientist John Kingdon does, into four discrete phases—(1) agenda setting; (2) specification of alternatives; (3) choice; and (4) implementation—and then ask if perhaps the influence of public intellectuals varies by stage in the policy process.⁴⁷

Yet another approach is to conceive of the policy process, again following Kingdon, as three process streams flowing through the system—streams of problems, policies, and politics. They are largely independent of one another, and each develops according to its own dynamics and rules. But at some critical junctures the three streams are joined, and the greatest policy changes grow out of the coupling of problems, policy proposals, and politics.⁴⁸ What joins these streams, in his view, are policy windows that periodically open and provide opportunities for outsiders to influence government policy.⁴⁹ The questions, then, are these: When do such windows open, and what does it take to get public intellectuals to jump through them?

Using this framework, Kingdon judges that academics, researchers, and consultants are the second most important set of nongovernmental actors in the policymaking process, and he concludes that they affect alternatives more than the agenda, and affect long-term directions more than short-term outcomes.⁵⁰ Would a similar approach be applicable to other issue areas and countries?

This question is addressed in a variety of different ways in the chapters by Suri, Bacevich, Willy Lam, Enrique Krause, Patrick Baert, Bradford DeLong, Kenneth Miller, Gilles Andréani, and me.

Is their effect good/beneficial?

Assuming the answer to our first question is in the affirmative, it begs a second important question: Is the influence of public intellectual good or bad?

I suspect that most people think that the influence of public intellectuals is on balance positive. Who would deny that having smart people, with no vested bureaucratic interest at stake, weighing in on issues of public moment, would not produce better policy? Indeed, their participation in this process seems like a sine qua non for the effective functioning of the marketplace of ideas underpinning our system of deliberative democracy.

Given that, it is striking how many thinkers—particularly but not exclusively from the Right of the political spectrum—come to the opposite conclusion. Paul Johnson, for example, says that one of the principal lessons of our tragic century, which has seen so many millions of innocent lives sacrificed in schemes to improve the lot of humanity is—beware intellectuals. Not merely should they be kept well away from the levers of power, they also should be the objects of suspicion when they seek to offer collective advice.⁵¹ Johnson maintains that since the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, we have been living under a delusion that the public activities of intellectuals could improve society.⁵² The Hoover Institution’s Sowell even blames such historical tragedies as the Holocaust and the crimes of communism on intellectuals.⁵³ Speaking for many post-Vietnam academics and others on the Left, noted linguist and public intellectual Noam Chomsky concludes that, as is no doubt obvious, the cult of the expert is both self-serving, for those who propound it, and fraudulent.⁵⁴

Offering a less polemical, but still pointed, indictment, one of our contributors, Mark Lilla, previously came to a strikingly similar conclusion, warning that whoever takes it upon himself to write an honest intellectual history of twentieth-century Europe will need a strong stomach.⁵⁵ Reviewing the various arguments about the puzzling historical affinity of intellectuals for various forms of tyranny—which include the widely embraced view that blames religion and other pre-Enlightenment factors, Isaiah Berlin’s counterintuitive indictment of the Enlightenment itself, and his own perspective, which highlights the different socialhistorical context within which public intellectuals like Raymond Aron and Martin Heidegger operated—Lilla suggests a number of alternative answers to this question, including his own: It depends.⁵⁶ Determining exactly upon what the potential impact of public intellectuals depends is another one of the central objectives of this volume. Suri, Bacevich, Lam, Ahmad Moussalli, DeLong, Lilla, Zuckert, Hösle, and I all discuss whether their effect is good or bad.

Despite the dire tone of their assessments of the deleterious consequences of public intellectuals, Johnson and Sowell do raise valid concerns. One is how far specific, specialized knowledge of the sort that academic public intellectuals possess travels to broader issues of public policy?⁵⁷ Hence, Sowell’s caution—when people operate as ‘public intellectuals,’ espousing ideas and policies to a wider population beyond their professional colleagues, they may or may not carry over intellectual rigor into these more general, more policy-oriented, or more ideologically charged discussions—is worth heeding.⁵⁸

A second, and perhaps more profound, question: Does the distinction between intellect and wisdom that Sowell posits needs further development?⁵⁹ Framed in a less polemical way, the question we might ask here is this: Is the distinction between theoretical as opposed to practical knowledge meaningful? And another related question his warning raises: What is the applicability of increasingly complex and abstruse academic approaches and scholarly methodologies to public policy debates? Our chapters on the various disciplines and professions engage this question directly.

