“A RGUED RATHER THAN ASSERTED”: A SOCIAL THEORETICAL APPROACH TO RECASTING THE PUBLIC

INTELLECTUAL NARRATIVE

An Essay Presented

by

MAX JOSEPH KORNBLITH

to

THE COMMITTEE ON DEGREES IN SOCIAL STUDIES

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a degree with honors

of Bachelor of Arts

HARVARD COLLEGE

MARCH 2010

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION : 1 I. Entrée 1 II. Defining the Public Intellectual 5 III. Who are the Public Intellectuals? 9 IV. The Term on Its Own Terms 11 V. Theoretical Background 14 VI.. What to Expect 19 VII. Setting Forth 23

1: WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT THE “PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL” : 25

I. From the Concept of Intellectual to the Concept of Public Intellectual 25 II. Academic Freedom and the Academic Intellectual 33 III: The Role of the Philosopher 39 IV. Russell Jacoby and the “Last Intellectuals” 44 V. Weber and Academic Vocationalization 50 VI. Richard Posner’s Weberian Account 55 VII. Setting Up 60

2: THE ROLE OF PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL IN A SYSTEM-LIFEWORLD CONTEXT : 62

I. Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action as it Rewrites Weber’s Framework 63 II: The Threat of System to Lifeworld: Filling in (q) 67 III: Rewriting the Public Intellectual Narrative, a “First Cut” 69 IV: The Lifeworld and Lifeworld Processes 74 V: System, Lifeworld, and the Places in Between 75 VI: The Press, an Analogue in the Boundary Space 78 VII: Moving Toward a Reformulation of the Public Intellectual Narrative 85 VIII: Wrapping Up 89

3: MEDIA SITES AND THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL : 91

I: Public Intellectuals and New Media, A Topic for Debate 93 II: The Internet, “Friend or Foe”? 96 III: Considerations of Media in Rationalization Accounts of the Public Intellectual 101 IV: Intellectual-Media Relations 104 V: Origins of the Op-ed Page as a New Site of Public Intellectual Activity 106 VI: The Under-Examined Op-ed Page 111 VII: Theories of Intellectuals on the Op-ed Page 119 VIII: Finishing Up 122 CONCLUDING REMARKS : 125 I: Looking Back: The Path of the Investigation 125 II: Looking Forward: Extensions of the Investigation 127

CONTENTS, CONTD. APPENDIX : 131

BIBLIOGRAPHY : 141

INTRODUCTION :

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I. Entrée

Daniel Bell, in his 1960 The End of Ideology, presented the concepts of

“scholar” and “intellectual” in opposition to each other:

The scholar has a bounded field of knowledge, a tradition, and seeks to find his place in it, adding to the accumulated, tested knowledge of the past as to a mosaic. The scholar, qua scholar, is less involved with his “self.” The intellectual begins with his experience, his individual perceptions of the world, his privileges and deprivations, and judges the world by these sensibilities. Since his own status is of high value, his judgments of the society reflect the treatment accorded him.1

Bell posited the “End of Ideology,” a technocratic age of expert-led comity and

prosperity that would allow the latter half of the twentieth century to avert the

sorts of horrors wrought by committed ideologues in the century’s early decades.

One necessary corollary to such an age would be the disappearance of a political

life steered by this ego-driven intellectual,2 in favor of the emerging age of

moderate scholarly consensus Bell saw unfolding around him.

Bell’s contemporary, fellow sociologist C. Wright Mills, did not see the

same future. The closing chapters of Mills’s 1958 work, The Coming of World

War Three lay out a strikingly different vision. “At just this point in human

history,” asserts Mills, “the role of intellectuals might well be crucial.”3

Intellectuals, in Mills’s account, are within a rare category of people possessing

both “the power to act with structural relevance,” and the “aware[ness] of the

1 Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960), 372. 2 Bell asserted that the “compulsion for the free-floating intellectual to become political” stemmed from the devalorization of intellectual virtues in a “business society.” (372) 3 C. Wright Mills, The Causes of World War Three (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958), 136.

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consequences of their actions.”4 Even as some “avoid these troublesome issues,”5

intellectuals owe a duty to those in society who lack either the knowledge or the

power to influence history:

The intellectual’s first answer to the question, “What, then, ought we to do?” is: We ought to act as political intellectuals. In the U.S.A. today... [i]f we are not discontented or do not feel ourselves to be, then we usually give vague sorts of advice, generally in line with the motives and the tone of the powerful, and so we tend to become mere technicians. But if we are to act as public intellectuals, we must realize ourselves as an independent and oppositional group. Each of us, in brief, ought to act as if he were a political party. We must act on the assumption that we are called upon to state issues, to judge men and events, to formulate policies on all major public issues.6

Although Mills’s evaluation of the present hardly alters Bell’s, his vision of the

desirable outcome directly counters that of Bell. For Mills, danger lurks in the

potential that intellectuals might lack a public face and position—an ideology Bell

might say. Whom Bell sees as a “scholar,” Mills sees as a “mere technician,” an

intellectual who has forsaken his most basic social role and function, a private

intellectual.

The position articulated by Mills is seemingly consonant with the vision of

man’s transcendent reason that can be traced to Plato’s Republic by way of

Kantian Enlightenment thought and Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge:

the legitimacy to rule of the class with wisdom, reason, knowledge. Such a claim

necessitates engagement: Voltaire, writing on “L’homme de lettres” contrasted

4 Ibid. 131-2. 5 Ibid. 133. Mills notes the “little slogan, ‘we are not out to save the world’” as sometimes “the disclaimer of a modest scholar” but evidence too at times of “the cynical contempt of a specialist for all issues of larger concern.” 6 Ibid. 135-6.

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that role’s presumption of public engagement with “the scholastic obscurantism of

decadent universities and academics.”7 Bell’s indictment of Mills’s position

echoes a skepticism of man’s capability almost equally entrenched in thought

since the Enlightenment (e.g. in the thought of Hume, or Karl Popper). The

excerpt of Mills given above remains notable today, however, for marking the

earliest known use of a term now in wide circulation: the “public intellectual.”8

The specific compound “public intellectual” is not essential to Mills’s

argument—as seen above, he uses the term interchangeably with “political

intellectual”—but the words seem to register as a distinct and salient compound to

the modern reader, rather than a fungible one. It may come as a surprise that the

term seems to have only been popularized as such from 1987, when intellectual

and cultural historian Russell Jacoby is credited for the term’s re-entry into

circulation through his book The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age

of Academe.9 Jacoby introduces “the public intellectual” early and as the central

concept of his work: “My concern is with public intellectuals, writers and thinkers

who address a general and educated audience.” The definition comes in the

7 Patrick Saveau in Tzvetan Todorov, et al., “Forum: The Genealogy of the Intellectual since the French Enlightenment,” PMLA 112, No. 5 (1997): 1127. 8 Daniel C. Brouwer and Catherine R. Squires, “Public Intellectuals, Public Life, and the University,” in Amitai Etzioni and Alyssa Bowditch, eds., Public Intellectuals: An Endangered Species? (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 33; James A. Danowski and David W. Park, “Networks of the Dead or Alive in Cyberspace: Public Intellectuals in the Mass and Internet Media.,” New Media & Society 11, no. 3 (May 2009): 337-356. 9 Brouwer and Squires, 33; Richard A. Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2002), 26; Eleanor Townsley, “The Public Intellectual Trope in the United States,” American Sociologist 37, no. 3 (2006): 39-66; Russell Jacoby, “Introduction to the 2000 Edition,” in The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Basic Books, 2000/1987), xvi.

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context of expressing skepticism at the notion that “private intellectuals” could

continue to flourish while “public culture” decays.10

Jacoby’s definition seems simple enough: intuitive, though perhaps not

precise. The continually aggregating number of works on the public intellectual

seems to suggest it has some salience: it has appeared in dozens of article titles

over the past five years and anchored the title of at least a half dozen academic

books since 2000,11 and in popular news sources the term is often used as if its

meaning is self-evident.12

Some observers, though, have objected to the notion that the concept has

any meaning at all, at least beyond that already packaged within the notion of the

“intellectual.” Oxford literature scholar Helen Small has deemed the term “close

to, if not quite, a pleonasm”13 and father of post-colonialism Edward Said, too,

expressed the view that the “public” in public intellectual was redundant.14 One

thing these two critics have in common is that they are non-American:15 we might

well conjecture that for this reason Jacoby’s tale of the gulf between the

10 Jacoby, 5. 11 An EBSCOhost search of academic journals finds “public intellectual” or “public intellectuals” in 72 article titles since 2005. 12 A LexisNexis search brings up 212 uses in popular American newspapers (“U.S. Newspapers & Wires”) for just the year 2009; Eleanor Townsley tallied similar results in the popular press in the middle of the past decade, and counted 145 appearances of the term in The New York Times from 1987 through 2005. 88% of the times when used in The New York Times, the term was given as if it’s meaning was “self-evident,” according to Townsley (Townsley, 45-6). 13 Helen Small, “Introduction,” in Helen Small, ed., The Public Intellectual, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). Note that the claim is made in this book which nonetheless appropriates the term as its title. 14 Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Parthenon, 1994), 12. 15 This designation is debatable in the case of Said, as he was American-educated and installed in an American university.

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intellectual and the public may not resonate so deeply with them.16 That the term

has nonetheless achieved widespread use in an American context will serve as an

introductory indication that the denotation and connotations it carries are a worthy

starting point for theoretical investigation.

This account begins, admittedly, in media res: this project will not trace

the concept of the intellectual back to its emergence from the Dreyfus Affair,17 to

its ancestry in the French philosophes,18 or to the ancient Greek agora.19 Rather,

at this account’s foundation will be a focus on the presuppositions and

implications of the concept of “public intellectual” as distinct role, since its

emergence in America in the very recent past. Still, writing on such a topic seems

to require presaging this focus with a definition, however preliminary, of the

intellectual—and more specifically of the public intellectual.

II. Defining the Public Intellectual

While this project’s interest in “public intellectuals” proceeds, as will be

seen, from the term’s association with specific theoretical narratives, it seems

nonetheless fair to begin with a provisional analytic definition of the role to which

that concept seems to correspond. This definition can by no means hope to be

16 Or, perhaps America so used to “scholars,” that it has forgotten the previously available term “intellectuals.” 17 For an account that does so see Tony Kemp-Welch and Jeremy Jennings, Intellectuals in Politics: From the Dreyfus Affair to Salman Rushdie (New York: Routledge, 1997). 18 See Tzvetan Todorov, et al., “Forum: The Genealogy of the Intellectual since the French Enlightenment,” PMLA, 112, No. 5 (1997), 1121-1128. 19 See Thomas L. Pangle, “A Platonic Perspective on the Idea of the Public Intellectual,” in Arthur M. Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, and M. Richard Zinman, eds., The Public Intellectual: Between Philosophy and Politics, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlfield, 2003), 15-26.

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precisely accurate, for reasons both of the approach and the subject matter: no

social role can be strictly defined by combining a set of linguistic signifiers,

especially signifiers as contested as those raised in discussing the public

intellectual. The role’s definition here will have four prongs: a public intellectual

propagates 1) a certain method of expression, 2) in a certain social space, 3)

relating to a certain kind of concerns, 4) with a certain ethical orientation.

1) We take the term “intellectual” to apply to a person responsible,

vocationally or avocationally, for the production or transformation of cultural

products, and more specifically products that reconcile both the factual and

normative components of culture.20 Clearly such a definition does not exist

independently of a theoretical framework (which will become more transparent),

but it hopefully leaves latitude to conceive of a wide range of intellectuals and

intellectual products, from literary journals to legal opinions. Of course, many

who fall under this definition of intellectual will not be public intellectuals.

To be a public intellectual, then, one must be both intellectual and, in the

appropriate sense, public. The “public” in public intellectual will be taken to

represent a region in a continuous rather than discrete field: intellectuals are more

or less public rather than either public or not. Furthermore, this field represents

the confluence of two vectors of publicness, “Public” intellectuals exhibit

publicity in both their channel and their subject matter. 2) A public channel, in

this case, rests in the space between private and official (governmental or

20 This definition does not make intellectuals coextensive with “knowledge-workers” and hopefully serves to exclude a class of technical specialists that intuitively belong to the latter formulation but would not be called intellectuals.

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corporate) communication—lacking the specialized knowledge and limited

audience of the former but also the pre-determination of message of the latter.

Hence, literary journals are generally private and legal opinions generally

official,21 while newspapers are public channels. While intellectual products that

begin in specialized channels may migrate to more public domains, and may do so

more or less “naturally,”22 such migration presumably would not make the

product’s originator a public intellectual unless she chooses to play that role by

taking initiative to further explicate her findings in public.

3) Public subject matter, meanwhile, is harder to precisely define

independently of intuition. Based on the definition of the intellectual above,

public subject for an intellectual might at the very least be said to include the

consideration of society-level facts or values (on this scale, both literary criticism

and legal argument sometimes may but don’t necessarily make the cut).23

4) More than being an intellectual who communicates in a public channel

and upon public subject matter, however, the term “public intellectual” seems to

include some notion of autonomy of voice, such that an intellectual is making a

21 An exception could be made in the latter case for an institution like the U.S. Supreme Court, whose opinions often take on prerogatives beyond those of specialized legal reasoning in order to speak to a broader public. But it should be noted that the Supreme Court generally deals in cases to be outside the scope of existing precedent—the factor which “pre-determines” lower courts’ justificatory claims. 22 For instance, in the case of scientific theories receiving public attention due to “discovery” by the media versus due to their promotion by a specific interest group. 23 Note that the “or” within the definition implies that a situation whose implications are limited to a few (or one, or perhaps even zero) individuals but which can be related to overarching societal values does fit within this category of public subject matter.

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reasoned self-determined case, not someone else’s case. By this autonomy, the

fact-value reconciliation of the intellectual remarked upon above becomes an

argument.24 Autonomy may be the most amorphous of the public intellectual’s

characteristics: even if degrees of autonomy could be precisely measured, it

would be hard to pick a spot on the auton-o-meter to mark the boundary between

the public intellectuals and the otherwise valid qualifiers. Both the

intellectualized ideologue and the intellectually-clad economic stake-holder are

potentially excluded by this requirement: they can win entry only by

demonstrating that their cultural product is put forward on the basis of reason, the

hallmark of autonomy. As do the other criteria, this leaves some space for

disagreement over who exactly qualifies, especially for those who take reason to

be in the eye of the beholder. Still, the exclusion of those seemingly acting upon

material interest or on insufficiently self-interrogating ideologies is the strongest

reason why those who fit the role’s other three criteria may still not be considered

public intellectuals.

Any set of specific criteria for this largely symbolic title will provoke

casuistic cross-examination. What prevents a blogger from being a public

intellectual? Nothing in theory, but clearly built into the above is an assumption

of both reaching an audience and covering a subject matter that few bloggers

(which is not to say none) achieve. A television personality or talk radio host?

Most television personalities perform and present cultural objects that they did not

24 Those without autonomously-determined arguments, might by some be called scholars—in the academic case—and not intellectual, in line with the distinction of Daniel Bell.

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themselves produce: part of the intellectual’s publicness as above defined is to be

the face of one’s own thought. Talk radio, meanwhile, is a genre in which the

observer is unlikely to find autonomous reconciliation of values and facts, and

more likely to find the assumption of the pure ideologue that (as the two don’t

conflict) no such reconciliation is necessary. A textbook author? This seems to

fall just short on all of the counts. Instead the natural habitat of the public

intellectual seems to be channels such as highbrow magazines, mass-market non-

fiction, public television, the op-ed page, public speaking engagements, and the

emerging intellectual regions of the internet—though doing such work in other

formats is not impossible. Meanwhile, for some individuals, such as think tank

representatives, their challenge seems to lie substantially apart from the

limitations of a medium.25

III. Who are the Public Intellectuals?

The question often arises of who, specifically, counts as a public

intellectual. At no point will this project attempt on its own to enumerate those

filling the role: the focus will be past conceptions of the role, theorization of the

role itself, and an examination of the role in context. Previous attempts to answer

the who question and name specific agents within the role, then, deserve a brief

review. Various lists, with varied aspirations to comprehensiveness, of public

intellectuals have been compiled.

25 The fascinating topic of the think tank intelligentsia won’t receive much coverage in the present project, for reasons to be seen. For an early take on the influence and intellectual legitimacy of think tanks see James A. Smith, The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite (New York: Free Press, 1991).

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In 2005, Foreign Policy and Prospect (UK) let readers vote on a pre-

selected list of 100 contenders for the title of world’s top public intellectual;

20,000 readers voted and the resulting top five consisted, in order, of Noam

Chomsky, Umberto Eco, Richard Dawkins, Václav Havel, and Christopher

Hitchens. (The top five write-in votes for figures not included on the ballot:

Milton Friedman, Stephen Hawking, Arundhati Roy, Howard Zinn, and Bill

Clinton.)26 Judge, and self-admitted public intellectual, Richard A. Posner’s 2001

book Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline tallied media mentions and

scholarly citations of a list of 546 (mainly American) apparent public intellectuals

for the period 1995-2000. This study found Henry Kissinger to just edge out

Daniel Patrick Moynihan to top the list of media mentions and Michel Foucault to

exceed runner-up Pierre Bourdieu by a wide margin as leader in scholarly

citations.27 Like Foreign Policy’s effort, of course, Posner’s required someone to

first compile a list of contenders (him); it also made no effort to distinguish

importance or quality of citations and mentions (nor, as can be seen, did being

deceased disqualify a candidate).

In his coinage of the term public intellectual, Russell Jacoby valorized the

intellectuals of the early Cold war years, and provided a set of whom he had in

26 “Prospect/FP Top 100 Public Intellectuals Results,” Foreign Policy, October 2005 (web exclusive), < http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:XzPi0z0L-WsJ:www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php%3Fstory_id%3D3260+2005+public+intellectuals+poll&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us >. (Note that the original version was not accessible on the journal’s website at the time of writing. The preceding address provides a cached version of the piece stored in Google’s archive. I consider it accurate after having consulted contemporary media reports of the poll’s results, which confirm the relevant details). 27 Posner, 209-213. Explanation of the rankings begins from 167.

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mind. His New York-centric list focused on the type of social critics that society

seemed to him to no longer be producing: “Mary McCarthy, Philip Rahv, C.

Wright Mills, Dwight Macdonald, Lionel Trilling, David Reisman, Irving Howe,

Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Edmund Wilson, Lewis Mumford, Malcolm Cowley,

Sidney Hook, and numerous others.”28 Since Jacoby’s work, objectors to his

thesis that public intellectuals have “disappeared” have felt compelled to catalog

the “new” public intellectuals. Those desiring a contemporary listing can turn to a

Daniel Drezner’s 2009 “Public Intellectuals 2.1” in the journal Society.29

Drezner’s long, unranked list can be found in the Appendix, along with those of

Foreign Policy and Posner.

IV. The Term on Its Own Terms

Many pages of what follows are devoted to claims and explanations of

such a disappearance. In fact, having provided a preliminary definition of the role

as well as a list of agents identified within it, it seems timely to note that this

project’s first sustained volley of inquiry will advance not upon those topics, but

rather into how the concept of the public intellectual has been “discovered.” One

preliminary theoretical point follows from the disagreement between Jacoby and

Drezner above: the emergence of a notion of “public” intellectuals—taking place

28 Jacoby, 8-9. Both Jacoby and Posner also cite the work of Charles Kadushin who in the early 1970’s produced a list of America’s then-top intellectuals. His top ten included several of the figures cited by Jacoby above, in addition to Daniel Bell, Noam Chomsky, John Kenneth Galbraith, Norman Mailer, Robert Silvers, and Susan Sontag. See Charles Kadushin, The American Intellectual Elite (Boston: Little Brown, 1974). 29 Daniel W. Drezner, “Public Intellectuals 2.1,” Society 46, no. 1 (January 2009): 49-50.

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as it has in the late twentieth-century United States30—seems to make the most

sense when contextualized as a recognition of a trend toward the contrary, toward

the privatization of the intellectual. In this framework, there emerges—first

among Russell Jacoby and soon after among those following his lexicographic

lead—a tendency to denote as “public intellectualism” a role commonly

associated with the plain old “intellectual.” But this occurs only as the traditional

class of those who identify and are identified as “intellectuals” segregate

themselves into an academic sphere marked by specialization and non-public

debate (in terms of topic, vocabulary, and forum).31 This is the gist of Russell

Jacoby’s thesis. And Richard Posner’s book in many ways represents a

restatement of Jacoby from a (politically) conservative angle.32 Both agree that

socialization into the academy is largely to blame for public intellectuals’ decline.

(This parallel will be explored in the following chapter.)

Scholars of the public intellectual role have not always taken their subject

matter to be fixed within the privatization narrative. Identifying the type of public

discourse in which “public intellectuals” are typically expected to take part as

elitist, some analysis have instead sought to establish a contrary spirit which

ought to define the true public intellectual. For instance, drawing on the thought

30 Note that the term has recently been applied increasingly in non-American contexts as well. The Foreign Policy poll above provides one example. Also, Charlotta Stern, “European Professors as Public Intellectuals,” Society 46, no. 2 (March 2009): 110-18 for the use of the term in a discussion of European intellectuals. Stern argues that Europe is just now seeing a rise of the private scholar analogous to what America has already seen. 31 The traditional intellectual then, is analytically identical in definition to the modern “public” intellectual. 32 Though, as will be seen, Jacoby models public intellectuals as declining in number whereas Posner sees instead a decline in their quality.

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of John Dewey, communication scholars Daniel C. Brouwer and Catherine R.

Squires have attempted to establish the sense in which an academic’s teaching of

the future public ought to be considered a public intellectual role,33 while

literature scholar Ellen Cushman has suggested service learning as a bridge

between the academic’s public and private responsibilities, and the hallmark of a

properly public intellectual.34

In general, though, “public intellectual” has been a concept validated by

its use mainly in the context of the sphere of print discourse in common language.

Redefining the “public” role of the public intellectual as the two aforementioned

works do, then, seems an exercise in changing the subject. Though service

learning and devoted academic teachers undoubtedly serve the public good, they

seem to focus on doing so in the intellectual’s capacity as a private professional.35

Instead, the definition presented at the outset of this chapter, as well as the term’s

regular usage, draws focus to intellectuals in the public sphere of debate, and to

redefine “public intellectual” to denote something else would require devising a

new term for this previously identified phenomenon.

Thus, the present inquiry will be in the spirit of those who have tracked

the development of the term “public intellectual” in line with its initial usage.36

33 Brouwer and Squires in Etzioni, 33-50.. 34 Ellen Cushman, “The Public Intellectual, Service Learning, and Activist Research,” in Etzioni and Bowditch, 101-110. 35 Or maybe as a citizen overcoming a certain set of institutional constraints. 36 Those who begin exploration of the concept with a discussion of Russell Jacoby include Ira Katznelson, “The Professional Scholar as Public Intellectual: Reflections Prompted by Karl Mannheim, Robert K. Merton, and C. Wright Mills,” in Arthur M. Melzer, Jerry Weiberger, and M. Richard Zinman, eds., The Public Intellectual: Between Philosophy and Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman &

14

One example is sociologist of public culture Eleanor Townsley, who has

cataloged the term’s use in the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher

Education from its introduction in 1987.37 One thing she noted—as have many

who’ve written on the subject—is that the term is characteristically mentioned in

the context of the public intellectual role’s decline.38 Examining the concept of

public intellectual in its original context, then, also serves to address the questions

of why this association exists, and whether the decline narrative could be kept at

bay without the wholesale redefinition of “publicness” attempted in other re-

examinations.

V. Theoretical Background

This project’s first chapter will locate the basis of the prevalence of

decline narratives in the ties between past conceptions of the public intellectual

role and the thought of Max Weber. The term’s origination by Russell Jacoby

will be contextualized within Weber’s thesis of rationalization of life spheres, and

the extended investigation of public intellectuals by Richard Posner will be

examined as a restatement of the rationalization narrative with different aspects

emphasized. Though Jacoby and Posner don’t exclusively focus on the cultural

dimension of vocationalization that Weber emphasizes, each story seems

nonetheless to depend on the manner in which vocationalism crushes the proper

Littlefield, 2003), 189-200; Daniel W. Drezner, “Public Intellectuals 2.1”; Amitai Etzioni “Are Public Intellectuals an Endangered Species?” in Etzioni and Bowditch, 1-30. 37 Townsley, 39-66. 38 Townsley also draws on the contexts of the term’s use to raise the aforementioned concern that the public intellectual naturalizes an elite sphere of discourse.

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spirit of the intellectual.39 It is through these parallels that this project seeks to

investigate the tension that emerges between a desire for constructive (and

instructive) accounts of public intellectualism and the tendency of the public

intellectual to be highlighted in stories of decline.40

Hence the project’s interest in a second-order reading of the public

intellectual concept-framework—second-order in the sense of taking as the main

point of focus not the phenomenon itself but the frameworks in which the

phenomenon is examined—is to elucidate the theoretical strands below the

surface. It is for this reason that the first chapter will not be one of the many

things it could be: a direct history of public intellectuals in America (as, for

example, Jacoby attempted), an enumeration of such intellectuals today (as briefly

provided above), or a theoretical account of how the academy moulds

intellectuals.41 The interplay of the Weberian echoes within accounts of public

intellectuals’ decline with empirical protestations against such narratives, along

39 For Jacoby that spirit is generally one of social criticism whereas Posner’s economicism causes him to stress the degree to which successful public intellectuals (suppliers) are responsive to their audience (consumers). 40 Etzioni in “Are Public Intellectuals an Endangered Species?” and Drezner in “Public Intellectuals 2.1,” among others, have objected to the public intellectual’s tie in concept to a decline framework, but seem largely to have taken such a link as incidental and empirically surmountable. One potential explanation for the tie of this concept to a story of decline is the term’s emergence in the era of the “Culture Wars”—Jacoby’s book appeared the same year as Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. An account along these lines is presented in John Michael’s Anxious Intellects: Academic Professionals, Public Intellectuals, and Enlightenment Values, briefly covered in the next chapter. While such a causal tie might present historical interest, it will be raised only in passing. 41 For two such accounts from quite different perspectives see Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus (Stanford, CA: Stanford, 1988 [1984]) and the theoretical portions of Neil Gross, Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2008).

