professors or pundits? - university of notre dameundpress/excerpts/p03256-ex.pdf · lectuals of...

Public Intellectuals in the Global Arena

Professors or Pundits?

Edited by

Michael C. Desch

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright 2016 University of Notre Dame

Public Intellectuals

An Introduction

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Statement of Problem

What roles do public intellectuals—persons who exert a large influencein the contemporary society of their country through their thought, writ-ing, or speaking—play in various countries around the world and byvirtue of their different disciplinary and professional backgrounds?

There is, to be sure, a small literature on the role of public intellectu-als in general, but it is organized around various thinkers rather than fo-cused on different countries in a comparative framework or on the uniqueopportunities and challenges inherent in different disciplines or profes-sions.1 Indeed, in his comprehensive treatment of the U.S. public intel-lectual scene, Richard Posner notes that “a cardinal omission [in the lit-erature] is the situation of the public intellectual today in countries otherthan the United States.” In his view, such a study “would be a fascinatingproject.”2

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The literature on their role in some specific countries is larger, but byno means comprehensive. Their role in the United States, both histori-cally and in contemporary affairs, is pretty well covered.3 The problem isthat this literature comes to very different and radically inconsistent con-clusions as to whether public intellectuals actually influence the public.4

Coverage of other countries is spotty: France, not surprisingly, is well cov-ered;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 pe-riods and eras.7 Finally, there have been a handful of efforts to gauge theeffectiveness of public intellectuals, but the focus has been more abstractand general than what we have in mind.8 There are a handful of booksthat attempt a more comprehensive approach, but to our knowledge nonedo precisely what we do in this volume.9 Given all of this, we agree withPosner that “the phenomena of the public intellectual deserves more at-tention from sociologists, economists, philosophers, and other students ofintellectual and expressive activity than it has received.”10

This Volume

Given this lacuna, and the reasonable assumptions that (1) public intel-lectuals play different roles in different countries, disciplines, and profes-sions and that (2) these variations need to be systematically understood,we initiated this project to produce a volume that considers the role ofthe public intellectual around the world and across the disciplines today.Our overarching objectives are twofold: (1) to achieve a better generalunderstanding of the phenomenon of public intellectualism and (2) toshed light on the U.S. experience, in particular, through a comparativecontext and an examination of its place within the different scholarlydisciplines and professions.

Specifically, we divide our volume into three sections. In the first,“Public Intellectuals in a Comparative Context,” we offer a series of in-depth studies of the role of public intellectuals in the United States anda variety of important countries or regions of the world, including China,Latin America, and the Arab world. Next, in “Public Intellectuals across

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Disciplines,” we offer a series of studies that might provide insight intowhy the public intellectual varies so widely across the disciplines. Herewe have chapters on changes in the disciplines of philosophy and eco-nomics, which have combined to dethrone the former and elevate thelatter as the preeminent home of public intellectuals in the academy. Wealso have chapters considering the evolving roles of the natural scientist,the former diplomat, and the blogger as public intellectuals. Finally, ourthird section, “Reflections,” contains some overarching thoughts on thepublic intellectual from a one-time skeptic, a skeptic of the skeptic, anadvocate of thinking about the changing place of public intellectuals inthe academy from a moral perspective, and then a synthetic conclusion.

This sort of inquiry is particularly appropriate for a Catholic univer-sity such as Notre Dame that values service more broadly to “God andCountry.” Though hardly a proponent of strictly utilitarian education,cardinal and Oxford don John Henry Newman nonetheless persuasivelyargued “that a cultivated intellect, because it is a good in itself, brings withit 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 dutywe owe to human society as such, to the state to which we belong, to thesphere in which we move, to the individuals toward whom we are vari-ously related, and whom we successively encounter in life.”11

In the rest of this introduction, I first propose a more precise defini-tion of our subject—public intellectuals. Next, I outline a very schematichistory of the phenomena, not as the last word but rather to highlighthow contested it is. Finally, I pose some specific questions, which ourvarious 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 inthis volume by philosopher Vittorio Hösle is an insightful meditation onthe deep issues associated with the deceptively simple taxonomical ques-tion of what we mean by “public intellectual.”

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But for now, most of us would probably agree with the late TonyJudt that the French scholar and commentator Raymond Aron qualifiesas one, perhaps the archetype of the species.12 Ira Katznelson suggestsC. Wright Mills as another exemplar of academic public intellectual, andagain most of us would at least concede this designation as plausible.13

But to avoid simply applying Justice Potter Stewart’s methodology foridentifying pornography to this task, we need a definition that goes be-yond knowing a public intellectual when we see one.