How often do intellectuals get things right when they engage in the public policy fray?

Again, we might presume a consensus that they mostly do, but many recent commentators have come to the opposite conclusion. Typical is blogger and public policy professor Daniel Drezner, who laments the dismal performance of intellectuals in proximity to power.⁶⁰ Johnson dismisses public intellectuals as as unreasonable, illogical, and superstitious as anyone else.⁶¹ Sowell agrees, arguing that the wisdom of crowds is a more reliable font of wisdom than the oracular pronouncements of individual public intellectuals.⁶²

In perhaps the most rigorous analysis of this question, social psychologist Phillip Tetlock concludes that publicly engaged scholars are in fact worse at prediction than others.⁶³ When we pit experts against minimalist performance benchmarks—dilettantes, dart-throwing chimps, and assorted extrapolation algorithms, Tetlock damningly reports, we find few signs that expertise translates into greater ability to make either ‘well-calibrated’ or ‘discriminating’ forecasts.⁶⁴

Tetlock maintains that the most important element shaping the dynamics of contemporary public intellectualism is intellectual style. Employing a metaphor made famous by the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin, he distinguishes between Foxes—those ‘who know many little things’—and Hedgehogs, those who ‘know one big thing.’ The problem, in his view, is that hedgehogs tend to be rigid and doctrinaire, and so are often wrong. But their bold and clear arguments nonetheless garner attention from the public and the media, and so they tend to win out in the intellectual marketplace of ideas.⁶⁵ Assessing the effects of different intellectual styles and other related factors therefore seems like a productive line of comparative inquiry. Bacevich’s and Suri’s chapters on American Cold War intellectuals provide some leverage on this issue, as do the chapters by Krauze, DeLong, Lilla, Zuckert, and me.

Finally, it may seem like an easy question to answer, but it is actually not clear by what standard we should judge the effectiveness of public intellectuals. Should we focus just on big instances that they get wrong, such as the end of the Cold War or 9/11, or should we compare their track record to other authoritative sources of information, such as academia, government officials, journalists, or even the general public?⁶⁶

What are the various mechanisms by which public intellectuals might exercise influence?

For example, public intellectuals may directly influence politics through holding public office, as did Boethius, Thomas More, or Francis Bacon. Conversely, they may serve as advisors to leaders or other political figures, along the lines of Plato and Aristotle.

Public intellectuals have upon occasion sought to exercise direct influence upon public policy by serving in government, but the historical experience of the best and the brightest, at least in the United States, has not been uniformly positive, and there are good bureaucratic reasons to doubt that this mechanism would be very effective.⁶⁷

Kingdon suggests an alternative direct route—what he calls policy entrepreneurship—available to those who are willing to invest their resources—time, energy, reputation, money—to promote a position in return for anticipated future gain in the form of material, purposive, or solidary benefits.⁶⁸ Would it be useful to have a sense of how influential public intellectuals have been in those direct roles? Again, Bacevich and Suri touch upon this, as do Lam on China, Krauze on Latin America, Ahmad Moussalli on the Arab world, and Hösle in his conclusion. In addition, Paul Horwitz discusses how new social media are providing new avenues for public intellectuals to ply their trade, and Baert discusses the increasing role of narrow expertise in contemporary public intellectual discourse.

I suspect that most of us would agree with the late James Q. Wilson, himself one of the most prominent American public intellectuals of recent years, that even his influence was not to be found in the details of policy but was more indirect. In his view, "intellectuals provided the conceptual language, the ruling paradigms, the empirical examples (note I say examples not evidence) that became the accepted assumptions for those in charge of making policy."⁶⁹

Such indirect roles might include building the frameworks,⁷⁰ what Sowell calls the general set of presumptions, beliefs, and imperatives that structure how we think about policy.⁷¹ Another indirect role might involve the selection of alternatives. The classic indirect public intellectual role is as the independent critic, or what sociologist Robert K. Merton calls the gadfly.⁷² Among this group we might also include persons whose intellectual work moves large segments of society and thus indirectly influences politics, either in their time (e.g., Jürgen Habermas) or through the ages (e.g., G. W. F. Hegel). Do we agree with Wilson on the efficacy of this, or any other, indirect role for public intellectuals?

