New Public Spheres: Recontextualizing the Intellectual 9781409460923, 9781315598062

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New Public Spheres Recontextualizing the Intellectual

Edited by Peter Thijssen, Walter Weyns, Christiane Timmerman and Sara Mels

NEW PUBLIC SpHEREs

Public Intellectuals and the Sociology of Knowledge Series Editors Dr Andreas Hess, University College Dublin, Ireland Dr Neil McLaughlin, McMaster University, Canada The sociology of knowledge has a long and distinctive history. Its function has always been that of attempting to bridge the aspirations of the discursive and institutional founding fathers of sociology with that of modern attempts to define the discipline through the study of the emergence, role and social function of ideas. However, since Mannheim first outlined his program in the 1920s, the sociology of knowledge has undergone many changes. The field has become extremely differentiated and some of its best practitioners now sail under different flags and discuss their work under different headings. This new series charts the progress that has been made in recent times – despite the different labels. Be it intellectual history Cambridge-style, the new sociology of ideas which is now gaining strength in North America, or the more European cultural analysis which is associated with the name of Bourdieu, this series aims at being inclusive while simultaneously striving for sociological insight and excellence. All too often modern attempts in the sociology of knowledge, broadly conceived, have only looked at form while they downplayed or disregarded content, substance of argument or meaning. This series will help to rectify this.

New Public Spheres Recontextualizing the Intellectual

Edited by PEtER THIJssEn, WaLtER WEYns, CHRIstIanE TImmERman University of Antwerp, Belgium SaRa MELs University Centre Saint Ignatius Antwerp, Belgium

First published 2013 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2013 Peter Thijssen, Walter Weyns, Christiane Timmerman and Sara Mels Peter Thijssen, Walter Weyns, Christiane Timmerman and Sara Mels have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. ‘Micro Public Spheres and the Sociology of Religion: An Evangelical Illustration’ by Richard McCallum, Journal of Contemporary Religion Vol.26:2 (2011) pp.173–187, reprinted by permission of the publisher (Taylor & Francis Ltd, www.tandfonline.com). All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Thijssen, Peter. New public spheres : recontextualizing the intellectual / by Peter Thijssen, Walter Weyns, Christiane Timmerman, Sara Mels. pages cm. -- (Public intellectuals and the sociology of knowledge) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-6092-3 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Intellectuals--History. 2. Political science-- Philosophy. 3. Social participation. I. Title. HM728.T455 2013 302’.14--dc23 ISBN 978-1-4094-6092-3 (hbk) ISBN

2013012951

Contents List of Figures and Tables   Notes on Contributors   Introduction New Public Spheres: Recontextualizing the Intellectual   Peter Thijssen, Walter Weyns and Christiane Timmerman

vii ix 1

PART I: History and Contemporary Developments 1 2 3

The Intellectual in the Public Sphere: Projections, Contradictions and Dilemmas since the Enlightenment   Harold Mah

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The Rise of the Embedded Intellectual: New Forms of Public Engagement and Critique   Patrick Baert and Alan Shipman

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From Public to Civic Intellectuals: Political Agency and Emerging Media Landscapes   Peter Dahlgren

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PART II: The Internet and the Public Intellectual 4

Intellectuals, the Public Sphere and Dissemination Strategies   France Aubin

5 How Salonfähig Are Online Political Forums? The Curious Case of Politics.be   Peter Thijssen 6

The Creation of New Public Places: A Critique of Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel   Frank Maet

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PART III: Women and the Public Sphere 7

Immigrant Intellectual: The Case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali   Odile Heynders

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Building Solidarity through Relationships: The Politics of Feminism as an Intellectual Project in Turkey   Nazan Haydari



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PART IV: Subcultures in the Public Sphere 9

Public Intellectuals and Micro-public Spheres: A British Illustration   Richard McCallum

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Public Intellectuals and Public Spheres: Who Is Left to Speak to the Public? Yusuf al-Qaradawi: Shaper of an Agonistic Discourse   Zvi Bar’el

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Reputation among the Hungarian Intellectual Elite   Luca Kristóf

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Index  

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List of Figures and Tables Figures Ideological public of Politics.be versus that of general Flemish population   11.1 The production of reputation among intellectuals  

5.1

102 201

Tables 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4

A comparison of salon and OPF   97 In politics, people sometimes talk about ‘left’ and ‘right’. When you think about your own ideas on this, where would you place yourself on this scale?   101 How often do you follow political news on radio and television or in the newspaper?   103 Which members of Politics.be are more ideologically extreme?   105

11.1 Sample composition of the elite survey, 2009   11.2 Influence of public intellectual activity on the number of reputational votes   11.3 Rankings of public intellectuals in 2001 and 2009   11.4 Correlation of voting for Esterházy and the voters’ political views   11.5 Political views of artists with great reputation  

202 205 206 207 208

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Notes on Contributors France Aubin is professor at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, in the Department of Arts and Social Communication, Canada. Her research interests cover public sphere, intellectuals, governance, human rights and discourse analysis. A member of GRICIS (an interdisciplinary research group on communication, information and society) since 2001, France Aubin conducts research on the governance of culture, communication and information from a human rights perspective (copyright, public right to information, right to cultural diversity) but also in terms of public policy. With a multidisciplinary focus, her research is rooted mainly in political philosophy and sociology. Patrick Baert is Reader in Social Theory at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge. Amongst his publications are, for instance, Social Theory in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (co-authored with Carreira da Silva, 2010); Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Towards Pragmatism (2005) and the edited volume The Politics of Knowledge (with Dominguez Rubio, 2012). More recently he has published on the sociology intellectuals, for instance, in Theory and Society (2011); the European Journal of Social Theory (2011); the Journal of Classical Sociology (2011); and the Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour (online version 2012). Dr. Zvi Bar’el is a lecturer at Sapir Academic College and Ben Gurion University in Israel. A senior research fellow at the Centre of Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University and the Middle Eastern Affairs analyst for Haaretz Daily. His latest book is When Cars Fell from Heaven (Hakibuts Hameuhad, Tel Aviv, 2011) on different models of military and civil occupations in the Middle East. Peter Dahlgren is professor emeritus at the Department of Communication and Media, Lund University, Sweden. His work focuses on media and democracy, from the horizons of late modern social and cultural theory. More specifically, he often addresses the theme of democratic participation, in particular in relation to the digital media. Active in European academic networks, he has also been a visiting scholar at several universities in Europe and the U.S. Along with journal articles and book chapters, his recent publications include Media and Political Engagement (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and the co-edited volume Young People, ICTs and Democracy (Nordicom, 2010).

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Nazan Haydari is a faculty member of School of Communications, Maltepe University, Istanbul, Turkey. She holds an MAIA (1999) in Communication and Development, Women’s Studies certificate (1999) and a PhD (2005) in Communications from Ohio University, Athens, Ohio. Her research areas are feminist media studies, radio studies, alternative media discourses, and media pedagogy. Odile Heynders holds a M.Phil from the University of Leiden and a PhD from the University of Tilburg. She is a Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of Culture Studies at Tilburg University and was a fellow at NIAS (Netherlands Institute for the Advanced Study in the Humanities) in 1998–99, and 2004–2005. She has published books (in Dutch) on strategies of reading, European poetry and the history of literature studies in the Netherlands. Her recent research project is on literary authors as European public intellectuals. Heynders is Head of the Research Programme: Literature and Visual Art in the European Public Sphere and supervisor, together with sociolinguist Jan Blommaert, of the junior research team (PhDs and Post docs) TRAPS: Transformations of the Public Sphere. Luca Kristóf (1979), Budapest. She studied at the Eötvös Lóránt Science University and the Corvinus University of Budapest. She completed her PhD in Sociology in 2011. Since 2002 she works as a researcher at the Institute for Sociology, Centre for Social Sciences at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She teaches at the Corvinus University of Budapest and the Pázmány Péter Catholic University. She is the editor of the online journal socio.hu. Her main research fields are elite studies, sociology of the intellectuals, sociology of consumption. Frank Maet (1971, Belgium) studied Theatre, Visual Arts and Philosophy. In 2011, he defended his PhD in philosophy at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, entitled New Artistic Times. A Philosophical Critique of the Relation between Art and Technology. He lectured at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and is currently teaching History of Philosophy and History of Contemporary Art at Ghent University College, KU Leuven Association. He has published on art theory and aesthetics (such as contemporary Kant interpretation, the end of art, postmodern aesthetics). Other topics of research are philosophy of technology and Kantian ethics. Harold Mah is Professor of Modern European Cultural and Intellectual History at Queen’s University in Canada. He is the author of Enlightenment Phantasies: Cultural Identity in France and Germany, 1750–1914 (Cornell University Press, 2003, 2004) and The End of Philosophy, the Origin of ‘Ideology’: Karl Marx and the Crisis of the Young Hegelians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). He has published articles in The Journal of Modern History, Representations, History Workshop Journal, New German Critique, and other venues. He is currently finishing a book entitled History Hates Theory: Case Studies in a Syndrome, which

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deals with the theoretical concerns and anxieties of historians from Herder to the present. He has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a fellow at Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities. Sara Mels holds a master’s degree in Modern History and in International Relations and Conflict Resolution from the K.U.Leuven. Since 2004 she is project coordinator at the University Centre Saint-Ignatius Antwerp (UCSIA) where she develops academic programmes on various topics of contemporary relevance to society. After 10 years teaching at the Université de Tunis, Richard McCallum completed in 2011 a doctorate in the sociology of religion at the University of Exeter in which he developed ‘a sociological approach to Christian-Muslim relations’. His current research interests include Evangelical Christians, Muslims and recent interfaith initiatives. He is based in Oxford, UK, and conducts freelance research into the interaction of faith communities at the same time as providing crosscultural training for companies working amongst Arabs in North Africa and the Middle East. Alan Shipman is a Lecturer in Economics at the Open University, and was previously an emerging-markets analyst, freelance economist and business journalist. His publications are mainly in the areas of free-market theory, financial economics and economics of knowledge, and include Knowledge Monopolies (coauthored with Marten Shipman, 2005) and the edited volume Personal Investment (with Mariana Mazzucato, Jonquil Lowe and Andrew Trigg, 2010). Peter Thijssen is Associate Professor in Political Sociology in the Department of Political Science and member of the research group Media, Movements and Politics (M2P) at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. His research focuses on public opinion, political participation, and solidarity. Recently he has published in European Journal of Social Theory, Acta Politica, British Educational Research Journal, Res Publica, etc. Christiane Timmerman holds an MA in Psychology and a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology for which she conducted extended field research in Turkey. Currently she is director of the Center of Migration and Intercultural Studies (CeMIS) at University of Antwerp; where she is in charge of several international, national and regional research projects including PhD projects on international migration and social cohesion and integration. Her current research interests are situated in the fields of marriage migration, ethnicity and education. She is former director of academic affairs of UCSIA (until October 2011).

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Walter Weyns teaches cultural criticism and sociology at the University of Antwerp. He is the author of articles and books on sociologist thinkers and theory of culture and media. In Het tijdperk van de maatschappij (the era of society) he takes a close look at five different aspects of what he calls ‘the vagueness of our post cultural era’. His most recent book Het geval Canetti (The Canetti Case) reveals the liberating power of thought of this thinker and his reservation against the world in his present shape.

Introduction New Public Spheres: Recontextualizing the Intellectual Peter Thijssen, Walter Weyns and Christiane Timmerman

Whomever or whatever intellectuals are, we know at least one thing: in one way or another they are servants or masters of the intellect; or perhaps better still, of discourse, of vivid language. This is because however much they pretend to be creatures of reason, heirs to the Enlightenment, intellectuals seem to be people who are more taken with language than with reason, who are passionate inventors of ideas and arguments, who think that words can capture the world and change it, people who, once they begin to speak, fall under the spell of what Jürgen Habermas (1984) called the Telos of language. This is their fundamental belief, which in itself is not necessarily founded on reason: that words are the guardian of a better future for humanity, and that in each instance of communication or discussion between people there is the spark of a greater truth, a greater justice, of a more rational and human future. Intellectuals may not always literally believe what they are saying – indeed they like to doubt and do so at length – but they do believe that their search for the right word really does matter. More often than not they believe the future of the world hangs on their words. The intellectual is a complex and paradoxical figure. The very society he cares for with every fibre of his being and wants to guide usually turns its back on him. Often enough he is an exile who, thinking, writing and critiquing from within his outpost, dreams of changing a society that has lost its way. He consoles himself with the thought that no power can compete with the word that speaks truth. He lives on, as well as for, words and ideas. He would willingly give his life for freedom of speech and thought; or, if lacking in courage himself, at least admires those who did or would have done. At the same time he is often wanting in his respect for those who disagree with him. Does he not detain the truth? Is it not the self-proclaimed ‘responsibility of the intellectual to speak the truth and expose lies’ as Chomsky (1967) wrote? Bernard-Henry Lévy (1987) expressed it even more categorically: ‘the intellectual is truth, reason, and justice itself’. He knows the power of words like no other but cannot ignore the daily reality that words and ideas can be manipulated like marionettes on a string. He believes in the freedom of thought. He calls his typewriter his fatherland. He prides himself on his independence of thought yet gladly signs collective manifestos and is pleased as punch when invited to speak at, say, the next meeting of the international Pen Club,

