12/5/21

I’ve always been interested in the idea of the intellectual, and especially our ideas about whether or not the intellectual has special work to do in the public sphere. This idea of the “public intellectual,” which Richard Posner defines as someone who is brought up in the academy but often writes on topics outside their area of expertise or spends time popularizing their own work, seems to be a relatively new one. There have always been intellectuals who wrote for popular audiences and there have always been those who never leave the small islands of their balkanized academic specialties. Posner, however, isn’t interested in these; he’s only interested in those who have taught in in universities, but have somehow – whether through media popularity, popularizing books, or commenting on current events – made themselves known to an audience that would have been otherwise unreachable to them.

I was interested in Posner’s take on this subject because I know him as a sort of intellectual curmudgeon, fiercely critical of most ideas (not least his own), and independent political bent. In fact, most of the intellectuals that spend time getting raked over the coals in these pages are liberals – Martha Nussbaum, Ronald Dworkin, Paul Krugman, Stephen Jay Gould, and the list goes on. He does really get down on two well-known conservatives – Robert Bork and Gertrude Himmelfarb – for being public “Jeremiahs” (see below).

Perhaps the biggest problem with the book, and its most clumsy part, comes from Posner’s insistence on defining a marketplace for public intellectuals, and I use the word “marketplace” in the strict economic sense. He uses theories of supply and demand to analyze precisely why so many people who have such horrible predictive abilities often keep popping up over and over again in the media, and never seem to be held accountable for their inaccurate accounts of events. He harps on Jeane Kirkpatrick for saying in 1979 that “communist regimes, unlike right-wing autocracies, would never evolve into democratic societies” and Daniel Bell for suggesting that “traditional ideologies of the West were exhausted” (p. 139). Admittedly, Kirkpatrick and Bell weren’t the most public of public intellectuals, but we can see where he’s going with this. His response is that the decreasing size of academic specialization contributes to this and makes the “market” weaker. It does seem reasonable to point out that someone who has spent their entire life studying nineteenth century British poetry might not have that much interesting or new to say about, for example, U.S.-Israeli relations or gay marriage. However, the general public seems to be blinded by the idea that anyone in a position of academic authority must know everything about everything, when clearly they don’t. As the quote above points out, even Jeane Kirkpatrick made critical mistakes even within her area of specialty, international diplomacy.

There is a one-sentence summary hidden away on page 75 which adumbrates most of Posner’s discontents. Public intellectuals, he says, have “a proclivity for taking extreme positions, a taste for universals and abstraction, a desire for moral purity, a lack of worldliness, and intellectual arrogance” which work together “to induce selective empathy, a selective sense of justice, an insensitivity to context, a lack of perspective, a denigration of predecessors as lacking moral insight, an impatience with prudence and sobriety, a lack of realism, and excessive self-confidence.”

The second half of the book sets up five kinds of thought and criticism that is often produced by public intellectuals. The chapters are called “The Literary Critical as Public Intellectual” (which mostly takes down some of Martha Nussbaum’s much too egalitarian, liberal readings of several novels), “Political Satire” (which looks at Huxley and Orwell), “The Jeremiah School” (consisting mostly of conservatives who think the world is going to Hell in a hand basket – nota bene Kirkpatrick and Robert Bork), “The Public Philosopher” (Thomas Nagel and others), and “The Public Intellectual and the Law” (mostly a criticism of Ronald Dworkin, including commentary on his involvement with the Clinton impeachment).

At the end of the book, I didn’t feel like I had taken away much from what Posner had to say. It’s true that when you turn on the television or the radio, you seem to hear from the same public intellectuals repeatedly, and that they aren’t held responsible for their mistakes to the extent that they make them. I read this mostly for its witty, coruscating takedowns of some well-known thinkers. The few words he saves for Camille Paglia are priceless. He even vents toward some thinkers toward whom I feel some personal affinity, but this definitely isn’t a book-length polemic. Also, he must have a wonderful sense of humor, because in the Acknowledgements, he thanks many of the people he criticized most harshly for reading his first draft. ( )

An astonishing social critique. Brilliant.