Public Intellectuals: a Study in Decline. . - infinite jest - book review

Washington Monthly, March, 2002 by Jamie Malanowski

PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS: A Study in Decline By Richard A. Posner Harvard University Press, $29.95

ONE OF THE KEYS TO UNDERstanding Public Intellectuals: A Study in Decline pops up in a recent New Yorker profile of its author, Richard A. Posner. In the article, Posner--a judge on the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, lord high arbitrator in the Microsoft antitrust case, a founder of the law-and-economics movement in the 1970s, author of 31 books on subjects ranging from AIDS to the Clinton impeachment trial to the Bush-Gore electoral deadlock, and of more than 300 articles on subjects stretching from pornography to Iceland--is quoted as saying, "I have exactly the same personality as my cat. I am cold, furtive, callous, snobbish, selfish, and playful, but with a streak of cruelty." Knowing the man to be both brilliant and mean--playful with a streak of cruelty--it seems to me quite possible that Public Intellectuals is merely a massive 398-page, chart-filled practical joke perpetrated upon a vain intelligentsia and a credulous media, all for the perverse, cat-stroking amusement of Richard Posner.

In the book, Posner argues that the state of "public intellectuals"--the big-brained types who have some academic background or relationship and who discourse on matters of public interest (by which he means political interest, and not, say, the Tom Cruise-Nicole Kidman breakup, regardless of how vast the public's interest in that subject may be)--has declined in the years since giants like George Orwell and Albert Camus walked the earth. He thinks that the ability of the current crop of high domes to comment knowledgeably, insightfully, and cogently on a range of matters is markedly inferior, and that academic specialization is the culprit, finding that too few people are accomplished over a sufficient number of disciplines to supply intelligent commentary. "When public intellectuals comment on current affairs," he writes, "their comments tend to be opinionated, judgmental, sometimes condescending, and often waspish. They are controversialists, with a tendency to take extreme positions. Academic public intellectuals often write in a tone of conscious, sometimes exasperated intellectual superiority. Public intellectuals are often careless with facts and rash in predictions."

Sorry, but to me this is too much like saying that major-league pitching has never been the same since Sandy Koufax felt up his last rosin bag. On the one hand, the observation is so obvious that the only real reaction one can make is to mutter ruefully over how a certified big brain like Posner can turn any p banal opinion into a book deal. On the other hand, the observation is worthless: Whether as a class public intellectuals are better than their predecessors or not, the only real task in their evaluation is to take them one opinion, one argument, one study at a time. Posner's acuity is far more valuable on a case-by-case basis than writ large.

Although, let's face it: Posner's acuity is often pretty dense. He really does have a passage in the book which reads:

"Line S represents the supply of that work. It slopes upward to indicate that the cost of supplying public-intellectual services increases with the quantity supplied. The intersection of D and S determines the quantity of public-intellectual services produced (q) and the `price' (p) in money and other (call it psychic) income that the producers receive. The reduction in the cost of supplying public-intellectual services could be shown in Figure 2.1 by rotating S downward from its intersection with the vertical axis. When this is done, S intersects D at a lower point, implying a lower market price and a greater output."

Surely this passage must have been included in jest--Posner allowing himself to appear to be a public intellectual so hemmed in by his specialty that he has trouble communicating with a general audience. How he must have howled when scribbling this!

The biggest joke in the book, of course, is the notorious Table 5.3, which ranks the Top 100 public intellectuals, using media mentions as the measuring stick. It is a preposterous roster. It includes people from so many disciplines and approaches as to render the term "public intellectual" so nebulous and vague that pretty much anything can be said about it. It was ridiculous of Posner to put people like George Bernard Shaw, John Steinbeck, W.H. Auden, and Lillian Hellman on the list. These aren't public intellectuals; they're dead people. Their influence on public discourse in the years 1995-2000 (the years for which Posner measured media mentions) were all mere reflections in the rear view mirror. Moreover, I'm not sure the idea of counting mentions in an Internet search engine is useful in the least, since many of George Bernard Shaw's entries on the search engine Google, where Posner took part of his count, yield little evidence of intellectual influence.

And there are flaws on the low end, too. Why is Susan Estrich here? She's an ex-political operative with a radio show who can be counted on to give a reliably Democratic slant on things. Jonathan Turley? A law professor who specialized in more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger Clinton flaying. Ann Coulter? The caffeinated anti-Clinton virago? Hey, they're all bright, articulate people, but not "intellectual" as anybody who's ever had to pass a vocabulary test would define it. Moreover, they're hardly in the same business as Thomas Friedman, Joyce Carol Oates, or Susan Sontag--none of whom are in the same business with each other! Henry Kissinger topped the list. Do you think he was there because of the amazing influence of his sporadic op-ed articles, or because he got a lot of media mentions because he used to be the secretary of state and was the subject of a number of books and shows up regularly in gossip columns whenever he goes to a black-tie dinner? Is Vaclav Havel on the list because of his plays? Or because he's the president of the Czech Republic?