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the Russell Tribunal or the Congrès Mondial des Intellectuels pour la Paix, where he gets lost in a labyrinth of factions and hits his head against a wall of incomprehension. He does not even shrink back, like Sartre and many others – against his better knowledge and if need be at cost to himself – from adapting the facts to the ‘truth’ rather than the other way round. ‘Why’, Max Frisch (1985) wrote in his diary when attending one of these postwar conferences, ‘do intellectuals, when in groups, have something unavoidably comic?’ Because they want so much yet are able to do so little. Intellectuals would like to act, very much so in fact, but they only know how to think. They are imprisoned in a Pascalian double-bind. They can encompass the whole world, certainly society, with their thought, and yet they are as vulnerable as a reed. Intellectuals do not exit from this impasse. They bridge the gap between thinking and doing by thinking a little harder, honing their arguments a little more. They may no longer believe that the Word created the world but they are of the opinion that the right word at the right moment can save society, if not the world, from destruction. The logocentrism of intellectuals can sometimes end as childish fantasies of saving the world. Whenever war threatens intellectuals are ready to take up the pen against the bombs. Just after the start of World War II Elias Canetti reproached himself for not finding the right words that could have prevented the killing, and he was far from the only one. In 1914 the Dutch author Frederik van Eeden (1971) wrote in his Diary: ‘Saturday 13 June – What has happened is so great and powerful, it is something so wonderful, that it takes my breath away just thinking about it again.’ What earth-shaking event had occurred? An international and colourful gathering of writers, among them Romain Rolland, Upton Sinclair, Martin Buber, Gustav Landauer and Walther Rathenau, had decided to form a spiritual community which could save the world. They called themselves the Forte Circle, after the Italian coastal resort Forte di Marmi where the first meeting was to be held. Van Eeden and the others were, at least briefly, truly convinced that this event could become of world-historical importance. If they, who were the wise men of their generation (in their eyes), could succeed in coming together and truly listen to each other what would not be possible? There would be a whole new spiritual climate of peace. The world would become a better place. War would be overcome forever. Two months later the initiative was scuppered: World War I broke out and even in cosmopolitan company nationalism took its toll. The mountain had brought forth a mouse. The megalomaniac ambition to raise the world’s level of spirituality and free it from war was not even capable of holding together a small group of authors. Yet these were not school children hatching idealistic plans. They believed honestly and truly in a ‘spiritual conquest of the world’, as a small book by van Eeden from 1911 was called. Though one can have a good laugh at the naive beliefs of these men (who, it should be noted, thought nothing of the absence of women in their midst), something of this elitist, high-falutin idealism can be found in all the initiatives of intellectuals who imagine themselves to be the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’ as Shelley (1971) once said of poets. One finds it in equal measure among

Introduction

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the first generation of Russian intellectuals, especially aristocrats who, imbued with romantic idealism, took aim at the Tzarist regime and answered the call to free the lowest classes from their economic, cultural and political oppression. One can recognize it in the Dreyfusards who, aroused by Zola’s clarion call J’Accuse, were full of the idea that if they came to the defence of one man’s rights they were defending the rights of all of humanity. So too, when Thomas Mann raised his always ironical voice to berate a German nation perverted by the Nazis, he did this because he believed in a universally true speech. Even Marxists and neoMarxists are full of idealistic naivety and pretentious elitism. Though they love to rail against elitists statements and ridicule ‘ideas’ and idealism, the distinction between class consciousness and false consciousness is thoroughly elitist, just like the notion of avant garde, and shot through with the world-bettering power of (Marxist) ideas and words. Intellectuals are the descendants of Thales of Miletus. While effortlessly gazing on high towards elevated general truths and values it can happen that they do not see the small holes at their feet and trip, to the merriment of onlookers who cannot understand that someone can be so stupid and clumsy. There are many such small potholes on the paths of intellectuals today. Which is why we ask whether the intellectual can stay upright at all. Is he not down on the ground too often to be able to see anything higher or further? Does he have a place in a business-like world focused on pragmatic problem solving? Has he not been superseded by a generalized professionalism? Is he not hopelessly naive in comparison with the scholarly expert who has little patience for pathetic pronouncements on truth and justice and limits himself to a scientifically based analysis of facts? Has the intellectual on the other hand not been made redundant in a world in which stable and authoritative publications groan under commercial pressures and one in which whoever wishes to can share his very personal views, comments and criticisms on everything and anything with the world via blogs, Twitter, Facebook or YouTube? Have the words of Antonio Gramsci (2011) in his Quaderni del Carcere not come to pass, namely that ‘all men are intellectuals’ (at least all those with an Internet connection and an opinion)? The many laments about the disappearance of the intellectual relate to these things. However, what if it is not a question of the disappearance but rather of the transformation of the intellectual? Could one say that he appears in a new guise and that, faced with the ‘scientification’ of knowledge and the tumultuous changes in and of the public sphere, there still remains something of the ethic of the intellectual? In this book we will explore the metamorphoses of the intellectual and the specific characteristics of the context in which these new manifestations occur. As Boltanski and Thévenot explain in their still important work De la justification: Economies de la grandeur [the English translation On Justification: The Economies of Worth came out in 2006] the worth given to people and their social roles is the result of contextualized tests. Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot identify six orders of justification used to evaluate the worth of people and their social functions. They speak for example of the inspired order, which is particularly

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useful for understanding the problematic of the intellectual. In this order, worth is accorded to inspired individuals who champion authenticity and personal detachment. Inspired worth also stubbornly remains associated with elitism because inspiration is not given to many and is always a little against the grain. Though the Augustinian notion of inspiration, to which Boltanski and Thévenot explicitly refer for the characterization of their own order, is a divine one, it is clear that the notion of inspired order has a wider application. Thus, the characteristics we ascribed to intellectual heirs of the Enlightenment show similarities with it. Though Habermas typified them as a rational-critical elite it is perhaps equally typical that it concerns enthusiastic and inspired (indeed, inspiring) improvers of the world. An intellectual is always a quixotic apparition; a little bit unworldly yet obsessed with outspoken ideas about how to improve the world. At the same time it goes without saying that an order of justification tending towards elitism and divine inspiration will be treated with a certain pity in this disenchanted and democratized world. Although Boltanski and Thévenot do not deploy an explicitly historical perspective in On Justification it is probably no accident that they begin their survey of the six orders with the inspired one, before moving to the domestic, the fame related, the civic, market and industrial ones. Although tensions between these orders are unavoidable they seem most palpable when the inspired order is involved. The inspired intellectual is beleaguered on all sides by more contemporary epigones, who seem to be more at home in the new public spheres. Thus the inspired intellectual clashes with the university professor who preens himself on his social standing and derives his worth from his loyalty to a powerful institution. He also clashes with the media expert who manages to capture the attention of an otherwise always fickle public by means of striking sound bites and who derives his fame from his ubiquitous presence in all kinds of media. He also has a hard time with the party ideologues and unions who try to serve the common good along with others via their commitment to the activities of all kinds of social associations. Next there is a clear tension between the inspired intellectual and academic entrepreneurs who try to mobilize as many research methods as possible and who, via their ‘output’, compete with other actors in the academic market. Lastly intellectuals tend to clash more emphatically with experts who derive their recognition from their impact on their peers within ever more demarcated and autonomous niches. In this work we are paying attention to the clashes between orders of justification as they impinge on the domain of the intellectual. Thus the inspired intellectual has issues with the conservatism and lack of independence of the university professor. Conversely, the university tends to reproach the self-styled inspired intellectual for his unsystematic approach and his lack of respect for academic traditions. This latter also has difficulties with the superficiality and insincerity of media-savvy experts, especially those active in the audio-visual media. In their turn the world of fame has little patience for the esoteric approach of the inspired intellectual. He again does not approve of the bureaucracy-prone and far from spontaneous social ideologues, which in turn dismiss the headstrong and impulsive character

Introduction

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of inspired interventions. Furthermore, inspired intellectuals object to academic entrepreneurs in that they are seen to confuse the means with the end. These latter complain of the former’s lack of empathy insofar as the inspired project their own vision onto others without seeing things from their point of view. Lastly, the inspired intellectual condemns the expert for spending so much time guarding the academic dividing walls that none is left for looking over them. Needless to say, the experts dismiss the improvisation and lack of professionalism of the inspired intellectual. In any event such clashes are aggravated by a changing context. One of the most frequently heard criticisms of On Justification is indeed that the authors do little to explain where their six orders come from. In other words there is a need for attention to be paid to the evolution of orders of justification in space and time. Peter Wagner (1999) correctly pointed out that the public sphere is a key to this. Individual roles and the social worth accorded to them are, after all, dependent on an evaluating public and on the public sphere as the arena for the contests. We pick up this gauntlet and contextualize the public sphere in which intellectuals express themselves today. At the risk of generalizing a little we posit that where in an earlier work Fleck, Hess and Lyon (2008) concentrated on Intellectuals and their publics we will try and look at Publics and their intellectuals. In this sense many chapters will explicitly follow on the work of Habermas and Eder rather than that of Goldfarb and Furedi. As already stated an inspired intellectual is by definition a public actor. He is in any case a public intellectual. He does not address a few individuals but a wider public since he aims to change the world. But what is the public and the public sphere in the cosmopolitan world of today? What it is not, at any rate, is a university-educated male elite. According to the followers of a more direct democracy of dialogue, all stakeholders must be involved. This is not only because the level of education has risen tremendously but also because the vertical monologue in which intellectuals displayed their wisdom in the presence of a largely passive public has been largely superseded. Gramsci’s winged words: ‘each man an intellectual’ no longer seem so far off. The public too has increased exponentially, not only in its diversity but also in its fragmentation. In a cosmopolitan world national borders often mean little. Because of the appearance alongside the established broadcasting media of all kinds of narrow casting media, often serving niche audiences via the Internet, it is hard to still speak of a uniform and coherent public sphere. This is all the more true insofar as these niche publics often turn into counter publics, which expressly distance themselves from the mainstream without engaging in true dialogue. Nor are these scattered public spheres necessarily best reached via the printed word. Audio-visual media are now the first order public sphere. This means they often make the news which is then only analyzed in the written news. To get into the news therefore the image is often more effective than the (written) word. This book results from an intensive exchange of ideas between scholars during an international academic workshop organized by the University Centre Saint-

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Ignatius Antwerp in March 2011, a present-day ‘Salon’ committed to intellectual and multidisciplinary scholarly debate on relevant social issues. The book is divided into four sections. Part I, History and Contemporary Developments, provides us with a general historical perspective on the role and context of the intellectual in the public sphere and also focuses on the evolution of some key concepts in the debate. In the first section three chapters provide a general context. We have chosen to use a multi-disciplinary perspective, not least to prevent the debate around the changed status of the inspired intellectual ending up in a disciplinary ditch. As we said before, it is precisely typical of the inspired intellectual to disapprove of academic segmentation. In the subsequent three sections we examine some specific changes in the public sphere, namely the presence of the Internet, its feminization and the problematic of sub-cultures and counter public spheres. In the first chapter, The Intellectual in the Public Sphere: Projections, Contradictions and Dilemmas Since the Enlightenment, Harold Mah takes a step further in his influential historical critique of Habermas’s theory of the structural transformation of the public sphere (Mah, 2000). This time he problematizes the link that Habermas made between the enlightenment idea of individual emancipation and the inception of the bourgeois conjugal family. According to Habermas rational-critical reason is a product of a private familial sphere which made more space than before for empathy and subjectivity. This causal relation is far from evident, yet it is more relevant than ever, according to Mah, albeit now in an opposite direction. Mannheim’s notion of a Freischwebende (free-floating) intellectual is more and more experienced as illusory and replaced by Gramsci’s organic intellectual who expressly identifies with specific social groups and public sub-fora. In the second chapter, The Rise of the Embedded Intellectual: New Forms of Public Engagement and Critique, the sociologist Patrick Baert teams up with economist Alan Shipman to zero in on this evolution. They distinguish three moments in it: from the authoritative intellectual, via the professional intellectual to the embedded intellectual. Like Mah, Baert and Shipmandistance themselves from previous analyses, which viewed this evolution as a manifest decline. They focus on the empirical arguments used to buttress the ‘declinist thesis’. They also argue that it is wrong to assume that the loss of the authoritative intellectual implies the death of critical sociology. They think the opposite is true because as embedded intellectuals build up a more democratic relation with their ever more intellectual public there arises a more radical form of reflexivity and often a better platform. In the third chapter,From Public to Civic Intellectuals: Political Agency and Emerging Media Landscapes, which provides a general context, the communications scholar Peter Dahlgren looks at the newly developing media landscapes as contingencies for public intellectuals. He specifically singles out the Internet and the Blogosphere as public spaces and as potential sources for democratizing intellectual life. He sees a two-fold democratizing of public intellectuals, on the one hand in terms of a quantitative increase and on the

Introduction

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other in terms of diversity. He calls the newly democratized public intellectuals ‘civic intellectuals’. Often these civic intellectuals reveal themselves as the selfproclaimed voice of some civic organization or other which often form a counter public sphere. They remain elitist insofar as they belong to the happy few who know how to position themselves in the newly globalized media landscapes. Part II, Internet and the Public Intellectual, explores how new public spheres, namely those that emerged with the introduction of the Internet, interact with, or even bring forth, the public intellectual and consequently re-shape and redefine his position. The three chapters that make up this section investigate how new forms of media relate to the position of the public intellectual. The first chapter of this part, Intellectuals, the Public Sphere and Dissemination Strategies by France Aubin, discusses the dissemination strategies used by twenty intellectuals who criticized globalization during the period 1994 to 2005. She first looks at controversial but essential terms such, as ‘intellectual’, ‘engagement’ and ‘public sphere’ (espace public) used in the discourse on this topic. Then she focuses on the elements of the dissemination strategies with particular attention to publics, dissemination platforms, media and the Internet. She concludes convincingly by arguing how public spheres influence and shape the dissemination strategies and finally also the position of the public intellectual. The next chapter ‘How Salonfähig are Online Political Forums? The Curious Case of Politics.be’, also employs an interdisciplinary approach and again it elaborates on the relevance of the public sphere, in this case ‘niche publics’ or ‘sub publics’, in understanding the status of the public intellectual. Peter Thijssen questions the evidence put forward by several theorists for a ‘paradise-lost’ feeling when discussing contemporary institutions, such as online political forums. Based on historical and feminist studies of the public sphere, both the historical salon and the contemporary cybersalon can be characterized as a counter-public intermediary enabling inter-discursive encounters between generally informed and non-polarizing, ideologically distinctive sub-publics. Thijssen demonstrates that this online political forum is indeed Salonfähig, based on the criteria of the recontextualized theory of the public sphere. In the final chapter of Part II, ‘The Creation of New Public Places. A Critique of Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel’, Frank Maet recombines some aspects of the media ontology implied in Making Things Public with other theoretical media concepts from Marshall McLuhan and Maurizio Ferraris. Again, the public plays a crucial role. More specifically, Frank Maet argues both for and against the ideas Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel’s exhibition Making Things Public that took place at the ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie) in Karlsruhe, 2005. He agrees with the idea that we have to look for new public places in times of new media technologies. However, in opposition to the anti-modern ontology proposed by Latour and Weibel, he defends a new modern perspective in relation to the present-day technological mediation of our public sphere. In Part III, Women and the Public Sphere, the authors develop a gendered perspective to elaborate on the role and context of the public intellectual. As