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

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

In terms of the motives of public intellectuals, Lionel Trilling arguesthat for most the decision to play that role is the result of “the impulse tomake sure that the daemon and the subject are served, the impulse to in-sist that the activity of politics be united with the imagination under theaspect of the mind.”15 In other words, public intellectualism is more of avocation or a calling than simply a profession, though, of course, thismay be changing.

Finally, Theodore H. White contrasts “the classic—or pure—intel-lectual, [whose] distinctive passion commonly voices itself in tone ofoutrage or despair as he looks down from the ivory tower on the man-in-action and scolds the hypocrisy or compromise which action forces ondreams” with what he calls, employing a martial metaphor, “the newaction-intellectuals [who] have transformed the ivory tower. For them, itis a forward observation post on the urgent front of the future—and theyfeel 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 How-ever, all of these definitional issues beg further elaboration and clarifica-tion, which many of our chapters offer.

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History

Another issue that could bear deeper examination is the historical evolu-tion of the institution of the public intellectual. Some people believe thatpublic intellectualism is a long-standing institution, tracing its roots atleast as far back as Plato’s “philosopher-king.” Along these lines, Harvardhistorian Richard Hofstadter notes the continuity from “the great intel-lectuals of pagan antiquity, the doctors of the medieval universities, thescholars of the Renaissance, the philosophers of the Enlightenment,[who all] sought for a conjunction of knowledge and power and acceptedits risks without optimism or naiveté. They hoped that knowledge wouldin fact be broadened by a conjunction with power, just as power might becivilized 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 “prog ress.”18

Students of the late political philosopher Leo Strauss, such as Mi chaelZuckert, who has a chapter in this volume, would no doubt endorse hisinterpretation of Plato’s Republic as teaching that, in his words, theemergence of a philosopher-king “is not possible [or at best, extremelyimprobable] because of the philosophers’ unwillingness to rule.”19 Thereason that philosophers will not agree to rule is that they are, by defini-tion, disengaged from the rest of society in the search for a truth thatmay or may not be politically salutary or even useful.20 This is undoubt-edly why Thomas Pangle contrasts philosophers with the sophists, per-haps the better historical analogue of our contemporary public intel-lectuals, who “vulgarized, and what is worse, rendered confused, theearlier wisdom—by diluting, if not abandoning, the pure passion forknowledge, and by making knowledge, instead, into a tool or weaponfor securing fame or fortune.”21 Given that, one can understand whyPaul Rahe concludes that in “antiquity, statesmanship and philosophyremained distinct,” and suggests that public intellectualism is “a productof the Enlightenment.”22

The question, however, is this: How did the Enlightenment set thestage for public intellectualism? Perhaps the most common view is thatthe Enlightenment’s liberation of the mind from the tyranny of religious



captivity and the advancement of “science” across the board in societyset the stage for the marriage of intellect and rule. Along these lines, his-torian Marc Fumaroli traces the rise of the “Republic of Letters,” a post-Reformation secularization of the Roman Catholic notion of “scholarsunited in a mystical body working together toward a common good whosesignificance is universal.”23 Many of these scholars, according to historianAnthony Grafton, also “pursued their research largely, or even primarily,for partisan reasons: in order to ensure the triumph of a religion or rulinghouse,” 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 thisEnlightenment tradition of public intellectualism. As historian GordonWood reminds us, the Founders were not professional politicians, butrather aristocratic gentlemen, who combined classical learning with asense of noblesse oblige that led them to abandon their farm or study totake up the reins of power.25 In this view, the founding philosopher-kingswere eclipsed in early nineteenth-century America as the result of thereligious revival known as the “Great Awakening,” the development of amore popular Jacksonian democracy, and the rise of intellectual currentslike transcendentalism, which harkened back to the Platonic notion ofthe disjuncture between politics and philosophy.26

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

Despite these possible pre- or post-Enlightenment sources of publicintellectualism, it is nonetheless fair to say that secular intellectual cur-rents and events have undeniably played a greater role in the emergence

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of what most of us recognize as the modern public intellectual. But whatare they? Conservative thinker Russell Kirk, to my mind, implausibly ar-gues that it is largely the intellectual legacy of Marxism.29 A much morecompelling case can be made that the primary “ism” undergirding mod-ern public intellectualism is liberalism. And its most salient Americanmanifestation was progressivism, which provided the intellectual founda-tion for engagement of scholars with policy—epitomized by WoodrowWilson, institutionalized in the New Deal Brains Trust, and brought toits apogee by Adlai Stevenson’s “eggheads” and John F. Kennedy’s NewFrontier.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 thestory of the history of ideas. Real-world events also served to broker themarriage between the world of ideas and political engagement. Some re-gard the seminal event as the Dreyfus Affair in France, which dragged in-tellectuals and other soldiers of ideas out of their studies and positionedthem on the barricades to combat the forces of religious and ethno-nationalist reaction in late nineteenth-century France.31 In contrast, a bitlater America went through a less dramatic process of public intellectualsemerging in response to events. One striking example was Robert LaFol-lette, who as governor forged a close working relationship with the Uni-versity of Wisconsin to address a host of real-world policy issues, whichwould set the stage for a more general engagement of American intellec-tuals with policy.32