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with the prior claims to the concept’s muddled or pernicious character, suggest an

imperative to stake out a different way to give a theoretical account of public

intellectuals.42 To avoid “changing the subject,” though, this project seeks to do

so by addressing, rather than ignoring, the edifice before us in the form the

original theoretical narrative—building upon it in some senses while

deconstructing its flaws in others. Thus the investigation of the concept of the

role will lead into to a re-centering of that concept.

The specific theory drawn upon on in the project’s constructive phase (and

second chapter) is that of Jürgen Habermas. The turn to Habermas will be more

clearly motivated as the story develops, but emerges fundamentally from his

rewriting of Weber within a theoretical system that prioritizes the value of mutual

understanding through public communication. Habermas’s theory holds promise

for its specific engagement with the Weberian framework, and for engaging in a

manner that holds out hope that the subjective experience of rationalization

charted by Weber does not signal irreparable societal doom. Habermas’s

framework holds special relevance for the present topic of study, an actor engaged

with what he coined as “the public sphere.”

While the analysis will draw on both the early, more historically grounded

work of Habermas (specifically 1962’s The Structural Transformation of the

Public Sphere) and his later work grounded more in an account of an indelible

42 As an example of such a reconstruction on different grounds see Thomas Bender’s a theoretically-grounded attempt to build the history of American intellectuals around the precepts of urban studies (a possibility hinted at in Jacoby): Thomas Bender, Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1993).

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human capacity for intersubjectivity (1981’s The Theory of Communicative

Action), this project will not particularly address the consequences of such a shift

in Habermas’s theoretical account over time. This includes neglecting the first

volume of Communicative Action, in which Habermas lays the post-metaphysical

basis for the theoretical centrality of discursive reason. While the analysis will

briefly use 1992’s Between Facts and Norms to elucidate the self-regulating

capabilities that characterize a healthy democracy, it will not explicate that work’s

focus on institutionalized governmental capabilities.

Still, the several works of Habermas carry a consistent theme—a theme of

the power of intersubjective communication to overcome the pressures imposed

by modernity—and returning to his earliest work on the public sphere is useful for

an attempt to reground the public intellectual narrative from a perspective rooted

in that sphere. This account follows Thomas McCarthy in believing that

Structural Transformation provides a useful and concrete foreshadowing of

Habermas’s later work.43 And, while the later portions of that book focus on an

orthodox Frankfurt School critique of the modern mass media, the project joins

Craig Calhoun in prizing the book’s earlier chapters as an exploration of the

possibilities for the constitution of a freely grounded communicative public

sphere.44 As in Structural Transformation, the theory constructed herein may

43 Thomas McCarthy “Introduction,” in Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Burger, trans. (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1989 [1962]), xi. 44 Craig Calhoun, “Introduction: Habermas and the Public Sphere,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, Craig Calhoun, ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1992), 39. Also at 10 where Calhoun calls the early chapters “both more original and more interesting.”

18

overlook some of the practical issues of limited accessibility posed by even

relatively successful public spheres. But that work’s historical account will assist

as this project seeks to turn the focus of the story of the public intellectual from

one of rationalization of the intellectual class into a story of investigating the

communicative potential of relevant media environments.

In “Political Communication in Media Society: Does Democracy Still

Enjoy an Epistemic Dimension? The Impact of Normative Theory on Empirical

Research,” Habermas has attempted to provide guidelines for how a theory of

democracy centered on communicative rationality could guide empirical research

in communications.45 While highlighting recent empirical work that validates the

possibility of a free public sphere (such as the ability of those working in media to

form independent normative codes and evidence that the mass public’s decision-

making may be based on generalized heuristics rather than mere ignorance),46 he

suggested that communications research should focus on examining successes and

failures with regard to the two “critical conditions” for achieving truly

deliberative outcomes through “mediated political communication.” Those two

conditions are that “a self-regulating media system gains independence from its

social environments” and that “anonymous audiences grant a feedback between

an informed elite discourse and a responsive civil society.”47 That is, examination

of media systems functioning within the public sphere should focus 1) on those

45 Jürgen Habermas, “Political Communication in Media Society: Does Democracy Still Enjoy an Epistemic Dimension? The Impact of Normative Theory on Empirical Research,” Communication Theory 16, no. 4 (2006): 411-26. 46 Ibid. 419-20. 47 Ibid. 411.

19

systems’ abilities to cultivate norms of discourse driven by the forces of reasoned

communication rather than by commercial imperatives and 2) on whether such

systems facilitate power-dispersion in society rather than elite feedback loops.

Following on the broader scale explication of Habermas’s theoretical in

the second body chapter then, the third will take on the explication of the “op-ed

page” as a format tied to the “public intellectual.” The examination will take the

form of a normative evaluation of that format’s promises and shortcomings as a

deliberative process within the public sphere.

VI. What to Expect

In the project’s first chapter, the above-outlined second-order interest in

the usages and narratives surrounding the term “public intellectual” is the

motivation for the opening section “What We Talk About When We Talk About

the Public Intellectual.”48 This leads to a focus on the academic vocation, and two

of the classic issues raised by the topic—the concept of academic freedom, and

the public role of academic reason—are explored in the abstract in the sections

that follow, “Academic Freedom and the Academic Intellectual” and “The Public

Role of the Philosopher.” The concluding segments of the chapter return to the

examination of the public intellectual concept as a central node in a specific set of

48 While this project won’t have space to address every work that purports to cover this topic, each of the following is a useful place to find a variety of viewpoints concerning the public intellectual, some but not all of which are recounted in this or the successive chapter: “Symposium: Part I: Public Intellectuals Then and Now,” Society 46, no. 1 (January 2009): 12-54; “Symposium: Part II: Who are the Public Intellectuals?” Society 46, no. 2 (March 2009): 110-154; Etzioni and Bowditch (see note 9, above); “The Future of the Public Intellectual: A Forum,” The Nation, February 12, 2001, 25-35. A longer listing of relevant works can be found in the bibliography.

20

narratives, in order to cross-examine the social theoretical presuppositions which

underlie such narratives. “Russell Jacoby and the Last Intellectuals,” “Weber and

Academic Vocationalization,” and “Richard Posner’s Weberian Account” join in

building the case that the privatization account of the intellectual takes the form of

the account of rationalization laid out in the thought of Max Weber, transposed

into the academic sphere.49 The chapter’s investigation of past conceptions of the

role of public intellectual motivates what is to be seen in the second chapter: a

turn toward theorization upon the role itself, in the hopes of advancing the

theoretical picture without a discontinuous break from past phrasings of the

concept.

The second chapter, then, the more categorically theoretical portion of the

project, begins (in the section “Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action as it

Rewrites Weber’s Framework”) with the introduction of Jürgen Habermas’s

critique of Weber’s thought as laid out in the Theory of Communicative Action,

Volume 2. The connection of this critique to the central theme of Habermas’s

theoretical system—a defense of a fragile, free modernity rooted in the power of

discursive interaction is then explored (in “The Threat of System to Lifeworld”).

With this in mind, the next step is to take a stab at rewriting the narrative of public

intellectuals with a focus on the prospect for forums of public communication that

49 In doing so, I largely ignore Weber’s thesis that the root of such rationalization in the Western world rests in a religious transformation (the developments constructed in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism). Rationalization was a central theme of modernity for Weber in all spheres of modern life: he himself noted that “rationalizations of the most varied character have existed in various departments of life and in all areas of culture.” Max Weber, “Author’s Introduction,” in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Talcott Parsons, trans. (New York: Scribner, 1958 [1920]), 22.

21

withstand the forces of Weberian rationalization (“Rewriting the Public

Intellectual Narrative, a ‘First Cut’”). The investigation briefly explores an

ambiguity relating to the conceptual versus societal impressions of a culture of

communicative reason (“Lifeworld and Lifeworld Processes”) before drawing on

Habermas’s later work Between Facts and Norms to thematize in this context the

value to a free society of a functioning civil society as the reflex to draw matters

into the sphere of reasoned debate (“System, Lifeworld, and the Places in

Between”). This brings the project to an examination of The Structural

Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas’s earliest and most concrete

work. The project proceeds first to read this more historical work in light of the

system of thought developed in the other works of Habermas (“The Press, an

Analogue in the Boundary Space”). What follows then develops the theoretical

analogy of the early bourgeois press’s role to that of the public intellectual

(“Moving Toward a Reformulation of the Public Intellectual Narrative”), settling

on a framework in which the public intellectual—sitting at the border of system

and lifeworld—is both parallel to the modern mass media in certain aspects of

practical effect, and also exists in necessary interplay with the media through

which s/he maintains public access. In sum, then, the second chapter builds on

the established conception of the public intellectual laid out in the first to theorize

the role from an alternative—media-centered and normative—perspective.

This sets up the third chapter as an extension of the second chapter’s

theme in the form of an application of this normative evaluative framework to

media formats linked with public intellectuals. Beginning with the observation

22

that new technological developments—the rise of the internet and the seeming

potential for the rise of “virtual” public intellectuals—have received some recent

attention in the theorization of public intellectuals (in the section “Public

Intellectuals and New Media, A Topic for Debate”), the project briefly undertakes

the question of the internet’s potential to be a free and productive site of discourse

(in “The Internet, Friend or Foe?’). This raises the question of whether the role

of sites of discourse has been underemphasized in the characteristic account of the

public intellectual’s past (“Considerations of Media in Rationalization Accounts

of the Public Intellectual”), which is followed by an examination of work that has

been done on encounters of the academic class with the media (“Intellectual-

Media Relations”). Eventually the investigation turns to a site of discourse that,

while often underemphasized in tellings of the story, has come to be identified

with the public intellectual in both that role’s positive and negative aspects: the

op-ed page. Noting that the modern American op-ed page50 dates only to 1970

(“Origins of the Op-Ed Page as a New Site of Public Intellectual Activity”)—and

hence is roughly contemporaneous with the trends described in Russell Jacoby’s

narrative—provides the impetus to investigate this facilitator of the spread of

argument-based “outsider” views into the public sphere. After briefly reviewing

the past empirical literature on the topic in the field of communications (“The

Under-Examined Op-Ed Page”), the chapter proceeds to consider how this assists

in an account of the role of public intellectual which focuses on the effectiveness

of media sites for the maintenance of the lifeworld (“Theories of Intellectuals on

50 Taken here to mean a daily page consistently featuring opinion pieces of non-regular outside contributors.

23

the Op-Ed Page”). The ultimate goal is not to valorize the op-ed page as an

overlooked site of public intellectual flourishing. The point, however, is that

putting focus on a site of discourse rather than a person makes the case that the

contingencies upon which “successful” public intellectualism depends might best

be evaluated from a perspective other than that of the specific agent, and free of

from the weight of bleak tales of rationalization.

VII. Setting Forth

The hope in the following is that each section of the work—through focus

on the interdisciplinary imprints of the phenomenon—might aid in elucidating the

others: That the theory of Habermas and its linkage to the thought of Weber might

clarify why a concept of the “public intellectual” has arisen as it has, and how that

concept might fall short; That the case of public intellectuals might motivate

further reflection on the theories of the public sphere and communicative

regulation of society; And that the theoretical motivation to conceive of a “public

intellectual” narrative centered on media sites rather than the intellectual class,

might prove food for thought within a literature whose disputes often seem less

self-conscious of their dependence upon theory. This is not a theoretical

challenge to the role of the public intellectual or to accounts of who specifically

fulfills it. Rather this project seeks to place the concept of such a role in an

expanded theoretical context, in order to challenge some truisms of the role and

its potential decline, mainly as such truisms are conceptually understood by

observers, but also as experienced by agents. Hence the focus shifts from the

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subjective experience of rationalization to the resiliency possible in certain

communicative situations.

The project, then, in total seeks to draw the parallels between the

characteristic story of public intellectuals’ decline and the Weberian

rationalization narrative, to theoretically re-center such a narrative in Habermas’s

framework of system and lifeworld, and to use this focus on the properties of

discourse to begin an account in which the potential of media sites for discursive

interchange takes a central place. Such a theoretical journey concomitantly raises

the hope that the future of the public intellectual is not as grim as has perhaps

been made out, even if future intellectuals remain vocationally situated within the

academy. The overall point, though, is not that theorists of the public intellectual

have been completely oblivious to the impact of media intermediaries upon their

object of study. In its strongest and most characteristic form, the tale of the public

intellectual is guilty, however, of the Weberian fallacy of linking technical

advance to metaphysical decline. Such tales hint, too, at the dangerous allure of a

societal-level account of intellectual work in which the intellectual-subject’s own

conceptual universe remains central. This project, then, like perhaps the ideal

public intellectual, is both critical and hopeful.

1: WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT THE “PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL ”

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This chapter will focus on the theoretical grounding of accounts of the

“public intellectual” in America. The opening section will use recent literature to

mark this term as linked to a picture of the pernicious effects of specialization

within the American academy. The subsequent section will examine how the

specific vocational ends articulated by the academy seem to challenge inhabitants’

ability to aspire to broader social relevance. The third section will focus on first

Kantian and then pragmatist articulations of the academic’s role in addressing the

public. The final three sections of the chapter, then, will return to the specific

discourse surrounding the “public intellectual” in contemporary American

thought. They will focus on how the characteristic conception of this role and of

its decline due to the rise of academic vocationalization has paralleled—often

explicitly—Max Weber’s framework of rationalization, in which society’s

productive advance through the escalating delineation of those spheres oriented

toward specific ends inherently undermines its ability to sustain thought systems

meaningful for its subjects. It is to its roots in the Weberian framework of

modernity achieved through rationalization, the chapter’s case will be, that the

concept of public intellectual owes its link to narratives of decline.

I. From the Concept of Intellectual to the Concept of Public Intellectual

Following the distinctions established in this work’s introduction, this

section will use a review of recent scholarship to proceed from a discussion of the

general role of the intellectual to a discussion of how the concept of “public

intellectual,” has been deployed specifically in the context of questioning the

interplay of the responsibility of the intellectual with the ends of the academy.

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Work on the public intellectual, of course, taps into a broader discourse of

the proper role of the intellectual. A central issue concerns whether the

intellectual should strive for participation or detachment. Political theorist

Michael Walzer, in his collection of case studies of renowned social critics, The

Company of Critics, emphasizes participation as successful intellectuals’ single

most important attribute. In his introduction, Walzer summarizes succinctly,

“criticism is most properly the work of ‘insiders,’ men and women mindful of and

committed to the society whose policies or practices they call into question.”1

Edward Said, meanwhile, in a set of public BBC lectures published in

1994 as Representations of the Intellectual, underscored the position of “exile” as

the natural place of the intellectual. “Insiders promote special interests,” Said

asserts, while the intellectual’s role is instead to challenge entrenched power and

custom.2 While claiming that too much effort is spent attempting to “define” the

intellectual role as opposed to analyzing the role’s practical effect, Said counts

himself as one who questions the appropriateness of the terminology of public

intellectual:

[T]here is not such thing as a private intellectual, since the moment you set down words and then publish them you have entered the public world. Nor is there only a public intellectual, someone who exists just as a figurehead or spokesperson or symbol of a cause, movement, or position.3

1 Michael Walzer, “Introduction to the Second Edition,” The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 2002), xi. 2 Said, xiii . It can, of course, be observed that Walzer as editor of Dissent and Said as a longtime exile from his homeland were speaking from very different biographical background, though of course each was also speaking as a professor at an Ivy League university. 3 Said, 12.

27

Inherent in his formulation, however, is that different intellectuals may possess

different degrees of public-ness, of both publicly-performed action and of concern

for public issues.

Said is correct in stating that outside of a specific context the term seems

analytically redundant: no intellectual can completely evade all public indication

of his existence. Shifting from a concern with the general role of the intellectual

as it comes in contact with public subject matter to a specific examination of the

concept of the public intellectual role, however, will demonstrate that the term

“public intellectual” arose in a specifically American context in which an

increasing amount of intellectual activity is increasingly private.4 The concept of

“public intellectual” implicitly links the pursuit of knowledge or wisdom and the

exercise of power. In a continuum of potential roles for members of the

knowledge-relating class, the ivory-tower academic is seen on one end of the

spectrum and the hard-nosed political practitioner on the other.

As cultural sociologist Eleanor Townsley has put it, “it could be argued

from the perspective of other national intellectual traditions that the term ‘public

intellectual’ is redundant,” but in America, the term implicitly raises “a well-

understood set of issues about how intellectual life should be practiced.”5

4 As explored in the Introduction and as will be expanded upon below, this is not a claim that the idea of an intellectual attaining publicity was in any way an American invention. Rather the story is of the fear of America’s privatization of its intellectuals. The origination of the term “intellectual” in nineteenth century France (necessarily) presupposed publicity, and the intellectual’s antecedent in the Homes des Lettres was crucial in constituting the very idea of a public in post-Enlightenment France. 5 Townsley, 39.

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Townsley tracks uses of the term in the New York Times: the first occurs in

1987—the year of Jacoby’s coinage—and steady growth is seen throughout the

nineties, with a new spike in the years between the turn of the millennium and

Townsley’s 2005 publication. She finds the term is pervasively used in a positive

sense (93% of the time) and with the implication that its meaning is self-evident

(88%).6

Seeking to analyze the public intellectual as a “trope” recurring in the

discussion of a specific American class, and especially its journalism, Townsley

concludes that the term “public intellectual” has gained currency by serving as a

cloak and justification “to legitimate a range of professional and institutional

strategies for putatively non-partisan actors in the academy and media.”7 Its use

for the media is as an argument that the public rather than the academy serves as

legitimator in measuring intellectual-cultural capital. For those in the academy,

Townsley draws on the almost functionalist picture of the university of Pierre

Bourdieu to argue that the term “public intellectual” appeals to (among others)

“those with lower amounts of specifically scientific capital.”8 In other words,

among academics the term itself provides a status-boost for those whose skills are

otherwise seen as less useful.

6 Townsley, 46-7. 7 Townsley, 58. 8 Townsley 55-6. In calling Bourdieu’s narrative almost functionalist, I mean to note the extent to which he believes intellectuals’ political and social views correspond to their status within the academy. Bourdieu sees that status itself as resulting from the re-creation within the academy of prior class differences, or as he says “a gradual transformation of inherited advantages into ‘earned’ advantages.” It should be remembered that this was intended very specifically as a representation of the French academy. Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus (Stanford, CA: Stanford, 1988 [1984]), 53.

29

Along similar lines, John Michael has linked the question of the place for

public intellectuals within the modern academy to an “anxiety” saturating the

American university. Such anxiety stems, he says, from the “culture wars”

around the turn of the nineties regarding the usefulness of modern disciplines

outside the technical sciences.9 Along such lines, references to the public

intellectual by academics often arise in the context of how specific disciplines can

fulfill it: “The Bioethicist as Public Intellectual,”10 “The College Professor as

Public Intellectual,”11 “The Need for Public Intellectuals: A Space for STS.”12

In defending literary criticism as a discipline aligned in its methodology to

play a public role, Bruce Robbins in 1993 proposed a reflexivity to the public

intellectual role in arguing that disciplines “manufacture vocations for

themselves” by “speaking in public, of the public, to the public, and to some

extent for the public.”13 Robbins’s assertion seems in some sense an admission of

the thesis expressed by Townsley above: that public intellectuals participate in the

public sphere in order to win legitimation for their pre-formed ideologies as well

as validation of their vocation.14 And yet, a counter-narrative can be told from it

9 John Michael, Anxious Intellects: Academic Professionals, Public Intellectuals, and Enlightenment Values (Durham, NC: Duke, 2000). 10 Kayhan P. Parsi and Karen E. Geraghty, “The Bioethicist as Public Intellectual,” American Journal of Bioethics 4, no. 1 (2004): 17-23. 11 Rita Bornstein, “Back in the Spotlight: The College President as Public Intellectual,” Educational Record 76, no. 4 (1995): 56-62. 12 Wiebe E. Bijker, “The Need for Public Intellectuals: A Space for STS,” Science, Technology & Human Values 28, no. 4 (2003): 443. 13 Bruce Robbins, Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (New York: Verso, 1993), 21. 14 An economist might call this a form of rent-seeking: nothing is produced through public intellectualism it rather seeks to capture an existing pool of public resources/attention for a set of competing pre-existing interests.

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as well: Robbins sees public interaction in this case as a check on academic

disciplines, a mechanism to restore their balance with public needs. Robbins’s

university-centric formation evokes a symmetry in which both sides (public and

intellectual) regulate the public intellectual’s conduct, the one through needs and

the other through skills. As such, Robbins sees his account as a natural counter to

the sort of narratives of decline often encountered in tales of the public

intellectual (the pervasiveness of which will be explored below).

While Said had argued that a certain “amateurism” is necessary for honest

intellectual activity—to free one from allegiance to purely professional

obligations15—Robbins argues that the public intellectual itself represents a

“secular vocation.” Robbins’s formulation finds an equally Weberian echo in an

from Alan Wolfe, a scholar of religion and politics, in his article “The Calling of

the Public Intellectual.” The role of (public) intellectual, Wolfe says, must be

self-claimed: “No one designated me an intellectual. I took the role myself... If I

have any authority, I developed it in the course of what I do.”16

In a sense, though, Wolfe’s notion of a calling conforms with Said’s

“amateurism” in holding that the public intellectual role is one that must be

defined outside of one’s professional training as a scholar. Wolfe’s piece is also

notable in that it taps a thus-far unmentioned category of study into the so-called

public intellectual: the case study (Wolfe’s is autobiographical). For another

examples of the genre take Barbara A. Misztal’s Intellectuals and the Public

Good: Creativity and Civil Courage—in which she treats (largely non-American)

15 Said, 82. 16 Wolfe, “The Calling of the Public Intellectual,” in Etzioni and Bowditch, 94.

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scholarly winners of the Nobel Peace Prize as examples of successful “public

intellectuals” and seeks their common denominators of success.

Within another collection presenting a case study focus, and asserting by

way of introduction that the volume explores “the uniquely modern phenomenon

of the ‘intellectual’ or ‘public intellectual’ (we use the terms interchangeably),”17

Columbia University social theorist Ira Katznelson makes an attempt to

synthesize the specific concept of the “public intellectual” (without such

parenthetical equivalence) and the greatest hits of the sociology of knowledge. In

his piece, “The Professional Scholar as Public Intellectual: Reflections Prompted

by Karl Mannheim, Robert K. Merton, and C. Wright Mills,” Katznelson takes

the work of Mills as entrée into a consideration of Mannheim’s theory of the

“free-floating intellectual.” While mentioning Russell Jacoby’s role in

popularizing the term in passing, Katznelson may get to the heart of the

expectations articulated in the modern concept of “public intellectual.”

Mannheim theorized the intellectual as free in the sense of being tethered to no

social class nor the accompanying rigidity of ideology. As such, the intellectual

could bring to bear (in Katznelson’s words) “realistic and appreciative

understanding of the inevitability of multiple perspectives by scholarly

17 Arthur M. Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, and M. Richard Zinman, “Introduction,” in Melzer et al. Employing such an equivalence allows contributors free range over all history in selecting cases of public intellectualism to examine. Thomas L. Pangle tackles the public intellectual in an ancient Greek context, while Paul A. Rahe demonstrates “That the public intellectual is a product of the Enlightenment.” (27) This statement undoubtedly holds in a sense: the modern role dates to the Enlightenment, when it was called the man of letters. The concept of the public intellectual, as something distinct, had yet no meaning though.

32

intellectuals” in combination with “assertions on behalf of systematic

understanding made possible by their special social and institutional

positioning.”18 This is the intellectual whose privatization—when he is

increasingly steered by vocational rather than free imperatives—seems to

impoverish public debate.

John Michael, as seen above, linked the problematization of the gap

between public intellectual and professional scholar to a need for legitimation

within the academic psyche. This elucidates a common theme across accounts of

the public intellectual. The emphasis on the case study, the excavation of specific

academic conventions, the attempts at moral analysis—justifying or indicting

collaboration with power structures19—amount to an account that would not be

permitted to pass unquestioned from most other groups: the story of the public

intellectual from the point of view of the public intellectual. Such a perspective

may hold a specific purpose: studies of the public intellectual are sometimes

explicitly presented as how-to manuals,20 and the use of such methods may

implicitly represent the same goal.

As has been seen, then, the concept of “public intellectual” alludes to a

nexus of narratives that differ in a sense from those brought to mind by the simple

term “intellectual,” in raising a specific set of questions surrounding intellectuals’

18 Ira Katznelson, “The Professional Scholar as Public Intellectual: Reflections Prompted by Karl Mannheim, Robert K. Merton, and C. Wright Mills,” in Melzer, Weinberger, and Zinman,197. 19 On this last point, see Linda Martín Alcoff, “Does the Public Intellectual Have Intellectual Integrity?,” Metaphilosophy 33, no. 5 (2002): 521-534 in addition to Cushman, and Brouwer and Squires above. 20 See for instance Mistzal 1-7, or Wolfe.