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mentioned earlier, in previous centuries the public intellectual, as well as his audience, were mainly male. This changed significantly with the emancipation of women. With the feminization of the public sphere, the role, and status of the intellectual also adapted to this new social situation. In the first chapter of Part III, Immigrant Intellectual: The Case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Odile Heynders analyses Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s opinions, ideas and public performances from a cultural studies angle. The author is specifically interested in the power relations in, around and resulting from Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s texts. Odile Heynders demonstrates that the former asylum seeker Ayaan Hirsi Ali can be taken as a specific prototype of the current public intellectual. In her texts, Ayaan Hirsi Ali evolves from a single-issue politician to a celebrity intellectual and a dissident with neo-conservative ideas. In the second chapter of Part III, Building Solidarity through Relationships: The Politics of Feminism as an Intellectual Project in Turkey, Nazan Haydari focuses on the relevance of feminist movements for the reconceptualization of the public intellectual. She therefore draws on the activism of feminist groups in Turkey and underlines the politics of relationships and solidarity as significant concepts of knowledge production. Feminism in Turkey offers a space for the reconceptualization of intellectualism that might go beyond the individual and conventional conceptualization of politics. Therefore, she relies on the selfrepresentation and knowledge-producing activities and accounts of various feminist/women’s groups in Turkey. She discusses how theorizing ‘solidarity’ and ‘interaction’ moves the question away from ‘who is intellectual’ to ‘what is the politics of intellectualism’, and opens up a space for reconsideration of the process of knowledge production as a collaborative effort. In Part IV, the final section of the book, ‘Subcultures in the Public Sphere’, the focus is on some specific case studies that illustrate the relevance of new ‘subcultural’ public spheres or even counter public spheres and the role of the public intellectual in these processes. In Chapter 9, Public Intellectuals and Micro-public Spheres: A British Illustration, Richard McCallum draws on the work of Fraser, Hauser, Warner and others to develop a model of micro-public spheres that is eminently suited to account for the voices of public intellectuals, and indeed ordinary citizens, in civic discussion. It describes a case study of a micro-public sphere in the British context. The concerns of Evangelical Christians over the presence of Islam in Britain has generated a rich source of interaction and texts that elegantly illustrate the concept of a micro-public sphere, and further demonstrates how the voices of religious public intellectuals need to be heard more widely. It also highlights how at times different spheres – religious and secular – publicly collide. In the second chapter of Part IV, Who is Left to Speak to the Public? Yusuf alQaradawi: Shaper of an Agonistic Discourse’, Zvi Bar’el demonstrates clearly how not just the academic sphere, but the public sphere can be re-shaped by individual intellectuals. Zvi Bar’el sees an ‘antagonistic-agonistic’ structure occupying the religious-intellectual sphere of debate in Muslim-ruled states. This sphere has

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become a public arena since the advent of satellite TV in Arabic in the mid-90s and a public location where counter-consensual ideas could find expression. In this newly established location, secular as well as religious intellectuals found a venue, not just to create a direct contact with their publics, but to reshape the formal public sphere itself. Zvi Bar’el illustrates this by elaborating on the case of the Egyptian scholar Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi who is one of the most successful religious intellectuals. The third and last chapter of Part IV, Reputation among the Hungarian Intellectual Elite, focuses on the processes and dynamics within a specific national, subcultural public sphere. Luca Kristóf explores how this specific public sphere creates the reputation of the Hungarian public intellectual elite. The author investigates some of the most respected Hungarian intellectuals and what social factors determine their reputation. Especially relevant in highlighting the making of the contemporary, nation-specific, public intellectuals is the analysis of the mechanisms of reputation in the intellectual community. References Boltanski, L. and Thévenot, L. 2006. On Justification. Economies of Worth. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chomsky, N. 1967. The Responsibility of Intellectuals. The New York Review of Books, 23 February. Fleck C., Hess, A. and Lyon, E.S. 2008. Intellectuals and Their Publics. Perspectives from the Social Sciences. Farnham: Ashgate. Frisch, M. 1985. Tagebuch 1946–1949. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Gramsci, A. 2011. Prison Notebooks. 3 vols. New York: Columbia University Press. Habermas, J. 1984. Theory of Communicative Action. Vol 1. Boston: Beacon Press. Lévy, B.-H. 1987. Eloge des intellectuels. Paris: Grasset. Mah, H. 2000. Phantasies of the public sphere. Rethinking the Habermas of historians. The Journal of Modern History, 72(1), 153–82. Shelley, P.B. 1971. A defense of poetry, in Critical Theory Since Plato, edited by H. Adams. New York/London: Harcourt Brace Javanovich, 499–513. van Eeden, F. and Gutkind, E. 1911. Welt-Eroberung durch Helden-Liebe. Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler. van Eeden, F. 1971. Dagboek 1878–1923. Culemborg: Tjeenk Willink-Noorduijn. Wagner, P. 1999. After justification. Repertoires of evaluation and the sociology of modernity. European Journal of Social Theory, 2(3), 341–57.

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PART I History and Contemporary Developments

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Chapter 1

The Intellectual in the Public Sphere: Projections, Contradictions and Dilemmas since the Enlightenment Harold Mah

The organizing statement of this volume, expressed in the title, indicates that its understanding of the public sphere is of course taken from Jürgen Habermas’s book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. This was originally published in 1962, but started to become remarkably influential in a variety of disciplines in the course of the 1980s and 1990s. This chapter discusses some of the things I have already said about Habermas’s theory (Mah 2000), but this time in relation to the role of the intellectual in the public sphere. The emergence of the modern public intellectual illustrates particularly cogently certain underlying assumptions and issues in Habermas’s theory and specifically how that theory and the modern intellectual exemplify a particular Enlightenment narrative of emancipation which both empowers the modern intellectual but also produces acute contradictions and dilemmas. This consideration of the public intellectual further elucidates Habermas’s theory in a new way, pointing to another neglected issue in his notion of the public sphere, namely the problematic role of emotional identification or empathy and what that has meant for public intellectuals and possibly for us today. The Modern Intellectual: Paragon of the Public Sphere In Habermas’s theory, the public sphere emerged in eighteenth-century Western Europe when people came together to discuss the issues of the day. They came together in new social venues – the English coffee house, the French salon, the German reading club. When people gathered together in these places, they did so, according to Habermas, with the expectation that the only valid criterion of discussion was rational analysis and argument, and that what counted as the ultimate authority in the public sphere was the best rational argument (Habermas 1962: 31–43, 57–73, Mah 2000: 156–7). These new venues of discussion, based solely on rational argument, constitute a momentous development for Habermas, the historical meaning of which I think has been somewhat underappreciated by commentators. Habermas’s theory of the

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emergence of a public sphere, of new venues of discussion in which the only authority is to be critical rational argument, is an idea that restates in more specific conceptual and institutional terms the Enlightenment narrative of emancipation. When persons met in the eighteenth century in the way Habermas describes, they were in fact freeing themselves from traditional authorities, such as the authority of the state, religion and social groups (guilds, for example), all of which before then would have dictated opinion on the basis of some presumed, unquestioned, given authority. This traditional authority assumes that reason is was differential, allocated according to one’s social or corporate status. That discussion in new venues was no longer limited or defined by status or corporate membership meant that people now come to credit Habermas with no authority except that given by their own individual reason (1962: 36), and the new venues of the public sphere make this new principle operational and institutional. Habermas’s theory is thus a more precisely theorized and historically specific account of how the Enlightenment project was fulfilled, of how individuals, on the basis of their own reason, could liberate themselves from arbitrary irrational limitations, whether of belief or of institutions. The public sphere actualizes Kant’s famous description of the Enlightenment – it is, to paraphrase Kant, the concrete implementation of humanity’s emancipation from its self-imposed tutelage (1991: 54).1 The emancipation of the rational individual – what amounts to a radical individualism in relation to traditional authority – is one aspect of the public sphere; the other aspect, which also further empowers this individual, is that in coming together with other rational individuals, they are also affirming what is common to all of them. The emancipation of the autonomous rational person brings about, according to Habermas, a new, broader sense of collectivity that extends far beyond the established, intermediate, corporate groupings and institutions of eighteenth-century Europe. We see this remarkable and rather paradoxical double development in what I have argued is the strangest transformation of the public sphere, the rhetorical and conceptual transformation of the public sphere from a set of spaces or venues where rational individuals meet into a collective subject, a single unified entity, no longer just a public sphere but a public, whose interests are ultimately the interests of humanity at large (Mah 2000: 166–82). The appearance and importance of the modern intellectual is entirely bound up with the emergence of the public sphere. In Habermas’s theory, we can see the figure of the modern intellectual appear in those who frequent the new venues and who publish criticism, initially of literature but then on other topics as well, including politics. What is characteristic of these critics is the same characteristic Habermas takes as definitive of the new public sphere – the liberation of rational reasoning from traditional authority. This independence from traditional authority has frequently been taken to be at its most radical in the eighteenth century during the French Enlightenment. Voltaire’s famous attack on the Catholic church, and 1  Kant ends the same paragraph with: ‘The motto of the Enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own reason.’

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his campaign against the arbitrary and inhumane legal practices of the French monarchy, Diderot’s publication of texts defying royal censorship which landed him in prison, Rousseau’s abandonment of aristocratic society which he saw as corrupting virtue and reason, these and other acts of defiant independence in the name of reason and a general humanity established the view that the modern intellectual must also be engagé. Freed from traditional authority, the intellectual has a duty to be active in influencing public opinion, making the public aware of its own better interests, providing, as it were, the best argument. We can see a direct line from Voltaire’s campaign to find justice for the wronged and tortured Frenchman Jean Calas to Emile Zola’s campaign to exonerate the wronged Alfred Dreyfus and then to the twentiethcentury explosion of intellectuals active in public causes: Jean-Paul Sartre’s support for Algerian independence, Bertrand Russell’s and E.P. Thompson’s campaigns for nuclear disarmament, Michel Foucault’s participation in the Prison Information Group of 1970s France. The new figure of the modern intellectual in the public sphere, liberated and liberating others from fixed belief, representing the interests of reason and humanity in general, is a figure that became a prominent part of the political imaginary in the nineteenth century, given, at times, to remarkable exaggeration. Radical young Hegelians meeting in Berlin in the late 1830s and 1840s called for what one of them described as the ‘Terror of Pure Criticism’, criticism that recognized no boundaries and that would usher in a new society (Mah 1987). Turgenev’s novel, Fathers and Sons, offers us the figure of Bazarov, the nihilist, whose complete and detached reason frees him from all ties to traditional belief, family, even emotion. At the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Russian Marxism produced the Leninist view of a Bolshevik avant-garde that could free itself from Russia’s backward social conditions and drag the country into the future. As soon as the image of the modern intellectual in a new public sphere emerged in the eighteenth century, it produced a deep anxiety on the right – in fact, this new image contributed to the emergence of an intellectual ‘right’ wing, a modern intellectual conservatism which defined itself precisely against the new intellectuals who could cut themselves off from tradition and authority. Edmund Burke (2001) attributed a key source of the violence of the French Revolution to the arrival of Enlightenment-inspired intellectuals. The rational independence of intellectuals became a standard trope of modern conservatism which describes that independence as an overbearing abstraction divorced from reality, at its best impractical and ridiculous, at its worst socially and politically dangerous. The history of the intellectual in the public sphere can be written as a history of the vicissitudes of how that figure embodies the Enlightenment principle of emancipation, the liberation of the rational individual from social, political, and traditional limitations, a figure that over the last two and half centuries has been affirmed, exaggerated, dismissed, or feared. This would be the history of the modern intellectual in keeping with a quite straightforward view of the consolidation

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of Enlightenment reason in an expanding sphere. But in addition to this more obvious history, there is also another, one that elucidates the contradictions of the public sphere. Social Particularity versus Public Sphere As I argued in my earlier article, the public sphere that Habermas describes is in key respects fictional, an idealization of intellectual activity, in which one exercises impartial rational criticism and judgment by setting aside one’s social interests and background. People enter the public sphere, perhaps, to express their particular interests and concerns, but in the course of the discussion, they set aside those interests to manifest a more general reason, recognizing in each other that same trait that constitutes, as Habermas put it, ‘a parity of rational individuals’ (1962: 157). This is the key primary transformation of people in the public sphere and it is imagined, in terms of a progress, as it were, an upward development from narrow social particularity or embeddedness to critical, universal, abstract rationality. This idea of a necessary progress is what I contend is the first fictional aspect in Habermas’s theory. It is an idealization of intellectual activity or, as we might also acknowledge, a projection of an ancient, Platonic model of intellectual transcendence onto the modern social world. Such a projection of rational transcendence is fictional, a phantasy of western philosophy, precisely because it is predicated on a denial of the inescapable fact of a social reality that always pre-exists it. People, even the most rational, are always embedded in some social context, and that inescapable fact, coupled with the new norm of a progress to rational transcendence in the public sphere, produces numerous tensions and contradictions. In my earlier article, I talked about how some these contradictions could affect the legitimacy claims of social movements (Mah 2000: 160–6). The same kind of contradiction lies at the heart of the history of the intellectual in the modern public sphere. And those contradictions – the tensions between norm and social being – constitute in fact a kind of alternative history to the one I outlined above. We might in fact say that the projection of the image of the modern critical public intellectual goes hand-in-hand with an internecine conflict, a debate not just over specific doctrines, but over identity, over whether the intellectual is fulfilling or betraying a fundamental mission. This concerns not just their commitment to a particular cause but their general ability to exercise independent judgment in the first place. Historians have often taken this approach in writing about some of the most honoured intellectuals. In a period crucial for the formation of modern reason, the Scientific Revolution, the gentlemen scientists of the British Royal Society trusted each other’s work, as Steven Shapin (1985) has argued, not because that work was ‘scientific’, that is, rigorously rational and empirical in a way we’d expect today,

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but because they recognized each other as gentlemen first. Here social class was the condition of possibility of intellectual recognition. Whereas earlier commentators once considered the French Enlightenment, in Peter Gay’s words, a ‘party of Humanity’ (1963), challenging the status quo and beliefs of eighteenth-century France, the historian Robert Darnton (1982: 1–40) altered the historiography when he argued that the philosophes, once they became celebrated public figures formed a closed, privileged elite that kept out newcomers, except for the few whom they decided to cultivate as aristocratic patrons would their clients. Philosophes in the late Enlightenment, in other words, behaved exactly like the other closed, privileged corporations in the period. The philosophes sustained that closed system in their actions even as they might have criticized it in public. Darnton’s views, we should point out, were already formulated in the French Enlightenment itself, by no less than its greatest representative, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Beginning with his 1750 Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences, Rousseau argued that not just civilization but the dissemination of knowledge in general corrupts, producing precisely a slavish immorality that the Enlightenment claimed to criticize.2 That new intellectuals both proclaimed the ideal of the public sphere, the supremacy of independent critical reasoning, while in crucial ways continuing to live and act in line with the traditional authorities, is a contradiction that also produced rather agonizing balancing acts, such as the one attempted by Habermas’s hero of Enlightenment reason: Immanuel Kant. In his 1784 essay ‘What Is Enlightenment’, shortly after making his famous declaration about Enlightenment emancipation, Kant then seems to draw back from that ringing endorsement of Enlightenment emancipation. He engages in what we would today think are rather awkward intellectual acrobatics. Even as he is announcing in public the arrival of the Enlightenment, he must also confront the reality of being a university teacher in Königsberg, appointed and regulated by the Prussian state. Kant makes a key distinction in his essay. As a teacher he says, one is of course required to teach what the Prussian state requires, but as a scholar one has a different obligation, that is, to say what one actually believes to the general public. A ‘clergyman’, Kant’s writes (1991: 156), ‘must while he is in church give instruction in accordance with the doctrines of the Church’. ‘But’, Kant adds, ‘as a scholar he is completely free to and in fact obligated to impart to the public all the carefully considered thoughts on the mistaken aspects of those [same] religious doctrines’. (1991: 156). Say one thing when addressing a congregation in Church, then as a scholar publicly pronounce the same thing to be rationally mistaken – that is the curious logic of Kant’s distinction. The problems for this distinction worsened after 1786, when a new, religiously more conservative monarch came to power in Prussia (Friedrich Wilhelm II) and 2  Rousseau’s argument was part of a long-standing debate in early modern France, constituting what I have called the ‘contradictory discourse of civility’ (Mah 2003).