Most would agree that the apogee of American intellectuals’ partici -pation in politics came with the Kennedy administration. Although theNew Frontier hardly depopulated the groves of academe, it did thrustscholars into the policy limelight and for a time “subtly transformed ourtree-shaded campuses from transmitters of knowledge to brokeragehouses of ideas.”33 In a glossy article in Look on what he termed the “ac-tion intellectuals,” journalist Theodore White wrote that with Camelot“scholars have arrived at the junction of history where their role in poli-tics demands definition. For it is as teachers, as cartographers only, thatthey must be seen. Their studies and surveys, however imperfect, arethe only road maps of the future showing the hazy contours of a newlandscape.”34



If the New Frontier marked the acme of intellectual engagement inpolicymaking, it also sounded the first stanzas of its swan song.35 Indeed,the sad fate of the “best and the brightest” in the Kennedy administra-tion, particularly their implication in the disastrous Vietnam decisions,represents a cautionary tale across the political spectrum about the perilsof intellectuals meddling in the public sphere.36 Apropos of these chang-ing attitudes, journalist David Halberstam recounted a conversation be-tween Lyndon Johnson and his political mentor, Sam Rayburn, the leg-endary Speaker of the House, in which the latter dammed the newpresident’s gushing about the intellectually brilliant cabinet he had inher-ited from his murdered predecessor: “Well, Lyndon, you may be right andthey may be every bit as intelligent as you say . . . but I’d feel a whole lotbetter about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.”37

Given this history, it is not surprising that contemporary thinkingabout public intellectualism is so polarized between those who, alongwith Russell Jacoby, are nostalgic for the time before Camelot when in-tellectuals and policy regularly mixed, and those who today think we areon the dawn of a new renaissance of public intellectualism, ushered in bythe Internet and mediated by the blogosphere. However, even scholarslike Anthony Grafton, who find the lost Golden Age/New Dawn di-chotomy overdrawn, nonetheless have to concede more to the pessimiststhan the optimists.38 In a recent opinion piece on nuclear proliferation inthe New York Times, physicist Lawrence M. Krauss laments that “to ourgreat peril, the scientific community has had little success in recent yearsinfluencing policy on global security.”39 This marks quite a change fromthe dawn of the nuclear age in which America’s atomic scientists had aseat at the policymaking table and a voice in our national public debateson these issues.40

In addition to clarifying the history of the American and other publicintellectual cases, we also need some more conceptual work to explainthe variation in the role and effectiveness of public intellectuals acrosstime and space. Do secular trends—modernity, the Enlightenment,even postmodernism—explain these patterns?41 Conversely, does the in-fluence of public intellectuals wax and wane as a result of cyclical trends,as Hofstadter suggests, with the emergence of particular policy problems,

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the engagement of intellectuals with them (both inside and outside ofgovernment), and the discontent and disappointment that inevitablycomes as theory and practice clash, as they invariably do?42 The chaptersin 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 pub-lic intellectualism, because a logical presumption of the investigation isthat they do, at least at some times and on particular issues. But thequestion needs to be answered, because a recent investigation of thetopic came to the conclusion that “there is little evidence that public in-tellectuals are highly influential.”43

There are two explanations for why this could be the case. First, onecould argue, as Posner does, that “real-world events have a much greaterimpact on public opinion than academic theories do.”44 Second, one couldmaintain, as historian Bruce Kuklick does, for example, that the ideas ofintellectuals merely serve policymakers as rationales or window dressingfor doing things they want to do on other grounds, such as ideology orbureaucratic 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, evenwhile sharing some elements of Posner’s jaundiced view, Thomas Sowelladmits that Posner may be right about the influence of “individual” pub-lic intellectuals, but he still believes that, in aggregate, they have a greaterimpact.46 This claim that the effect of public intellectuals as a group isgreater than the influence of individuals certainly bears further investiga-tion, which many of the contributions to this volume address.

Another way to qualify Posner’s conclusion would be to disaggregatethe policy process in a more detailed way, as political scientist John King-don does, into four discrete phases—(1) agenda setting; (2) specification



of alternatives; (3) choice; and (4) implementation—and then ask if per-haps the influence of public intellectuals varies by stage in the policyprocess.47

Yet another approach is to conceive of the policy process, again fol-lowing Kingdon, as “three process streams flowing through the system—streams of problems, policies, and politics. They are largely independentof one another, and each develops according to its own dynamics andrules. But at some critical junctures the three streams are joined, and thegreatest policy changes grow out of the coupling of problems, policyproposals, and politics.”48 What joins these streams, in his view, are “pol-icy windows” that periodically open and provide opportunities for out-siders to influence government policy.49 The questions, then, are these:When do such windows open, and what does it take to get public intel-lectuals to jump through them?