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privatization in the academic profession, especially in America. Having raised

the topic of the academic profession’s function, the following two sections will

briefly theorize first on its defining norm and then on its public face.

II. Academic Freedom and the Academic Intellectual

“Academic freedom” takes the mold of Kantian ethical freedom. In

Kant’s ethical philosophy, as laid out in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of

Morals, man is a free subject as a consequence of being bound by transcendental

moral law: man exercises and demonstrates his autonomy to the extent that he

chooses to follow this objective, absolute, and immanent moral law over the pull

of his worldly and contingent “heteronymous” desires. Freedom lies in the

subject’s ability to transcend, through reason, his particularity and the

contingencies of his existence.

Analogously, academic freedom in the ideal takes the form not of free

choice of subject matter or content, but rather of a commitment to be bound by the

internal logic and standards of one’s discipline (freedom to follow a set

methodology), rather than the external and heteronymous contingencies of the

institutional, political, or social environment. In Kantian times, with the division

of the three “higher” professional faculties with their own internal logics from that

of the philosophers, this meant a “lower faculty” guided and bound, in the ideal,

purely by the standards of rational inquiry.21 As the individual can possess ethical

21 It should be noted that the terms higher and lower faculty refer not to intellectual standing but instead denoted those closest to government. See Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, Mary J. Gregor, trans. (New York: Abaris, 1979 [1798]). The distinction can serve as a counterintuitive metaphor in the sense that the starting points of the professional faculties are built on top of

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freedom only due to the absolute moral law to which he owes rational obedience,

so too academic freedom in its strongest form relies on the precept that the

underlying standards of rationality provide transcendent guidance to the scholar’s

critique.

The proliferation of disciplines can be said to have fractured this unitary

rational order of the “lower faculty.” With the philosophy faculty balkanized by

disciplinary boundaries, the rationality guiding each free scholar has been

specified and reduced to the essentials of a single ever-refined dimension of the

totality. Just as modern society seems to leave each ethical individual no longer

serving a unitary totality in his actions, but rather reduces the essential ends of

each sphere of human action to specific and incommensurable ends (the “warring

gods” of Weber’s “Science as a Vocation”22), so too do disciplines in the academy

rope off specific spheres of knowledge claims such that each scholar no longer

serves the grand totality of reasoned inquiry but rather prays at the altar of merely

one of the pantheon of disciplinary gods.

And yet, beyond the fragmentation of the underlying force of transcendent

reason implied by disciplinarity, the Kantian vision of academic freedom has an

even more basic challenge within the American academy. Broadly, “freedom” as

a concept in American thought and society owes less than might be expected to

the rationalist metaphysical conceit of the Enlightenment—the Kantian

framework in which man’s freedom rests in his capability to morally order the

the conclusions (derived from pure reason) of the lower faculty: this grants the lower faculty a regulatory function over the higher to be seen below. 22 Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, 153.

35

universe. American “freedom,” instead, has long been articulated in the language

of “liberty,” that heritage of common law privilege in which men are free in their

equal right to be unmolested by arbitrary forms of central order. The origins of

“liberty” are less bound in a particular set of metaphysical and epistemological

claims than those of freedom—they are instead generated from within a specific

legalistic tradition. Americans may discuss our “freedom” as citizens, but for the

most part we mean our liberty.23

What, then, to make of the notion of academic “freedom” in an American

university? One possibility is to note the Germanic origin of the university

template, and see academic freedom as an “import” of a sense.24 This framework

might explain the tension of the concept with other norms and ideals of American

society, with American resentment to a dictatorship of the professoriate resting on

the same grounds as the disaffection for a dictatorship of the proletariat, or for a

dictatorship of unmediated reason (a.k.a. the French revolution model). The

American tradition of liberty arises through constant interpretation in light of

actual social life such that transcendent notions of the ideal—while in some sense

they remain the national religion—are relied upon only to the extent that they can

23 The desirability of such an interpretation might be more heartily endorsed by political conservatives in the modern American spectrum. See for instance John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005/1960), 51-2 for the claim that “the Declaration of the Rights of Man... was a parchment-child of the Enlightenment [while] [t]he rights for which the [American] colonists contended against the English crown were basically the rights on Englishmen.” (The religious aspects of Murray’s case are suspect but superfluous to this argument). 24 See Frederick Rudolph and John R. Thelin, The American College and University (Athens, GA: University of Georgia, 1990/1962).

36

be squared with day-to-day life practices.25

What is the “academic freedom debate,” however? Certainly there exist

two dueling conceptions. The first, which might be called the Kantian, is the

conception under which academic (disciplinary) methodology exists as a

generally agreed upon set of practices, alongside which freedom lies in the ability

to apply the method and follow such findings wherever they lead. Advocates of

such a conception view the freedom of the academic as easily disaggregated from

the academic individual’s rights as a citizen, which must be respected outside the

classroom and the lab but exist within them only to the extent that the exercise of

speech—for instance—falls within the academic function. (Notably, in his own

justification of this conception, English professor and regular public explicator of

academia Stanley Fish defends it on the grounds of vocational custom and societal

efficiency, rather than the metaphysical claims relied upon by Kant.26)

The second conception of academic freedom, then, is a framework in

which the claim to the first sense of “freedom” is used to protect a somewhat

arbitrary power held by an aristocracy of knowledge, one in which the liberties of

academia are unfairly restricted to certain groups. Conservative activist and critic

of academia David Horowitz, for instance, with a sort of “equal protection”

argument, advocates what we have termed liberties, not freedom. Horowitz tends

25 For a similar argument see Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, J. P. Mayer, ed., George Lawrence, trans. (New York: Harper & Row, 1966 [1850]), 459-68. The section is entitled “Why the Americans are More Concerned with the Applications than with the Theory of Science.” 26 See Stanley Fish, Save the World on Your Own Time (New York: Oxford, 2008), 16: “my deflationary definition of academic freedom is narrowly professional rather than philosophical.”

37

to belabor the irony that his formulation relies on no external grounding of

knowledge while that of the academic establishment appeals to some external

(transcendent and objective) standing in defense of academia’s special function of

critique.27

This is not to say that fostering a diversity of views and methodologies

(when done as more than the gloss on a political agenda) does not provide great

functional benefit to the modern academy.28 The point is not such formulations’

illegitimacy, but rather that they are ex-post justifications of an academic

profession largely institutionalized along the lines of its ex-ante justifications—

the fully rationalist academic freedom of the first sort outlined above. Although,

as noted in Fish’s case, even defenses of the first notion of academic freedom can

be structured as a case for consensus-built conventions rather than of the ideal of

transcendent reason.

In a sense, the first and second formulations most differ in that the first

posits the academic in his or her critical function as speaking from a position of

epistemological strength, and the second from weakness. Given all the talk of

transcendent reason above, this first claim should be clear, the second and

subsidiary claim refers to the unjustified claims against liberty made by an

aristocracy. Academic freedom vests power in academia, while the promotion of

academic liberty defends society from domination by academics (in the sense that

the promotion of free speech defends society from domination by certain flavors

27 See David Horowitz, “In Defense of Intellectual Diversity,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 13, 2004. 28 J. S. Mill, “On Liberty,” 1869 presents the classic utilitarian case for diversity of opinion.

38

of speech).

The 1915 “Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic

Tenure”29 is a report of the American Association of University Professors still

cited in the academic freedom debate. It distinguishes three “elements” of

academic freedom—“freedom of inquiry and research; freedom of teaching

within the university or college; and freedom of extramural utterance and

action.”30 Driven by its motivating context—a series of instances of professors

called into question for their associations—, the report focuses only on the latter

two “elements,” while noting that the first is “almost everywhere so safeguarded

that the dangers of its infringement are slight.” This very statement reinforces the

notion that the freedom of “inquiry and research”—to engage in each as one’s

disciplinary reason mandates—is traditionally a central convention of the

American university. The second form of academic freedom is, then, if not a

rebellion at least an addendum to the university as originally envisaged: the

academy’s primary self-told function in America, as elsewhere, was to generate

truth. The long-standing American tradition of public discourse, as emblemized

by the Federalist, was initially one of statesmen not scholars. The story of public

intellectual decline takes the gulf between the academy’s “freedom” and the

mainstream’s “liberty” as given and unbridgeable, but the next section will raise

doubts on that score.

29 Edwin R. A. Seligman, et al., “1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure,” on behalf of the American Association of University Professors, December 1915, < http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/policydocs/contents/1915.htm > (reproduced from AAUP Bulletin, Volume I, Part 1 [1915]: 17–39). 30 Though it notes the second and third elements are “closely linked.” (Ibid.)

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III. The Role of the Philosopher

In response to the above exposition of Kantian freedom as applied to the

academy, it might be noted that even Kant seems to have endorsed a role for the

academic intellectual in the process of public reasoning. In his “An Answer to the

Question: What is Enlightenment,” the main theme of which is stated as being

that in the interest of human advance “the public use of one’s reason must always

be free,” Kant puts forth the following:

[I]nsofar as [an individual within a well-ordered society] also regards himself as a member of the community as a whole, or even of the world community, and as a consequence addresses the public in the role of a scholar, in the proper sense of that term, he can most certainly argue, without thereby harming the affairs for which as a passive member he is partly responsible.31

In other words, Kant seems to recognize that the freedom of the intellect provided

by the scholarly apparatus carries with it an opportunity or even a responsibility to

share the fruits of such reason with a broader public. And yet, built into this

assertion seems to be the very fissure around which debates of the academic’s

public presence often revolve. Kant defends the public use of reason, but centers

his defense on the case of its use “in the role of the scholar, in the proper sense of

that term.”

To what extent this clarification qualifies the general theme, depends upon

a definition of the proper role of the scholar in a public forum. Such a definition

is elucidated in Kant’s The Conflict of the Faculties. The faculties in conflict are

the “lower faculty” of philosophy—whose investigations take as their measure

31 Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?,” 1784, < http://www.english.upenn.edu/~mgamer/Etexts/kant.html >.

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pure reason—versus the “higher faculties” of theology, law, and medicine, which

orient their inquiry instead toward some practical aim. Kant posits a very different

public role for the two forms of scholar. On the topic of public conflict between

the higher and lower faculties, he notes that each “engage[s] in public conflict in

order to influence the people,” an end which can be accomplished only by

“convincing the people that [each faculty] knows best how to promote their

welfare.” All the philosophers (or more broadly, for present purposes, humanists)

have to share in this regard, however, are suggestions for moral living “derive[d]

from reason,” that is suggestions that seemingly require no specific expertise and

would be unnecessary if the populace “would only restrain our inclinations and be

ruled by our reason.” The people in Kant’s account, impatient with suggestions

entailing greater moral effort, turn to the higher faculties instead, seeking

“miracle-workers” and saying “Surely this why you have studied—so that you

would know more than someone like ourselves... who can claim nothing more

than sound understanding.”32 Note that Kant is dealing with a non-politically

empowered public in this normative context, and hence one that turns to

intellectuals mainly for suggestions of personal rather than public improvement.

Even this limited role produces a problem, however, if it allows the public

to define the scope of each faculty’s supposed expertise:

But the businessmen of the three higher faculties will always be [perceived as] such miracle workers, unless the philosophy faculty is allowed to counteract them publicly—not in order to overthrow their teachings but only to deny the magic power that the public superstitiously attributes to these teachings and the rites connected with them—as if, by passively surrendering

32 Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, 47-9.

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themselves to such skillful guides, the people would be excused from any activity of their own and led, in ease and comfort, to achieve the ends they desire.33

Here then, Kant makes clear that in addition to (normative) morality, the

philosopher’s reason also has a certain (positive) domain over all expert

disciplines (within and outside the academy, and which may include questions of

politics), covering the intersection at which such disciplines have their roots in

pure reason. In Kant’s framework, public discursive encounters result in the

transparent triumph of moral reason, which both reminds the public of moral

obligations and defends the boundary of personal moral action against the

passivity induced by the “skillful guides” of the other academic disciplines. The

intellectuals are divided between moral instructors (the lower faculty) and experts

(the higher faculty) with defined domains, moral and positive respectively: aside

from defending their own spheres (whose bounds are distinctly definable with

clarity to Kant if not with us), the former enters the domain of the latter or the

latter that of the former only as a private citizen. Hence the freedom to do so (as

remarked upon in the prior section) is not tied to his status as an academic.

The Kantian picture does not envision the integral role in government

played by the sphere of public discourse, which first came to the fore in France

with the rise of the “homme de lettres.” As Chrétien-Guillaume Malesherbes

described in 1775:

A tribunal has arisen independent of all powers and that all powers respect, that appreciates all talents, that pronounces on all people of merit. And in an enlightened century, in a century in which each citizen can speak to the entire nation by way of print, those

33 Ibid. 51.

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who have a talent for instructing mean and a gift for moving them—in a word, men of letters—are, amid the public dispersed, what the orators of Rome and Athens were in the mind of the public assembled.34

Kant’s intellectual, though a promoter of moral reason, does so in a form of

private not public guidance.

Contemporary pragmatists35 have struggled to define a role for philosophy

and its bearers within the public space described by Malesherbes but independent

of the Kantian claim to transcendent morality outlined above. Richard Rorty

argued that the (justified) abandonment of a strong claim to epistemological truths

circumscribed the philosopher’s standing in broader conversations. According to

the early Rorty, “To drop the notion of the philosopher as knowing something

about knowing which nobody else knows so well would be to drop the notion that

his voice always has an overriding claim on the attention of other participants in

the conversation.”36 Philosophers, that is, enter the arena of reason on equal

ground with all comers, but the answer (according to the later Rorty) lies not in

“unfortunate attempts” to emulate the (academy-facing) methodological expertise

of the other disciplines.37 On the face this seems to exhaust the potential for

34 From Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, Lydia G. Cochrane, trans. (Durham, NC: Duke, 1991). 35 From within the academy, incidentally or not. 36 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton, 1979), 392 as relayed in Jürgen Habermas, “Philosophy as Stand-In and Interpreter,” in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1991), 3. 37 As Rorty puts it, “The idea that either literary criticism or philosophy should become an expert culture is a result of unfortunate attempts to squeeze these areas of culture into a university system tailored to the needs of lawyers, physicians, and natural scientists.” Richard Rorty, “Philosophy and Romanticism,” in

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“lower faculty” functions of academics. Yet this is not quite so, for “philosophy,”

says Rorty, “is what is left over after one has bracketed both common sense and

all the various expert cultures.”38

Jürgen Habermas comes this far with Rorty.39 But in Habermas’s

framework of communicative action—which centers the power of

discursive reason in the domain between expert discourse and irreducible

value claims—what’s left over is exactly sufficient to maintain

philosophy’s “function of being the ‘guardian of rationality.’” 40

Habermas lays out a prescription then for a philosopher at the

crux of system and lifeworld (more on the use of these terms in the

following chapter). Hence, Habermas notes that “philosophy... might do

well to refurbish its link with the totality by taking on the role of

interpreter on behalf of the lifeworld.” This places the desires posed by

common sense to the expert spheres in the drivers seat:

[T]he issue that philosophy will face when it stops playing

Philosophy as Cultural Politics, (Philosophical Papers, Volume 4. New York: Cambridge, 2007), 125. 38 Ibid. 39 More precisely, Habermas in his piece on the role of the philosopher “Philosophy as Stand-In and Interpreter” is responding to the first of the three quotations above, but as James Bohman and William Rehg note: “Habermas undermines both of the traditional Kantian roles for philosophy: philosophy as the sole judge in normative matters and as the methodological authority that assigns the various domains of inquiry to their proper questions.” (James Bohman and William Rehg, “Jürgen Habermas,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (May 17, 2007), < http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/habermas/ >.) 40 Habermas “Philosophy as Stand-In and Interpreter,” Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge, MA: MIT 1990 [1983]), 2.

44

the part of the arbiter that inspects culture [per Kant above] and instead starts playing the part of a mediating interpreter... is how to overcome the isolation of science, morals, and art and their respective expert cultures. How can they be joined to the impoverished traditions of the lifeworld, and how can this be done without detriment to their regional rationality?41

Philosophy—if it can reconnect to common sense with a comparable

degree of robustness to its familiarity with the disciplinary logics of the

academy—serves in some sense as the mediator between public norms

and private reason. Such a formulation does not automatically make

philosophers public intellectuals, but it does provide the definition, given

in the Introduction above, of “intellectuals” as reconcilers of system and

lifeworld.42

Though they differ on their specific situating of philosophy within

the conceptual universe, the danger posed by cultures and vocabularies

of expertise that go unchallenged is a commonality between the three

thinkers presented above. As has been seen, stories of the disappearing

public intellectual often share this sense of what is lost when the

academy is fragmented into mutually exclusive expert domains. The

41 Ibid. 18-9. 42 Jurgen Habermas, “Political Communication in Media Society,” 416 defines “intellectuals” in the public sphere as those “who have gained, unlike advocates or moral entrepreneurs, a perceived personal reputation in some field (e.g., as writers or academics) and who engage, unlike experts and lobbyists, spontaneously in public discourse with the declared intention of promoting general interests.” This definition is approximately similar to our definition of the public intellectual, depending on what is meant by “spontaneously.”

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following sections develop the manner in which such a sense is not just

correspondent to, but the very source of, the concern with “public

intellectuals.”

IV. Russell Jacoby and the “Last Intellectuals”

For the remainder of this chapter’s analysis of the “public intellectual,”

greatest focus will be given to two major studies of the topic—Russell Jacoby’s

1987 The Last Intellectuals, from which the term emerged as a common referent,

and Richard Posner’s 2001 Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, which

stimulated a renewed burst of (often critical) discussion and work relating to the

topic. The first study deserves examination for having introduced the term

“public intellectual” to the contemporary scene, and in doing so having framed a

specific context in which the term has meaning. The second deserves attention

for explicitly echoing this theme, and although it drew significant critiques, they

tended to knock its methodological approach while underscoring the context with

which it linked the “public intellectual.” Jacoby and Posner tell fundamentally

Weberian narratives: each emphasizes the threat posed by increasingly specialized

and self-perpetuating institutions—especially the academic vocation—to prior

notions of the public face of the scholar/intellectual. The following investigation

will distinguish the manner in which the two—rather different—accounts of the

state of the public intellectual relate to the Weberian hypothesis. The narrative of

the intellectual sphere as yet another that has been rationalized—binding

intellectuals into ever more reduced and less useful disciplinary specialties—and

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“disenchanted”—removing the opportunity and imperative for meaningful

work—will be the central theme of the remaining sections.

The “Last Intellectuals” of Jacoby’s title are “last” in terms of chronology,

though not (necessarily) last in the sense of permanently final.43 Specifically,

Jacoby casts the generation that established its cultural authority in the two

decades post World War II—figures such as Daniel Bell and C. Wright Mills—as

having a presence and desire to influence the wider culture that subsequent

generations (at least up to the book’s 1987 publication) lacked. This generation,

he said, fostered an intellectual sphere—centered in New York City—consisting

of discussion outside of the academy and directed at an educated public (as had

previous generations). “They grew up writing for small magazines when

universities remained marginal; this experience informed their style—elegant and

accessible essays directed toward the wider intellectual community.”44 But The

Last Intellectuals describes a transition of intellectual life from a more public

discourse in the twentieth century’s first half to a discourse gradually more and

more confined within academic boundaries. The “last generation” moves into

university positions but maintains its ability to speak toward the public ear,45 but

ensuing generations lose that ability altogether. Jacoby ascribes the lack of public

communicative capability he identifies within the generation academics who have

(so to speak) intellectually come of age within the academy to the functional

imperatives of the university:

43 We’ll see below what Jacoby’s account would require for a new set of intellectuals to arise. 44 Jacoby, 17. 45 Ibid.

47

Younger intellectuals no longer need or want a larger public; they are almost exclusively professors. Campuses are their homes; colleagues their audience; monographs and specialized journals their media. Unlike past intellectuals they situate themselves within fields and disciplines—for good reason. Their jobs, advancement, and salaries depend on the evaluation of specialists, and this dependence affects the issues broached and the language used.46

He goes on to invoke largely economic structural impulses for the

migration of intellectuals into the university, a causal story deserving of brief

examination before returning to the question of how vocational pressures threaten

the intellectual’s public function. Jacoby bemoans the disappearance of “urban

bohemian” settings which fostered intellectual life, and asserts that at some point

“bohemia ceased to attract a younger intellectual generation.”47 Whether this

incubator of intellectuals is lost by way of the cooption of counter-culture by the

mainstream,48 post-World War II suburbanization,49 or the rise in rents and loss of

literary businesses accompanying gentrification50 is not crucial to the plot, and

Jacoby doesn’t settle on one answer. Its loss, however, is the catalyst in

relocating the nexus of American intellectual life from the public sphere to within

the academy.

The broadly economic impulses pushing intellectual discourse into the

academy have deep effects, however. In the academy, Jacoby sees the “New

46 Ibid. 6. 47 Ibid. 37. 48 Ibid.39. 49 Ibid. 40. 50 Ibid.49.

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Left” which “sprang into life around and against universities,”51 turn into a

generation of professors utterly socialized into the tradition of the scholar (to

return to Bell’s dichotomy above). He calls their works “largely technical,

unreadable and—except by specialists—unread”52 and describes a generation

bowing to the codes of the academic profession rather than bending them.

“Perhaps because their lives had unfolded almost entirely on campuses they were

unwilling or unable to challenge academic imperatives,”53 Jacoby posits. The

unfolding story is one of rationalization: a life spent within the professional

norms of the academy leaves the new generation ever less able to step outside its

specific technical imperatives. “[P]rofessionalization,” asserts Jacoby, “leads to

privatization or depolitization, a withdrawal of intellectual energy from a larger

domain to a narrower discipline.”54

Jacoby’s claim seems to be that an entire socio-political strata who once

might have embraced the challenge to ask big questions and speak in a public

idiom have become instead “specialists without spirit,” to use a (perhaps

imaginatively translated) phrase of Max Weber’s.55 And so, what begins as a

story of the economic effects of a disappearing bohemia—in the realm of the

external and objective—culminates in a transformation of the subjective ethos and

inter-subjective discourses of the scholarly class. For instance, Jacoby refers to an

51 Ibid. 140. 52 Ibid.141. 53 Ibid. 140. 54 Ibid.147. 55 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Talcott Parsons, trans. (New York: Scribner, 1958 [1920]), 182. Jacoby himself doesn’t cite Weber in this context. As for the phrase, Stephen Kalberg’s 2002 translation for Roxbury renders this phrase as “narrow specialists without mind.”

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account on the pressures on political scientists to use a more specialized

“professional idiom” in their disciplinary work, endorsing the originator’s notion

that, “Notwithstanding formal justifications, the primary reason... for ceaselessly

creating new terminology in political science has less to do with the substance of

science than with the form of organized enterprise.” 56 Jacoby has no precise

account of how and why the pressure of specialization is internalized by the

professor, and he seems not to really need one, for the structural imperatives are

clear enough: as noted above, a professor’s job and reputation depend upon

possessing and burnishing the credentials, demeanor, and orientation of a

specialist.

To say that Jacoby’s narrative is unambiguous is not to say that he does

not couch it in the appropriate caveats. “It is too simple to draw a direct line

connecting life and thought, matching professors who are preoccupied with

research or conference papers and their cultural contribution;” he admits, but

continues that nonetheless “it would also be foolish to deny a relationship.”57 The

Last Intellectuals closes with an appeal to the complicated nature of reality—as

opposed to its abstract representation—as signifying a ray of hope. Jacoby notes

that despite the story he has told of seemingly irrepressible vocational pressures

pushing in one direction, the (non-)specialist’s spirit need not remain permanently

lost:

56 Jacoby, 156. The work from which the quotation is drawn is David M. Ricci, The Tragedy of Political Science: Politics, Scholarship, and Democracy (New Haven: Yale, 1984), 224. 57 Ibid. 232.

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Younger intellectuals have responded to their times, as they must; they have also surrendered to them, as they need not. Humanity does not make history just as it pleases, but it does make history. By the back door choice enters the historical edifice.58

Indeed in a preface to his book’s second printing, Jacoby notes sets of new

intellectual voices who have heeded his call, black intellectuals and “the new

scientists” for instance. He celebrates such demonstrations that “not heeding but

bucking institutional imperatives” can bear fruit, without further explicating,

metaphorically or otherwise, how such an orientation of resistance emerges.59

V. Weber and Academic Vocationalization

As seen, later scholars of the “public intellectual” have consistently

pointed to Jacoby as either the originator or (in light of Mills’ above-noted single

use of it) populizer of the term,60 and this may help explain its tie seen above to a

context of academic professionalization, and the “rationalization” of intellectual

work. Professionalization and vocationalization in the academy have been themes

consistently highlighted by historians of the American academy, before and after

Jacoby’s work. A central tenet of Frederick Rudolph’s classic 1962 historical

survey The American College and University consists of charting the American

educational system’s development into large-scale and profession driven

universities from a base of homespun religious schools.61 In 1969 David Riesman

and Christopher Jencks published The Academic Revolution, whose focus on the

post-world-war two boom in college education noted that even the lowest levels

58 Ibid. 237. 59 Ibid. xix. 60 See above (Introduction at 3, note 8). 61 Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A History (New York: Knopf, 1962).