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the result was increased government censorship. Kant at this time collected a series of articles into a book on what was then called ‘natural religion’ which vindicated the allegorical and moral as opposed to literal meaning of the Bible. The book was censored, but through a legal loophole managed to be published. With the book’s publication, the government then threatened Kant with what it called ‘unpleasant consequences’ if he wrote anything more about religion. We can see Kant’s response after 1798 when another monarch (Friedrich Wilhelm III) with more liberal views ascended to the throne. Kant then wrote another book, The Contest of the Faculties (1979), referring to university faculties. Here Kant argued for greater freedom for the philosophical faculty in the university, but he now also seemed to shy away from addressing the public sphere. Academic clergy, he now bluntly states, ‘are not free to make public use of their learning as they see fit, but are subject to the censorship of their faculty’. In the debate over the divine origin of the Bible, those arguments, Kant writes, ‘must not be raised at all in public discussion directed to the people,’ which would ‘only get entangled in impertinent speculations and doubts’. Kant had in effect reverted to the traditional, corporate and absolutist system of differential reason, as he then concludes that on controversial issues ‘it is much safer to rely on the people’s confidence in their teachers’, (1979: 37, 47) who in Prussia, we should remember, were appointed and regulated by the central state. These tensions, denunciations and compromises of intellectuals about the role of public intellectuals indicate, not that the idea of the modern intellectual is false in itself, but that there is a contradiction at the heart of the public sphere and therefore at the heart of its representative, the modern intellectual. The logic of the public sphere, its Enlightenment project that imagines an emancipation of reason from social constraints and traditional authority, that logic forgets that people, including intellectuals, are always enmeshed in social realities. Rousseau denounced his fellow philosophes because of that contradiction; Kant tried to reach a settlement with the Prussian authorities. The contradiction is such that it is possible to question the integrity of an intellectual simply by pointing to their always-existing social embeddedness. Supposedly through intellectual effort alone, one is to transcend one’s social class or the stereotypes of one’s gender or any other social condition – perhaps. Or perhaps, those conditions exert an influence of which one is not fully aware. And even if one leaves one’s particular class, for example, one always enters another class – even if it then appears to be a ‘class’ of intellectuals. As their own class, intellectuals will have particular economic interests and predetermined points of view, all of which seem to undercut any claim to social independence. Hegel considered this ‘intellectual’ class to be the modern bureaucracy, which, emerging from other classes to work for a universal state, would set aside narrow, particularist concerns (1967: 131–140; Mah 1987: 25–31). But in the ensuing history of the modern bureaucracy, many have criticized that institution for precisely becoming an interest group and a parasite on the rest of society. We see this concern being played out right now, in the United States for example, as state

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governments, such as that of Wisconsin, excavate the collective bargaining rights of public workers. The contradiction between an intellectual’s claims to intellectual independence from society and the fact of their inevitable social embeddedness led the young Karl Marx in his move away from Hegelianism in the 1840s to turn this in-built tension in the modern intellectual into a full-blown theory of ideology. Marx accused his former friends and teachers of holding certain philosophical views because those seemingly abstract views were, consciously or not, ultimately in the service of an existing class and state (Mah 1987: 201–2). That the most seemingly rational, systematic, self-generated and impartial of ideas could be tied to a partiality for some social interest served as a recurring issue for social scientists and philosophers since Marx, and I have already given some examples above of how it was used by historians in rethinking the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. Given this kind of corrosive self-awareness, an awareness that can eat away at the integrity of the Enlightenment ideal of independent and universal intellectual activity, some intellectuals have been concerned with trying to recover something of the Enlightenment conception of intellectual activity. In the early twentieth century, for example, the social theorist Karl Mannheim (1991) set forth a research program he called ‘the sociology of knowledge’ which was an investigation of the inevitable ways in which knowledge is crucially determined by social interests. Mannheim recognized that this connection undercut the authority of the intellectual and of the idea of universal knowledge, suggesting an epistemological relativism dependent on social interests that was then still regarded as untenable. Against this undesirable conclusion Mannheim ended up postulating, that is, simply reaffirming, that there still might be a group of intellectuals – ‘free-floating’ intellectuals as he put it – who did not feel the full pressure of social interests and could see beyond the limitations of particular social groups. No one has really been convinced by Mannheim’s argument. How to ensure the full critical independence of intellectual judgment from its own social conditions? This question continued to follow intellectuals into the twentieth century. For example, it lay at the basis of a current classic of modern liberal theory, John Rawls’s famous book A Theory of Justice published in 1971. Rawls tried to imagine tests that would determine if one were judging impartially and universally. He proposed, for example, that one should assume a hypothetical ‘veil of ignorance’ in legal deliberation, that is, assessing and judging as if one did not know whether one would benefit from that judgment, that is, as if one did not know one’s own interests. Contemporary liberal historiography has also agonized over this problem. In 1988, the historian Peter Novick published an important study of the 100year history of the American historical profession called That Noble Dream: the “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession. Novick showed how a liberal consensus about certain historical issues and ‘objectivity’ in American academic circles over the course of the long history of the profession had

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been based on a shared social and political background on the part of historians. That consensus of shared assumptions about objectivity in the profession was occasionally challenged but only probably decisively lost according to Novick after the 1960s, when historians became more radical, when identity politics in the 1980s and beyond became ascendant, and when new theories that questioned the validity of Enlightenment reason and traditional empiricism emerged from the depths of hyper-theoretical, post-structuralist Paris. In 1988 Novick concluded that the profession could very well be irreparably disintegrating into relativism and fragmentation, a condition in which microcommunities of interpreters would emerge who would not, and often could not, address anyone outside of their own narrow circles. Novick and other historians were decrying the arrival of so-called ‘post-modernism’. Whatever we think of Novick’s and others’ judgment of this shift, it seems to me we have seen a marked shift to some sort of more relativistic and fragmented idea of intellectual communication, so that even Habermas’s universal Enlightenment public sphere has been enlisted into this shift, morphing from an ideal of a rational, universal and transparent community to an ideal of multiple, conflicting arenas of discourse. In other words, a strong tendency today – and it is one reason I wrote my earlier article – has been to misread Habermas’s theory of the public sphere as being in the service of identity politics, forgetting that it is an Enlightenment conception of universal reason, and ignoring all the issues that arise when that Enlightenment conception is then conjoined to a post-Enlightenment, putatively ‘post-modern’, conception of publics and public communication. Reason versus Empathy in the Public Sphere Having said that, I want to re-emphasize that I have also been arguing that this Enlightenment which believes in the transcendence of social limitation to access universal reason has always in crucial respects believed in a fiction, one that is predicated on ignoring the inescapable facticity of a social reality in which, in one way or another, a person is always situated. We can see this denial of an inevitable social reality in Habermas’s theory in another way as well, in an odd combination of acute perceptiveness and wishful thinking that has not been commented on as far as I know and that might lead to a better understanding of the contradictions of the public sphere and the public intellectual. To backtrack for a moment to Habermas’s account of the origin of the public sphere in the eighteenth-century: Habermas sought the sources of the ‘rationalcritical’ public sphere in what he calls a ‘specific subjectivity’ (1962: 43) and by which he meant not some rational, philosophical selfhood, but the sense of self or personhood that was found in the ‘sphere’ of the ‘conjugal family’ (1962: 36). Like some historians of the period, Habermas believed that this nuclear, high-affect family, which he also called bourgeois, emerged definitively in the eighteenth century.

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What characterized the nuclear or conjugal family was a greater ‘privatization’ of the family, an increased intimacy in which members of the family came to recognize each other as individual persons with distinctive emotions and character. One related to each other, one identified with each other, as Habermas says, in terms of the ‘purely human’ (1962: 48). This was the age of sensibility or sentimentality, when readers, for example of Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse, would intensely identify with the suffering of the novel’s characters. People would weep as they read the novel, and then write to Rousseau as if the characters were real (Darnton 1985). The other major eighteenth-century example of this same phenomenon would be Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. Habermas’s argument is that this view of empathic identification defined the intimacy of the new conjugal family, and that from that high-affect, empathic family there arose the modern public sphere through a new discussion of literature, as we see in the popular reception of Rousseau’s and Goethe’s novels. The literary public sphere emerged, in Habermas’s words, ‘as an expansion and completion of the intimate sphere, that is, the conjugal family’ (1962: 50). That sphere was the medium through which the empathic individuals projected themselves as distinct beings beyond the family and in the process came to re-define themselves. Or as Habermas put it, making it sound very much like a Hegelian journey to fulfilled self-consciousness: ‘They [these individuals] formed the public sphere of rational-critical debate in the world of letters with which the subjectivity originating in the interiority of the conjugal family, by communicating with itself, attained clarity about itself.’ (1962: 51) The empathic individualism of the conjugal family is thus clarified and completed in the new modern public sphere. What I find significant about this line of thinking, aside from the Hegelian topos (Mah 1987: 13–17), is that it contains a striking slippage. Note how Habermas, in the quotation I cited, refers to the public sphere as one ‘of rational-critical debate in the world of letters’. But, given what Habermas has just said about the family, what is mysterious here is that there is no indication of where that ‘rational-critical debate’ could come from. Habermas jumps from the emotional identification of interiorized individuals in the family to the rational-critical debate of the public sphere. But there is no explanation of how intimate emotional recognition turns into something rationalcritical. Indeed, one could easily and more convincingly argue that the two operate at cross-purposes. The more one recognizes and identifies with another person, the less one is ready to criticize that other person’s views. There is a conspicuous gap between Habermas’s idealized bourgeois conjugal family and his idealized rational critical public sphere, and it is not possible from what he says to go from one to the other. Noting this slippage makes us re-think the nature of Habermas’s expectations for Enlightenment rational criticism. Habermas wants us to assume that critical rationality leads to vigorous argument that issues in agreement and consensus in the public sphere, but there is no reason why critical rationality should do that.

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One can just as easily imagine endless, ruthless, critical debate – the ‘Terror of Pure Criticism’ as a Young Hegelian called it. One might think all the way back to Socrates, frequently irritating the Athenian public with his relentless challenges to accepted belief (Plato 1989)3. What usually ends critical analysis and discussion is some arbitrarily imposed limit, arbitrary in that it is not derived from the internal logic of the debate itself but by a set time limit to debate, by physical exhaustion, or in Socrates’s case, by denunciation and death. All this points to the highly phantasmatic, utopian nature of Habermas’s theory in another respect: that the Enlightenment project for critical rationality imagines a culmination of rational criticism in consensus or agreement that is not found in this rationality itself. Seeking the historical origins of mutual agreement, then, Habermas ultimately finds it in the high-affect conjugal family, which is based on empathic identification, and Habermas then simply affixes critical rationality to that empathic identification to get us to the public sphere that he wants. But however phantasmatic and utopian, this has become the situation of the modern public sphere: critical rationality producing agreement or consensus, which is actually built on top of a base, not of critical rationality but of empathic identification. Sometimes this complex arrangement seems to work, as I’d like to think the first events of the recent Arab Spring or the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989 and after showed – but that arrangement of critical reason and empathic identification is often a tenuous, momentary harmonization and, more often, becomes a problematic one in which emotional identification and critical reason collide. That conflict between empathic identification and abstract Enlightenment reasoning constitutes another recurring theme in the history of intellectuals in the public sphere. I’d just like to give two examples of this and then suggest what all the tensions and contradictions in the public sphere discussed here might mean for us today. In the late 1940s, Albert Camus gained a reputation as an outspoken independent public voice, who refused to give in to the polarized political positions of the Cold War when much of the French intelligentsia supported the Soviet Union, even after Stalin’s abuses became well-known. This is the Camus beloved by recent western liberals such as the late Tony Judt (1998). However, as opposed to the Cold War, in dealing with the Algerian War in the mid-1950s, Camus’s independence took on quite a different form. As the son of pied noirs, European settlers in Algeria, Camus was concerned for his mother and family who were living in Algiers when the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale/National Liberation Front) was exploding bombs in the city. Camus would support neither the FLN nor the idea of an Arab Algeria independent of France. But Camus also opposed the French government’s repression, its declaration of a state emergency and the military’s use of torture in Algeria. Camus self-consciously chose public silence on these issues – until, that is, in 3  See especially Plato’s ‘Apology’ and ‘Euthyphro’.

