Mind Games

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.

About the Author

Christopher Caldwell

Mr. Caldwell is a contributing editor of the Claremont Review of Books and the author of The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.

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.