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of higher education were placing a greater emphasis on the need for professional

credentials.62 Julie Rueben’s 1996 The Making of the Modern University takes as

its focus the turn-of-the-twentieth-century environment in which scientific expert

truth claims displaced moral instruction as the main currency in college

classrooms.63 Of non-historians, observers from Thorstein Veblen to Allan

Bloom have mocked the esoteric and inward-focused conventions of academics.

Jacoby’s book seemed to crystallize these uneasy observations of the trend toward

a professionalized academy into a salient story of the intellectual’s disappearance

from public life.

As was made clear above, in examining Jacoby’s work, one goal has been

to demonstrate the Weberian narrative implied by his and other lamentations of

professionalization in the academy.64 Not only did Max Weber provide the

original paradigm through which disaggregation of the conceptual world into

distinct value-spheres proves a threat to a meaningful social order, but he made

clear the specific implications of this transformation for the academic. At the

locus of Weber’s thought is the notion that modern society attains complex

achievements through its ability to “rationalize” social life, and specifically to

divide the cultural totality into distinct value-spheres engineered into the most

62 Christopher Jencks and David Riesman, The Academic Revolution (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968), 25. 63 Julie A. Reuben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996). 64 A greater orientation toward intellectual history might reinforce this connection through a more in-depth examination of Jacoby’s valorization of C. Wright Mills and Mills’s own intellectual relationship with Weber, but present purposes will allow the parallels to speak for themselves.

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efficient means toward their specific distinct ends (e.g. capital-accumulation,

political power, abstract knowledge). As an unavoidable result, however, Weber

asserts that the culture is “disenchanted,” losing its religion and the sense of an

overarching mystery that ties together these various spheres.

Of the scientist—the man trained and steeped in academic convention—

Weber says, “Only by strict specialization can the scientific worker become fully

conscious, for once and perhaps never again in his lifetime, that he has achieved

something that will endure. A really definitive and good accomplishment today is

always a specialized accomplishment.”65 He faces, like Jacoby says, a vocational

pressure to downplay generalist tendencies. What’s more, says Weber, “because

the various value spheres of the world stand in irreconcilable conflict with each

other,” the scientist is left with nothing of consequence to insert into an argument

“for practical and interested stands” except potentially a better analysis of the

most efficient means toward a “presupposed end.”66 In this sense the scientist and

politician serve “warring gods,”67 for the scientist knows only how to serve the

machinery of inquiry and the politician that of nation, and inculcation in the

former only pulls him further from the latter. Hence the greater rationalization of

science, and of the academy in general, withdraw their participants from political

discourse, as observed by Jacoby.68

65 Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, trans. (New York: Oxford, 1946), 135. 66 Ibid. 147. 67 Ibid. 153. 68 Only briefly in his “Politics as a Vocation” does Weber mention those for whom politics is an “avocation” noting that peripheral involvements are usually

53

The possibility that intellectual life could itself be thus rationalized and

disenchanted is in some sense ironic, since the intellectual plays a major role in

the downfall of prior faiths:

The intellectual seeks in various ways, the casuistry of which extends into infinity, to endow his life with a pervasive meaning, and thus to find unity with himself, with his fellow men, and with the cosmos. It is the intellectual who conceives of the “world” as a problem of meaning. As intellectualism suppresses belief in magic, the world’s processes become disenchanted, lose their magical significance, and henceforth simply “are” and “happen” but no longer signify anything. As a consequence, there is a growing demand that the world and the total pattern of life be subject to an order that is significant and meaningful.69

Weber is describing the ascendancy of reason in the Enlightenment: having

dissolved the explanatory potential of the previously communally accepted

background knowledge (faith in the unknowable) that gave actions meaning, the

intellectual sets forth with the assumption that his method can produce a new

grounding of meaningful action. But his tools are more limited than he realizes—

capable of metaphysical desiccation but not of revitalization.

In an analogous account of rationalization within the academy itself,

though, it is this very orientation to even a limited value/meaning system (free

rational thought) that loses out to the specific bureaucratic demands of a

functionally rationalized life sphere. Bureaucracy is the institutional embodiment

of the ethic of rationalization. In the essay “Bureaucracy,” Weber claims of a

then ongoing debate that “all [these] discussions of the foundations of the

“in the case of need... for [those] whom politics is, neither materially nor ideally ‘their life.’” (Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber, 83.) 69 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Ephraim Fischoff et. al., trans. (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1978) Vol. 1, 506.

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education system” are manifestations of the “struggle” between specialists and

their predecessors, who were trained as “gentleman” generalists rather than

“experts.” This struggle “intrudes into all cultural questions” and is “determined

by the irresistibly expanding bureaucratization of all public and private relations

of authority and by the ever-increasing importance of expert and specialized

knowledge.”70

Weber’s thought generally balances two forms of rationalization: the

rationalization of institutional structure through bureaucracy and the

rationalization which transforms the individual subject’s magical worldview into

disenchantment. In Russell Jacoby’s narrative, the Weberian aspect hews mainly

to the first form: the bureaucratic demands of the academy are what result in his

withdrawal from public life, albeit in concert with the demands of

“professionalism” to shift one’s vocabulary and interests.

If the above account of Jacoby’s work and the ensuing examination of

Weber have accomplished one thing, it has hopefully been to underscore that

from its very entry into contemporary discourse, the term “public intellectual” has

been integrally associated with a narrative of specialization, rationalization, and

disenchantment, which parallels that of Max Weber. One can distinguish two

senses in which this might be asserted: either that Jacoby’s account is

substantively equivalent to Weber’s, or merely that it is close enough in form to

regard each as reflecting a fundamentally similar unease with modernity. Either,

for this investigation’s purposes, will do—the significance lies in establishing

70 Max Weber, “Bureaucracy,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, trans. (New York: Oxford, 1946) 243.

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Weber as a sensible theoretical framework for the “public intellectual narrative”

as it has developed—a claim that will be buttressed by a turn to an account of the

public intellectual more self-consciously Weberian in its progression.

VI. Richard Posner’s Weberian Account

What is perhaps the first book-length study to claim as its topic “the public

intellectual” was published in 2001 by Richard Posner. While (incorrectly)

crediting Jacoby with coining the term,71 Posner’s work in fact takes a somewhat

different view of the fundamental form and function of the “public intellectual.”

Posner, working within the vocabulary and ethos of economic thought, centers his

argument not on a historical narrative of the evolution of intellectual life, but

rather on the observation and modeling of a contemporary “market failure.”72

Fourteen years after Jacoby, however, Posner sees not an undersupply of public

intellectuals (as he might characterize Jacoby’s claim), but rather characterizes the

problem as one of quality, or quality control:

Plenty of professors want to reach a larger public than the merely academic. When people speak of the decline of the public intellectual... they are referring to the quality rather than quantity, to the possibility that the distinctive social value of the public intellectual may not be fully compatible with a full-time career as an academic.73

71 Posner, 26. 72 See Posner, 164-6: he places this term in quotation marks to indicate he does not intend a precise economic usage. “I have been using ‘market failure’ loosely, when what I have meant is closer to ‘being a disappointment in light of expectations widely held in academic circles.” One might take from his analysis that the economic approach in fact does a poor job of identifying or modeling precisely what the “failure” here is. 73 Posner, 72.

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In seeking the source of such incompatibility, it will be seen below that Posner,

too, draws on a Weberian model.

So what is the market served by the public intellectual? Posner notes that

in many ways the purpose of “public intellectual” might not be to inform the

public at all: his writings may fulfill a demand for highbrow entertainment and the

feeling of having attained sophistication,74 while the intellectual supplying these

goods is often doing so in order to attain prestige.75 To the extent that the public

intellectual provides an information good, however, in Posner’s posited market,

the product expected from public intellectuals is correct analysis, or (as he further

shoehorns his findings) testable predictions: “Prediction is the stock and trade of

the public intellectual.”76 This proves a convenient object of analysis for Poser,

as the notion that the “product” of a public intellectual consists most significantly

of a set of testable predictions allows hints at how this market might be corrected.

(The “market” needs somebody “keeping score,”77 holding intellectuals

accountable for their failed predictions, says Posner, although he gives little hint

of how exactly this is feasible.)78 Though as even Posner’s establishing examples

demonstrate,79 this seems an incredibly poor reading, and a Spartan model of what

74 Ibid. 147. Posner describes public intellectual output as a “solidarity good,” by which he means serving to reinforce the consumer’s own opinion and hence his feeling of self-esteem, rather than to generate mutual understanding. 75 Ibid. 66. 76 Ibid. 128. 77 Ibid. 390. 78 The closest he comes is suggesting professors post on their websites all of their “nonacademic writing” in order for discerning consumers to be able to perform their due diligence before relying upon such predictions. (390) 79 (While somewhat tangential to the present project, it is hard to recount Posner’s framework without the compulsion to enter into yet one more critique of this

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the public intellectual provides. 80

Alongside the economic furniture within Posner’s account, though, he

acknowledges a debt to the Weberian narrative of modernization. “I draw on

sociology as well, in particular on Max Weber, an academic public intellectual of

uncanny foresight.”81 Posner calls the university the “chief culprit” in the market

failure he has identified, 82 and his account of its pernicious effects comes across

as not so different from Jacoby’s:

Its rise has encouraged a professionalization and specialization of knowledge that, together with the comfortable career that the university offers people of outstanding intellectual ability, have shrunk the ranks of the “independent” intellectual. That is the intellectual who, being unaffiliated with a university (or, today, a think tank)—an outsider to the academic community—can range

work, and so this and the following note present inescapable observations): As one example of a prediction, on pages 122-3 Posner eaxmines Sean Wilentz’s testimony in a House Judiciary Committee hearing prior to President Bill Clinton’s impeachment. The Princeton historian testified that “upon this impeachment inquiry, as upon all presidential impeachment inquiries, hinges the fate of our American political institutions. It is that important.” That “Clinton was impeached, and the sky did not fall,” is Posner’s proof that this was a shoddy prediction, ignoring the clearly normative dimension of the statement. 80 As perhaps a first step for his scorekeeping, Posner creates a leaderboard by devoting a chapter to tallying the LexisNexis news database search results for a list of those individuals he has pre-selected as “public intellectuals.” (See Posner 167-72 on the selection process; his lists of top-ranked intellectual by both media mentions and citations are included in the appendix.) This empirical component of Richard Posner’s examination again proves insufficient: Posner’s “ranking” of public intellectuals by their “hits” in whatever context, or in passing mention may provide a reasonable account of their simple media visibility, but this approach has severe flaws. An unexpectedly hostile review in the National Review of all places characterizes the discrepancies created by indeterminately counting up such hits as “an exercise in garbage-in, garbage-out.” (Christopher Caldwell, “Mind Games,” National Review, February 11, 2002) Having already noted the supply of such individuals to be robust, Posner’s enumeration of them seems ill-suited to examine the quality of public intellectual products, this being the characteristic which he has identified as the genuine concern. 81 Posner, 13. 82 Ibid. 388.

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broadly over matters of public concern unconstrained by the specialist’s attitude that a university career breeds.83

Again it is the spirit of the intellectual that has been sapped through

professionalization (though Posner seems, more than did Jacoby, to view this as

an almost fair trade-off). He calls upon a quote of Weber’s: “limitation to

specialized work, with a renunciation of the Faustian universality of man which it

involves, is a condition of any valuable work in the modern world.”84

Posner calls his account in Public Intellectuals “[i]n its Weberian aspect...

continuous”85 with a previous work of his entitled The Problematics of Moral and

Legal Theory. In that work—in the course of laying out his case for a pragmatic

turn in legal thought—he takes to task academic moral philosophers (much as

Richard Rorty took that field to task) for having rationalized their field out of

significance. The upshot of a discipline that has become “as thoroughly

professionalized as accounting,” is, according to Posner, the adoption of “a

complex and esoteric mode of analysis and expression” in academic philosophy.86

Academics enter the moral realm as “professionals rather than seers, prophets,

saints, rebels, or even nonconformists.”87 Philosophers possess the tools to

convince only those who begin from comparable starting points: they have

foreclosed the tools traditionally available to those seeking a true impact on public

morality—the “moral entrepreneurs” in Posner’s terminology—chief among them

83 Ibid. 388-9. 84 Ibid. 64, from Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Parsons, trans., 180. 85 Ibid. 13. 86 Richard A. Posner, The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1999), 79-80. 87 Ibid. 79.

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charisma and the ability to lead by example.88 Posner’s focus, then, falls as much

on how the substantive aims of the philosopher’s vocation, and not simply its

bureaucratic accoutrements, prevent active and effective public engagement.

“The age of professionalism—in moral philosophy as in medicine—is also, and in

consequence, the age of what Weber memorably called the disenchantment of the

world,” he says.89 Unlike a charismatic, public-focused (and perhaps demand-

driven) entrepreneur, an academic for Posner has rationalized his methodology

toward private aims of knowledge-creation.

We may seem to have given Posner’s work outsize attention, given its

considerable flaws.90 The work is notable, however, in part because it generated a

sort of response indicative that it had, however incompletely, raised a worthy

topic—a story easy to chase but difficult to capture. The Chronicle of Higher

Education published a satirical piece poking fun at the number-crunching bent of

Posner’s work. According to the Chronicle, the “Top 100 Reasons (Divided by 4,

Plus 10) That Intellectuals Should Take Richard Posner's 'Public Intellectuals'

Seriously Despite the Devastating Reviews”91 included (albeit at number 34) that

“He's forced every self-styled American public intellectual to publish a piece --

88 Ibid. 42 on the distinction between academics and moral entrepreneurs and 85 on charisma. Posner prizes the “entrepreneurial” role in morality, and equates the entrepreneurial ethic with charisma in the political sphere, in line with his free-market spin on the Weberian framework. 89 Ibid. 79. 90 See above: 56n79 and 57n80. 91 Carlin Romano, “Table 2.8: Top 100 Reasons (Divided by 4, Plus 10) That Intellectuals Should Take Richard Posner's 'Public Intellectuals' Seriously Despite the Devastating Reviews,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 8, 2002, B20.

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somewhere, anywhere, please!!! -- on Public Intellectuals.” These responses

provided (in some cases) the raw materials for aforementioned compendiums of

articles on the subject published over the past decade.

VII. Setting Up

Comparing the relation of Posner and Jacoby to the Weberian narrative of

modernization helps distinguish two ways in which “rationalization” threatens the

public intellectual, each of which is recognized by each writer but between which

a different balance is drawn. While neither thinker limits himself solely to one

face of the rationalization thesis, one can nonetheless distinguish between two

interlinking threats of rationalization that are highlighted. One form is

rationalization in the bureaucratic sense, which Jacoby draws upon in stressing the

ways in which the structure of the economy influences academics (when

“preoccupied with research or conference papers” as above) to do work other than

that of the public intellectual. The other manner is rationalization in a more

subjective sense, in which loss of “independence” is wrought not by the material

pressures on the academic but instead by the “specialist’s attitude” mentioned by

Posner above.92 The attitude may seem to result naturally from such pressures,

but only given a specific set of ethical assumptions. (This is what leaves the

“back door” for choice alluded to by Jacoby in his conclusion.)

92 Much of Posner’s “market failure” narrative actually comes nearer a bureaucratic account: academics’ function as institutionally defined confines and discourages the sort of action/production that would be meaningful on and for the outside.

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The hope is that by first introducing the many loci of recent work

exploring the problem of the “public intellectual” and then introducing the

original narrative in which the term emerged, this chapter has laid a sufficient

foundation to justify treating the “public intellectual” problem as not simply a

problem of insider versus outsider intellectuals, but rather as a Weberian

rationalization narrative coinciding with a specific form of professionalization

within the American academy. The chapter’s middle sections proceeded to

develop arguments first that the academy’s distance from American public life

can be expressed in differing conceptions of “freedom” and then that within a

pragmatist framework such distance can be overcome from the scholar’s

perspective if he can maintain links to the broader discourse. Returning to the

origins of the “public intellectual,” the chapter linked Jacoby’s popularization of

the term to an implicit embrace of the Weberian framework, and saw that Posner

made the link explicit. The next chapter proceeds to expand upon the

examination of the importance of the discursive-pragmatist conception of

intellectuals developed in the third section of this chapter. A desire to challenge,

beginning from its own grounds, the Weber-inflected conception of the public

intellectual as tied to decline, motivates a return to the thought of Habermas, who

frames his work in part as a response to Weber while seeking to rescue the

promise of modernity from a vision of its rationalization into nothing.

2: THE ROLE OF PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL IN A SYSTEM-L IFEWORLD CONTEXT :

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This chapter will rely on an explication of some of the major works of

Jürgen Habermas to sketch an alternative theoretical framework which expands

upon the Weberian public intellectual narrative developed in the previous chapter.

The purpose is not to conceive of a new role for the public intellectual, but rather

to work from prior conceptions of the public intellectual in order to challenge the

implication drawn by such conceptions between the role and its decline.

The chapter begins by explicating Habermas’s critique of Weber’s

thought, and provisionally examining how issues of the public intellectual fit

within Habermas’s general model of society under conditions of modernity

(system-lifeworld confrontation). It goes on to explore the application of

Habermas’s system to the examination of historically contained moments, as

elucidated by Habermas’s account of the development of the early modern press.

An analogy of the press and the public intellectual is used to explore the

applicability of Habermas’s normative perspective for countering the implication

of inevitable decline in public meaning-creation which accompanies the societal

advance of academic specialization in rationalization accounts of the public

intellectual. Ultimately, Habermas’s focus on discourse in the “public sphere,”

and his normative orientation toward preserving the autonomous capabilities of

the intermediaries that facilitate such discourse, lead to an ability to greater

formalize the variety of social linkages which appear to threaten the public

intellectual, and how such linkages cultivate or impair instances of effective

public intellectual discourse. In seeking a conceptual framework that does not

pre-determine that the risks faced by public intellectuals overpower the potential

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for resilience inherent in the role, this leads to a picture in which the public

intellectual’s interaction with evolving media of communication emerges as an

important subject of inquiry going forward.

In line with where the theory leads, more so than the last chapter, this

chapter will focus on threats posed not just to the public intellectual but by the

public intellectual. The threat of intellectuals in general was seen (implicitly)

when touching in the preceding chapter on Weber’s account of the role of

intellectuals in rationalization of life spheres leading to disenchantment. One type

of threat posed by the public intellectual was remarked upon briefly in the

introduction, espoused by those who sought to tear down the elitist discourse of

public intellectuals for a new vision of a proper role to accompany the term.

Unlike those accounts, ours raises this issue in the context of the established

narrative of the public intellectual, building from the pre-supplied theoretical base

rather than casting it aside and disregarding the debt the concept owes to it.

I. Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action as it Rewrites Weber’s Framework As seen previously, the wellspring of work on the social role of "public

intellectual" over the past two decades often explicitly or implicitly constructs a

framework of rationalization, though not always following the full outline of the

Weberian narrative of modernization. Weber’s account of the danger posed by

overly rationalizing traditional value spheres such that the original values lose

their “enchantment”—transcendent meaning—at minimum resonates in both

terminology and narrative structure with accounts of the public intellectual who is

driven to extinction by obscurantist, professionalizing, and self-referential bents

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within the modern academy. Hence an attempt to refashion this general

theoretical outline within a modern re-formulation of Weber seems natural and

presents a high potential for illumination. A suitable place to begin is the second

volume of Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action. The introduction noted

some sources of Habermas’s appeal as an interlocutor on this topic, including his

interest in the public sphere and his normative orientation toward defending rather

than giving up on meaning-creation under conditions of modernity, as well as his

evocative conceptual scheme for capturing the challenges posed by such

conditions. In the Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas provides another

reason, for one framing provided within the work suggests it serves a grand

attempt to fill gaps within the Weber's theoretical account of the process and

dangers of modernization.

To proceed requires a sketch of the use of the terms “system”—the

complex of those spheres of life in which outcomes are determined through

mechanisms dependent on such abstract forces as capital and power—and

“lifeworld”—the space for value-dependent action determined by collective

processes of reasoning through the channel of language. Habermas sees the

central tension of modernity as the reconciling of an ever more complex system

with the maintenance of a robust lifeworld comprehensible to all social

participants.1

1 See Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, Thomas McCarthy, trans., (Boston: Beacon, 1987 [1981]), 113-198 for the section “Intermediate Reflections: System and Lifeworld.” (The work will henceforth be referred to as “TCA, Vol. 2”).

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For Habermas, Weber’s shortcoming lies fundamentally in having

identified two distinct realities of modern life, but remaining unable to provide a

compelling account of the causal pathway between them. Weber’s is a meta-

historical narrative of the interplay between the imprints of modernity on the

social-systematic and the individual-cognitive environments. Habermas notes

that Weber’s work does a poor job of explaining a channel through which the

mechanics of modern society—efficiency-driven structures of organization in

economy and government—can actually target, threaten, and unmoor the sets of

values and meaning-creating propositions present in the minds of individuals. In

other words, Habermas finds flaw with Weber for not making explicit and

credible the link between functional “rationalization” on the societal level, and the

subjective experience of “rationalization” (and the resulting value-crisis) on the

personal level. Habermas posits a missing intermediate step:

Weber’s explanatory strategy can be rid of these and other difficulties if we assume that:

(p) the emergence of modern, to begin with capitalist, societies required the institutional embodiment and motivated anchoring of postconventional moral and legal representations; but (q) capitalist modernization follows a pattern such that cognitive-instrumental rationality surges beyond the bounds of the economy and state into other communicatively structured areas of life and achieves dominance there at the expense of moral-political and aesthetic-practical rationality, and (r) this produces disturbances in the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld.

Weber’s explanation of the emergence of modern societies focuses on the proposition (p); his diagnosis of the times refers to the pathological side effects asserted in (r); he does not put forward the proposition (q), which is nevertheless quite compatible with the

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interpretation of [one of Weber’s essays] proposed above.2 In the terminology of communicative action, Habermas’s critique is that Weber

assumes the transference of “rationalization” from the system (the collection of

those activities within society which run along channels fixed by the workings of

money, power, and other impersonal referents) to the lifeworld (those activities

whose performance is constantly renegotiated through reference to individual and

shared values), but does not provide a convincing explanation or justification of

the procedure by which he sees such transference occurring. Habermas’s work,

then, is in part an attempt to address the general criticism of the liberality with

which Weber throws around the word “rationalization” without differentiation

between its objective (system-rooted) and subjective (lifeworld-denuding)

variants.3

The value for Habermas of delineating this intermediate step is that it

allows him to establish, contrary to Weber’s framework, that “Neither the

secularization of worldviews nor the structural differentiation of society has

unavoidable pathological effects per se.”4 For proposition (p) of the outline above

is put forward as historical fact (if not a necessity, for writing of what “societies

required” leaves this precise distinction ambiguous) and proposition (r) as the

result of an implication. The insertion of proposition (q), however, as the

predicate from which (r) becomes a necessary result (from which it is

2 Ibid. 304-5. The essay referred to is Weber’s Zwischenbetrachtung, i.e. “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, 323-62. 3 Habermas notes a similarly “ambiguous” equivocation between divergent uses of the term “rationalization” at TCA Vol. 2, 307. 4 Ibid. 330.

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“produce[d]”), maintains a space of contingency in the link between (p) and (q)

(based on the hypothetical that while “modernization follows [one] pattern,” this

does not necessarily provide basis for saying such is the only possible pattern).

One of Habermas’s ultimate intents, then, is to demonstrate not only that the

historical process of modernization has “produce[d] disturbances in the symbolic

representation of the lifeworld,” but also that such disturbances are contingent,

and their non-occurrence (or at least reparation) is conceivable. While Weber

sees the fruit of modernity as necessarily both sweet and bitter—the losses in

spirit correspond with gains in material, intellectual, and cultural attainment that

result from the rationalization process—Habermas seeks to distinguish the

positive consequences from the negative, and lay a boundary between the positive

benefits it yields (a “motivated anchoring of postconventional moral and legal

representations”) and the harvest of despair it can call forth ( “disturbances” of

the lifeworld’s communicative maintenance).

II. The Threat of System to Lifeworld: Filling in ( q)

The specific chain of events through which the rationalization-

systemization of economic and political value spheres contaminates the broader

social landscape (and with it the set of activities which are determined through

continued reference to self-conscious formulations of values—the lifeworld of

both public/political and also private/familial discourse)—then—is what

Habermas puts forth as differentiating his theory from Weber’s. The particular

distortions of modern life investigated by Weber are distinguished by Habermas

into two broad categories: “loss of meaning” (approximately equivalent to

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“disenchantment”) and “loss of freedom,” hewing more to the bureaucratic

aspects of the Weberian narrative. In his critical terminology, Habermas lays out

a view in which each of these twin ills results from the products of modernity

turning on its whole, but in which this betrayal—contrary to the Weberian

account—does not amount to a necessary historical fact:

It is not the differentiation and independent development of cultural value spheres that lead to the cultural impoverishment of everyday communicative practice [1) “loss of meaning”], but an elitist splitting-off of expert cultures from contexts of communicative action in daily life. It is not the uncoupling of media-steered subsystems and of their organizational forms from the lifeworld that leads to the one-sided rationalization or reification of everyday communicative practice [2) “loss of freedom”], but only the penetration of forms of economic and administrative rationality into areas of action that resist being converted over to the media of money and power because they are specialized in cultural transmission, social integration, and child rearing, and remain dependent on mutual understanding as a mechanism for coordination action.5

In other words, 1) the potential for a rich, meaningful conceptual

representation of the world is not inherently lost from the development of

specialized vocabularies, and forms of means-ends evaluation, for use within the

specialized economic and governmental processes that arise with the capitalist

economy and the bureaucratic/client state. Rather, our basic conceptual

systems—whose coherence rests on the communally and deliberatively developed

reasonableness of “everyday communicative practice”—can cope with such

systems, and continue to make vital contributions to the ability to subjectively

experience meaning, in some set of cases: those cases which, despite the

development of specialized systems, maintain a social structure such that

5 Ibid. 330-1.

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communicatively-generated everyday values continue to inject their (inherently

reasonable) imperatives into these specialized spheres.

