Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline By Richard A. Posner. Harvard University Press, 408 pages, $29.95
Richard A. Posner's Public Intellectuals reminds me of my grandmother's attic: here an elephant table brought home from Africa; there a cuckoo clock; all around, a miscellany of items collected under one roof. Alas, Posner, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, intends his newest book to be more than a hodgepodge. He seeks to demonstrate that "the public intellectual can be studied in a systematic and fruitful fashion." With that goal in mind, he has equipped the book with several academic accoutrements. He has a thesis, in two parts: (1) that public intellectuals say foolish things because they are subject to so few quality controls, although (2) it doesn't matter, because no one pays much attention to them anyway.
Following an economic model, he argues that the proliferation of mediaoutlets has enlarged the market for public intellectuals, who produce "credencegoods"--that is, goods whose "quality cannot be determined" before you buy them.How do readers know whether to "buy" the opinions public intellectuals areselling? They listen to the intellectual's rhetoric. They observe evidence of theintellectual's commitment. They examine his or her credentials--usually academicones, since, as Posner accurately asserts, most public intellectuals these daysare also professors.
There's the rub, in Posner's view. Today's professors specialize when they dotheir academic work. When they write about social and political issues for thegeneral public, they move beyond their area of expertise. Members of theiraudience, themselves often specialists, lack the knowledge to evaluate what issaid. Freed from knowledgeable scrutiny, intellectuals can pretty much say whatthey want and get away with it. (Posner does not take reporters and editorsseriously as gatekeepers.) At the same time, if intellectuals embarrassthemselves beyond hope of redemption, they can simply retire from the publicfield and work full time at their teaching jobs.
And embarrass themselves they do, Posner argues. He spends more than half ofthe book demonstrating the errors made by particular public intellectuals.Drawing partly on his own earlier writings, he takes to task first oneintellectual, then another. As part of his supposed systematic analysis, he putshis most prolonged critiques in a section that he calls "Genre Studies." Here, hesingles out literary critic Wayne Booth and philosopher Martha Nussbaum, notesthat they "are not in the mainstream of contemporary literary studies," andnevertheless uses them as exemplars. Their error, in his eyes: turningliterature to political use. Elaborating on this theme in a chapter on politicalsatire, Posner turns to George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World to show the folly of interpreting "the novels of yesterday as political tracts." In a chapter on philosophers, he returns to Nussbaum and also portrays Richard Rorty as a loose cannon firing off proposals, signifying nothing. In another chapter, "The Public Intellectual and the Law," he continues what he calls his "nastly [sic] little spat" with Ronald Dworkin over the Clinton impeachment. This chapter, which prolongs an argument already turned stale, is the dreariest of the "Genre Studies."
I was more interested in Posner's dissection of "the Jeremiah School," which,he writes, includes Gertrude Himmelfarb, Robert Bork, Robert Putnam, and other"declinists"--intellectuals who see American culture going downhill all the way.The trouble with these Jeremiahs, Posner suggests, is their tendency to connecteverything with everything else. If something they don't like happens in onecorner of the culture--sloppy dress or promiscuous sex, for instance--they assumethat it spells doom for the entire culture.
Posner himself exudes a bouncy cheer about the state of the country--indeed,the world. An enthusiastic free-marketer, he speaks of "the success of(partially) deregulated capitalism in producing unimagined prosperity in much ofthe world." Writing before September 11, he refers to our "living in an era inwhich we feel safe." Could he have imagined the state of mind in which readerswill take up his book? His own lack of foresight demonstrates another point hemakes about intellectuals at some length: When they try to foresee the future,they are likely to get it wrong. Paul Ehrlich predicted that Americans would gohungry. Robert Bellah predicted a polarization of wealth. Jeane Kirkpatrick saidthe communist countries would never turn into democracies. Wrong, wrong, wrong,says Posner. Not for the first time, I felt that we are living in differentworlds, he and I.