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

This question is addressed in a variety of different ways in the chap-ters by Suri, Bacevich, Willy Lam, Enrique Krause, Patrick Baert, Brad-ford 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 asecond important question: Is the influence of public intellectual goodor bad?

I suspect that most people think that the influence of public in-tellectuals is on balance positive. Who would deny that having smartpeople, with no vested bureaucratic interest at stake, weighing in on is-sues of public moment, would not produce better policy? Indeed, theirparticipation in this process seems like a sine qua non for the effectivefunctioning of the marketplace of ideas underpinning our system ofdeliberative democracy.

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Given that, it is striking how many thinkers—particularly but notexclusively from the Right of the political spectrum—come to the op-posite conclusion. Paul Johnson, for example, says that “one of the prin-cipal lessons of our tragic century, which has seen so many millions ofinnocent lives sacrificed in schemes to improve the lot of humanity is—beware intellectuals. Not merely should they be kept well away from thelevers of power, they also should be the objects of suspicion when theyseek to offer collective advice.”51 Johnson maintains that since the writ-ings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, we have been living under a “delusion”that the public activities of intellectuals could improve society.52 TheHoover Institution’s Sowell even blames such historical tragedies as theHolocaust and the crimes of communism on intellectuals.53 Speaking formany post-Vietnam academics and others on the Left, noted linguistand public intellectual Noam Chomsky concludes “that, as is no doubtobvious, the cult of the expert is both self-serving, for those who pro-pound it, and fraudulent.”54

Offering a less polemical, but still pointed, indictment, one of ourcontributors, Mark Lilla, previously came to a strikingly similar conclu-sion, warning that “whoever takes it upon himself to write an honest in-tellectual history of twentieth-century Europe will need a strong stom-ach.”55 Reviewing the various arguments about the puzzling historicalaffinity of intellectuals for various forms of tyranny—which include thewidely embraced view that blames religion and other pre-Enlightenmentfactors, Isaiah Berlin’s counterintuitive indictment of the Enlighten-ment itself, and his own perspective, which highlights the different social-historical context within which public intellectuals like Raymond Aronand Martin Heidegger operated—Lilla suggests a number of alternativeanswers to this question, including his own: “It depends.”56 Determiningexactly upon what the potential impact of public intellectuals dependsis another one of the central objectives of this volume. Suri, Bacevich,Lam, Ahmad Moussalli, DeLong, Lilla, Zuckert, Hösle, and I all discusswhether their effect is good or bad.

Despite the dire tone of their assessments of the deleterious con-sequences of public intellectuals, Johnson and Sowell do raise validconcerns. One is how far specific, specialized knowledge of the sort thatacademic public intellectuals possess travels to broader issues of public



policy?57 Hence, Sowell’s caution—“when people operate as ‘public in-tellectuals,’ espousing ideas and policies to a wider population beyondtheir professional colleagues, they may or may not carry over intellectualrigor into these more general, more policy-oriented, or more ideologi-cally charged discussions”—is worth heeding.58

A second, and perhaps more profound, question: Does the distinc-tion between “intellect” and “wisdom” that Sowell posits needs furtherdevelopment?59 Framed in a less polemical way, the question we mightask here is this: Is the distinction between “theoretical” as opposed to“practical” knowledge meaningful? And another related question hiswarning raises: What is the applicability of increasingly complex and ab-struse academic approaches and scholarly methodologies to public policydebates? Our chapters on the various disciplines and professions engagethis 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 re-cent commentators have come to the opposite conclusion. Typical isblogger and public policy professor Daniel Drezner, who laments the“dismal performance of intellectuals in proximity to power.”60 Johnsondismisses public intellectuals as “as unreasonable, illogical, and supersti-tious as anyone else.”61 Sowell agrees, arguing that the wisdom of crowdsis a more reliable font of wisdom than the oracular pronouncements ofindividual public intellectuals.62

In perhaps the most rigorous analysis of this question, social psy-chologist Phillip Tetlock concludes that publicly engaged scholars are infact worse at prediction than others.63 “When we pit experts againstminimalist performance benchmarks—dilettantes, dart-throwingchimps, and assorted extrapolation algorithms,” Tetlock damningly re-ports, “we find few signs that expertise translates into greater ability tomake either ‘well-calibrated’ or ‘discriminating’ forecasts.”64

Tetlock maintains that the most important element shaping the dy-namics of contemporary public intellectualism is intellectual style. Em-ploying a metaphor made famous by the British philosopher Isaiah

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