Meanwhile, 2) traditional processes of the reinforcement, recapitulation,

and reiteration of values are not inherently too weak—in some metaphysical

sense—to overcome some transcendent “rationality” represented by systems.

Rather, such processes fall and are colonized when concrete imperatives of

systems (for the generation of money or power) are able to overcome the

traditional barriers or discursive sites that maintain the lifeworld as a place of

reason-based discourse by bombarding it with manufactured imperatives.

III. Rewriting the Public Intellectual Narrative, a “First Cut”

In the Habermasian formulation of the essential outlines of the phenomena

of loss of meaning and loss of freedom, one can see that variants of the two

represent the fundamental questions at issue when speaking of public

intellectuals.6

The first is (in the Weberian account) the fear that spheres of culture will

so specialize as to lose the ability to communicate with one another, or with

mainstream discourse. We can call this the threat posed by (public) intellectuals,

especially if we embrace Habermas’s reformulation of this fear as “an elitist

splitting-off of expert cultures”: privileging some group of experts to speak on

behalf of the populace threatens those norms which dictate that public discourse is

a democratic and deliberative process with priority given to those arguments

6 In calling this section the “first cut” of a scheme to be clarified later in the chapter, I acknowledge a terminological debt to Gross’s Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher.

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which advance the cause of reason (or reasonableness), not necessarily those of

people who have the “right” training and the “official” answers. This is “loss of

meaning” in the sense that meaningful political participation is impossible for the

individual citizen when “political” questions are settled through other means (be

they relegated to determinations on the basis of “cost-effectiveness,” explicitly

fenced off as questions to be settled by experts, or just widely accepted as such).

The second fear could then be called the threat posed to public

intellectuals. This is the threat alternatively modeled above as either uncoupling

of subsystems from the lifeworld (in the Weberian version provided by

Habermas) or the penetration of systematic imperatives into continuing processes

of lifeworld creation-transmission (the Habermasian reformulation). This is the

danger posed by public intellectuals who have become academicized in the sense

of no longer being “engaged” with real people and problems: questioners who no

longer ask the big questions. Applying this framework to the downfall of the

public intellectual takes for granted a refutation of the previous concern and

provides for the possibility of the public intellectual as an honest lifeworld-

determined actor in the public sphere—for how else could his/her status as such

be put in jeopardy? This “loss of freedom,” then, when particularized to the

public intellectual, would be a loss of freedom from the lifeworld perspective,

which is to say an observation that the substance of contributions by intellectuals

to public discourse is coming to be increasingly determined by imperatives of the

academic system—for instance the views one must hold to be respectable (or the

methods, modes of communication, etc. one must practice)—or by some other

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power system rather than being determined/structured as responses to the

expressions of other discourse-participants. Here the role of public intellectual,

rather than posing a threat, itself comes under threat.

If the Habermasian fears seem naturally to flesh themselves out in line

with the concept of the public intellectual as it has been developed, despite the

Weberian allusions of the narrative described above, it might be because the very

subject presupposes a sort of public sphere that by Weberian right had and has no

hope of continued vitality—and thus if taken at face value would make the subject

hold no interest for all but the most nihilistic theorists.

One concern, however: to apply the above theories of Habermas to a

specific subsphere of the modern economic-political complex (the academic

subsphere), and to speak of the system imperatives it might place on an individual

within it, presupposes that some “steering medium” exists to guide that sphere.

Habermas’s classic steering media consist of money and power, and he

emphasizes the delinguistified quality of each.7 Academia, however, in its ideal

form is a completely linguistified sphere, with status and output determined by

discursive debate. A possible response: Bruno Latour’s seminal contribution to

the sociology of science included a structural account of the process of scientific

discovery which modeled it as a self-perpetuating cycle in which various forms of

physical, social, and monetary capital are continually transformed one into the

7 See Habermas, TCA, Vol 2, 183.

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other without any (necessary) underlying end. 8 Such an account of the drivers of

the university would be one possibility to justify theorizing about a delinguistified

abstraction within academia. This sort of account, however, represents an

overstatement and is hardly necessary for this story. At a more basic level, fears

of the “autonomy” of the academy are legion and tend to relate both to the

sphere’s internal social power structure and to the infiltration of market and

government imperatives into a supposedly self-guiding process of discovery.9

What we see, then, is that academia—in its role as social

producer/legitimator of truth/wisdom/knowledge/expertise—itself sits on the

periphery between system and lifeworld: on one hand, it relies heavily of

language and shared methodological, epistemological, and ontological consensus.

On the other, it can be modeled as coming under threat both from internal

systematic imperatives that interfere with its ability to generate meaning for a

broader culture, and also from the external imperatives of the more classic

steering media of money and power that both overtly and covertly may impinge

on the freedom of academic actors. The public intellectual looking out from

within the academy, then, sits on the threshold of a vocational sphere and the

public sphere, but he also sits—if we believe he may come under threat in both

ways (and in affirmation of the different universes in which each of those spheres

are subsumed in the Habermasian diagram)—at the crux of system and lifeworld.

8 Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, “The Cycle of Credibility,” in Science in Context: Readings in the Sociology of Science, Barry Barnes and David Edge, eds. (Open University Press: 1982), 21-34. 9 See for instance, Christopher Simpson, ed., Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences during the Cold War (New York: New Press, 1999).

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In some ways, the two threats outlined with the assistance of Habermas

map to the threats raised by other observers with respect to the public intellectual.

The left—epitomized by Russell Jacoby—fears thinkers unable to speak to

broader (“meaningful”) social questions after having been immersed in

obscurantist academic discourse, but also fears (a la Noam Chomsky10) the co-

option of the academic imprimatur of respectability by the pressures of coercive

measures of power or money (leading to “unfreely”-determined outputs). The

right (think David Horowitz) focuses on the imperatives internal to systematized

academia as the threat to the “freedom,” while one of Richard Posner’s fears lies

in the “meaning” to be lost by an institution whose intellectuals have lost all

incentive to provide the public discourse with the goods it desires (though for him

this consists of concrete answers to intelligible questions rather than lifeworld-

affirming dialogue).

Between internal and external threats to meaning and freedom this actually

leaves in aggregate four imaginable threats, and accounts from both sides of the

political divide often intermix them. Note that while both theorists from the

previous chapter are modeled here as worried about preserving meaning, Jacoby’s

focus on bureaucratization might mean he fits as readily into the framework of

loss of freedom due to internal factors as the above-modeled internal loss of

meaning. His tangential concern with the availability of a public ready to receive

intellectual ideas11 might speak to an externally-determined loss of meaning,

10 See for instance Noam Chomsky, “A Special Supplement: The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” The New York Review of Books, February 23, 1967. 11 Jacoby, 6.

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while Chomsky above is put forth as a leftward-leaning example of the fear of

externally-determined loss of freedom.

It falls to us now to 1) clarify an equivocation of the term “lifeworld” that

has been used in the proceeding retelling of the Habermasian account, 2) better

delineate the thick boundary-area and linkage between system and lifeworld, and

the role of the “public sphere” and “civil society” in mediation between the two,

and 3) transition from the macro-historical to the sector-specific level, through a

focus on the system-lifeworld boundary exemplified by the press/mass media. All

this will prepare the chapter to 4) generate from the above transformation of the

Weberian framework of the public intellectual a new set of normative

propositions for evaluating the public intellectual within a system/lifeworld

model.

IV. The Lifeworld and Lifeworld Processes

Habermas’s description of the lifeworld distinguishes between the

perspective of a single subject and that of a grand narrator. From a subject’s

perspective, the lifeworld represents those commonalities of concept that allow

for processes of meaningful communication, reaching mutual understanding, and

hence collectively-affirmed decisions to take place: “from the perspective of

participants the lifeworld appears as a horizon-forming context of processes of

reaching understanding.”12 From a more general perspective, however, the

lifeworld serves crucially in maintaining the cohesion, reproduction, and

meaningful functioning of societies whose systematic complexity exceeds the full

12 Habermas, TCA Vol. 2, 135

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grasp of any individual: “Collectives maintain their identities only to the extent

that the ideas members have of their lifeworld overlap sufficiently and condense

into unproblematic background convictions.”13

Hence, the lifeworld represents a mass of concepts within the grasp of a

single subject, but also (when viewed from above) implies a set of organic

functions that reproduce and, under conditions of modernity, refine and deliberate

these concepts. So, when the lifeworld is delineated into private (largely familial)

and public spheres, the term begins to be used not merely for the mass of

commonly held and continually reconstituted propositions that underlie those

entities, or the interactions through which this is done, but for the “differentiated”

channels along which such interactions commonly take place—for those

systematic developments which remain “rooted” in the lifeworld. In this sense,

then, while academically-produced analytic thought which migrates into the

“public consciousness” constitutes a piece of the lifeworld in that term’s most

precise meaning, the processes by which it does so can themselves be considered

integral to the lifeworld (more precisely they are denoted by Habermas as the

social or cultural reproduction of the lifeworld). As such, the processes for the

propagation of academic products are at the nexus of systemic and lifeworld

imperatives, of expert and public discourse.

V. System, Lifeworld, and the Places In Between

As mentioned above, the danger posed by rationalization of society along

vectors of money and power consists not only of the demarcation of spheres

13 Ibid. 136

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ordered along these lines from the lifeworld, but more prominently that such

spheres will inject system imperatives into inherently lifeworld-critical processes

such as “cultural transmission.” As seen, academia undoubtedly constitutes one

such process.

Where does hope come from for Habermas that such processes can be

preserved in their non-system-dominated form? One thing to keep in mind is that

Habermas’s response to critical theories of mass media captivation and cooption

of the individual’s subjectivity is not to assert the consistent transcendence of that

subjectivity, but rather to point to and formalize the empirical reality of modern

societies’ continual redefinition of themselves. Collective affirmation of the

organic viewpoints of ordinary individuals sometimes just does beat the public

relations specialists. The “public sphere,” which can “best be described as a

network for communicating information and points of view [in which] the streams

of communication are, in the process, filtered and synthesized in such a way that

they coalesce into bundles of topically specified public opinions,” represents the

place in which such interaction can take place. (“The social space generated in

communicative action” rather than the functions or contents of such interaction).14

It is worth elaborating on the treatment in Habermas’s Between Facts and

Norms of the prospective role of an effective public sphere in actuating lifeworld

values within the system-processes of modern governance. Within the public

sphere, Habermas describes the role of a “civil society”—beyond the established,

official mechanism of government—and uses the term not in the Marxist sense

14 Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, William Rehg, trans. (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1996 [1992]), 360.

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but rather in the contemporary sociological definition of a network of voluntary

organizations organized to apply pressure to the foci of governmental-system

power.15 A free society need not be one in which this civil society and other

aspects of the public sphere are able to triumph over the system on every issue of

ambiguous domain, but rather one in which crucial, extraordinary issues that

speak to lifeworld concerns “originating in the periphery” of the power structure

are able to be conveyed in such a way as to “make it plausible” that change in the

center is effected.16

Civil society in this case is co-defined by the issues its raises and by its

structural characteristics. “One can distinguish, at least tentatively, the more

loosely organized actors who ‘emerge from’ the public, as it were [civil society],

from other actors merely ‘appearing before’ the public. The latter have

organizational power, resources, and sanctions available from the start,” 17 while

those emergent from roots in dynamic and voluntary civil society rather than the

systematic establishment must win their power through discourse. In a

flourishing public sphere, they can do so when their arguments are strong enough.

One question, then might be put as whether academicians established within the

public sphere belong within the first group—emergent from the public—or the

second—representatives of the power structure.

This seems to be the issue in dispute between those concerned with the

threat to public intellectuals, and those who view the role itself as a threat. In this

15 Ibid. 367. 16 Ibid. 380. 17 Ibid. 375.

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work’s Introduction, it was noted that one method of studying the public

intellectual has been an attempt to redefine the term, seeing the traditional notion

of the role as a threat rather than a benefit to society: this amounts to an assertion

that expertise cannot be allowed to colonize the public sphere. Cases for such a

threat by the public intellectual highlight the dangers manifested either 1) if an

increasingly systematized academy is driving scholars to seek a certain kind of

“publicity” (a danger especially at schools dependent on the state—with its own

imperatives—for funding), or 2) in system imperatives’ control over the type of

individuals who ultimately advance through the ranks and thus have access to the

legitimating aura of academic respectability. An example which would be

germane for inquiry is the success or failure of think tank hires in presenting their

opinions as independent and authoritative. The threat by public intellectuals, then,

is that as representatives of the power structure they may neglect to truly aid in

the goal of regenerating rather than further systematizing the lifeworld.

The narratives of the public intellectual’s decline in the last chapter,

however, did not focus on this threat. They focused rather on the threat to the

public intellectual, primarily of imperatives internal to the academy. Continuing

to investigate such a threat to this role at the boundary of system and lifeworld

calls for raising the topic of a parallel role within the same space.

VI. The Press: An Analogue in the Boundary Space That the public intellectual exerts any potential influence through the

newsmedia is true almost by definition. An intellectual who exerts his influence

directly within the policy process—and without the use of such media

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intermediaries as book publishers, print media, television producers and

distributors, online content aggregators, etc.18—could hardly be considered to be

doing so “publicly” except in certain situations of overlap between policy-creation

and public broadcast, such as congressional testimony. Our structural analysis

tells us, though, that the intellectual’s dependence on and link to the newsmedia is

not coincidental, in the sense that the press and the intellectual overlap at the

boundary of system and lifeworld. In doing so, they share the potential of

facilitating public discussion of lifeworld values as such values relate to

differentiated systematic processes.

This section will be devoted first to Habermas’s account of the rise and

fall of an effective lifeworld-reinforcing press in the era of early modernity. An

application of the general system/lifeworld framework to the evolution of the

modern press serves to demonstrate the situation of a specific societal sub-entity

at the nexus of system and lifeworld for the purposes of both analogy and

interplay with our own subject of inquiry.

The project within which this narrative falls is Habermas’s The Structural

Transformation of the Public Sphere. While his later theoretical works would

come to focus on the crucial importance of situations of discursive interaction in

ensuring and preserving individual autonomy within massive and powerful

modern systems, both the theoretical and the historical moorings for the

importance of such situations are laid out in this, Habermas’s first major work and

a work still tied to the vocabulary of the Frankfurt School:

18 Often all owned by the same entities.

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[T]he two conditions for a public sphere to be effective in the political realm—the objectively possible minimizing of bureaucratic decisions and a relativizing of structural conflicts of interest according to the standard of a universal interest everyone can acknowledge—can today no longer be disqualified as simply utopian. The dimension of the democratization of industrial societies constituted as social-welfare states is not limited from the outset by an impenetrability and indissolubility (whether theoretically demonstrable or empirically verifiable) of irrational relations of social power and political domination. The outcome of the struggle between a critical publicity and one that is merely staged for manipulative purposes remains open; the ascendancy of publicity regarding the exercise and balance of political power mandated by the social-welfare state over publicity merely staged for the purpose of acclamation is by no means certain. But unlike the idea of a bourgeois public sphere during the period of its liberal development, it cannot be denounced as an ideology. If anything, it brings the dialectic of that idea, which has been degraded into an ideology, to its conclusion.19

The passage sees an opposition created between “critical publicity,” and the

instrumentalized processes which Weber deemed “rationalized life spheres.”

Critical publicity here signifies not merely the “broadcast” of a result to the

members of a polity, nor simple transparency in a societal process of

determination, but rather a materially public communication process—one

determined by deliberative interaction between polity members who are not

predominantly bringing to bear capital, status, and other media external to the

process. For the bringing to bear of such goods leads to a determination on

grounds external to the debate, and hence accompanied by a publicity “merely

staged for the purpose of acclamation.”

19 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Burger, trans. (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1989 [1962]), 235. Emphasis added.

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In tracing the inheritance of modern “publicity,” Habermas interweaves

histories of the structure of the polity, political thought, modes of “private”

discourse, and the press (a term which for our purposes can be said to represent

the producers of all “newsmedia”). It might be more correct, in fact, to say he

reconstructs an interwoven history, since the institutional picture he paints is of a

feudal Europe within which all four were threaded together: the polity, recognized

no delineation between public and private in its own dealings, and fomented no

news media. As the polity becomes bureaucratized (exerting ever more gravity as

its own system), a separate potential for reasoned public dialogue takes the

foreground in reigning in the polity’s differentiation into competing channels of

power.

Habermas narrates first the development and then the loss of a critical

publicity, facilitated by the rise of the press, but undermined by its capture by the

economic forces of bourgeois society: “Developed out of the system of private

correspondences [trade-related newsletters with small followings] and for a long

time overshadowed by them, the newspaper trade was initially organized as a

small handicraft business.” He describes the motivation of early European

publishers as “pure business” but in the pursuit of a “modest maximization of

profits that did not overstep the traditional bounds of early capitalism.”20 In time,

however, newspapers came to embrace the “editorial function,” by serving as a

“dealer in public opinion” and at the same time promoting the bourgeois values of

20 Ibid. 181.

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public debate.21 The liberal state’s sanction of “the political public sphere,”

however, allowed the nascent press industry to “abandon its polemical stance and

concentrate on the profit opportunities for a commercial business [which

happened in] Great Britain, France and the United State at about the same time

(the 1830’s).”22 While gathering the systematic features of a modern enterprise,

however, the organizations again became ideologized, except this time along the

lines of political factions, as perverse market pressures—the “general tendencies

toward concentration and centralization” present across industries—led to

newspapers which manufactured rather than aired viewpoints.23 In other words,

the system captured a product ostensibly engineered as a mirror of or a check

upon it, and the trend only proliferated with newer mass-oriented media

technologies. “[T]he degree of economic concentration and technological-

organizational coordination in the newspaper publishing industry seems small in

comparison to the new media of the twentieth century—film, radio, and

television.”24

In some sense, the historical story told is one of unraveling. The pinnacle

of discursive achievement occurred—much of Habermas’s descriptive

undergrowth suggests—prior to the rise of first the liberal and then the welfare

state. Habermas prizes the rationality-oriented, publicly spirited discourse of the

21 Ibid. 182. Also see Tocqueville, 516-20 “On the Connection Between Associations and Newspapers,” for one account of the impact this has on civil society in the American case. 22 Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 184. 23 Ibid. 186. 24 Ibid. 187. Outside of the United States the response was to preserve a strong state role in broadcasting such that “the original basis of publicist institutions [in civil society] became largely reversed.” (Ibid. 188)

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salon as precisely what the modern mass media has negated: a sequence of

arguments issued in response to one another, with the expectation of participation,

intended to clarify rather than obscure objects of discord, and appealing to

thought—rather than power—as the final determinant of their resolution. Salon

culture is constructed out of a set of commercial developments that splinter the

fiction of the state as single personage inherent to feudalism.25

Habermas buys the Marxist critique, however, that this golden era of

bourgeois discourse gives way eventually to a different fiction: maintenance of a

patina of reasoned public discourse behind which lies a (potentially fatal)

mechanism of private individuals reasoning from the contours of their own self-

interest. The limited class of self-conscious subjects produced by the bourgeois

Enlightenment creed ostensibly grows to include the entirety of individuals of all

classes, but in the meantime participants’ status as self-conscious subjects is

subsumed, first to their standing as producers or consumers within liberal

capitalist society, and later also to their standing as electors and clients of the

bureaucratic welfare state. In line with the focus of other critical theorists,

Structural Transformation envisions the danger of a public conversation

conducted by entities driven by profit-imperatives, manipulating and excluding

the populace. Unlike others, however, Habermas asserts (in the above excerpt)

that this struggle “remains open.”

25 See the brief discussion of the “homme de lettres” at 1.II for an impression of the spillover of the salon into print discourse. For an American example consider the age of pamphleteers, and the Federalist.

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The normative proposal, then, to return to the excerpt above, is the

creation of a modern system for deliberative, participatory, mass societal-level

determination in which “unlike the idea of a bourgeois public sphere during the

period of its liberal development, it cannot be denounced as an ideology.” Such a

system remains open to all stakeholders and is not rooted in the interest and

worldview of a specific subsection of the population. The mass media stifles such

developments both by its non-participatory qualities and through its centralized,

capitalistic mode of production (in which discourse is just another commodity).

This might seem to require homogenous input into its supply chain (ideas) that

can only be supplied by large bureaucracies, returning the story to the dependence

of the public intellectual on media access.

It is in this universe of concepts that the modern university system seems

both a threat and a requirement in the Habermasian framework. On the one hand

universities are large, mechanistically structured bureaucracies that often seem to

be performing a trade in the goods of status and power rather than a process of

unencumbered deliberation. On the other, the underlying principle of the

university is rational inquiry, often in the scientific or the deconstructive mode,

and status within the system is idealized as being attained through sincere

discursive processes. Like agents of the press, intellectuals situated within the

university face conflicting pulls of lifeworld-determined and system-defined

courses of action.

The institutional scaffolding of intellectual life, like that of the press

above, asserts a certain degree of pressure upon those who inhabit it, measured in

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the feeling of administrative rationalization as bureaucratization and economic

rationalization as vocationalization. From the societal perspective, however, as

Habermas’s historical account evaluates the press for their potential to foster free

debate in light of the media of communication used, so too could the public

intellectual be evaluated at the nexus of lifeworld and system at which he presents

himself.

VII. Moving Toward a Reformulation of the Public In tellectual Narrative

There are several nexuses at which the compatibility of the modern

intellectual with sustainable processes of public discourse could be evaluated.

The state, the intellectual, the public, and the press all represent nodes to be

considered in an explanatory system, each pair with unique channels between

them. The press, either in the role of reporting or through networks of

distribution, serves to mediate contact between intellectuals and the news

consuming public—roughly the same mediating role it plays between politicians

and the governed (presumably the participatory public of the salon stood at a

lesser degree of social mediation not only from the government but also from the

university). Intellectuals are often seen to be at their most potentially dangerous

(and influential) when they bypass this mediator, taking their influence straight to

those holding the levers of power, with their expertise never exposed for scrutiny

by the wisdom of common people. Meanwhile, the state funds, in part when not

totally, the universities and holds various other levers of power over the press that

reports on it. The people relate to all three of these authority-producing entities

primarily as consumers. The contemporary press and university each adopt a role

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of “gatekeeper” with respect to legitimating the claims to authority of each other

and the state. It is under this reasoning that rights such as tenure and “academic

freedom” find justifications analogous to those behind freedom of the press.

Of these several nexuses outlined above, however, the public intellectual

denotes the figure on the intellectual side of the intellectual-press nexus. The

degree to which the discourse presented at such a site or sites hews to the

conventions of reasoned argumentation which regulate the modern lifeworld (as

fostered and demonstrated by the early public sphere Habermas celebrates) serves

to evaluate the success of public intellectuals. Hence, a focus on the

characteristics of these sites and their potential for prizing lifeworld over system

imperatives (as did the early press) can illuminate a major determinant of the

potential for fact-value reconciliation to be provided by public intellectuals.

Thus, a fair view of the ability of the public intellectual role to continue

effectively in light of the systemic pressures presented by the modern university

could be provided by taking as the center of the narrative the sites of public

intellectual discourse rather than the individuals denoted by the term. The next

chapter will preliminarily investigate such a narrative, but first a review of this

chapter’s argument will recap the transition from Weberian rationalization to

Habermas.

The system/lifeworld framework, as seen in this chapter, moves beyond

the Weberian account in which increasing complexity within society directly—

and somewhat mystically—erodes the bases of that society’s meaning-networks,

and so beyond the equivocation between the individualistic goal-oriented

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(instrumental) and system-determined (functional) rationality. A more complex

account takes its place, in which the systematic segmentation of capitalist/modern

development poses a threat only in those subcases where it impinges on spheres

directly charged with continually and communally renegotiating common

meaning-networks. It might be said that any theorist of the decline of the public

intellectual—even if working within a Weberian schema—must subscribe to the

second theory (or at least something beyond the Weberian account) if he believes

the decline of the public intellectual to be reversible. It could be asked, then, in

the theorists examined previously, whether moving beyond Weber involves

rewriting their accounts, or merely re-founding them upon a more stable base.26

In the Weberian framework, increasing specialization within the academy

and the loss of the generalist inevitably lead to an inability to find public faces for

intellectual work—a situation seemingly contraindicated on a day-to-day basis—

or an impoverishment of their ability to serve effectively at fact-value

reconciliation. The system/lifeworld framework explains well the duality noted in

the imperatives placed on the public intellectual: to serve his discipline and

vocation impartially (a system imperative) while also examining “big” social

questions (a lifeworld imperative). Such a paradigm associates this tension with

the fear of loss of meaning—it is not the development of specific, partitioned

academic vocabularies that threatens the meaningfulness of scholarship, but rather

the potential to forget the root social purpose for which those vocabularies were

delineated and to lose the ability to convert not merely their conclusions but their

26 The third section of the next chapter addresses a portion of this question.

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arguments to everyday language. To put it another way, the role of public

intellectual itself makes clear that a model of system-lifeworld “uncoupling” (a la

Habermas’s reading of Weber) misconstrues the problem, for as long as there is a

lifeworld, it will border and densely link to the system through various social

actors—the question is which way power flows: do the intellectual’s system

imperatives nudge the lifeworld or does the lifeworld nudge him?27

Threats to the public intellectual, then, can be solved only through a focus

on the public media of discourse—the sites at which either redeliberation of

commonly-held concerns through argument or systematic imposition of non-

public imperatives through distortionary conditions of power-assertion take place.