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Stockholm in 1957. While there to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature Camus was once again asked by an Arab Algerian to take a position. Camus made a famous, controversial declaration: ‘I believe in justice’, he said, ‘but I will defend my mother before justice’ (Todd 2000: 378). From the rather curious way in which he put this, we can see, I think, that Camus is framing the choice as one between his most immediate, original, personal loyalties, as opposed to an abstract principle expected by many in the public sphere and especially by other French intellectuals. Camus was excoriated in the leftist French press, but, for Camus, family trumped universal abstract right. Camus self-consciously upheld his own emotional identifications over the abstract criteria of intellectuals in the public sphere. In the decades after the arrival of identity politics, we have witnessed what some might suggest is the arrival of a new kind of public sphere, no longer a supposedly unified field of individuals who have freed themselves from social conditions, but instead an arena of multiple spheres. The source of these many spheres is sometimes the same criterion of rational criticism found in the Enlightenment conception, but it seems to me that the primary rationale of these new spheres is more often the emotional identification that Habermas first located in the eighteenth century. Public voice is defined and empowered by the social group it identifies with, and that group may or may not also be critical and rational, but, above all, it empathizes with other members of the group. In many ways, this seems to me the kind of ‘public’ sphere we commonly find in politics and the new electronic social media. One of the seemingly strongest early representatives of this contemporary view of the public sphere was the Columbia university professor Edward Said, who, in 1978, published his most famous work, Orientalism. That book took issue with western views of the Middle East, revealing behind the most academicseeming, Enlightenment-influenced studies of the nineteenth century, a western stereotyping of an imagined ‘Orient’ in the service of western hegemony. That book and Said’s Palestinian background led him to become a public commentator on Middle Eastern issues and an advocate for the creation of a Palestinian state. Orientalism greatly fed the growth of cultural studies and identity politics and their characteristic scepticism of Enlightenment claims, asserting not Enlightenment individualism and universalism but cultural particularism or relativism. After the arrival of identity politics, all intellectuals inevitably became, it seemed, versions of what Gramsci (1991) called ‘organic intellectuals’, intellectuals who gave expression to the life experiences of the social group from which they came or with which they identified. The Enlightenment project and the Enlightenment’s putatively ‘free-floating’ intellectual may thus very well be over, and the new aim of the public arena in an era of highly differentiated identities would then be one of learning to live with what is in effect cultural and epistemological relativism. As Said says in one of his Reith lectures of 1993 on public intellectuals: ‘The fundamental problem [facing people today] is therefore how to reconcile one’s identity and the actualities of

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one’s own culture, society and history to the reality of other identities, cultures, peoples’ (Said 1994: 69). In a subsequent lecture, Said (1994: 80) reaffirms this point in a telling, bemused comment about a friend and fellow engagé intellectual: As I watched my friend join, then abandon and then re-join sides, often with great ceremonies of bonding and rejection (such as giving up and then getting back his Western passport) I was strangely glad that being a Palestinian with American citizenship was likely to be my only fate, with no more attractive alternatives to cozy up to for the rest of my life.

Whatever one makes of the combination – Palestinian with American citizenship – that convolution reduces Said’s statement to a kind of comforting settlement in having his identity and therefore, he indicates, his intellectual views, set by ethnicity and citizenship. His friend’s trouble, Said implies, lie in the fact that he does not identify with the group he has been born into or the country in which he lives. Some might think that from Said’s reputation, this affirmation of the primacy of empathic identification is to be expected from Said. However, that is not the whole story. Said’s loyalties in his lectures on public intellectuals are actually more divided and in a way we might expect given his university education in Western academia. Said begins his first lecture with a ringing endorsement of the Enlightenment ideal of the emancipation of the rational intellect from all social limitation and goes on to delineate that Enlightenment ideal in detail. Said discusses three examples, all from western literature, of intellectuals who cultivated their independence to the point of eccentricity, exile, and rebellion. Said admires Bazarov the nihilist from Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Stephen Daedalus from Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Frédéric Moreau from Flaubert’s Sentimental Education. What he likes about these figures is their ability to free themselves from social belief and expectations and to assert a consciousness that is sceptical, committed, unremittingly devoted to rational investigation and moral judgment. I am not sure if Said has characterized these figures correctly (Bazarov is a social failure and is killed off by Turgenev; Daedalus has no social loyalties at all and asserts an art for art’s sake ethic; Moreau betrays his original intellectual character to make his way into Parisian society.) But in any case what is striking is how Said is embracing here, at the beginning of his lectures, an Enlightenment model of individual rational independence over any social tie that would otherwise define them: in these cases, neither homeland, nor social class, nor family, nor, in the case of Stephen Daedalus, even one’s mother, restrains intellectual independence. Although Said sometimes seems to be the theorist of identity politics that he is often made out to be, his 1993 Reith lectures indicate in fact someone who is pulled in two directions, on the one side, by that Enlightenment ideal of the independent intellectual in the public sphere and, on the other, by a new public sphere of speakers anchored in their social conditions. Said provides no resolution

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to the opposing pull of these forces and ultimately leaves us with a question that he says is the fundamental question for him, and we could say as well that it is the fundamental question of the Enlightenment public sphere of universal reason in a new world of multiple public spheres of personal identification: Is the intellectual galvanized into intellectual action by primordial, local, instinctive loyalties—one’s race, or people, or religion—or is there some universal and rational set of principles that can, and perhaps do govern how one speaks and writes? In effect I am asking the basic question for the intellectual: how does one speak the truth? What truth? For whom and where? (Said 1994: 65)

Said, in 1993, is uncertain but not anguished about what to do with this present situation: how a new norm of emotional identification and rootedness conflicts with a still strong Enlightenment standard of universal critical reasoning that claims to have been un-rooted. Now, almost a decade later, we might be at the point, both in universities and in the media, at which the standard of Enlightenment reason, and with it the universal Enlightenment intellectual, has in fact passed into at best a secondary, ancillary status in a world of multiple public spheres organized around particularist identifications. References Burke, E. 2001 [first published 1790]. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Darnton, R. 1982. The Literary Underground of the Old Regime. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Darnton, R. 1985. Readers Respond to Rousseau, in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Essays. New York: Vintage Books, 215–57. Gay, P. 1963. The Party of Humanity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Goethe, J.W. 2005 [first published 1774]. The Sorrows of Young Werther. New York: Modern Library. Gramsci, A. 1991. Prison Notebooks. New York: Columbia University Press. Gustave, F. 2000 [first published 1869]. Sentimental Education. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Habermas, J. 1992 [first published in 1962]. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hegel, G.W.F. 1967 [first published 1821]. The Philosophy of Right. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Joyce, J. 1992. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. London: Penguin Books. Judt, T. 1998. The Burden of Responsibility. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kant, I. 1979 [first published 1798]. Contest of the Faculties. New York: Abaris Books.

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Kant, I. 1991. An answer to the question what is enlightenment?, in Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 54–60. Mah, H. 1987. The End of Philosophy, the Origin of ‘Ideology’: Karl Marx and the Crisis of the Young Hegelians. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mah, H. 2000. Phantasies of the public sphere: rethinking the Habermas of historians. Journal of Modern History, 72, 153–82. Mah, H. 2003. Enlightenment Phantasies: Cultural Identity in France and Germany, 1750–1914. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mannheim, K. 1991 [first published 1936]. Ideology and Utopia. London: Routledge. Novick, P. 1988. That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Plato. 1961. Euthyphro, Apology, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by E. Hamilton and H. Cairns. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 3–26, 169–218. Rawls, J. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rousseau, J.-J. 1993 [first published 1750]. A discourse on the arts and sciences, in The Social Contract and the Discourses. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1–29. Rousseau, J.-J. 1968 [first published 1759-60]. La Nouvelle Héloïse. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Said, E. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. Said, E. 1994. Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures. New York: Pantheon Books. Shapin, S. 1985. Leviathan and the Heat Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Todd, O. 2000. Albert Camus: A Life. New York: Carroll and Graf. Turgenev, I. 2009 [first published 1862]. Fathers and Sons. London: Penguin Books.

Chapter 2

The Rise of the Embedded Intellectual: New Forms of Public Engagement and Critique Patrick Baert and Alan Shipman

In this chapter we will argue that, over the last couple of decades, various social and political transformations have brought about substantial changes in how intellectuals are able and willing to engage with the broader public. Social and political critique have changed in form, but not declined in substance. We will argue against those authors who interpret these transformations as a decline in public engagement and critique. In contrast, we identify changes in the form and strategy of intellectual interventions that herald a new era of public engagement and critique. When sociologists and historians have written about public intellectuals, they have mainly promoted what we call a ‘declinist’ argument. Declinists point to a previous golden age of the public intellectual and argue that their number and influence has been falling for some time (Jacoby 1987, Posner 2001, Furedi 2004). Their downbeat assessment is complemented by studies of the ‘knowledge economy’, which depicts a growing proportion of society applying knowledge at work but few developing their ideas intellectually. Many who might have been intellectuals are drawn into commercialized alternatives more favourable to careeradvancement (Florida 2002: Chapter 11, Brooks 2001). An increasing number who wish to influence public policy or discussion do so by speaking and writing for ‘think tanks’ or research centres with political party affiliations, even though such work is generally perceived to lack the objectivity and rigour associated with academic research (Medvetz 2010, Collini 2006). Those who remain in academic posts find their research and teaching downgraded into unimaginative routine work (Evans 2005). Although the advance of knowledge and the expansion of universities may lead to a larger ‘community’ of intellectuals, declinists suggest that a greater proportion of them have become privatized, not expecting people outside that community to understand their work or shape its application. As well as fewer intellectuals becoming public, declinists also identify a loss in the power and influence over society that public intellectuals have. There is often a clear moral dimension to this argument: public intellectuals are portrayed as providing a positive impact, contributing to a strong civil society and a healthy democracy. Democratization may have induced intellectuals to go public –

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requiring them to inform and persuade an expanding proportion of the general public and not just a small governing elite – but by involving the public in their debate, intellectuals also promote democratization. So the decline in number and influence of public intellectuals is seen as inviting a bleaker future in which policy and institutions are less amenable or accountable to the public. Many declinists also present the decline of the public intellectual as the obverse of rising numbers and influence within the intellectual community of non-public intellectuals. Those who stay focused on an intellectual audience contribute to undermining the authority of those who ‘go public’, by characterizing their broader perspective as populist and superficial, dumbing-down the ideas of others and compromising their own intellectuality by courting publicity. This chapter argues that, even in the Anglo-American context in which it has principally been argued, the decline or disappearance of the public intellectual is largely a misperception. The ‘declinist’ argument tends to understate the extent to which intellectuals can (and do) still broaden their motivation and social engagement to become public intellectuals; and it tends to overstate the extent to which, conversely, intellectuals can (and are compelled to) narrow their motivation and social engagement to become ‘experts’ or ‘technocrats’. Although declinists are correct in identifying a large cohort of intellectuals who are no longer publicly engaged, they are wrong to imply that the number or influence of public intellectuals has declined. This is, in part, because they fail to recognize new types of public intellectual, made possible (and in some cases necessary) by institutional and cultural changes, and new sources of public intellectual, especially from the natural sciences. These changes have arisen through the impact of intellectual activity on knowledge and on the perceptions of knowledge, as well as from changed external demands on the process and products of intellectual work. So the chapter ends by identifying the new routes through which public intellectuals emerge from within larger intellectual communities. An intellectual is defined as an individual who creates knowledge about an aspect of the natural or social world, and relates this to existing knowledge. Knowledge is defined in its broadest sense, as communicable ideas that convey cognitive value (Young 2001, Rouanet 2003). It therefore encompasses the artistic and religious as well as the scientific, reasoned opinion as well as demonstrated ‘fact’. The intellectual pursuit of knowledge goes beyond its practical pursuit for the fulfilment of specific tasks, as performed by researchers in universities or industry and ‘knowledge workers’ employed in the private or public sectors. While intellectuals may conduct research into closely defined topics and focus on solving particular problems, their role consciously extends to contextualizing new knowledge, linking new ideas to those that already exist, building theories that account for a broad range of observations or empirical discoveries, and refining or extending the application of existing theories. A public intellectual is a knowledge creator who addresses issues of social concern and engages with a broader public. Whereas intellectuals value knowledge in itself and develop it through interaction with other intellectuals, a

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public intellectual identifies additional value in publicly presenting and applying knowledge and thus addresses an audience beyond intellectual peers. The ‘mediaenhanced’ public intellectual gains access to the public with the help of journalism, broadcasting, book and journal (including online) publications and new media. They tend to acquire a strong public profile. The ‘direct’ public intellectual gains more immediate access to the public: through (for example) delivering public lectures, being called as an expert witness at a trial or public enquiry, or advising a social or political organization. Direct engagement increasingly leads to media enhancement as new online media bring the initially localized message to a wider public. The ‘Declinist’ Thesis The intra-institutional account of decline is epitomized by Russell Jacoby’s position and puts the blame squarely on modern universities (Jacoby 1987) for absorbing intellectuals and restricting their capacity for critical or innovative thinking. It corresponds to the romantic image of the intellectual who is best able to engage with a broader public when not institutionally curtailed. The employment and career structure within university institutions is held to be incompatible with the role and ethos of the public intellectual. The specialist subdivision of disciplines and the rise of the bureaucratically managed ‘multiversity’ (Kerr 1963) pushes academics into disciplinary silos without the incentive to engage with the outside world or even other disciplines. Intellectuals had a distinctly public profile until they were employed en masse within universities. Ironically, whilst the expansion of the university sector in the 1960s was accompanied by a political radicalization of the student movement, it simultaneously tranquillized the public intellectual. To be recruited and promoted, intellectuals must address other intellectuals rather than a broader audience. They must use a technical, jargon-laden language to address increasingly esoteric issues. Peer approbation eclipses societal significance as a criterion of intellectual success. Outside the seminar room, family commitments and rising accommodation costs force younger intellectuals to move away from urban centres, to a suburban life (and commuter travel) less conducive to political or social engagement. A second, extra-institutional type of argument focuses on structural changes around universities, especially in their relation to the economy and the state. Whereas the previous argument emphasized the isolated, self-referential nature of modern universities, here the argument is that universities are too intertwined with outside economic interests that discourage critical thought. For example, Nisbet (1970 [1997]) argues that after eight centuries of preserving free thought insulated from worldly pressures, universities in the twentieth century succumbed to annexation by governments as a means to boost national income and employment, and by businesses as a source of practical knowledge. Their transition from an enclosed medieval institution to one exposed to modern commercial pressures is