Finally, as Patrick Deneen explores in his chapter, public intellectuals could play a very important indirect, though heretofore unacknowledged, role through undergraduate teaching.

Is it fruitful to compare the social roles of public intellectuals within the same country over time and across different countries?

The United States was a country founded by public intellectuals, but their subsequent standing has been mixed. Indeed, Hofstadter highlights the irony that the United States should have been founded by intellectuals; [but] for throughout most of our political history, the intellectual has been for the most part either an outsider, a servant, or a scapegoat.⁷³ He attributes this anti-intellectualism to popular resentment, because we Americans chafe at being at the mercy of experts.⁷⁴

It appears that the tenuous standing of intellectuals is a global phenomenon, which might be because, in part, they have historically been part of a distinct social or economic class in their societies.⁷⁵ But both the comparative standing of intellectuals in different countries and the reasons behind that raise some interesting questions worthy of further investigation. The chapters by Suri, Lam, Krauze, Moussalli, Baert, Andréani, Lilla, and me touch upon this question.

What is the relationship between public intellectualism and the university?

One of the more complicated issues, especially in the United States, is the evolving role of the university and the professoriate in public intellectualism.⁷⁶ Indeed, this topic bears closer examination because, as Posner observes, although not all intellectuals are professors, even today … most are.⁷⁷ Thus, the fate of public intellectualism is inextricably linked with developments within American universities.

On the one hand, one might expect that professors and other university-based scholars would play an active role in larger public debates by virtue of their deep expertise in their fields and also given the protections afforded them by tenure and academic freedom, which should reassure them that they can weigh in on even very controversial debates at little professional cost. And, at least in the American case, there was a tradition of academic public intellectualism that persisted into the 1960s. To be sure, some universities and scholars continue to play this role, but there is, on the other hand, a widely shared sense that Russell Jacoby is right when he complains that the missing intellectuals are lost in the universities.⁷⁸ How much this has changed, and why, is worth exploring, as is the related question of whether the same is true in other countries. Baert’s chapter on philosophy, DeLong’s on economics, Miller’s on the natural sciences, Zuckert’s discussion of the decline of political theory in political science, Deneen’s discussion of undergraduate education, and my own chapter on the ethical obligation of scholars to society all shed light on this question.

If we agree with Jacoby and others that academic public intellectualism has declined, what explains that decline? Roughly speaking, there are two conceivable classes of answers. For example, it is possible that the public, for whatever reason, no longer values academic expertise. As mathematician Laurent Lafforgue admits, our pride and self-confidence crumbles, however, when we realize that the majority of people outside academia demonstrate, whether through their words or their attitude of disdain, that they don’t see any great value in our learning, and that, at any rate, they don’t consider the pursuit of learning at all necessary to leading a good life.⁷⁹ This raises the question: Why have public attitudes about the academy apparently changed so dramatically?

Another possibility that we need to consider is that these changes in public attitudes are a response to developments with the academic enterprise itself. "I believe that it is fair to say that the position, the contribution, most precisely the social significance of the public intellectual, Posner maintains, is deteriorating in the United States and that the principal reasons are the growth and character of the modern university."⁸⁰

Some commentators embrace this explanation because the decline of American public intellectualism seems tied to developments in the American university, particularly its dramatic expansion, which began at roughly the same time.⁸¹ Others focus not so much on the growth in size of the American university and the consequent change in the social and economic demographics of the students and faculty, but rather on the intellectual changes that have taken place over this time in the academic disciplines. Taking a long historical view, Habermas concludes that the shift from the ancient to modern view of the relation of theory and practice means that the genuine area of praxis is withdrawn altogether from the discipline of methodical investigation.⁸²

Already in the nineteenth century, Newman lamented the increasing disaggregation of knowledge between universities and the literary world.⁸³ This development, of course, worried him because the Catholic intellectual tradition he embraced maintained a commitment to both the unity of knowledge and its application for the betterment of man’s physical and social well-being.⁸⁴ To be sure, Newman was an ardent enthusiast for the classical Liberal Arts and hardly a proponent of strictly vocational education.⁸⁵ But he conceded that

if then a practical end must be assigned to a University course, I say it is that of training good members of society. Its art is the art of social life, and its end is fitness for the world.… a university training is the great ordinary means to a great but ordinary end; it aims at raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aims to popular aspiration, at giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at facilitating the exercise of political powers, and refining the intercourse of public life.⁸⁶