Solutions internal to the academy address only one of two faces of the imperative

for public intellectuals to serve the public sphere, neglecting the situation they

face when they get there. The interest in media—as reviewed in the case of the

modern press above—is hence two-fold: at the border of the lifeworld, the public

intellectual faces analogous challenges by system-imperatives as does the media,

but also reflexively receives from (as well as exerting upon) media pressure to

provide a more or less lifeworld-discursive product.

A revitalization of the public intellectual role seemingly would depend on

the promulgation of expert discourse such that not merely the contrary

conclusions but the presuppositions and intermediate propositions of public

27 See Habermas, TCA, Vol 2, 185: “the institutions that anchor steering mechanisms such as power and money in the lifeworld could serve as a channel either for the influence of the lifeworld on formally organized domains of action or, conversely, for the influence of the system on communicatively structured contexts of action.”

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voices of fact-value decision-making can be cross-examined and deliberated. It

might seem that both television and the internet once evoked hopes of such

promise and are now failing. An evaluation that decenters the (p) of the case—

the ethos of the university—to place central focus instead on (q)—the system of

public discourse—might inquire of the suitability of the media system for

allowing and encouraging reasoned discourse in which arguments are made and

supporting premises revealed.

VIII. Wrapping Up

There’s a sense in which the public intellectual may seem an easy case for

reframing in a context of system imperatives and lifeworld processes as mediated

by communication systems. Public intellectual work intimately involves a

communicative linkage between an ethically-informed vocational sphere and a

larger society-level discourse. When we refocus our lens so as to center on that

linkage—on situations for the public presentation of fact-value-reconciling

arguments—we find that the potential for public intellectual activity radiates from

the linkages which produce a robust public sphere. Whether or not this speaks to

the broader appeal of the Habermasian framework as presented is up to the reader

to judge.

Aside from a recasting of the “danger” and “decline” narratives in a more

self-contained framework, then, this analysis has indicated two additional

propositions for moving beyond these accounts of reification within the academy

and market pressure beyond it. Going forward with an investigation of the

shifting role of public intellectual, we should take account of the following: 1) the

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story of the public intellectual as it can be told as a story of the interaction of the

intellectual with the system of mass communication in the public sphere (“the

media”), and 2) the fact that predictions and normative propositions of such a

role’s potential development are intimately tied into the continuing evolution of

communication norms and communication technology. The following chapter

will address these twin questions, beginning with the latter. Noting that

reflections on the public intellectual have turned to the topic of media

intermediaries most readily in contemplating the public intellectual’s role going

forward into the age of “new media,” the chapter will consider how the narrative

looking backward changes when recontextualized around a media format.

3: MEDIA SITES AND THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL :

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This chapter will focus on the evaluation of media environments as they

facilitate, or don’t, the activity of public intellectuals. After a few preliminaries,

the first section will investigate how the internet has been portrayed as a potential

game-changer for public intellectuals. The second section follows with a brief

theorization of the internet’s character as a potential medium reason-based of

communication. The subject will then turn to accounting for the history of the

public intellectual role, in line with the previous chapter’s conclusion that not just

the future but the history of the public intellectual can be told through an

evaluation of the communicative potential of the media sphere sites to which the

public intellectual has access. First, the extent to which this issue is raised in the

above mentioned rationalization accounts of the phenomenon will be explored,

followed by a brief section on an empirical account of the relations of intellectuals

and media. The chapter’s later sections will foreground a specific site associated

in both its positive and negative aspects with public intellectuals: the op-ed page.

An account of the op-ed format’s surprisingly recent establishment (1970 in the

standard account) and aspirations to become a public forum will be followed by a

review of the recent empirical literature on the subject. The chapter will conclude

by synthesizing the presentation of the op-ed page as a media site with the theory

presented in the previous chapter, clarifying the theoretical concerns led to by the

normative theorization of public intellectuals in the context of specific media

spaces. Overall, then, this chapter provides a provisional attempt to demonstrate

that the concerns raised regarding the fate of public intellectuals—and the

potential to counter such concerns—are best foregrounded in an account that

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takes the points of contact with the media, rather than the agent himself, as

central.

Entering this examination of the practical media sphere, it will help to

preliminarily establish a framework and also a terminology of inquiry. Habermas

has proposed a general strategy for research into role of the media in fostering a

deliberative public sphere, such a space being the keystone of a political system in

which “the cooperative search of deliberating citizens for solutions to political

problems takes the place of the preference aggregation of private citizens or the

collective self-determination of an ethically integrated nation.”1 He proposes two

main tracks of investigation, suggesting inquiry into 1) those factors which allow

or prevent the maintenance of media system norms independent of external

pressures of the market or power structure and 2) feedback mechanisms which

facilitate or interfere with symmetric responsiveness between discourse in the

media and in the broader civil society. Public intellectuals as a phenomenon of

media systems seem to depend upon and reinforce each of these tenets.

The following investigation will focus on the ways in which the evolution

of agents to fulfill the role public intellectual (as defined in the introduction),

depends on the norms and technologies of communication available to them. The

term “media,” will be used—depending on context—to denote both the group of

1 Habermas, “Political Communication in Media Society...” 3. For some considerations of these other conceptions of democracy in a communicative context see Seyla Benhabib “Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition, and Jürgen Habermas,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, Craig Calhoun, ed., 73-78.

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people sorting and transmitting “news” (also the “newsmedia”)2 and the

combination of individual “mediums” through which news is transmitted.

Provisionally, “media format” (or channel) signifies a combination of a set of

norms held by media (in the sense of people) and a technology of transmission (a

medium) that together serve to deliver “packaged” information, which may

include news. A “form” of media is used here interchangeably with “medium” in

denoting primarily the latter, technological aspect.3 When the term “forum” is

used, this represents a media format which seeks to emulate or evoke the

characteristics of a “public forum,” the ideal of a particular social space fed

through a variety of media channels with publicly significant content that thus

acquires general social visibility, and becomes potentially available for

deliberative interactions in the sense indicated above through the presentation of

varied reason-based arguments. This project is especially concerned with the

contribution public intellectuals make toward actualizing the public forum ideal in

cases where some public choice is called for.

I. Public Intellectuals and New Media, a Topic for Debate While a major contention of this project is that the media as a focal point

of the public intellectual narrative has been under-emphasized, the role of media

appears most prominently in forward-looking rather than backward-looking

2 I confine my concern with “news” to the political without saying this is definitional of the term: provisionally “news” could be all normative and positive statements relating to ongoing events, although a more realistic definition of the news should likely note that it exists only codependently with the newsmedia. 3 This raises a hackle that at the border of the technology and the norms of the profession may sit a set of “technical norms” difficult to conclusively assign to either, but precision will be set aside in favor of recognition that some such distinction exists even where no bright line can be drawn.

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accounts of changes in the public sphere interactions of public intellectuals.

These forward-looking accounts tend to focus on a (yes, still) rising

medium/technology of communication, the internet. Take for instance a 2009

article in the journal New Media & Society by James A. Danowski and David W.

Park entitled “Networks of the Dead or Alive in Cyberspace: Public Intellectuals

in the Mass and Internet Media.” They hypothesize that, because the internet

fosters a greater “sociomorphic development”—the creation of new social and

conceptual links—around a topic of discussion once raised than do more

traditional media, and that hence “public intellectuals have more a presence on the

internet than in traditional media.”4 Through an analysis of media content

relating to 662 public intellectuals from Richard Posner’s list and elsewhere, the

pair demonstrate that the “afterlife” of a dead public intellectual is less fleeting in

cyberspace—that is discussion of the person and the person’s ideas proceed at an

approximately unaltered rate—than in print media, and use this to posit that a

straightforward decline narrative should be tempered by the rise of the web.

“When viewed in terms of communicative impact, intellectuals seem to be far

from their last gasp,” they claim.5 It is unclear with what sense of irony the claim

is made—after all, suggesting that new media technology may give intellectuals’

ideas a greater salience after their passing does not directly refute a contention

such as Jacoby’s that they may be dying out). The methodology of Danowski and

Park is to examine the imprint of the public intellectual in the web-based

discourse of others, but while noting the “[m]any theorists [who] have evaluated

4 Danowski and Park, 345. 5 Ibid. 352.

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the internet’s potential to provide a new home for the public sphere”6 they stop

short directly questioning how the new media environment has changed the public

contact points of the intellectual herself.

In contrast, Daniel Drezner’s 2008 Chronicle of Higher Education piece

“Public Intellectual 2.0” and its upgrade the subsequent year in the journal Society

entitled “Public Intellectuals 2.1,” focus on these points of contact.7 Drezner, a

professor of international politics at Tufts, asserts that “For academics aspiring to

be public intellectuals, weblogs allow networks to develop that cross the

disciplinary and hierarchical strictures of the academy—and expand beyond the

academy.”8 The path to public intellectual access has become easier for non-

academics as well, he says, as blogs provide a launching pad through which to

catch the eye of larger media. Drezner sets himself in opposition to those such as

Russell Jacoby and Alan Wolfe who (again in an admission of the power of this

new medium) have portrayed blogs as threatening the civility, complexity of

thought, and audience mass of public debate. Such objections “manifest some of

the same flaws of the larger decline meme,” says Drezner.9

In any case, however, perhaps because of its currentness or perhaps

because of the existence of a ready-made “media revolution” narrative, the

digitization of society seems to be one narrative able to make a dent in the

6 Ibid. 339. 7 Daniel W. Drezner, “Public Intellectual 2.0,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 14, 2008. Daniel W. Drezner, “Public Intellectuals 2.1,” Society 46, no. 1 (January 2009), 49-54. (Sic: the difference in pluralization between the two is not an error). 8 Drezner (2009), 53. 9 Ibid. 52. Such flaws centered, in his framework, around an idealization of the past at the cost of an accurate view of change over time

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recurring story of the public intellectual. The rise of an internet society, for better

or worse, takes the place of “academic anxiety” as the underlying cultural edifice

which determines the narrative. It should be noted, then, based on the distinction

above that this is the tale of a medium, a new form of media technology, that de-

emphasizes the role of the profession of the newsmedia as intermediaries who

mold the format (the social and technological conventions) which media

communication takes. The internet allows for a tale of disintermediation and

increased agency on the part of the intellectual in line with a conceptual

framework in which the public intellectual serves to center the narrative. While a

step beyond the rationalization thesis, the new narrative falls short of interrogating

the role of media intermediaries in facilitating public intellectual activity, both in

the internet age and in the past. The following section will theorize more

generally on the internet’s effect on public discourse in order to speculate on the

relation of this new technology to the question of mediation.

II. The Internet, Friend or Foe?

The internet’s potential for salutary impact on the process, outcome, and

efficacy of public debate stems from two broad subsidiary claims. 1) Technology

evangelists have long pointed to the access barriers broken-down by a

communication network in which even far-flung participants can be both

producers and consumers of debate. On this count, the internet seems to

overcome some of the dangers of the economically and technically centralized

communication apparatuses of the era that first came to be known as “high

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capitalism.”10 2) Internet advocates have also embraced the formulation that “On

the internet nobody knows you’re a dog”11 in its noblest form: the idea that debate

is not only widened but leveled as texts become detached from traditional

connotative marks of credibility. On these grounds can be seen the internet’s

potential to approach what Habermas has called the “ideal speech situation,”

where statements are evaluated only on the grounds of their particular

reasonableness.12

Fear of the internet’s effect on discourse, meanwhile, may not fit neatly

into a limited set of boxes, but at least three stylized concerns deserve to be

highlighted. A) It’s claimed that the internet threatens those norms of civility

necessary for effective public discourse by providing anonymity, as well as

physical and hence mentally constructed distance between discussants.13 B)

Critics also raise the negative restatement of number 2) above: all information and

analysis on the classic internet can be seen as equally illegitimate for not being

able to be credibly certified by legitimacy-conferrers. C) Lastly, and perhaps

most crucially for present purposes is the self-selection effect seen in internet

interchange: the fear that the internet allows readers and contributors to artificially

limit debate as they perceive it by letting them select and link to only similarly-

10 See, for instance, Drezner (2009) above. 11 Peter Steiner, “On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog” (Cartoon), The New Yorker, July 5, 1993, 61. 12 See Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, Thomas McCarthy, trans. (Boston: Beacon, 1984 [1981]), 8-42 for the section “‘Rationality’—A Preliminary Specification.” 13 For instance Russell Jacoby, “Last Thoughts on The Last Intellectuals,” Society 46, no. 1 (2009): 38-44, as referred to by Drezner, above.

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minded potential participants (this effect is easiest to spot in the segmentation of

the political “blogosphere”).14

The second decade of the public internet has seen the consolidation of

traffic around sites founded or acquired by media corporations, as well as

technological improvements allowing such sites to reinsert many markers of

“legitimate” versus “illegitimate” communication into this medium.15 This aids in

alleviating fears A and B, above, but is balanced by a diminishment of the

beneficial qualities of internet debate by first segregating a smaller class of

producers from a larger mass of consumers and second increasing the role of

signaling through credentials contra prior points 1 and 2, respectively.

Meanwhile, as discursive communities (for instance interlinked networks of

blogs) reify—increasingly hosted by those same media entities—concern number

3, the threat to open, productive discourse posed by delimiting communities of

belief with potentially little cross-communication, seems only to increase.

What accounts of the communicative effect of the internet often seem to

underemphasize is the extent to which potential dangers relate not to the internet’s

functional so much as to its illusionary qualities. To illustrate the point: Google

14 Cass R. Sunstein, Republic.com 2.0 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton, 2007), at 220-1 makes the case for how internet-induced “excessive fragmentation... might well compromise freedom, understood from the democratic point of view,” citing J. S. Mill, John Dewey, and Louis Brandeis in noting that “For citizens in a republic, freedom requires exposure to a diverse set of topic and opinions.” 15 See Sunstein’s book noted above. I was surprised a quick literature search did not turn up more emphatic formulations of this point, but for one source refer to Chris Paterson, “News Agency Dominance in International News on the Internet,” in David Skinner, James R. Compton, and Michael Gasher, eds, Converging Media, Diverging Politics: A Political Economy of News Media in the United States and Canada (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2005), 145-64.

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and other search engines have become the backbone of the internet ethos—they

functionalize the access to a universality of information which the internet

represents. In order to comb the internet and rank each site’s relevance to

particular topics, however, Google must represent the probability with which a

user will go from any single site to any other, and to do this its algorithm includes

a fixed chance that from a given page a user—rather than following a link—

navigates to a randomly chosen page on the internet.16 For Google, this method

has allowed them to represent the world wide web as an interlinked whole and to

use that representation for commercial gain. And were this a representation of

how users truly behaved in day-to-day surfing, one could see why the internet

would in fact bear much more resemblance to a physical public space, a place in

which as Cass Sunstein says “you are able to press [an] argument on many people

who might otherwise fail to hear the message.”17 Nonetheless, Google’s

algorithm is a way to represent the web that differs from its usual use practices:

people formally reify “social networks” of their pre-existing acquaintances, seek

out news from ideologically comfortable sources, etc. This is easier to do, as

Sunstein avers, with fewer “general interest intermediaries” around, but the real

threat is the idea that the public loses an appreciation for such intermediaries as

they slowly fade to nothing in an internet cocoon that seems to offer a grander

version of universal exposure.

16 See Lawrence Page, “Method for node ranking in a linked database,” U.S. Patent 6,285,999, filed January 9, 1998, and issued September 4, 2001. I owe my understanding of this topic to a lecture by Harvard Statistics Professor Joseph Blitzstein. 17 Sunstein, 26.

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An interesting though far from conclusive reflection of the effect of the

internet on the public presence of intellectuals can serve to return this brief

digression to this project’s primary topic. In mid-2008, Foreign Policy magazine,

in tandem with the British periodical Prospect, released a list of “The Top 100

Public Intellectuals.” The list was presented alphabetically, from Pakistan’s

Aitzaz Ahsan to Slavoj Zizek of Slovenia (the Americans ran from Kwame

Anthony Appiah to Fareed Zakaria) with invitation for readers to vote online to

rank the most influential of these intellectuals.18 The magazines had done much

the same thing three years before, when Noam Chomsky had triumphed, and

expected similar results. Instead, the poll attracted a very different fragment of

the internet than that the publications had likely intended. The website of a

Turkish newspaper associated with Sufi cleric Fethullah Gülen highlighted the

poll, and it was soon linked to from “every single Gülen website, official and

unofficial, [staff at Prospect] were able to find.”19 Gülen won the poll, and

ballots from his supporters seemed to lift nine other Muslim thinkers to round out

the top ten. (Chomsky was eleventh: see Appendix for the full results). The

model under which the technology of the world wide web allows each public

intellectual to better connect with his particular fiefdom while serving an illusion

of free deliberation (or in this case voting), certainly caused Prospect to take note.

“Next time,” cautioned the account of Gülen’s unlikely triumph, “don’t be

18 “The Top 100 Public Intellectuals,” Foreign Policy, no. 166 (May 2008): 58-61. 19 Tom Nuttall, “How Gülen Triumphed,” Prospect, no. 148 (July 26, 2008).

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surprised to see the Chinese walk the poll—a campaign to rouse a few million

Sufis will pale against the might of the Chinese information machine.”20

It is yet to be seen whether the developments outlined above fragment the

dialogue between public intellectuals and a general public or instead incubate the

production and public-facing instinct of a greater proportion of intellectuals. It is

notable, though, that this media focus has proven a standard narrative for the

future of public intellectuals but not for the role’s past. 21 This calls for a return to

historical accounts of the public intellectual, and the possibility for a new

beginning.

III. Considerations of Media in Rationalization Accounts of the Public

Intellectual

The conclusion of the previous chapter leads to the proposition that one

way to represent not just the future but a history of the public intellectual—which,

as was previously discussed, seems essential for the concept’s salience given its

own origins—is to seek out the media formats in which public intellectual

discourse is generated or presented. While Russell Jacoby’s focus is the

pernicious effects of potential public intellectuals’ socialization into the

university, his work does not fully exclude the description of the sites in which

20 Ibid. 21 While the above examination of the internet seems to involve a greater focus on technological possibilities than will the coming examination of the op-ed page, each seeks to embody a compelling but at times overstated potential for disintermediation between debate participants and their perceivers. While it is not necessary for such stories to be parallel in order to make the case that each relates to the history of the public intellectual, assertions that they are media developments of such different character as to be incomparable would seem overstated.

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“public intellectual” exchange occurs. Jacoby emphasizes the discursive vitality

of the “little magazines” around which generations of New York intellectuals’

public lives initially centered:

The contributors viewed themselves as men and women of letters, who sought and prized a spare prose. They wrote for intellectuals and sympathizers anywhere; small in size, the journals opened out to the world. For this reason their writers could be read by the educated public, and later they were. Schooled in the little magazines, the Max Eastmans or Dwight Macdonalds or Irving Howes easily shifted to larger periodicals and publics.22

For Jacoby, the eventual inability of such magazines and other media formats to

provide a suitable livelihood stands as an intermediate effect of the decline of

urban bohemia and represents one of the proximate causes driving intellectuals

into the university, and thus towards specialization along vocational lines. In this

narrative, while many of the older figures—those who began in the intellectual

street and only end up in the universities (as the “last generation” of

intellectuals)—retain something of the ethic of spirited debate forged by these

prior media environment, those who spend their lives in the university (the

missing post-60s intellectuals) are socialized into a rationalized, spiritless, and

inward-looking debate apparatus.

The previous chapter advocated a reconceptualization of the generating

conditions of “public intellectual activity” as not primarily a particular mindset,

but rather a set of well-maintained meeting points between intellectual

“producers” and “public” debate (encompassing debate modulated toward the

22 Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals, 7. Note the reference to the “homme de letters”/man of letters ideal derived from the French Enlightenment’s sphere of print discourse.

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public broadly, debate toward an educated public, or debate regarding public

policy and taking place in a widely observable forum). To recast Jacoby’s

narrative then—the narrative within which the term came into being, and which

we’ve seen intimately ties into the broader Weberian diagnosis of modernity—

means to tell a history of the public intellectual as one of forums altered (or

perhaps lost) rather than of an ethos lost. What’s left of this chapter will

undertake a small slice of that challenge, by examining a specific public-facing

media format, an ostensible forum for public presentation of arguments, that has

arisen and drawn in the academic class over the period of time in which Jacoby’s

story takes place.

Before wading in waist-deep, however, a brief digression as to how the

previous chapter’s theory comports with that of Richard Posner. Posner, too,

blames a “decline” of public intellectuals on a Weberian narrative of

rationalization within the academic track. To him, however, the so-called failure

of the public intellectual was not manifested in disappearance, but rather the

modern-day public intellectual is peddling shoddy goods. On the face of it, one

could view the divergence of Posner’s account with that of Jacoby as a dispute

over definitions within the same narrative: how bad must one’s “public” media

product be before it ceases to register as “intellectual” at all. It seems, however,

that the focus on the product’s quality brings the story a little closer to the nexus

of intellectual and media that the present account seeks to examine. The

shortcomings of Posner’s work, however, in part relate to the dispute, covered

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above, over his specification of what that “product” of a public intellectual, the

most central aspect of the role, consists of.23

For Russell Jacoby, for Posner’s critics, and for us, a valid prediction is

not the product most associated with the public intellectual role. The role is

intuitively associated with some form of prescription, not description: an attempt

to elucidate the value choices at play behind communal decisions. It is not

debates over scientific claims that take place within the public sphere, but rather

discussions of the applicability of science and other forms of knowledge to aid in

public decision-making (i.e. the ends by which such activity is measured are

general or publicly political, not scientific). To accept Posner’s (and this project’s

above-presented) conclusion that “public intellectuals” do not disappear but rather

“public intellectual activity” changes form, but also accept this account of how

such activity properly can properly be described, produces a new set of criteria to

determine whether there exists “market failure.” This leads to asking not whether

predictions presented are borne out, but rather whether the forums in which public

intellectual activity takes place are overly constrained by (for instance)

commercial imperatives in ways that prevent effective debate of public values (or

leave intellectuals unable to address them). From this perspective too, then, it is

essential to examine the formats through which public intellectual activity takes

place in an attempt to examine their conduciveness to the enterprise.

IV. Intellectual-Media Relations

23 Critics also derided Posner’s attempted use of economic language and models to represent the sphere of public commentary as a market. His indiscriminate empirical methods, as mentioned above, drew fire as well.

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Australian media scholar David Rowe has provided an example similar to

what by the present account is called for: examining the suitability of media

formats for presenting intellectual discourse. By interviewing academics and

newspaper writers (in Australia, but also the United Kingdom, and the United

States) about their mutual interactions, he has attempted to determine—from a

limited sample—the general character of such interaction. Rowe did not

specifically seek figures known as “public intellectuals” for his survey, and he

keeps his subjects pseudonymous. Rowe’s findings point generally toward a

discourse in which the power of media professionals to shape the final product

when working with academic commentators indicates a danger of system-driven

co-option. Rowe’s theoretical summation draws on the thought of Foucault in

seeming to make the case that the powerlessness of the academic in media

situations is inevitable:

[T]he knowledge forms commanded in an [academic] institutional sphere deriving much of its cultural legitimacy from its inaccessibility are being drawn, through the agency of journalism and its own public affairs personnel, into the contemporary public sphere with conflicting rationale—principally, public service, relevance, marketing, promotion and the occupation of media space. This multi-functional task—one that [one academic interviewed] ironically described in religious terms as ‘‘a sprinkling of holy water’’—is accomplished through the situational control of journalists over their academic sources, their working encounters involving a difficult discursive negotiation that requires extracting those elements of ‘‘the ivory tower thing’’ that confer authority (what Foucault described earlier as ‘‘scientific status’’) while adopting procedures that place academics and their intra-mural knowledge into a highly mediatised public sphere.24

24 David Rowe, “Working Knowledge Encounters: Academics, Journalists and the Conditions of Cultural Labour,” Social Semiotics 15, no. 3 (2005): 285-6.

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Yet Rowe’s relevance to present purposes is limited. Rowe seems to be

dealing with academics in a situation not archetypal to the “public intellectual”

role. 25 Academics providing background or quotations for a newspaper article

already in progress have rather clearly lost some agency with regard to the topic

of the piece, which has already been “pitched” and approved: this alludes to the

“agenda-setting” capability often ascribed to the press by theorists.

Of course, much focus has been given to the manner in which the

commercial imperatives of the press distort the presentation of “the news.”26

Given this inquiry’s interest in “public intellectual activity,” general commercial

distortions of the media landscape, even as it relates to intellectuals, provide an

unsophisticated lens. There exists another portion of the daily paper, though, to

which academics and other intellectuals often contribute and in which the

conditions of their contributions are ostensibly much freer than the steered

quotation-production process described by Rowe: the op-ed page.

V. Origins of the Op-ed Page as a New Site of Public Intellectual Activity

While the term “op-ed” long served as newspaper speak for the page

(physically) opposite the editorial page, attempts to allocate the credit for the

contemporary notion of an op-ed page—a page of signed opinion pieces

25 Much the same as Richard Posner’s indiscriminate tallying of mentions of the figures on his (pre-selected) list regardless of whether those mentions relate to the “public intellectual” role and whether they are in a news or editorial context limited his empirical work’s usefulness. 26 For one example, see Ben H. Bagdikian, The New Media Monopoly (Boston: Beacon, 2004).