Outside the lab, of course, any predictions are dicey. It's wiseto pay less attention to what intellectuals say about the future than to whatthey say about the present and past. For instance, Wendell Berry, one of myfavorite intellectuals, envisions a bleak future if we go on as we've been goingon; but his essays and books mostly look at things as they are and have been, notthings as they will be. Reading him over several decades, I have become familiarwith his mind--not only his "opinions" or "predictions" but his turns of thought,his ways of grappling with the subjects that he has made his own--among them, theemptiness at the heart of commercial life. Thinking about the place of Berry'swork in my life, I find Posner's economic model, with its focus on discrete worksand discrete assertions, sadly reductive.
Berry long ago abandoned university life, which he found constricting, andhe now spends his time writing, speaking, and tending the earth. He lives quitemodestly on a small hillside farm--enhancing his credibility as an intellectual,Posner might say, by living the values he espouses. Yet Berry, an influentialfigure in the environmental movement, is not even on Posner's radar screen. Hefails to make the master list Posner presents as his only attempt at systematicresearch--a miscellaneous, idiosyncratic collection of European, British, andAmerican thinkers, alive and dead, academic and independent. Posner built thislist out of one compiled by another author in 1970, adding names, apparently, asthey occurred to him. It is impossible to find any basis for Posner's inclusionof certain names on the list and not others. Why, for instance, does he includeToni Morrison but not Alice Walker? Todd Gitlin but not Tony Judt?
He subjects the names in this bogus sample to database searches in an attemptto draw conclusions--for instance, that "media mentions come at the expense ofscholarly citations." The result is pseudo-social science that undermineswhatever slim credibility the rest of his book musters. About midway through thischaper, I began entertaining the notion that Public Intellectuals might be asatire.
Taken straight on, the book does not hold up. If there has indeed been a"decline" in the quality of public intellectual life, Posner gives too muchweight to specialization in academe as its cause. At minimum, he ought to takeinto account the power of television--scarcely, as we know it, a great medium forthinking things through. He also ought to consider the corporatization andcommercialization of the publishing world.
But the "Decline" in the subtitle is in fact hypothetical--pure tease. Posnermakes no attempt to trace a decline; this book is not a history. Nor, by takingapart the arguments of a handful of intellectuals, does he make the case thatpublic intellectuals speak irresponsibly. At most, he proves that theseparticular intellectuals make arguments that he can punch holes in.
Is the academic work of intellectuals any more rigorous than their efforts aspublic critics and advocates, as Posner maintains? Because he himself has onefoot in the academic world (he also holds an appointment at the University ofChicago), we might be inclined to take his word for it. I have my doubts. Ibelieve he overestimates the quality controls in the academic world. His ownjerry-built book, published by Harvard University Press, is no better thancomparable books issued by trade publishers, not only in large things but insmall: Historian Garry Wills's name is once rendered as "Gary" and the poet AllenGinsberg's name is misspelled "Ginsburg." Early in the book, Posner does admitthat other symbolic goods, if examined closely, might also display signs offailed quality control. He does not let that caveat lead him to wonder whetherany field of human endeavor, examined closely, might not prove flawed.
Instead he marches on, concluding the book confidently, as he begins. Ascorrective to the sorry state of intellectual affairs, he offers severalremedies for holding public intellectuals to account. For instance, universitiescould require professors to post all nonacademic speaking and writing on the Web,so that the public could have a record of their follies. Universities could alsomandate that their professors disclose income earned from their outsideactivities as public intellectuals so the public could identify conflicts ofinterest that might taint their views. Income disclosure, he suggests, might alsopressure faculty to tend to their academic knitting, where they are more likelyto make real contributions to society. These are not bad ideas so much as theyare small ones, unlikely to improve the usefulness of intellectuals'contributions to the public conversation.
Inevitably--since this is the question he's raising--I found myself wonderingif Posner's own book constitutes an irresponsible act. Transparently, he does notknow enough about his topic to take it on, nor does he appear to have a firm gripon how to approach it. He says that to some extent his book originated in hisexperience as mediator in the Microsoft antitrust case--when he observed thatintellectuals' commentary on the case "was little better than kibitzing." Hisbook is not much more. Yet it is in some ways useful: for instance, as a guide toother writing on public intellectuals (he provides good footnotes) or as astimulant for thought (he leaves so much room for argument). There's somethingalmost endearing about his confident plunge into deep unknown waters. I wouldnever say, as he seems to be saying of some public intellectuals, that he oughtto have refrained from speaking.