Political scientist Ira Katznelson recounts how prior to the professionalization of disciplines, between 1870 and 1920, scholarly public intellectualism was more common. But, in his view, since then our social science disciplines have changed beyond recognition. Increasingly separated from their lineages of political, social, and economic thought, confidently technical, and developed by distinctive scholarly subgroups, the social sciences mainly advance self-referentially, inside specialized conversations.⁸⁷

The result, as Thomas Bender notes, is that though the academic disciplines in America have been astonishingly successful in producing new knowledge, … their almost complete hegemony in our intellectual life has left Americans with an impoverished public culture and little means for critical discussion of general ideas, as opposed to scientific or scholarly expertise.⁸⁸ It is precisely the increasing professionalization of academic disciplines that has made them more inward-focused and corporate in orientation.⁸⁹ Such an attitude could explain the decline of public intellectualism by virtue of the fact that now scholars and public intellectuals working in the same area have different intellectual agendas: "Academic researchers aspire to be social scientists, while public researchers seek to be social scientists," in Herbert J. Gans’s assessment.⁹⁰

What has been the cause of these intellectual changes? Some candidates might include the increasingly rigid distinction between science and policy, with research in the former being defined as basic to the exclusion of applied knowledge relevant to the latter.⁹¹ Another might be that the growing intellectual division of labor—in important respects the sine qua non of intellectual progress—has also had the unfortunate result of fragmenting knowledge, which Lafforgue characterizes as nothing short of tragedy for the University and for the research individually.⁹² Finally, professionalization may have also had the effect of giving the disciplines a more internal and self-referential caste.

The result of these various disciplinary changes is, in Posner’s view, that today, then, the typical intellectual is a safe specialist, which is not the type of person well suited to play the public intellectual’s most distinctive, though not only, role, that of critical commentator addressing a nonspecialist audience on matters of broad public concern.⁹³ Jacoby adds that academic professionalization leads to privatization or depoliticization, a withdrawal of intellectual energy from a larger domain to a narrower discipline.⁹⁴ And Bender concludes that rigor and intellectual security were gained at the cost of making the parts of American intellectual life more powerful than the whole.⁹⁵

The major question, therefore, is not how to overturn academic professional and political attitudes. But rather, it is, as Katznelson puts it, how to balance a university career and a public voice, against odds, without lapsing into media glibness or scholarly hypercircumscription.⁹⁶ Our comparative disciplinary perspective in this volume hopes to illuminate how best to achieve this balance.

What has been the role of different disciplines in public intellectualism and how have things changed within and among them on this score?

There seems to be general agreement that the disciplinary center of gravity among public intellectuals has shifted over time. At one time, philosophy provided the founding public intellectuals because it was considered the architectonic science of knowledge spanning all of the other disciplines and uniting them under its rubric.⁹⁷ In the heyday of American public intellectualism in the 1950s and early 1960s, historians such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and literary critics such as Lionel Trilling constituted the bulk of engaged intellectuals. Today, however, it seems as though economics has become the universal methodology of most public intellectuals.⁹⁸

Why is philosophy no longer the wellspring of public intellectuals? Answering the question is the focus of Baert’s chapter. One might argue that philosophy was never a suitable disciplinary grounding for public intellectualism because the two are at root incompatible, a lesson that some believe we have failed to learn throughout history, to our collective peril.⁹⁹ The cautionary tale on this score was the disastrous results of the efforts of the twentieth century’s greatest philosopher, Martin Heidegger, to become, if not a philosopher-king, at least an intellectual power behind the throne in Hitler’s Germany. The problem of Heidegger, Lilla observes, was the problem of all great philosophers, nothing more, nothing less. Their thinking had to be cultivated and protected from the world, but they also must be kept from worldly political affairs, which are properly the concern of others—of citizens, statesmen, of men of action.¹⁰⁰ Following this reasoning, Paul Rahe explains that the quest for theoretical wisdom does not eventuate in political prudence: this quest may, in fact, be antithetical to and subversive of political prudence.¹⁰¹ Rahe’s contention that prudence and knowledge are incompatible bears further investigation. What, precisely, is the relationship between prudence and knowledge and upon what, if not the former, is the latter grounded?

