Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline

Christian Century, April 10, 2002 by William Dean

By Richard A. Posner. Harvard University Press, 408 pp., $29.95.

NEAR THE END of Public Intellectuals, Richard Posner observes that Richard Nixon was forced from office in 1974 "because people were outraged." This was perhaps the public's most dramatic gesture of the second half of the 20th century. But the people Posner defines as public intellectuals would never have understood this, since his public intellectuals concern themselves only with public policy--not with public philosophy, public ethics or public theology, and not with matters of moral and spiritual outrage.

This view is not unique to Posner. Almost all public intellectuals today would agree that they should focus on hard-headed policy questions rather than soft-headed value questions. Such public intellectuals would attend, for example, to the politics and the legalities surrounding Nixon's impeachment and resignation, but not to how his behavior undermined the nation's moral and spiritual stature.

Posner underscores his position by using, without irony, an 1891 comment by British scientist William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) as an epigraph: "When you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind." Such a judgment of what counts as "knowledge" puts on the sidelines such great figures of American public life as Jane Addams, Walter Rauschenbusch, Walter Lippmann, Dorothy Day, John Dewey, Reinhold Niebuhr, Sidney Hook and Christopher Lasch. Many critics of the contemporary scene would argue that it is precisely these kinds of figures that we lack today--public intellectuals who can write with clarity and moral passion about public issues--and that their absence is a sign of the decline of public intellectuals. Posner sees a decline, but it has to do not with intellectuals' loss of scope and ambition but with their factual inaccuracy.

Posner is himself a remarkable public intellectual. He is a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School and chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. By 1995, he was already the most prolific writer in the American judiciary, cited 20 times by the Supreme Court and 200 times by appeals courts, and he was the author or editor of 21 books. (Ten more have been published in the past six years.)

Posner's narrow definition of the public intellectual is his book's greatest weakness and its greatest strength. Using economic analysis, hard data and checks on prediction, Posner subjects dozens of public intellectuals to pointed criticism, if not a sound thrashing. He concentrates on "academic public intellectuals," arguing that independent public intellectuals are a dying breed, and he demonstrates how their public pronunciamentos have been sloppy and prejudiced in ways they would never allow in their scholarship.

Academic public intellectuals--normally rebuked only privately in a confidential manuscript evaluation or personnel committee report--will feel wronged by this kind of treatment. After all, their public-intellectual writing is, for them, just a sideline. Someone who checks the accuracy of their descriptions or predictions is like the sourpuss at a party who interrupts a heartfelt rumination or a scandalous rumor by remarking that it ignores the facts. Posner deserves credit for putting their feet to the fire. Speaking like an economist, he argues that a public intellectual who goes untracked and unchecked, as most do, is like a business insulated from customer response or government regulation. They know that if, by some strange chance, what they publish as public intellectuals is read and repudiated, they will escape economic punishment because they enjoy a tenured faculty post.

Posner notes that Paul Ehrlich incorrectly predicted Malthusian catastrophes of overpopulation, that Noam Chomsky has twisted politicians' motives beyond recognition, and that Robert Bork has repeatedly called liberals the catalysts for catastrophic consequences that never occur. He reminds us too that Richard Rorty claimed in 1987 that "time seems on the side of the Soviet Union"; in 1988 that "if there is hope, it lies in the Third World"; and in 1992 that America "could slide into fascism at any time." These kinds of gaffes, Posner observes, generally go not only unpunished but unnoticed.

However, one wishes Posner had spent more time in the library and less in the courtroom. He discusses at length literary scholar Wayne Booth, and then says Booth is neither a public intellectual nor a literary critic because his criticism is too moral. But the problem here is Posner's, not Booth's. Posner should have 1) left Booth out of his book on public intellectuals; or 2) not called him a literary critic; or 3) avoided the obsolete assumption that good literary criticism is about formal, not moral, analysis. He glibly dismisses philosopher Martha Nussbaum's important epistemological critique of the cultural relativists because, he says, their relativism is not epistemological but only political. He also slights her normative analysis of developmental economists because, he says, their normative assumptions are too modest to bother with.