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viewed as having destroyed the pursuit of learning for its own sake. Because they are now employed to serve society’s operational needs, intellectuals are deterred from taking on a more public role that might question the workings of society and argue for alternatives. These intra- and extra-institutional arguments offer different explanations for the same phenomenon: a diminishing proportion of intellectuals becoming public intellectuals, and an increasing proportion migrating to the more restricted role of ‘expert’ or ‘technocrat’. This shift is underlined by changes in the way intellectual status is defined and assigned. When the term was first deployed, most intellectuals were ‘public’, deploying their skills to pursue a social or political cause (Eyerman 1994). Now the term is applied to a new type of professional who pursues the creation and dissemination of knowledge without directly engaging with the public, usually in the setting of a university, and those going ‘public’ are a subset of the whole. ‘Technocrats’ are individuals who receive an academic or professional training, via a university or equivalent institution, but who restrict its use to narrowly contextualized problem-solving, even if principally employed in an academic post. In contrast to intellectuals, such experts are viewed as accepting and implementing received ideas and procedures, seeking to vindicate them by results rather than critically examining their principles. They apply ideas in pursuit of results, not developing ideas for their intrinsic merits or contextualizing and connecting them. This is sometimes characterized as a shift from ‘double’ to ‘single-loop’ learning (Argyris 1976) or from the theoretically grounded ‘Mode 1’ to the application-oriented ‘Mode 2’ variety of knowledge (Gibbons et al. 1994). The ‘non-intellectual’ expert was initially identified especially with the natural sciences. Physics, chemistry, engineering, mathematics and computing were acknowledged to have helped win wars and drive economic growth in the twentieth century; but those who advanced and applied them were widely viewed as lacking the breadth of interests and contextual understanding that would qualify them as intellectuals. One of the staunchest admirers of scientists conceded that ‘the whole literature of the traditional culture doesn’t seem to them relevant to those interests … As a result, their imaginative understanding is less than it should be. They are self-impoverished’ (Snow 1959: 13–14). This criticism has subsequently been extended to intellectuals in the social sciences, arts and humanities. Increased specialization, raising the complexity and quantity of analysis in every field, makes it mentally harder to maintain broader interest and understanding, and those who display too much breadth risk being regarded as lacking depth. Motivationally, the need to forge a career within a state- or corporatelyfinanced university makes it materially less rewarding to do so. Intellectuals are seen as seeking routine applications of established knowledge, to sustain and strengthen the corporate economy (and tax base) that provides their career structure. This leaves them unable or unwilling to mount disruptive challenges to that knowledge that might shake up their institutional surroundings or force them to think afresh. So, for example, Boggs (1993), building on earlier observations of Gramsci, argues that economic progress (in Western liberal democracies) is

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associated with the eclipse of ‘critical’ intellectuals (who challenge accepted wisdom, maintaining a pluralism of methodologies and theories) by ‘technocratic’ intellectuals, who narrow the task down to one of restricted, even formulaic, problem-solving. Conservative critics, too, identify a tendency for intellectuals to cease constructively challenging, and start conforming to, a system that harnesses knowledge for wealth creation and gives up the autonomy of knowledge creation. Some have even identified intellectuals as a ‘new class’ that exercises power through control of intellectual rather than material property (Djilas 1957, Konrad and Szelenyi 1979). This criticism initially arose from communist-era Eastern Europe. But contemporaneously in North America, ‘the technostructure has become deeply dependent on the educational and scientific estate for its supply of trained manpower … [and] what may be called the reputable social science no longer has overtones of revolution. Rather it denies the likelihood, even the possibility…’. (Galbraith 1967: 290). Although ‘declinist’ critics do not explicitly address the issue of public intellectuals, the negative implication is clear. Once recruited to bureaucratically restructured, economically captured universities, thinkers and scholars no longer take seriously their critical function and their role in engaging others to think critically. Any surviving public intellectuals are likely to have moved away from academia or never been immersed in it to start with. Before Western universities grew in size and number, many public intellectuals had operated outside them. Now, the bureaucratic constraints that accompany this expansion have again become a reason to avoid them, even when this means more distance from collaborators and sources of funding. For example, James Lovelock has promoted the ‘Gaia Hypothesis’ as an independent scientist, consulting for academic and commercial organizations but avoiding employment by them, and making supplementary income through popular book sales. ‘Science was and is my passion and I wanted to be free to do it unfettered by direction from anyone, not even by the mild constraints of a university department or an institute of science. Any artist or novelist would understand – some of us do not produce their best when directed’ (Lovelock 2000: 2). Likewise, the journalist Christopher Hitchens, reflecting on his nomination as a leading public intellectual, argued that academic status was now a barrier to the production of radical ideas with which the public would want to be engaged. For him, the term ‘public intellectual’ ‘… largely described people who worked outside the academy and indeed outside of large-scale publishing, tending to be self-starting independents or editors of ‘minority-of-one’ type magazines’ (Hitchens 2008). These ‘declinist views underpin Ben Agger and Michel Burawoy’s argument that sociology ought to go beyond the safe contours of the academy and take on a public, political role (Agger 2000, Burawoy 2005). They contend that sociology lost some of its previous public functions in the process of fighting to obtain professional and academic status. Other intellectual disciplines have similarly disengaged as their practitioners expand in number and move inside the academy. They form an increasingly enclosed and isolated community that – by

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virtue of concentration, separation from society and specialization of language and models – puts dialogue with itself above engagement with the wider community. Through peer reviewing, they also become the sole arbiters of valid and applicable knowledge, which is now transmitted to students and the rest of society rather than forged in dialogue with them. Burawoy argues that sociology, having obtained academic recognition, needs to shed its defensive shield and strive for a public profile, assisting and directing various political and social movements. He also calls for an ‘organic’ public sociology, which targets a visible and active counterpublic with an explicit agenda, to supersede ‘traditional’ public sociology, which addressed an amorphous, passive, invisible audience and lacked a clear social or political agenda. The Declinist Backdrop: Wider Intellectual Decline A complementary strand of contemporary critique suggests that intellectuals have contributed to the erosion of their social status and influence by changing the nature and perception of knowledge – to one that is easier for the public to challenge or dismiss. This is implicit in the argument that the intellectual as ‘legislator’ is in decline (Bauman 1991). The Enlightenment vision assumed that intellectuals obtain superior knowledge as well as ethical and aesthetic judgement by transcending culture and language. Bauman claims that this view is no longer prevalent today because of widespread scepticism towards foundationalist philosophy. Instead, the post-modern condition promotes a view of intellectuals as mere ‘interpreters’, skilful in making sense of one culture to another. Although Bauman does not explicitly address the issue of public intellectuals, it is clear that the Enlightenment notion of the intellectual as legislator is conducive to their emergence. Indeed, foundationalism provides the intellectual with the necessary back-up and authority to enter the public domain. Therefore, evidence of the erosion of the intellectual as legislator could be taken as evidence for the decline of the public intellectual. The more explicit depiction of ‘growth of knowledge’ undermining the status of intellectuals is captured in The Decline of Donnish Dominion (Halsey 1992), which identifies the social causes of the erosion of intellectual authority. Halsey argues that the twentieth century expansion led to a ‘democratization’ of knowledge production and consumption. The vast expansion in the number and size of universities, the moves from small-group to classroom tuition, and the arrival of new (often modularized) degree disciplines eroded academics’ status, while multiplication of the number of graduates narrowed the gap between ‘intellectuals’ and the wider public. While ancient universities (in England, Oxford and Cambridge) retained their prestige, they became small islands in a sea of newer institutions whose academics found less research time amid teaching duties, felt less valued, encountered more external pressure over research and curriculum design, and worked in discipline-divided faculties rather than broader collegiate

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settings. Halsey’s surveys suggest a general trend (especially in more recently chartered universities) for wider public engagement, in the sense of accepting students from more varied socio-economic backgrounds and dealing with more outside agencies in procuring funds for research or conveying its results. This is not intellectual engagement, however, and actually deprives academics of the authoritative voice to become effective public intellectuals. A third type of argument that may underscore the declinist argument arises from the philosophy and social studies of science. It suggests that changes in the way knowledge is generated and validated (in the natural and social sciences) have lessened the impact of intellectual work on public opinion, and made it less likely that intellectuals will gain public prominence. Philosophy of science, in moving against positivism and the deductive-nomological method, has created an impression that scientific discoveries and opinions are more provisional, fallible and limited in scope than they (and the public) once believed (Popper 1963[2002]). Specialization has undermined previous holistic and ‘grand’ theories without creating new ones, and the multiplication of scientific effort has tended to prevent any unanimity, with conflicting results or dissenting interpretations always available. Where a consensus is reached, it’s the fact that it is spread across many equally-qualified professional scientists may reduce the likelihood that one of them will be viewed as the pioneer or champion and emerge into public view. So, paradoxically, the ‘growth of knowledge’, the increasing sophistication of scientific method and the rising number of practising scientists seems to be accompanied by a decline in the status and power of the intellectual. Knowledge and its production become subjected to democratic pressures, with intellectuals inside and outside universities competing with other social actors for its construction and validation (Delanty 2001, Friese and Wagner 1998). Contesting Decline: The Renewed Intellectual Engagement The argument that public intellectuals have fallen in number and influence, in a context of general intellectual retreat, is deficient in at least two ways. Firstly, authors who subscribe to the declinist argument tend to distort the past and present: they romanticize and glamorize intellectual life in the early twentieth century whilst depicting the present as devoid of public intellectual life (Etzioni and Bowditch 2006). American intellectuals are particularly keen to depict their own intellectual history in this light, so as to argue that we need to revive what they see as a truly American pragmatist tradition that conceives of intellectual life in terms of social and political engagement. This leads them to understate the degree to which intellectuals could remain publicly engaged even after recruitment to universities and absorption into the purely internal conversation of academia. A substantial number of American public intellectuals during the so-called golden era – including those who inspired the 1960s student uprisings, and the growth of

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new, engaged intellectual pursuits, such as computer science and communication studies – held academic positions. University posts and academic recognition have been a reinforcement, not a restraint, for a growing number of intellectuals who now bypass journalists to communicate directly through mass media and displace politicians to lead public debate. Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky, Anthony Giddens, John Gray, Germaine Greer, Paul Krugman, Edward Said and Joseph Stiglitz are among many who have substantially influenced public debates and attained associated public profiles without any compromise to their intellectual status. When they first appeared, there was an arguable case that new fora for knowledge creation and dissemination such as think tanks, blogs and documentary films provided alternative channels for public engagement, to which intellectuals would migrate to escape the insular and de-politicized academy (Stone and Garnett 1998, Abelson 2002). But these channels have rapidly become complements, not substitutes, enabling certain intellectuals to ‘go public’ by leveraging the credibility gained from peer-reviewed research, without eroding that credibility. A university chair or research fellowship enables these thinkers to write for partisan think tanks, sign petitions, give interviews or post polemical blogs, bringing their ideas to a much wider audience, the academic affiliation conferring an objectivity not enjoyed by full-time participants in such projects. Independence from direct commercial or political funding, something afforded by a university post, can be essential for avoiding suspicions of bias (Farrell and Sides 2010). The new channels’ capacity to complement the activity of academics has led increasingly to co-optation by them: with universities establishing or acquiring centres that can also function as think tanks and consultancies (such as the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and the University of Westminster’s Policy Studies Institute), and academics joining networks that promote pre- and post-publication results online (such as the Centre for Economic Policy Research). Secondly, ‘declinist authors tend to present public intellectual life as an amorphous entity: they make little distinction between different types of intellectual life and different types of public intellectuals. Besides Burawoy’s distinction between traditional and organic public intellectuals, there is little conceptualization of the different shapes public intellectual life can take. Consequently, they tend to equate subtle changes to public intellectual life with its decline or disappearance. The decline of early twentieth century forms of intellectual authority, based on epistemic certainty and institutional prestige, leads not to the demise of public intellectuals but to the possibility of new types. Today’s public intellectuals no longer rely on earlier types of legitimacy but thrive on the prevailing sense of epistemic uncertainty and draw on an educated public to rally support for their views. A distinction can be drawn between three types of public intellectual: those we call authoritative intellectuals, professional intellectuals and embedded intellectuals. All three have always existed, but their relative numbers and significance have changed over time. Whereas authoritative public intellectuals

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tended to be characteristic of the nineteenth to early twentieth century, professional intellectuals emerge in the course of the twentieth century, and the last three decades have seen the rise of the embedded intellectual. These are ideal-types, and in reality most public intellectuals combine features of all three. Those who support the declinist thesis erroneously mistake the fall of the authoritative intellectual figure for a decline of the public intellectual as such, ignoring the emergence of new types. Authoritative Intellectuals The derivation of intellectual status from authority is common when professionalization of intellectual life and specialization among disciplines are at a relatively early stage, and when only a small proportion of the public receives higher education or a schooling that could lead to it. Whilst modern universities established themselves in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, this period predates the intense professionalization of academic disciplines that characterizes the mid- to late twentieth century. This means, firstly, that universities have not yet acquired the monopoly of knowledge creation and dissemination. Scholars outside the university have a significant impact on intellectual life and academics have to engage with them. For example, the major advances in biology by Charles Darwin, and in statistics and meteorology by Francis Galton, were conveyed via learned societies outside of the university system; and few academic historians matched the profile of Thomas Carlyle or Lord Acton. Secondly, the demarcation between academic disciplines was not fully developed and scholars were able to negotiate different fields of inquiry without losing credibility: for instance, Thorstein Veblen and Max Weber published both as economists and sociologists, Lord Kelvin combined mathematics, physics and engineering, and John Dewey’s work was central to areas of philosophy, education and psychology. Thirdly, there is limited standardization within the disciplines in that there is not much of a consensus yet about the types of questions that ought to be asked and how to answer them. This means that people within a discipline are not able to present themselves in a unified fashion. Thus, until the 1920s when Marshall became influential, there was not a single agreed set of principles for Economics that made it a discipline and allowed it to be taught as a stand-alone subject (Kadish 1993). Those who establish such principles and assemble a curriculum around them can exert substantial power over the direction of thought in newly emerging disciplines, as Marshall demonstrated with his Principles of Economics (Marshall 1920), and over the launch of a degree in the subject at an ancient university. Authoritative intellectuals, like Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertrand Russell or John Dewey, have distinct charismatic qualities, which make them particularly wellsuited for a public profile. They know how to write or speak with clarity and conviction, how to shock and how to entice their audience. They often help to fashion new disciplines and in the process of making bold knowledge claims in that area they persuade the public that a subject area exists and is worth pursuing.