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prominently featuring non-regular contributors—generally involve the New York

Times, which published its first such page on Monday, September 21, 1970.27

On its surface, the format and placement seem well-suited to providing the

sort of “product” this project has noted as the public intellectual’s most

significant: the examination of current issues or knowledge through the lens of

normative theories or values. A Weberian account of the public intellectual

makes op-ed writers the primary object of study, but the prior theoretical re-

examination of the public intellectual role seeks to ascribe some historical

significance to the rise of op-ed as a format and potential forum.

While it was noted in the previous chapter that the editorial function is a

longstanding feature of journalistic enterprise,28 the op-ed format represents

something fundamentally different. While the Times had previously had regular

contributors who appeared on the editorial page, these contributors were

professional journalists in the employ of the Times. Op-ed, however, has been a

space for other voices outside of the journalistic profession—the voices of both

principals and critical observers. And for individuals who were both: that first

page contained a contribution from M.I.T. economist and presidential advisor

Walt Rostow, who would go on to become one of the most common contributors

27 Kenneth Rystrom, The Why, Who, and How of the Editorial Page, first ed. (New York: Random House, 1983), 305. Robert B. Semple Jr., “All the Views That Are Fit to Print,” The New York Times, September 20, 1990. Andrew Ciofalo, “Survey Probes Status of Op-Ed Journalism and Practices of Op-Ed Editors.” Newspaper Research Journal 19, no. 2 (1998): 19. Stephen S. Rosenfeld, “The Op-Ed Page: A Step to a Better Democracy,” Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, 5, no. 3 (2000): 7. 28 For a more journalistic account of this history in the United States, see the early chapters of 1. Steven M. Hallock, Editorial and Opinion (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007).

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to the page.29 In its ideal, the page is, as a pair of media scholars put it “the one

place in the paper where public discourse, through the mediation of a service

editor, can appear unfettered.”30

The format was not completely unprecedented: the Times already ran a

column of outside contributions once a week. The Washington Post, which

became the first of the papers to emulate the Times’ innovation by actually

introducing an op-ed page after the Times had announced its plans but a month

before the first such Times page appeared,31 had already been in the custom of

running excerpts of legislative debates alongside its editorials and columns. The

introduction of the op-ed page, however, marked the rise of a particular forum

that has come to be associated with academic forays into the public sphere and

has foregrounded academics in a public setting side-by-side with and ostensibly

on equal footing with policy-makers and media producers.

If the op-ed page has (speculatively) proved a home—and especially a

creator—of “public intellectuals,” particularly of the academic variety, it counters

Jacoby’s thesis that the species has been disappearing, and buttresses a counter-

narrative of shifting points and forms of contact. If it proves a site more for

value-debate than for factual prediction, it helps counter Posner’s fundamental

account of what the public intellectual provides. But most generally, the op-ed

page provides a location in which to see—under a theory in which public

29 W. W. Rostow, “United States and Asia: I,” The New York Times, September 21, 1970, 43. Harrison E. Salisbury, A Time of Change: A Reporter’s Tale of Our Times (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 319. 30 Andrew Ciofalo and Kim Traverso, “Does the Op-Ed Page Have a Chance to Become a Public Forum?” Newspaper Research Journal 15, no. 4 (1994), 52. 31 “F.Y.I.” (unsigned editorial), Washington Post, August 10, 1970, A18.

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intellectual activity comes under threat when legitimate and reason-seeking

communication falls prey to the pressures of delinguistified systems—whether a

story predominantly conceived as one of “public intellectuals” centered around

individuals can instead reasonably be told as one of “public intellectual activity”

centered around media/communication systems. The latter framework presents

enticing advantages over the former: it illustrates how an observational account of

“public intellectuals” as individuals cannot hope to fully disentangle changes in

the prevalence and orientation of such figures from the qualities of the formats of

and shifts in the channels of communication they utilize.

When the New York Times published its first op-ed page, an item on the

Times’ editorial page introduced that page’s new neighbor. Citing the

increasingly complex challenges facing the nation and the dependence of a

healthy democracy on “deeper public understanding of issues,” the editorial

described the objective behind “Op. Ed.” The paper hoped “to afford greater

opportunity for exploration of issues and presentation of new insights and new

ideas by writers and thinkers who have no institutional connection with The Times

and whose views will very frequently be completely divergent from our own.”32

The page displaced the obituaries and served as a home as well for regular

columnists previously being published on the editorial page, which also allowed

that page to print more letters from readers.

A piece commemorating the page’s twenty-year anniversary in 1990 noted

that the page resulted from protracted debate between various principals at the

32 “Op. Ed. Page” (unsigned editorial), The New York Times, September 21, 1970, 42. Italics added for consistency.

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paper and that its appearance “coincided with a remarkably turbulent period in

American history.”33 The page caught on quickly, allegedly becoming the second

most read page of the paper after the front,34 garnering ever more submissions,35

and spurring enough imitators that by 1974 Time magazine was naming the

nation’s best newspapers in part based on the “range of disparate opinion” offered

by their op-ed pages.3637

The 1988 memoir of Harrison E. Salisbury, the longtime Times man

tapped as the page’s first editor, asserts that the era of the page’s founding was

one of “uncharted, unproclaimed, and largely unrecognized revolution.” But the

page was meant to rebuff, and not to proclaim this revolution: “Establishment

America was under siege. From the watch post of Op-Ed, we brought the latest

bulletins to the readers of the Times.” 38 In other words, according to Salisbury,

despite the paper’s testimony at the time and going forward,39 the page was

conceived of in part as a balance on the liberal editorial outlook of the paper. “It

33 Semple, “All the Views...” A detailed account of this debate can be found in Chris Argyris, Behind the Front Page: Organizational Self-Renewal in a Metropolitan Newspaper (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1974), a published study of dysfunction in the Times by a management consultant bound by a commitment to anonymize the paper and the principals. An account that peels away these shrouds can be found in Marilyn S. Greenwald, A Woman of the Times: Journalism, Feminism, and the Career of Charlotte Curtis (Athens, OH: Ohio University, 1999). 34 Salisbury, 317. 35 See Ibid. or Semple for confirmation. 36 “The Press: The Ten Best American Dailies,” Time, January 21, 1974, < http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,911025,00.html >. 37 Guy Golan and Wayne Wanta, “Guest Columns Add Diversity To NY Times' Op-Ed Pages,” Newspaper Research Journal 25, no. 2 (2004), 71 names the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, along with the aforementioned Washington Post, as among the major papers which soon followed suit. 38 Salisbury, 316. 39 See “Op.-Ed. Page” and Semple.

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was to be opposite in the true sense. If the Times was liberal, the Op-Ed articles

would be reactionary or conservative or radical or eccentric.”40 The hiring of

Nixon speechwriter William Safire—with no elite journalism background—as a

regular columnist for the page underscored this intent.41 Salisbury also noted that,

in his view, the page—by the time of his writing in 1988—had “lost most its

Op[positional] quality” and become predictable.42

The theoretical potential, as well as the risks of the op-ed page, remain to

be developed. On a basic level, though, it seems a potential format for

intellectuals in the academy to have the opportunity to reach a “public audience,”

and furthermore reach policy-makers and “elites,” serving some functions of the

ideal forum. The risk, however, is that media “gatekeepers” will mold discourse

of academics such that it must either fulfill certain political prerequisites or else

must emulate the discursive strategies of policy-makers and journalists in order to

gain entry.

VI. The Under-Examined Op-Ed Page

Scholarly interest in the op-ed page has been, as many of the handful of

articles on the subject note, fairly scarce.43 Work on papers’ internal editorial

function has been widespread,44 and even PR initiatives targeted at op-ed pages

received scholarly attention prior to analysis being devoted to the pages

40 Salisbury, 317. 41 Rosenfeld, 7. 42 Salisbury, 317. 43 See Golan and Wanta, 72; Ciofalo and Traverso, 51. 44 See Ciofalo and Traverso, 62, note 2, for a list of histories of or covering the editorial function which give scant or no account of op-ed.

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themselves as a media development.45 Whether this speaks to the pages’

(speculatively) unquestioned position as a self-evident institution in public life or

to their lack of impact as mere homes for clearly manufactured debate is hard to

discern.

Andrew Ciofalo, a professor at Loyola College, Maryland, published in

the mid-1990’s the first scholarly work examining the op-ed page. Ciofalo’s two

articles in Newspaper Research Journal (the first jointly with his student Kim

Traverso) dissected a survey sent to the editors of daily papers across the nation.

The first set of published results framed its inquiry with the title, “Does the Op-Ed

Page Have a Chance to Become a Public Forum?” Ciofalo and Traverso found

pages to be failing in this regard, with editors expressing a moderate preference

for pieces sourced from “principals” and “experts” over well-written pieces from

the less credentialed.46 The prevalence of this preference held up across region,

size, and other categorizations of the papers studied. Other survey questions

found that editors preferred pieces pegged to the news, and valued those offering

“new insight” or an “interesting solution” over those framed as attempts to

explain “complicated issues.”47 The overall conclusions of Ciofalo and Traverso

included that a certain “uniformity” across the preferences of varied editors’

likely resulted from “shar[ing] a common set of journalistic values,” and further

45 Gerri L. Smith and Robert L. Heath, “Moral Appeals in Mobil Oil’s Op-ed Campaign,” Public Relations Review 16, no. 4 (1990): 48-53 appeared before all the studies surveyed below; Clyde Brown, “Daring to Be Heard: Advertorials by Organized Interests on the Op-ed Pages of the New York Times,” Political Communication 18, no. 1 (2001): 23-51 appeared before all which analyze the actual content of op-ed pages. 46 Ciofalo and Traverso, 59. 47 Ibid. 57.

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that preference for the views of experts and principals “suggests a vulnerability to

such monopolizing of the public discourse in the media” to the disadvantage of

“citizen writers.”48 Ciofalo’s second article focused on the characteristics of

survey respondents’ papers: 50% of responding papers had op-ed pages, those in

larger markets were more likely to, and almost 20% of those with such pages

dated their tradition to before the Times’ inaugural 1970 page.49

With Ciofalo’s basic data on the preferences of editors established,

subsequent studies have tended to focus on whether papers fulfill the professed

ideal of adding diversity through the op-ed page, and later on how to use these

and other preferences to a prospective writer’s advantage:

Guy Golan and Wayne Wanta’s 2004 study, “Guest Columns Add

Diversity To NY Times' Op-Ed Pages,” examined a year’s worth of New York

Times op-ed contributions on the subject of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What

they found challenges the conclusion that op-eds in general ideological agreement

with a newspaper’s editorial slant neuter the page’s balancing function. Golan

and Wanta found that guest pieces complemented the paper’s hired stable of

editorial columnists by focusing on different sub-issues than those motivating the

paper’s columnists. They also tended to be less critical of the parties involved.50

48 Ibid. 60 49 Ciofalo (1998). This latter result is interesting, although without a better notion of the format of such pages—especially their orientation toward outside contributors—little can be concluded. Rystrom, 305 claims the New York World of the 1920’s and 30’s under Walter Lippman as perhaps the page’s earliest ancestor. 50 Golan and Wanta, 70-82.

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Yonghoi Song’s 2004 study “Freelance Op-Ed Pieces Demonstrate

Newspapers’ Political Slant” took as its data the op-ed pages of the Washington

Post and the Washington Times on randomly selected dates over the course of the

90’s. Song concluded, unsurprisingly, that the political streak of op-ed page

contributions differed between the two papers, with “liberal” op-eds

outnumbering conservative in the Post (60% to 40%) while hardly appearing in

the Washingtion Times at all (only 5% of the time). More interestingly, Song’s

study tallied that 28% of Post contributors were listed as think tank affiliates

(more for the Times) and 14% with academic affiliations (fewer for the Times):

current or former government officials made up many of the rest. Since the Post

stands as the capital’s major print daily, this finding does speak relatively poorly

for the presence of “outsiders” (and academic intellectuals) in this medium.51

Anita D. Day and Guy Golan’s 2005 study “Source and Content Diversity

in Op-Ed Pages: assessing editorial strategies in The New York Times and the

Washington Post” examined op-ed content relating to three controversial issues

(gay marriage, affirmative action, and the death penalty) in those two papers over

four years. Among other findings, they saw that 52% of outside contributors on

the given topics were academics and that the tone of outside contributions

represented “a limited diversity strategy, allowing slightly divergent opinions on

51 Yonghoi Song, “Freelance Op-Ed Pieces Show Newspapers' Political Slant,” Newspaper Research Journal 25, no. 3 (2004): 38-51.

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these issues” when considered along a single scale of approval or disapproval of

the practice in question.52

Bob Sommer and John R. Maycroft establish their 2008 study

“Influencing Public Policy: An Analysis of Published Op-Eds by Academics,” by

taking note of anecdotal evidence that op-eds influence public discourse.

Emphasizing the influence of op-eds in the political process, they provide recent

examples of academics called on to testify before Congressional committees

following the appearance of specific op-eds,53 and also quote New Jersey Senator

Robert Menendez to the effect that “One of the most consistent ways for me to

learn about academics who have an expertise in issues important to me is reading

their views in the media, most typically on the Op-Ed pages.”54 The authors

frame the remainder of the article as advice for academics aspiring to have their

op-ed published. They base this advice on characteristics identified in a

tabulation of academics’ pieces published in New York Times, Wall Street

Journal, and Newark Star-Ledger. Their general findings: prestigious universities

have an advantage at the Times and Journal, published op-eds tend to be heavy on

anecdotes and not statistics, to take a “tone” that’s negative or neutral but not

positive to the issue in question, and to be time-pegged to a specific news event

52 Anita D. Day and Guy Golan, “Source and Content Diversity in Op-Ed Pages: assessing editorial strategies in The New York Times and the Washington Post,” Journalism Studies, 6, no. 1 (2005): 61-71. The quotation given appears on page 66. The limitations of measures by which this and other studies quantify one-dimensional “agreement” as a proxy for diversity is a major shortcoming, though Golan and Wanta’s contribution noted above, suggests it can be overcome. 53 Bob Sommer and John R. Maycroft, “Influencing Public Policy: An Analysis of Published Op-Eds by Academics,” Politics & Policy, 36, No. 4 (2008): 588. 54 Ibid. 589.

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relevant to their subject matter.55 Sommer and Maycroft found (like some of the

above-listed studies) that pieces tended not to go directly against the paper’s

editorial position—to the tune of 90% of the time.56 They also noted the greater

presence among academics on op-ed pages of those who had experience as either

policy-makers or journalists have greater presence, as well as the low proportion

of women.57

Each of the four preceding studies has the advantage, for present purposes,

over Ciofalo’s of having examined “elite” sources versus the entirety of the

American newspaper genre. For in the elite print media (we assume) is found the

elusive “public intellectual activity.” Several of the studies focus on the

presentation of specific topics on the opinion page in seeking a revealing case

study. While Sommer and Maycroft share this project’s interest in academic

professionals on the op-ed page, their effort is not comparative across vocations

and so sheds insufficient light on the question of whether academics’ op-ed

communications seem to emulate those of journalists and policy-makers.

55 Ibid. 608-9 summarizes the findings in recommendation form. 56 Ibid. 598. Sommer and Maycroft actually list this as the percent of time that the op-eds agreed with the paper’s editorial position, but they then go on to note that “In many cases, though, editorials were not precisely matched to an op-ed topic, and we had to make a judgment call as whether or not the editorial page was in agreement” (598). This may sound more consistent with Golan and Wanta’s findings to the effect that op-eds tend to raise new issues or subtopics not previously on the paper’s agenda. 57 Ibid. 605-6. In response to the gender imbalance, and a recognition of the op-eds importance in (identity) politics (at least), an organization called the Op-Ed Project pushes to “train women experts in all fields to write for the op-ed pages of major print and online forums of public discourse,” noting the importance of representation in this public forum in which they are under-represented. The Op-ed Project, “About,” < http://www.theopedproject.org/ index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=57&Itemid=63 >.

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Furthermore, none of the studies takes a historical perspective on potential

evolution of the op-ed page over time. Rather, they compare the “effectiveness”

of this media format at some fixed point in time to the norm/ideal conceived of

within the code of journalism, usually in the guise of whether newspapers have

provided appropriate diversity of access to their op-ed page or whether they seem

to be controlling access as media “gate keepers” and “agenda setters.” Their

mixed conclusions are not inconsistent with the above-theorized pattern of

questioning. It is, however, beyond the scope of this project to undertake the

direct empirical study that might return more convincing results on the role of the

op-ed page in the potential evolution over time of vibrant public intellectual

activity.

On the one hand, the advice of Sommer and Maycroft reinforces the

hypothesis that intellectuals’ entrance into the public sphere is molded as much by

media conventions as academic conventions. While this may manifest itself

perniciously in that success requires the adoption of certain conventions of the

journalist such as a compelling “lede,” a new twist, and a clear and not overly

complex narrative; it also results in a forum that better serves the needs of the

public and even the policy-maker by requiring precisely the sort of application of

findings/expertise and argument-formation that newer intellectuals supposedly

lack.

Of course such media formats may depend on profit-driven entities, and in

the origin of the format they may even have been targeting their most reactionary

consumer, but the format itself (and much of the rise of the web, on which more

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later) rebuts the notion that there has been no audience and no profit58 for public-

facing debate. On the other hand, the community of public intellectuals loses a

potentially harmful degree of self-constitution and is potentially selected by media

for motives other than the organic formation of debate. In a 2000 piece in the

Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, former Washington Post

editorial page editor Stephen S. Rosenfeld gave a clear idea of what elite papers

seem to look for:

A good piece is by a principal, is newsy, consequential, argued rather than asserted, stylish or at least fresh in its writing, reasonably convincing in its conclusion, relatively “me”-free, delivered in a timely fashion be e-mail, normally seven hundred words, clean, and double-spaced.59

Certainly the influence of media commercial and productivity norms (as

suggested by Sommer and Maycroft) receives emphasis (“newsy,” “stylish,” not

to mention well-formatted and consequential from the media-perspective) and yet

if this is, as Rosenfeld also notes, a format into which junior academics are

begging to be socialized, much of the rest of his list (“argued rather than

asserted,” “convincing in its conclusion”) represents those pressures which

previous narratives have lamented are no longer being felt by intellectuals. The

op-ed page is a nexus generating something of a pull in opposition to academia’s

push.

This is not to say that a “decline” narrative is wholly vitiated simply by

switching from a tale of the public intellectual’s subjective and psychic “decline”

58 Though the case may be different these days. 59 Rosenfeld, 11.

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to an account more centered on the rise (or fall) of different media forms. Indeed

concerns with the ability of commercial imperatives to override the intellectual

are interwoven into the argument. One challenge is sorting out which objections

to a new public intellectual climate result from legitimate concerns with its

“thinness” and its perhaps narrow boundaries, however, and which stem from

more proprietary feelings over where the power to define such a relationship

ought to lie. The very fact that the op-ed page has attracted so little study perhaps

points to its lack of legitimacy evaluated by academic norms. Yet, having

hypothesized that the public-intellectual link cannot fully disappear, it seems

more not less important to investigate a discursive and textual format such as this,

which has arisen in the time since critical theory assured us that non-participatory

broadcast media left little room for heterogeneous debate directed toward the

mass market.

VII. Theories of Intellectuals on the Op-Ed Page

The chapter to this point has laid the groundwork to make a case that the

story of the public intellectual can be told as one of changes in the nexus between

intellectuals and the public—at sites defined by formats of mediated

communication—rather than changes in the intellectual class. The op-ed page can

serve as an example, depending on its effectiveness in fulfilling its ideals, of the

way in which public intellectual contact has been simplified and streamlined into

meaninglessness by the demands of corporate communication and abandoned by

cloistered intellectuals, or of the way in which public and media demands for the

explication of value-choices exert sufficient pressure to prevent the public sphere

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from being denuded of intellectual content. Clearly, the story of this specific

format—the op-ed—does not fully reach the present-day, a day in which a

superficially much greater realignment, driven by technological and commercial

pressures, has gripped the media sphere. The argument, of course, is not that the

story of changes in the public intellectual role can be rewritten as the rise of this

specific media site. Nor is it that concerns about an ethical “vocationalization” in

the academy can be completely dismissed. Rather, the chapter has noted that to

more fully represent changes in the intersection of intellectual work and public

discourse, op-ed is one of various changing media sites whose shifts must be

accounted for. The reverberations of these shifts play as large a role in shaping

the public intellectual’s discursive niche as do those forces that result from

revolutions in the intellectual’s exclusive quarter.

The op-ed specifically deserves attention for suggesting that these media

forces—many of which could be seen as illegitimately steering or stifling public

intellectual discourse—in fact seem also to act in favor of training intellectuals in

communication conventions that enable them to have public reach, and even to

express opinions that might lessen or neutralize the commercial and professional

constraints upon the medium.

Having presented the caveat already that this project’s intention is not to

replace one totalizing conception of the public intellectual narrative with another,

it becomes natural to ask: to what sort of reconstruction does the presentation of

the op-ed page as a story of public intellectual life amount? Many accounts of the

intellectual take note of the important role played by media in allowing (or

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disallowing) intellectual-critical discourse to enter the public sphere. Returning to

Edward Said’s account of Representations of the Intellectual, the reader finds an

effective portrayal of this phenomenon experienced subjectively from the

intellectual’s point of view:

In underlining the intellectual’s role as outsider I have had in mind how powerless one often feels in the face of an overwhelmingly powerful network of social authorities—the media, the government, and corporations, etc.—who crowd out the possibilities for achieving any change.60

In this account, the media constitute just one more facet of the power structure

preventing substantive discourse from seeing public light. As seen in Rowe,

above, few intellectuals may feel as if their contacts in the media have much of a

stake in accurately relaying their ideas and proposals. A convincing (empirical)

measure for how discursive power flows through media sites is, however, difficult

to establish.

The op-ed page has been cited as natural habitat for public intellectuals,61

and considering the genre’s relatively recent birth this seems to emphasize the

degree to which its development belongs in a story of the recent travails of the

public intellectual role as institution. The op-ed page also, however, is looked

down upon as anti-intellectual: forcing scholars to submit and explain a proposal

or conclusion in a small space and hemmed in by potentially intricate conventions

may result in feelings of “powerlessness” similar to those cited by Said above. In

the case where access to the forum is overly dependent on specific positions or

60 Said, xvi-xvii. 61 Drezner (2009), 49 provides one example from the side of the spectrum concerned with the study of public intellectuals. Day and Golan, 61 is an example of the point coming from scholars whose interest is the op-ed page.

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connections, such concerns are warranted. When this critique verges into a

condemnation of the hope for substantial issues to be debated in everyday

language and before the eyes of the public (even a largely ill-informed public),

however, the whole idea of a public intellectual loses coherence—overwhelmed

by the doomsayers glimpsing a supposedly irredeemably rationalized world.

Admittedly, though, not everyone on the op-ed page is doing the work of a public

intellectual—some are steered to the page by their incentives as government

functionaries or representatives of private commercial enterprises62—and few can

become public intellectuals with a sustained presence. Still, the format carries a

potential for drawing scholars into the public sphere when otherwise they might

remain cloistered in academia.

It should not pass without note, either, that the newspaper opinion format

seems to have influenced the format of discourse on today’s internet, whether

such discourse officially rests within in newspaper, consumer-focused, or

academic websites. Speculatively, the case can be made that the op-ed page has

served as the model for those parts of internet discourse which have proven the

most vibrant and healthy for democracy (if not op-ed, then what has?). The

danger posed to democracy by the prospect of all journalism becoming “opinion

journalism,” which is often raised in relation to such developments, is not trivial.

That this danger does not lessen the historical and current importance of space for

opinion-presentation in the public press should be easy enough to see.

62 The relevance of pseudo-commercial, pseudo-scholarly, “think tanks” to the concept of the public intellectual is potentially fascinating but not something that this project will have the opportunity to cover.

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VIII. Finishing Up

Amidst various criticisms, the emergence of forums for large audiences to

witness debates between scholars and policy-makers carried out on the printed

page is one to be acknowledged. (It is also one for which there is a long tradition

in the United States.) This chapter has seen scholars concerned with a

disappearance of academics and intellectuals from popular discourse (like

Jacoby), with the distortionary powers of the media in writing on intellectual

matters (like Rowe), and with the lack of accountability of academics for their

forays into the public sphere (like Posner). For each, the existence of a medium

that draws intellectuals into the public sphere, allows for self-structured discourse,

and provides a context which values the proposal of solutions and appeals to

normative viewpoints is one whose emergence should be examined as relevant

and potentially quite significant.

In the Habermasian model of communal value-configuration, unlike in the

over-determined and pessimistic Weberian framework, there are two possibilities

for that which replaces previously uncontested “background” truths—those

essential for a meaningful worldview—when such propositions are shattered by

modernity’s overwhelming force. In one case the void within the background is

given over to be filled by particularized systems with mechanics

incomprehensible to non-specialists, or simply irresistible in their influence—

rationalized with a layer of firm iron by those system imperatives which have

already unyieldingly disenchanted the previous store of values. In the other

possibility, the background is renegotiated, re-spun, and rewoven through

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mutually comprehensible practices—the resilient and nurturing form of

rationalization possible through effective discourse.63 Media of communication

can advance either form of rationalization, as seen in the later and earlier portions,

respectively, of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Which

“master” a medium serves represents a function of its potential to facilitate

autonomous exchange mediated by reason, and whether such potential is

actualized given the contingencies of the particular case.64

This has of necessity been but a glimpse of a story of the public

intellectual told around the nexus of public sphere media channels in facilitating

that role. The hope, however, has been to show that—as predicted by the

preceding theoretical inquiry—the pull of system and lifeworld on public

discursive frameworks tells a story far beyond one of rationalization along an

obscurantizing axis followed by decline. Forums for public critical debate are not

inevitably lost to a cannibalizing modernity: in fact such forums can exert the

power of communicative rationality in the perennially reconstituted public sphere.

