Mind Games. - book review

National Review, Feb 11, 2002 by Christopher Caldwell

Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, by Richard A. Posner (Harvard, 408 pp., $29.95)

The decline of public intellectuals announced in Richard Posner's new book must have been a mighty precipitous thing. For the term "public intellectual" was popularized only in 1987, when UCLA historian Russell Jacoby used it to describe academics who pontificate on passing political issues for a general audience. The problem with such thinkers, for Posner as for Jacoby, is that they embody the modern university's weaknesses without drawing on its strengths. People attracted to scholarship today tend to be leeched of idiosyncrasy in the "Ph.D. mill," cosseted by tenure (or cowed by the lack of it), sheltered from other disciplines by overspecialization, and drilled in an idiom that is gobbledygook to non-academics. Their only compensating advantage is the kind of formal accountability typified by peer review- which is precisely what public intellectuals flee when they join a shouting match on Crossfire or sign an "open letter" to the New York Times about, say, why the president shouldn't be impeached. At best, they do (in Posner's words) "what journalists would do, though perhaps with a lag"; at worst, they wind up mere entertainers, ideologues masquerading as experts.

Posner, a circuit-court judge and University of Chicago law professor, trains his rifle on a familiar barrel of fish. There's Paul Kennedy, with his Gorbachev-era warnings of American overstretch; Paul Ehrlich, who waited decades for a population explosion that never came; Lester Thurow, who prophesied that Japan's economy would lead the world, just months before it collapsed; Martin Feldstein, who predicted that the Clinton budget of 1993 would cause a recession; and Edward Luttwak, who foresaw "a bloody, grinding combat with thousands of casualties" in Iraq in 1991. For the most part, however, Posner is concerned with grinding axes and picking nits. He faults Arthur Schlesinger Jr., David Frum, and Thomas Nagel for (in their different ways) stressing privacy rather than obstruction of justice during the Clinton sex scandals. He flays New York Times economics columnist Paul Krugman, first for ignoring a paper on the history of typewriter ergonomics, then for mistaking the relevance of the Robinson-Patman Act to online pricing policy. If there were no more to his book than such trifles, it would resemble a hundred piece-of-my-mind editorials strung together, with no larger point.

But a larger point is just what Posner thinks he has. A pioneer of the "law and economics" movement, he views the public-intellectual field as an instance of "market failure." So he tries to subject it to a rigorous social-science analysis, breaking public-intellectual work into genres ("self-popularizing," "jeremiads," "real-time commentary," "politically inflected literary criticism," etc.) and assembling a "statistical profile of the modern public intellectual." Here, Posner crosses a line into the absurd.

Posner assembles his profile by feeding a list of intellectuals' names into Google and Nexis, and tallying up their mentions in media, websites, and scholarly literature between 1995 and 2000. The result is a league-table of the "top" thinkers of our time, in which, for instance, the law professor Jonathan Turley, by virtue of a few weeks' on-air bloviation about Bill Clinton in 1998, ranks just above W. H. Auden and Saul Bellow. Much of Posner's analysis of intellectual life rests on this exercise in garbage-in, garbage-out.

His choices as to who qualifies are also dubious; for example, Posner reckons it a "borderline case" whether Harvard president Lawrence Summers should count as a "public intellectual." Is he nuts? Whatever one thinks of Summers, his broadly respected academic work on late- 20th-century mergers and buyouts is the foundation of corporate-finance policy for virtually all center-left parties in the Western world. Sidney Blumenthal, by contrast, prompts no such misgivings; by Posner's reckoning, he even ranks as the No. 5 public intellectual of our time. Posner makes no effort to distinguish between the web "hits" people get for their thinking and the hits they get for other things, but we can assume the lion's share of Blumenthal's 8,044 media mentions involve work in his chosen academic discipline: the study of what a psychopathic stalker that lying slut Monica Lewinsky was.

Since Posner purports to be covering foreign intellectuals (Anthony Giddens is here), where's Ulrich Beck? Adam Michnik? Norberto Bobbio? Zygmunt Bauman? Ralf Dahrendorf? Mario Vargas Llosa? Any one of these would have obtained more hits than the lower-ranking members of Posner's intellectual all-star team. Why is Stanley Fish on the list but not Helen Vendler? Posner actually has an answer to that one: He has decided to ignore purely "aesthetic" literary criticism, "as it does not contribute to public discourse on political or ideological matters." But that renders tautological his complaint that much public- intellectual activity is ideological cheerleading. And it still doesn't explain why the marginally political Philip Roth qualifies as a public intellectual while the marginally political John Updike does not.