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Although authoritative intellectuals might have a present or past university association, they do not derive their authority from being steeped in an academic discipline or from being an expert. They tend to be generalists who write and speak about a wide range of topics with a distinct critical voice. The writings and public performances of authoritative intellectuals have a strong moral component: they exhibit character, take the moral high ground and thrive on taking an outsider position. They rely on what we call ‘vertical authority’ in that they speak at, rather than with, their audience, even if they are populists or aim to promote equality. Sartre epitomizes this type of public intellectual. Educated in a high profile discipline (philosophy), endowed with cultural and social capital through both his family background and the École Normale Supérieure, Sartre was a charismatic figure who wrote about a wide range of subjects – from political collaboration and anti-Semitism to colonialism and Marxism – without being (or presenting himself as) an expert in any of the topics covered. Not only did he cover a broad range of topics, he also straddled different genres: writing novels, short stories, plays, and regular journalistic pieces, as well as technically sophisticated philosophy. His writings had a strong moral and critical dimension, implicitly taking an authoritative, superior position towards his audience, and tackling socially and politically sensitive issues without empirical investigation. This is particularly telling in his Réflexions sur la question juive (Sartre 1954 [1946]) in which he reflects critically on the phenomenon of anti-Semitism without employing social research methods, combining literary references with philosophical analysis, and propounding an eclectic mix of Durkheim and Tarde’s sociological theory (Baert 2011). The dilemma of authoritative intellectuals, as it manifests itself in the course of the twentieth century, is intertwined with the process of professionalization. As intellectual life increasingly becomes centred round what is called ‘organized knowledge’ and disciplinary specialization, it becomes more and more difficult for them to act as generalists without being dismissed as dilettantes. Professional Intellectuals Partly due to the success of authoritative intellectuals, the first part of the twentieth century saw an intensification of academic professionalization. The rise of the professional intellectual is characterized by two main developments. Firstly, the major universities became dominant research institutions: not only creating and disseminating knowledge, but monopolizing knowledge validation by collecting together intellectuals who discussed and assessed one another’s work. Peerrecognition became central to the dissemination of ideas, which were increasingly classified as ‘knowledge’ only when published in peer-reviewed journals. The power of intellectuals to pronounce on appropriate policies and public choices came to depend on the evidence and analysis they presented rather than the status they held. Secondly, standardization took place as academics defined the boundaries of their disciplines and reached a relative consensus on language,

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methods and techniques. This enabled scholars to present themselves in a unified fashion, refining methods and conventions that distinguish professional research from lay activities. In general, the humanities and social sciences have been slower than the natural sciences in adopting this professional model, especially with regard to standardization. On one end of the spectrum there is sociology. This has remained a relatively heterogeneous discipline with different views as to what to study and how to study it, despite growing agreement as to which theories and methods are appropriate for which types of questions and even more consensus as to which journals are significant. In contrast, economics has for over half a century shown a relatively high degree of consensus around market forces driven by constrained maximization. Few heterodox economists find a home in economics departments of major research universities in the US, more being located in management schools which preserve greater heterogeneity. Compared to sociology and economics, philosophy occupies a middle ground. A certain level of standardization took place after 1945 when analytical philosophy managed to seize a dominant position in a number of key departments in the US; other forms of philosophy tending to be reclassified as ‘history of philosophy’ or exiled to other departments. However, philosophy at Yale kept its pluralism, and even at Harvard, the history of philosophy remained important throughout the 1960s. Outside the top American departments (and indeed outside the US), philosophy remained an ecumenical field. The professional intellectual is steeped in a particular discipline, gaining attention through expertise, peer review and institutional support. This type of intellectual makes statements that draw on epistemic or logical certainties, referring to corroborated ‘findings’ or ‘reasoning’. Professional intellectuals face a ‘differentiator’s dilemma’: epistemic or logical certainty and methodological consensus provide their legitimacy, but also imply standardization and this latter is not in tune with the charismatic qualities associated with public performance. When their expertise opens up a role in consulting, advising and problem-solving in areas of public or commercial policy, they may also confront an ‘innovator’s dilemma’. New discoveries which radically alter the discipline’s core beliefs or procedures would render some of the expert knowledge redundant, so there may be an incentive to accommodate anomalous findings within the current framework rather than break out of it, as earlier intellectuals might have aspired to do. Declinists often treat professionalization as tantamount to the disappearance of the public intellectual, and the downgrading of intellectuals in general, because it turns each discipline into a standard set of techniques and results which (in the manner of Weberian bureaucratization) can be detached from their intellectual creators and applied by any competent practitioner. In practice, there are two ways in which intellectuals can overcome this dilemma and still attain public prominence after their discipline becomes professionalized. They can excel at distilling and popularizing a rising or dominant view within their discipline. For example, Richard Dawkins (2008, 1989) conveys an approach to evolution

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formulated in mathematical obscurity by William Hamilton (1964) and others; and Paul Samuelson (1948) wrote the textbook, which, through many editions, standardized what he presented as ‘Keynesian’ economics. Or they can command attention by attacking an established view and developing an alternative, as they battle an entrenched ‘mainstream’. So, for example, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg and Ilya Prigogine all presented radical alternatives to existing views of the natural world, and Noam Chomsky’s universal grammar (Chomsky 1957, 1965) counterposed earlier behaviourist approaches to linguistics. Some intellectuals span both groups by using public appearances or largecirculation publications as representatives of the mainstream to promote ideas that lie outside it. This may enable their alternative to move towards mainstream acceptance. Thus, some evolutionary theorists accuse Dawkins of advancing the ‘selfish gene’ as a consensus view, marginalizing rival Darwinian interpretations. Some economists complained that Samuelson popularized a ‘Keynesianism’ that lacked many of Keynes’s more radical insights, keeping ‘post-Keynesian’ theories off the post-war curriculum. A generation later, popular Anglo-American understanding of economics was reshaped by the television documentaries of Milton Friedman (1980) and John Kenneth Galbraith (1977), both well outside the mainstream of the time. Stephen Hawking’s often controversial views on space and time may now be regarded as representative of the discipline by the millions who have bought his Brief History of Time (Hawking 1988) or viewed related documentaries. Those who obtain prominence in either of these ways can often expand it by engaging with the public outside their discipline, drawing on their legitimacy in one area to exert influence in others. High status in a discipline regarded as rigorous, with a high degree of consensus over major discoveries, can be especially effective in enabling public pronouncements on political or social matters, where less consensus reigns. So, for example, nuclear physicists Robert Oppenheimer and Andrei Sakharov made notable attacks on their respective political systems, their scientific eminence offering comparative (but ultimately incomplete) protection against reprisal. Chomsky has used intellectual prominence in linguistics as the foundation for similarly prominent political dissent (Chomsky 1983, 2003), as did the historian Edward Thompson, whose popular critiques of defence policy (Thompson 1985) derived considerable status from his earlier intellectual work (Thompson 1963). Professional intellectuals’ use of subject-specific expertise to solidify their political or social critique is quite different from the authoritative public intellectual’s status, as the latter remains a generalist. Pierre Bourdieu exemplifies the professional intellectual. In contrast with Sartre’s notion of the ‘total intellectual’, Bourdieu’s foray in the public sphere in the course of the 1990s was interconnected with his professional expertise and his sociological research into the nature and effects of neo-liberalism. It is precisely this social scientific knowledge that provided him with the intellectual arsenal to critique, for instance, some of Alain Juppé’s more controversial policies at the time (Swartz 2003). In contrast with the personality cult surrounding Sartre,

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Bourdieu always conceived of sociology as a collective, professional endeavour, centred round scientific expertise. Like Sartre, however, Bourdieu still held on to a hierarchical relationship with the public in so far as he asserted sociological authority and critique based on its scientific credentials. Several challenges to this presumption of superior knowledge have led to the gradual erosion of the professional public intellectual. Firstly, there is growing recognition, within and beyond academic circles, that scholars’ claims are rarely backed by epistemic certainty or logical proof. Anti-foundationalist philosophies, like neo-pragmatism, now question previous theories of truth and correspondence (Rorty 1979, 1991: 63–77, 1998: 19–42). Successive scientific certainties are known to have been called into question and ultimately overturned; by ‘pessimistic induction’, much contemporary knowledge can be expected to perish in the same way (Stanford 2006: Chapter 1). The wider public is increasingly aware that there are limits to human knowledge, including the knowledge of scientific experts (Smithson 1989, Gross 2007, Beck 2009: 115–28). For example, public policy has had to recognize that some decisions previously based on probabilityanalysed ‘risk’ actually involve genuine uncertainty, where we cannot attribute probabilities to possible outcomes (Callon, Lascoumes and Barthe 2009: 13–36). The limitations of scientific knowledge are illustrated by recent fierce and unresolved debates over the dangers of volcanic ash for flying over Northern Europe, the causes of the 2007–2009 financial crisis, and possible side-effects of low frequency electromagnetic fields. In neither case is more research likely to do away with the genuine uncertainties that are at stake. Secondly, higher levels of general public education make it more difficult for intellectuals to sustain the type of vertical authority associated with the first two types of public intellectual. With education comes a growing awareness of the fallibility and contested nature of scientific findings or philosophical positions, and indeed a willingness to challenge those views. The intense public debates and parliamentary inquiries into academic conduct at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Change Unit, after a leaking of emails (Marshall 2009, Corbyn 2010, Harrabin 2010), illustrate the greater openness of intellectuals to public scrutiny and criticism when pronouncing on issues with wider social and political impact. The increased use of academics as expert witnesses in criminal trials has exposed their reasoning to critical scrutiny, sometimes leading to arguments being undermined in the courtroom or by subsequent re-analysis. For example, after the testimony of eminent paediatrician Roy Meadow led directly to a mother’s imprisonment for the deaths of her children, re-examination of his statistical methods suggested that he had substantially overstated the odds against their dying of natural causes, leading to the women’s release and the expert’s disgrace (Dyer 2005). Increasingly lay-people feel entitled to be involved in debates of this nature. Although few are equipped to read the scientific papers and question the conclusions directly, they have found ways to force intellectuals from ‘lecture mode’ into dialogue. These include probing and publicizing the sources of evidence, deploying dissenting intellectuals who can move the peer-review process into public forums, and

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forcing intellectuals to state their case in ‘ordinary language’, which sometimes leads them to use metaphors and examples that are more easily attacked than the underlying model. Thirdly, universities (and disciplines within them) are increasingly competing for funding. Even where they do not regard public opinion as having any direct relevance to knowledge creation, intellectuals are forced to recognize the indirect public influence in determining which research and teaching activities are worth supporting, and in influencing political decisions on the allocation of resources. Academics are becoming entrepreneurs whose lifeline depends not only on the approval of peers, but also on the backing of democratically accountable agencies. Public engagement has become vital to securing the inputs to knowledge creation and ensuring a continued public appetite for the outputs. Embedded Intellectuals Once a critical public needs to be convinced that intellectual activity has inherent merits and worthwhile products, the embedded intellectual becomes more prominent. The concept of embeddedness conveys a sharp reduction, or disappearance, in the ability of intellectuals to exist apart from the rest of society. They cannot maintain a conversation, or obtain resources for it, without engaging with those outside the intellectual community. Whereas authoritative intellectuals could regard themselves (and be regarded by others) as ‘above’ society because of superior general knowledge and insight, and professional intellectuals could be similarly regarded as ‘outside’ society because of superior specific knowledge and expertise, ‘embedded’ intellectuals are inescapably immersed in their society. The difference between ‘lay’ and ‘learned’ language no longer reflects an unbridgeable gulf in understanding. In the view of Amitai Etzioni, although embedded thinkers still speak ‘in two voices: that of the public intellectual and that of the academic … While the voice changes as different audiences are addressed, the points do not’ (Etzioni 2001: xiv). Embedded intellectuals manifest themselves in two different ways. One group, who might be termed ‘intellectual persuaders’, use a role initially established within an intellectual profession to build public and political opinion in favour of further institutional support (especially research funding), which then enhances the research programme. Extreme examples include Linus Pauling, who used his eminence in biochemistry (culminating in two Nobel prizes) to mobilize support for his controversial views on ‘orthomolecular’ medicine, using public opinion to raise the profile and financial support for research linking diet to cancer; and Rupert Sheldrake, who has enrolled the public in experiments to test his controversial ‘morphic resonance’ theories (Sheldrake 1987). Even when not so adrift from the mainstream, social and natural scientists increasingly can use old and new media to direct attention to their expert interventions and mobilize support for their research and interpretations (Hevern 2004, Woolgar 2004). In the arts, intellectuals actively engaged in literature, drama and visual art have led campaigns for state sponsorship

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to replace past philanthropic sponsorship, and those in critical roles have appealed to the public as well as policymakers in establishing these as academic disciplines. Although not public intellectuals in the traditional sense, publicly promoting their research activities is central to their survival. For ‘intellectual persuaders’, engagement with the public is mainly expedient, that is, a means to an end, which is usually the pursuit of intellectual work on the ‘authoritative’ or ‘intellectual’ pattern. The public needs persuading – of the validity and value of intellectual activity – to go on giving it support. This includes financial support as taxpayers of governments, customers of companies that sponsor research, and buyers of intellectual products. It also includes willingness to tolerate intellectual work that may have an increasing impact on society’s security and welfare – from the potentially inflammatory tracts of a controversial historian to the potentially inflammatory torus of a particle physicist. Even if their conclusions are demonstrably correct, those being paid to think must convince the public (and its political representatives) that this is the best use of their time and of other people’s resources. A second group, which we might call ‘dialogical intellectuals’, treat engagement with the public as a direct input into knowledge creation. For example, philosophers, influenced by the pragmatist rejection of a neutral algorithm for adjudicating ethical, aesthetic or scientific claims (Rorty 1999: xvi–xxxii), recognize that theirs is only one amongst a range of legitimate voices and they cannot discard lay people’s views. Some moral philosophers who once reasoned deductively over correct action in tragic-choice situations now work inductively, canvassing public opinion and trying to rationalize what is in the public mind (Hauser 2007). In a similar way, some economists who observe inconsistency between axiomatic decision theory and popular decision practice have ceased to ignore or re-educate the wider public, and instead re-build their theories to accommodate its choices (Kahneman and Tversky 1979, Sonsino et al. 2002). Some cultural anthropologists, influenced by the reflexive turn in cultural anthropology (Marcus and Fischer 1986 [1999]), make a concerted effort not to impose their own categories onto what is being studied but to develop dialogical knowledge so as to learn from others. Increasingly, scientific researchers and consultants involved in large public projects develop what some commentators have called ‘dialogic democracy’ (Giddens 1994: 115 ff.): that is, they engage the public in environmental impact and risk assessments, recognizing the validity of the lay-man’s rationality over axiomatic rational choice theory (Latour 2004). Although not all of them have a distinct public profile in the traditional sense of the word, they publicly engage with the public they are studying so that the latter has a central input in the knowledge formation. For dialogical intellectuals, engagement is more often an end in itself – motivated by belief that a public input to intellectual enquiry can usefully inform and direct it. Through such dialogue, intellectuals deepen their knowledge by exposure to public opinion and action. Ideas extracted from this engagement can be used to challenge received intellectual ideas, tested for consistency on their