63 See Habermas, TCA, Vol. 2, 195-7. 64 Concomitantly, they can also serve as facilitators for the relay of concerns from social periphery to center called for by Between Facts and Norms.

CONCLUDING REMARKS :

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This project at the outset introduced the concept of “public intellectual” as

a category whose salience has been indicated by the term’s adoption and

prevalence. There and in the next chapter, the term’s connection to a fear of

fragmentation within the academy and its segregation from society was

developed. Such concerns remain current: a January Chronicle of Higher

Education review of English professor Louis Menand’s latest book bestows on

him the honorific of “unpublic intellectual.” The title might be suitable—

Menand’s book focuses on flaws within the academy, rather than a broader social

sphere—and is inspired by his comment in an interview “I'm not a public

intellectual. I don't have an agenda."1 Another recent Chronicle issue features

Russell Jacoby’s critique of a new book, styled as a takedown of intellectuals as

useless and cloistered, from the Hoover Institution’s Thomas Sowell. “Is there

anything new to say about intellectuals?” Jacoby begins.2

This has been one challenge for the present project: what can be said about

intellectuals that moves beyond whether faith in the critical power of abstract

reason (such as C. Wright Mills’s) overcomes skeptics (Sowell or Daniel Bell)?

Or about public intellectuals beyond whether to affirm or deny the appeal of the

sort of “unpublicness”—preoccupation with the conventions of the academy—

that Menand implicitly praises?

I. Looking Back: The Path of the Investigation

1 Karen J. Winkler, “Oxygenating Academe: The Unpublic Intellectual,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 10, 2010. See also Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010). 2 Russell Jacoby, “Why Intellectuals are All Bad,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 14, 2010. See also Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society (New York: Basic Books, 2009).

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Ultimately, in demonstrating that such preoccupations lay within the very

(recent and American) notion of the public intellectual, the project has hoped to

use awareness of this fact not to change the subject, but to ask what’s left of the

subject when the perspective is shifted. The first chapter devoted itself to

revealing the theoretical account behind characteristic articulations of the concept

of public intellectual and the academy’s ideal of freedom. A discussion of Max

Weber’s theory of rationalization as applied to the academy demonstrated the

story of disappearing public intellectuals as a tale of the innate damage wrought

by systematic specialization, and the corresponding intellectual specialization, to

the potential for shared meaning.

The second chapter moved on to a recasting of the concept through

extension upon its revealed theoretical links. In doing so it sought not a new way

to conceive of the role of public intellectual but a new way to theorize its

interaction with a shifting society. Hence the work of Jürgen Habermas, in

reconceptualizing Weber’s necessity-driven narrative of rationalization as

technical advance and metaphysical decline from a contingent and communicative

rationality-prizing perspective, became relevant. Through reference to

Habermas’s earlier work, the public intellectual was seen to both interact with and

parallel the press at the system-lifeworld boundary. This raised the notion that

concern over the disappearance of effective public intellectuals necessitates a

focus on preserving meaningful sites of discourse on the societal level, where a

different—communicative—rationality could take root and be nurtured.

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This work’s third and final chapter thematized the question of meaningful

public intellectual discourse in relation to specific sites which might serve as

nexuses for public intellectual activity. Specifically the chapter noted that even as

the op-ed page has emerged in the very same years of the public intellectual’s

alleged decline, little work has linked the two or placed the deliberative

capabilities of media formats at the center of the narrative in which scholars

conceptualize the public intellectual.

II. Looking Forward: Extensions of the Investigation

It’s not that Russell Jacoby in 1987, or those who followed on his interest

in the public intellectual role, lacked an awareness that intellectuals operate within

a network of institutional and social links: Jacoby, after all, attributed critical

thought’s migration to the academy to a decline in “urban bohemian” settings.

But the nature of what, if we prize such a role, should be of greatest priority to

preserve changes in moving from an account of rationalizing fragmentation of the

intellectual’s expertise and position to one of communicative rationalization of the

discourses in which she takes part. And why such a role is prized becomes better

articulated.

In addition to further work on the communicative ecosystem in which

contemporary public intellectual activity takes place, a few lines of inquiry are

suggested going forward. It might be argued that the framing arrived at by the

current project minimizes the importance of the “towering figure,” those

individual intellectuals who by their very stature produce the sort of autonomy

with which those bemoaning the public intellectual’s decline are concerned.

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Surely such autonomy benefits communicative processes, but the contention of

the current framework is that such autonomy is produced as much by the

communicative structure within which it arises as by the grand rational

individualism of its holder: this claim could be investigated through further

theoretical and empirical consideration.

As a corollary, the extent to which intellectual figures and the intellectual

class reflexively shape media formats and media norms is a question at the locus

of the rationalization and the media-centered accounts of the public intellectual.

If prior accounts underemphasize the intellectual’s debt to norms and technology

of communication, study of the format’s debt to its utilizer would help avoid

committing a symmetric overlook.

Another conceptual extension would involve exploring the applicability of

the approach developed herein to other questions of rationalization and autonomy

in the intellectual sphere, especially the case of think tanks and their paradigm of

“interested” social science research. Through the injection of new, system-driven

imperatives into the public discourse, these new institutions’ representatives

present another case in which to observe reflexive pressure between

communicative norms and rationalized spheres of thought.

Additional interest lies in comparative possibilities. This project has

established that the specific notion of the public intellectual first generated inquiry

(for the role’s seeming dissolution) within the context of the American academic

system. To the extent which other nations’ intellectual spheres seem to have

paralleled or since echoed American fears of academic vocationalization, though,

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the narrative’s purview has been expanded by some scholars, e.g. to contemporary

Europe.3 A comparative application of this project’s framework for re-

conceptualizing threats to the public intellectual role could provide a more

resilient basis for normative evaluation of non-American cases. Evaluation of

such cases could also serve to advance the merits of this versus the previous

conception of the public intellectual’s evolution.

A further potential comparative investigation is that across disciplines

within the American academy. Some observers have noted a change in the mix of

public intellectuals over the same course as their supposed decline, especially of

humanists giving way to social scientists.4 The implication of this observation for

a media-centered framework is less clear. On the one hand the transformation

seems to demonstrate that even more scientificized disciplines are capable of

entering the public sphere. But it also serves to question whether media might be

improperly constraining debate to certain forms of putative expertise. It reminds

us, too, that a media-centered narrative still requires a cognizance of media’s

interplay with trends within the academy.

Finally, this project is open to revision and critique through its own

method. As one of the strikes against the Weberian outlook characteristic among

“public intellectual” conceptions is that it seems to presume that modernity

3 See Stern, “European Professors as Public Intellectuals.” Also, George Ritzer, “Who's a public intellectual?” British Journal of Sociology 57, no. 2 (2006): 209-13 and Stefan Müller-Doohm, “Theodor W. Adorno and Jürgen Habermas - Two Ways of Being a Public Intellectual: Sociological Observations Concerning the Transformation of a Social Figure of Modernity,” European Journal of Social Theory 8, no. 3 (2005): 269-280. 4 Posner, Public Intellectuals, 173; Drezner, “Public Intellectuals 2.1,” 51.

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presents as its final “promise” only a hopeless fragmentation into

meaninglessness, so conversely the normative philosophical approach of

Habermas takes as one of its components an assumption of inherent potential for

reconstruction. Habermas has, in some sense, been a “master thinker” adopted by

this project. As such, an attempt to advance the practical case within—that the

infrastructure of public debate can take center stage in telling the story of public

intellectuals—through other justificatory frameworks would increase its putative

significance.

But the proposition—like the link of system to lifeworld—allows for

implication to flow both ways: if it is the communicative reason framework which

allows the conceptual rescue of this meaningful phenomenon—the public

intellectual—then perhaps this makes a case for the method of thought itself.

Russell Jacoby’s account culminated with an acknowledgement that

somehow “choice enters the historical edifice.”5 Jacoby was speaking of choice

in one’s actions. But if the choice in one’s theory is between Habermas, with the

prospect of a modernity with constraints to be rewoven through the commune of

its inhabitants, or Weber and the iron cage, such a “choice”—ironically—isn’t

really much of one at all.

5 Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals, 237

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APPENDIX:

L ISTS AND RANKINGS OF THE TOP PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS

RICHARD POSNER’S 2001 RANKING BY MEDIA MENTIONS......................132 RICHARD POSNER’S 2001 RANKING BY SCHOLARLY CITATIONS..............134 FOREIGN POLICY/PROSPECT 2005 RANKING BY ONLINE VOTE (TOP 20)..136 FOREIGN POLICY/PROSPECT 2008 RANKING BY ONLINE VOTE.................137 DANIEL DREZNER’S 2009 LIST OF P. I.’ S BORN SINCE 1940....................139

132

RICHARD POSNER’S 2001 RANKING OF THE TOP 100 PUBLIC

INTELLECTUALS RANKED BY MEDIA MENTIONS FROM 1995-2000

1 Kissinger, Henry 2 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick 3 Will, George 4 Summers, Lawrence 5 Bennett, William J. 6 Reich, Robert 7 Blumenthal, Sidney 8 Miller, Arthur 9 Rushdie, Salman

10 Safire, William

11 Orwell, George 12 Dershowitz, Alan 13 Morrison, Toni 14 Scalia, Antonin 15 Wolfe, Tom

16 Mailer, Norman 17 Shaw, George Bernard

18 Havel, Václav 19 Kristol, William

20 Buckley, William F., Jr. 21 Vonnegut, Kurt 22 Wells, H. G. 23 Steinbeck, John 24 Breyer, Stephen G.

25 Vidal, Gore 26 Bork, Robert 27 Stein, Herbert 28 Leary, Timothy 29 Friedman, Thomas 30 Dionne, E. J. 31 Lewis, C. S. 32 Roth, Philip 33 Silber, John 34 Friedman, Milton 35 Moyers, Bill 36 Goodwin, Doris Kearns 37 Menckehn, H. L. 38 Turley, Jonathan 39 Auden, W. H. 40 Bellow, Saul 41 Schlesinger, Arthur Jr.

42 Oates, Joyce Carol

43 Brecht, Bertold

44 Rand, Ayn 45 Spock, Benjamin 46 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia 47 Halberstam, David 48 Friedan, Betty 49 Krugman, Paul 50 Huxley, Aldous 51 Mann, Thomas 52 Lewis, Anthony 53 Baldwin, James 54 Forster, E. M. 55 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.

56 Gould, Stephen Jay 57 Estrich, Susan 58 Sontag, Susan 59 Carson, Rachel

60 Pound, Ezra 61 Doctorow, E. L. 62 Steinem, Gloria 63 Dawkins, Richard 64 Sartre, Jean-Paul

65 Keynes, John Maynard 66 Paglia, Camille 67 Holmes, Oliver Wendell 68 Ross, Andrew 69 Galbraith, John Kenneth 70 Posner, Richard 71 Ellison, Ralph 72 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr

73 Hellman, Lillian 74 Coulter, Ann 75 Horowitz, David 76 Camus, Albert 77 Sommers, Christina Hoff

78 Du Bois, W. E. B. 79 Ginsburg, Allen 80 Cox, Archibald 81 Sachs, Jeffrey 82 McLuhan, Marshall 83 Brzezinsky, Zbigniew 84 Tribe, Laurence 85 Brooks, David 86 Luce, Henry

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87 Kael, Pauline 88 Johnson, Paul

89 Wills, Garry 90 Berlin, Isaiah 91 Chomsky, Noam 92 Abrams, Floyd 93 Franklin, John Hope

94 Mead, Margaret 95 Wilson, James Q. 96 Frum, David 97 Yeats, William Butler 98 Wolfe, Alan 99 Guinier, Lani

100 Stigler, George

Source: Richard A. Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2001), 209-11, Table 5.3. Explanation of Methodology: “I used... three Lexis-Nexis databases—Major Newspapers, Magazine Stories (combined), and Transcripts (of television and radio shows)—for the media mentions. The Major Newspapers Database contains the fifty largest U. S. newspapers by circulation plus the major foreign newspapers that are published in English... All the databases were visited in a six-week period beginning on July 17, 2000. Online searches of these databases yield many errors, owing mainly to confusion of names. To enable these errors to be corrected, samples of... media mentions of all the persons listed in Table 5.1 [Posner’s initial, self-generated list of 546 “public intellectuals”] were examined and the total... mentions of each person were adjusted accordingly.” (Posner, 168n5)

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RICHARD POSNER’S 2001 RANKING OF THE TOP 100 PUBLIC

INTELLECTUALS RANKED BY SCHOLARLY CITATIONS FROM 1995-2000

1 Foucault, Michel 2 Bourdieu, Pierre 3 Habermas, Jürgen 4 Derrida, Jacques 5 Chomsky, Noam 6 Weber, Max 7 Becker, Gary 8 Giddens, Anthony 9 Gould, Stephen Jay

10 Posner, Richard 11 Dewey, John 12 Sunstein, Cass 13 Barthes, Roland 14 Sen, Amartya 15 Erikson, Erik 16 Rorty, Richard 17 James, William 18 Bruner, Jerome 19 Coleman, James 20 Krugman, Paul 21 Wilson, Edward 22 Said, Edward 23 Gilligan, Carol 24 Adorno, Theodor 25 Friedman, Milton 26 Wilson, William Julius 27 Butler, Judith 28 Ehrlich, Paul 29 Dworkin, Ronald 30 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 31 Diamond, Jared 32 Taylor, Charles 33 Sartre, Jean-Paul

34 Putnam, Robert 35 Merton, Robert 36 Stigler, George 37 Stiglitz, Joseph 38 Wilson, James Q. 39 Huntington, Samuel 40 Lewontin, Richard 41 Epstein, Richard 42 Samuelson, Paul

43 Dawkins, Richard 44 Eco, Umberto 45 Putnam, Hilary 46 Eskridge, William Jr. 47 Williams, Raymond 48 Hirschman, Albert 49 Bhabha, Homi 50 Amar, Akhil 51 Lipset, Seymour Martin 52 Keynes, John Maynard 53 Hayek, Friedrich 54 Gardner, Howard 55 Herrnstein, Richard 56 Tribe, Laurence 57 Walzer, Michael 58 Etzioni, Amitai 59 Nussbaum, Martha 60 Feldstein, Martin 61 Ackerman, Bruce 62 Solow, Robert 63 Skocpol, Theda 64 Hobsbawm, E. J. 65 Simon, Herbert 66 Buchanan, James

67 Fish, Stanley 68 Schelling, Thomas 69 MacKinnon, Catharine 70 Hart, H. L. A. 71 Arendt, Hannah 72 Nozick, Robert 73 Bellah, Robert 74 Fukuyama, Francis 75 Nagel, Thomas 76 Bell, Daniel 77 Gellner, Ernest 78 West, Cornel 79 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 80 Lukacs, Georg 81 Boulding, Kenneth 82 Fromm, Erich 83 Jencks, Christopher

84 Mills, C. Wright

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85 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.

86 Reich, Robert 87 Sandel, Michael 88 Kennedy, Duncan 89 Calabresi, Guido 90 Berlin, Isaiah 91 Bork, Robert 92 Fiss, Owen

93 Thompson, E. P. 94 Frank, Robert 95 McConnell, Michael 96 Lessig, Lawrence 97 Myrdal, Gunnar 98 Scalia, Antonin 99 Sachs, Jeffrey

100 Kinsey, Alfred

Source: Richard A. Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2001), 212-4, Table 5.4. Explanation of Methodology: “My data sources fir scholarly citations are the Science Citation Index, the Social Sciences Citation Index, and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, all published by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and all limited to scholarly journals. I used the Dialog search program to count citations (excluding self-citations) for the last five years to each if the academics in Table 5.1 [Posner’s initial, self-generated list of 546 “public intellectuals”]. Because the ISI databases (which, incidentally, count citations to coauthored articles as citations to the first named author only) list cited author by last name, last name plus first initial, and last name plus first and middle initial, there is an acute danger, particularly in the case of common last names, of misattributing citations... To enable the disentangling of such overlaps, a sample of the citations to each of the names in Table 5.1 was examined and corrections made accordingly...” (Posner, 169n6)

136

2005 FOREIGN POLICY/PROSPECT RANKING OF THE “WORLD’S TOP

PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS” BY ONLINE VOTING (TOP 20) 1 Noam Chomsky

2 Umberto Eco

3 Richard Dawkins

4 Václav Havel

5 Christopher Hitchens

6 Paul Krugman

7 Jürgen Habermas

8 Amartya Sen

9 Jared Diamond

10 Salman Rushdie

11 Naomi Klein

12 Shirin Ebadi

13 Hernando de Soto

14 Bjørn Lomborg

15 Abdolkarim Soroush

16 Thomas Friedman

17 Pope Benedict XVI

18 Eric Hobsbawm

19 Paul Wolfowitz

20 Camille Paglia

Top Write -in Votes: 1 Milton Friedman, 2 Stephen Hawking, 3 Arundhati Roy, 4 Howard Zinn, 5 Bill Clinton Explanation of Methodology: “[ Foreign Policy] and Britain’s Prospect magazine asked readers to vote for the top five public intellectuals from our Top 100” through online vote. Over 20,000 votes were received. Source: “Prospect/FP Top 100 Public Intellectuals Results.” Foreign Policy. October 2005 (web exclusive). Accessed March 4, 2010 from Google archive.

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2008 FOREIGN POLICY/PROSPECT RANKING OF THE “WORLD’S TOP

PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS” BY ONLINE VOTING

(Rank in 2005 poll is in parentheses.)

1 Fethullah Gülen (*)

2 Muhammad Yunus (*)

3 Yusuf Al-Qaradawi (56)

4 Orhan Pamuk (54)

5 Aitzaz Ahsan (*)

6 Amr Khaled (*)

7 Abdolkarim Soroush (15)

8 Tariq Ramadan (58)

9 Mahmood Mamdani (*)

10 Shirin Ebadi (12)

11 Noam Chomsky (1)

12 Al Gore (*)

13 Bernard Lewis (34)

14 Umberto Eco (2)

15 Ayaan Hirsi Ali

16 Amartya Sen (8)

17 Fareed Zakaria (35)

18 Garry Kasparov (*)

19 Richard Dawkins (3)

20 Mario Vargas Llosa (29)

21 Lee Smolin (*)

22 Jürgen Habermas (7)

23 Salman Rushdie (10)

24 Sari Nusseibeh (65)

25 Slavoj Zizek (23)

26 Vaclav Havel (4)

27 Christopher Hitchens (5)

28 Samuel Huntington (28)

29 Peter Singer (33)

30 Paul Krugman (6)

31 Jared Diamond (9)

32 Pope Benedict XVI (17)

33 Fan Gang (82)

34 Michael Ignatieff (37)

35 Fernando Henrique Cardoso (43)

36 Lilia Shevtsova (*)

37 Charles Taylor (*)

38 Martin Wolf (*)

39 EO Wilson (31)

40 Thomas Friedman (16)

41 Bjørn Lomborg (14)

42 Daniel Dennett (24)

43 Francis Fukuyama (21)

44 Ramachandra Guha (*)

45 Tony Judt (*)

46 Steven Levitt (*)

47 Nouriel Roubini (*)

48 Jeffrey Sachs (27)

49 Wang Hui (*)

50 VS Ramachandran (*)

51 Drew Gilpin Faust (*)

52 Lawrence Lessig (40)

53 JM Coetzee (44)

54 Fernando Savater (*)

55 Wole Soyinka (66)

56 Yan Xuetong (*)

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57 Steven Pinker (26)

58 Alma Guillermoprieto (*)

59 Sunita Narain (80)

60 Anies Baswedan (*)

61 Michael Walzer (68)

62 Niall Ferguson (45)

63 George Ayittey (*)

64 Ashis Nandy (*)

65 David Petraeus (*)

66 Olivier Roy (*)

67 Lawrence Summers (60)

68 Martha Nussbaum (53)

69 Robert Kagan (62)

70 James Lovelock (71)

71 J Craig Venter (74)

72 Amos Oz (59)

73 Samantha Power (*)

74 Lee Kuan Yew (*)

75 Hu Shuli (*)

76 Kwame Anthony Appiah (*)

77 Malcolm Gladwell (*)

78 Alexander De Waal (*)

79 Gianni Riotta (*)

80 Daniel Barenboim (*)

81 Thérèse Delpech (*)

82 William Easterly (*)

83 Minxin Pei (*)

84 Richard Posner (32)

85 Ivan Krastev (*)

86 Enrique Krauze (85)

87 Anne Applebaum (*)

88 Rem Koolhaas (51)

89 Jacques Attali (*)

90 Paul Collier (*)

91 Esther Duflo (*)

92 Michael Spence (*)

93 Robert Putnam (77)

94 Harold Varmus (94)

95 Howard Gardner (70)

96 Daniel Kahneman (64)

97 Yegor Gaidar (*)

98 Neil Gershenfeld (87)

99 Alain Finkielkraut (81)

100 Ian Buruma (*)

Explanation of Methodology: The 100 candidates were pre-selected by the two publications. According to Foreign Policy the criteria for selection were that “[C]andidates must be living and still active in public life. They must have shown distinction in their particular field as well as an ability to influence wider debate, often far beyond the borders of their own country.” Open online voting allowed individuals to select five intellectuals. (“The Top 100 Public Intellectuals,” Foreign Policy) Over 500,000 votes were cast. (“Intellectuals—the results,” Prospect)

Sources: “Intellectuals—the results,” Prospect, July 26, 2008, < http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2008/07/intellectualstheresults/ >; “The Top 100 Public Intellectuals,” Foreign Policy, May 2008: 58-61.

139

DANIEL DREZNER’S 2009 LIST OF PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS BORN POST-1940

•“At magazines and periodicals, full-time authors and contributing editors who write serious but accessible essays on ideas, culture and society include Anne Applebaum, David Brooks, Jonathan Cohn, E.J. Dionne Jr., Rachel Donadio, Gregg Easterbrook, Barbara Ehrenreich, Thomas Frank, Malcolm Gladwell, Philip Gourevitch, Hendrik Hertzberg,

Christopher Hitchens, John B. Judis, Michael Kinsley,

Charles Krauthammer, Louis Menand, Peggy Noonan, Katha Pollitt, Jonathan Rauch, Meghan O’Rourke, Ramesh Ponnuru, Virginia Postrel,

David Remnick, Eugene Robinson, A.O. Scott, James Surowiecki, Andrew Sullivan, James Traub, Jacob Weisberg, Leon Wieseltier, James Wolcott, George F. Will, and Fareed Zakaria.

•Despite the thinning of their ranks, unaffiliated public intellectuals like Chris Anderson, Kurt Anderson, Paul Berman, Michael Beschloss, Robert Caro, Debra Dickerson,

James Gleick, Susan Jacoby, Robert D. Kaplan, Ray Kurzweil, Tony Kushner, Joshua [M.] Marshall,

Scott McLemee, P.J. O’Rourke, Rick Perlstein, Kevin Phillips, Paul Theroux, and Robert Wright

still remain. •The explosion of think tanks in the past 30 years has provided sinecures for the intellectual likes of William Galston, Robert Kagan, Joel Kotkin,

Michael Lind, Brink Lindsey, Walter Russell Mead,

Jedediah Purdy, David Rieff, and Shelby Steele.

•The American academy houses many intellectuals uninterested in engaging the public, but it also houses Eric Alterman, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Benjamin Barber, Michael Bérubé, Joshua Cohen, Tyler Cowen,

Daniel Dennett, William Deresiewicz, Jared Diamond, Michael Eric Dyson, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Niall Ferguson,

Stanley Fish, Richard Florida, Francis Fukuyama, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Todd Gitlin, Doris Kearns Goodwin,

140

Amy Gutmann, Jacob Hacker, Tony Judt, Paul Kennedy, Paul Krugman, George Lakoff, Nicholas Lemann, Steven Levitt, Lawrence Lessig, Mark Lilla, Patricia Nelson Limerick,

John Mearsheimer, Peter Novick, Martha Nussbaum, Joseph Nye, Steven Pinker, Richard Posner, Samantha Power, Robert Putnam, Eric Rauchway, Robert Reich, Dani Rodrik,

Jeffrey Sachs, Michael Sandel, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Alan Sokal, Joseph Stiglitz, Laurence Summers, Cass Sunstein, Sean Wilentz, and Alan Wolfe. ”

*While the boundaries may in some cases bleed together, the inclusion of Louis Menand in the first rather than the final category seems to be in error. Note that others included on the lists (e.g. Samantha Power, Laurence Summers, Cass Sunstein) have since moved into governmental positions. Source: Quoted verbatim, with formatting altered and emphasis added, from Daniel W. Drezner, “Public Intellectuals 2.1,” Society 46, no. 1 (2009):50-51. Explanation of Methodology: “Jacoby repeatedly challenges critics of The Last Intellectuals to name the names of public intellectuals born after 1940 in order to compare them with past generations. But this is not a very difficult task... It will be easy for the reader to quibble with one of the names... listed above. However, most cultural commentators would agree that most of the names... belong on that list.” (Drezner, 50-51)

141

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