Whether in fact we agree that philosophy and public intellectualism are ultimately incompatible, we should ask whether its replacement by economics has proven more satisfactory. This is DeLong’s task. Some argue that the intellectual hegemony of academic economics undermines academic public intellectualism by reinforcing the narrowness and scientism of the contemporary social sciences. Indeed, many commentators have remarked on the economists’ intellectual imperialism, which leads, in Edmund White’s words, to a desire on the part of many scholars to apply the aggregate techniques and arithmetical methods of the economists to the entire range of national problems.¹⁰² Martha Nussbaum raises a different concern about the increasing predominance of economists among public intellectuals. She worries about the philosophical recalcitrance of economists, and their refusal to admit that their work does make substantive philosophical commitments that need to be scrutinized, and she concludes that philosophy should once again play a major role in public debates.¹⁰³ Either way, we need a better sense of the potential contributions and limitations of members of the different disciplines as public intellectuals. In addition to the Baert and DeLong chapters, Miller’s discussion of the natural scientist as public intellectual, Suri’s chapter on history, and Horwitz’s discussion of law provide a comprehensive disciplinary perspective on the topic.

Is public intellectualism more important in different issue areas?

Another set of related questions we explore deals with the impact of public intellectualism in different issue areas. Are public intellectuals, as Sowell suggests, most influential in the softer legal, cultural, and political realms?¹⁰⁴ Or are they, as longtime U.S. national security decision-maker Paul Nitze argued, more influential when they provide hard technical information to decision-makers rather than trying to influence broader policy decisions themselves?¹⁰⁵

Again, our disciplinary and professions studies provide the most insight here, but almost every chapter in the volume touches upon it.

What are the most serious limitations to public intellectuals making a positive contribution to broader public debates?

The lack of high-quality public intellectualism today could be a function of either supply or demand. On the former, one possible reason public intellectuals might not make a positive contribution is that, following the previous discussion of developments within the modern university, today’s would-be academic public intellectuals have become intellectually hyperspecialized and therefore have little to offer of general interest to the rest of society.¹⁰⁶

On the demand side, a source of weakness among today’s public intellectuals could be a failure of the intellectual marketplace of ideas.¹⁰⁷ Tetlock, for example, suggests that the problem of public intellectualism may lie with consumers, who have little motivation to be discriminating judges among public intellectuals. Indeed, he suggests that we do not listen to public intellectuals because we think they can reveal to us the truth, but rather because they bolster our prejudices or provide a crutch giving us quick and simple answers to complex issues, rather than allowing us to think them through ourselves.¹⁰⁸ Other commentators emphasize that the public simply treats public intellectuals as sources of entertainment and solidarity.¹⁰⁹ Most of these reasons for public interest in public intellectualism are hardly conducive to public intellectuals making a positive contribution to public policy.

This is another common focus in the volume: Suri looks at American exceptionalism as a set of blinders, Lam focuses on the close links of Chinese intellectuals with the state, Moussalli highlights the schizophrenic attitudes among Arab intellectuals toward the West, Lilla focuses on liberalism as a boundary upon our intellectual horizon, and Horwitz’s chapter on the blogger as public intellectual explores the promise and peril of this new medium of communication.

Assuming we accept the broad consensus that public intellectualism is declining in both frequency and quality, how can it be made better?

One camp suggests that the problem is not the overacademization of public intellectualism, but rather its relative lack of solid grounding in the norms and techniques of science—if only public intellectuals were more academic in their approaches, they would provide better advice to us. A related suggestion is that we improve public intellectuals by more consistently applying rewards and sanctions based upon their performance.¹¹⁰ The assumption here is that unlike engineers, physicians, or scientists, the intelligentsia face no serious constraint or sanction based on empirical verification.¹¹¹ The solution that many observers across the political spectrum recommend is fostering greater accountability.¹¹² Of course, not everyone is convinced that science and the market will dramatically improve public intellectualism.¹¹³ In either case, more careful consideration of this question is warranted. The exchange in the third