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own terms, or used to understand the often unintended social impact of intellectual thought. Increasing use of public opinion and survey research, oral history, media analysis, diary exercises and participant observation (among other methods that entail engagement) indicate a perceived need to receive more input from the public before ideas can be convincingly communicated about or to the public. Dialogue can be especially important for the social sciences and humanities, for which the public (or sections of it) are usually objects of research as well as targets for research output (and policies based on it). While some intellectuals have reacted to lay-audience challenges to the professional intellectual by seeking to renew an authoritative role, through axiomatic or abstract theorizing, at least as many have reacted by embracing the dialogical role, launching new strands of empirical or participant-observer research in which what people think is a necessary component of what we think about people. For both types of ‘embedded’ intellectual, the original two missions, to create and disseminate knowledge, are recognized as increasingly hard to pursue without engagement with a third – the mobilization of public input to research and teaching. The relentless expansion of universities has made intellectual work a costly enterprise that the public must be called upon to finance, via taxation or tuition fees. It has also equipped the public to be more sceptical of intellectuals’ declarations and insistent that they prove their worth. High education levels and an increasing sense of the contested nature of knowledge claims make it difficult for intellectuals to rely on a vertical relationship of authority vis-à-vis their audience, or to assert authority through professional expertise. Instead, intellectuals have to develop ‘horizontal authority’, enrolling a wider public in the production of knowledge – as financial or ideational contributors – at the same time as communicating new ideas to it. Burawoy’s (2005) plea for a public sociology is indicative of this trend towards the embedded public intellectual in both meanings of the term: as intellectual persuader and embedded intellectual. Public sociologists tailor their research agendas to the needs and preferences of the groups with which they work, and Burawoy envisages public sociology as a dialogical endeavour in which both sociologists and those groups learn from each other. Although public sociology is conceived as a critical endeavour, the notion of critique differs from that adopted by Bourdieu and other professional public intellectuals. The concept of critique, involved in public sociology, no longer rests on principles of epistemic certainty, empirical evidence and expertise but is intimately intertwined with a far more radical form of reflexivity than the one conceived by Bourdieu. Critique, within the framework of public sociology, comes down to a dialogical enterprise in which both parties – the investigators and those with whom they cooperate – are, epistemologically speaking, on an equal footing.

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The Public Intellectual and the Intellectual Public Accepting public input to the methods and conclusions of intellectual thought, implying the comparable status of ‘lay’ and ‘expert’ opinion, is a radical departure from the working methods of authoritative and professional intellectuals. Instead of claiming (through ascription or achievement) superior knowledge to that of the public, and approaching it in the fashion of legislator or teacher, intellectuals increasingly view knowledge as gaining substance or legitimacy only through interaction with the ‘public mind’, using dialogue and persuasion. Instead of lecturing, embedded intellectuals have to argue their case to an audience that can question and criticize. An increasingly educated public is more resistant to being talked-down to, and more inclined to demand a voice in conversations involving professional intellectuals. This is not to say that expansion of general and higher education has narrowed the knowledge gap between intellectuals and the general public. The epistemic distance between intellectual and lay conversation has been lengthened by an increasingly technical use of language (especially mathematical and statistical), and an increased use of referencing to past contributions, a knowledge of which is required in order to make sense of new contributions. What narrows as a result of expanding education is the evaluative distance between the intellectual and the public. ‘Lay’ audience members become more competent at assessing the nature, coherence and effectiveness of intellectual arguments, and more confident in expressing scepticism or demanding clarification. This increases the public inclination to challenge, reserve judgement on or even reject intellectual arguments outright, without any claim to have received or fully understand the technical details of those arguments. Education leaves ‘lay’ readers and listeners better equipped – or believing themselves to be better equipped – to assess the structure and coherence of intellectual arguments without grasping their full content. The separation of evaluation from technical understanding is assisted by professional intellectuals formalizing and empirically testing earlier ‘authoritative’ arguments. Formalization involves the conversion of verbal arguments into models, making explicit the axioms or assumptions underlying those models, which a lay public can consider and challenge without fully understanding the models themselves. So, for example, many ‘lay’ people challenge the assumptions of rational choices or flexible labour markets that underlie complex economic models. Members of the public can judge the provenance and accuracy of data independently of their assessment of the models that use it, leading, for example, to climate-change sceptics challenging key inputs to global warming models. Education can confer the ability (and confidence) to identify and challenge a style of intellectual argument even when the argument’s technical content is beyond non-specialist comprehension. An increasing specialization of intellectual work also increases the scope, and incentive, for an educated public to criticize ‘professional’ argument even without grasping all the details. Narrowly focused areas of enquiry can make experts

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seem incapable of grasping the wider picture, so that the public – with a stronger understanding of its own interests – has (or claims) a role in contextualizing and judging the value of their work. Once they begin to associate the growth in specialist knowledge with a decline in the ability to situate and evaluate this knowledge, members of the public (and their political representatives) become more confident in interrogating the specialists. Half a century ago, this view of intellectuals as disabled by their specialism led US congressional representatives to treat some of the most powerful scientific minds as comparable to those of children, unable to grasp the implications of their discoveries, or to accept adult regulation (Hall 1979). Across the Atlantic, Churchill (typically more pithily) pronounced that scientific experts should be ‘on tap but not on top’. Declinists have tended to argue that intellectuals yield to this tendency, perhaps even welcoming it – rarely resisting the loss of a public role, and often accepting confinement to narrow expertise, not least because the criteria for intellectual respectability have shifted from generalism to specialism. Our argument is that any such confinement was only a short phase following on the maturing of the professional intellectual and was extensively reversed as intellectual activity became re-embedded in a more knowledgeable society. The reversal has been driven by new incentives for public engagement, frequently associated with new strands of thought that lend themselves to broad-based application. Natural and social scientists have increasingly succeeded in reversing the Churchillian assessment, transcending specialism to supply an overall vision, and taking a more direct role in the management, application and dissemination of their research by displacing former intermediaries. They have been incentivized to do so, as earlier observed, by the persuasive need to mobilize support for their work and the dialogical imperative to involve the public in it. Conclusion We have argued that the thesis of decline in the incidence and influence of public intellectuals is – even in the Anglo-American context in which it has mainly been developed – deficient in at least three ways. Firstly, it mistakenly presents the rise to dominance of the academy, as a centre (across the world) for the generation and dissemination of knowledge, as antithetical to public intellectual life. Secondly, it interprets external challenges to that dominance, and the increasing substitution of ‘dialogical’ for ‘vertical’ engagement with the public, as a weakening of the public intellectual role. Thirdly, it fails to recognize that the erosion of foundationalism increases the incentive for intellectuals and knowledge producers to engage with the public, as does the increased need for public support of intellectual activity. We counter the declinist thesis by identifying three different forms of intellectual, with contrasting incentives for intellectual engagement. Times of change in the relative frequency of these forms have often been identified with decline, when they actually lead to widespread renewal of public commitment,

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though with different motivations and manifestations. The most recent renewal involves a social re-embedding of intellectual activity, linked to an increasingly knowledgeable society. The emergence of ‘embedded’ intellectuals does not mean the eclipse of ‘authoritative’ and ‘professional’ intellectuals, nor an erosion of the scope and incentives for these longer-established types to also become publicly engaged. Whilst it is true that intense professionalization makes it more difficult for authoritative intellectuals to emerge and survive, it is perfectly compatible with the rise of the professional public intellectual. The professionally focused ‘specific’ intellectual may, far from becoming disengaged from the wider social relevance and impact of their work, actually become more strongly connected to them and motivated to pursue them, through ever closer linkage between their professional knowledge application and their practical living and working situation (Foucault 1980). Two motivations for public engagement, initially characteristic of authoritative intellectuals, are retained by the newer types. Intellectuals may use public fora (including broadcasting, the popular press, public enquiries and the Internet) to disseminate and popularize intellectual understanding and exercise ‘thought leadership’. The example of philosophers Cyril Joad and Bertrand Russell in the early days of radio is continued today by (for example) David Attenborough presenting natural history on television and Nouriel Roubini posting economic forecasts on the Internet. Some intellectuals also enrol the public in their quest for knowledge, but purely as subjects for observation or agents of observation: For example, astronomers, including Carl Sagan, engaging home computers in the ‘Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence’, and naturalists collecting data from mass public observations. In addition, new ‘horizontal’ forms of public engagement are observable after the high-point of professionalization and of foundationalism. Intellectuals have grown in number and influence because public funding of research and teaching afford them opportunities not available when they were reliant on personal fortunes, philanthropy or aristocratic tutoring. To maintain this security they must persuade the public that knowledge has value and allay concerns about its human and environmental impact (in such areas as stem cell research, nuclear engineering and financial innovation). While some intellectuals seek to persuade the public of the merits of their current projects, others mobilize opinion against the current orthodoxy, using popular belief in a concept to counterweigh peer dismissal. In the most radical form of ‘horizontal’ engagement intellectuals involve the public not only in shaping the conditions for knowledge production, but also in the actual production of knowledge and the passing of judgment on its validity. This occurs, for example, with ‘citizens’ juries’ on proposals for technology adoption, and opinion surveys which indicate whether predicted trade-offs between present pain and future gain (on public spending or carbon emissions cuts) are politically deliverable. The arrival of the persuasive intellectual has not meant the disappearance of the authoritative intellectual. Nor, despite the intra- and extra-institutional challenges

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noted earlier, has the professional intellectual gone into retreat. There is still a thriving demand (and supply) for, among many other cases, statisticians as expert witnesses at a trial or public hearing, toxicologists as advisers at a public enquiry into waste dumping, and economists on a central bank’s monetary committee. While these engagements with non-academic fora require the subjection of intellectual argument to non-peer review, they contribute to legitimizing the intellectual process and demonstrating its social value (Beecher-Monas 2007). And there is still demonstrable scope for intellectual reputation gained in a specialist area to propound specific views (or world-views) beyond it, as when Noam Chomsky attacks American foreign policy or Richard Dawkins condemns organized religion. Our principal contention is that the rise of the professional intellectual has been wrongly interpreted as the eclipse of the classically defined intellectual by the ‘expert’; and that the subsequent arrival of the intellectual persuader has been wrongly interpreted as the dethronement or abdication of the public intellectual. Conversely, the arrival alongside traditional authority of intellectual professionals and persuaders has created new opportunities and motivations for public intellectual engagement. The ranks of inwardly-focused experts may have outgrown those who engage a wider public, but there has been no fall in the numbers who are publicly active and thus a significant expansion of the public intellectual space. References Abelson, D.E. 2002. Do Think Tanks Matter? Montreal: McGill-Queen University Press. Agger, B. 2001. Public Sociology: From Social Facts to Literary Acts. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Argyris, C. 1976. Single-loop and double-loop models in research on decision making. Administrative Science Quarterly, 21(3), 363–75. Baert, P. 2011. Jean-Paul Sartre’s positioning in Anti-Semite and Jew. Journal of Classical Sociology, 11(4), 378–97. Bauman, Z. 1991. Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Postmodernity, and Intellectuals. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, U. 2009. World at Risk. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beecher-Monas, E. 2007. Evaluating Scientific Evidence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boggs, C. 1993. Intellectuals and the Crisis of Modernity. Albany: State University of New York Press. Bourdieu, P. 1988. Homo Academicus. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. 1991. Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. 1996. State Nobility; Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Konrad, G. and Szelenyi, I. 1979. Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power. New York: Harcourt Brace. Latour, B. 2004. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lovelock, J. 2000. Homage to Gaia: The Life of an Independent Scientist. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marcus, G. and Fischer, M. 1986 [1999]. Anthropology as Cultural Critique. Chicago: Chicago University Press (2nd edition). Marshall, A. 1920. Principles of Economics. London: Macmillan (8th edition). Marshall, G. 2009. Leaked email climate smear was a PR disaster for UEA. The Guardian [Online], 23 November. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/ environment/cif-green/2009/nov/23/leaked-email-climate-change [accessed on 25 May 2010]. Medvetz, T. 2010. Public policy is like having a vaudeville act. Qualitative Sociology, 33, 549–62. Nisbet, R. 1997 [1970]. The Degradation of the Academic Dogma. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers (2nd edition). Popper, K. 2002 [1963]. Conjectures and Refutations. London: Routledge. Posner, R. 2001. Public Intellectuals: A Study in Decline. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rorty, R. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rorty, R. 1991. Philosophical Papers, Volume 1; Objectivity, Relativism and Truth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, R. 1998. Philosophical Papers, Volume 3; Truth and Progress. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, R. 1999. Philosophy and Social Hope. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Rouanet, S. 2003. Religion and knowledge. Diogenes, 50(1), 37–50. Samuelson, P. 1948. Economics. New York: McGraw-Hill. Sartre, J.-P. 1954 [1946]. Réflexions sur la question juive. Paris: Gallimard. Sheldrake, R. 1987. A New Science of Life. London: Paladin. Smithson, M. 1987. Ignorance and Uncertainty: Emerging Paradigms. New York: Springer. Snow, C.P. 1959. The Two Cultures: And A Second Look. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sonsino, D., Benzion, U. and Mador, G. 2002. The complexity effect on choice with uncertainty – experimental evidence. Economic Journal, 112, 936–65. Stanford, P.K. 2006. Exceeding Our Grasp: Science, History and the Problem of Unconceived Alternatives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stone, D. and Garnett, M. (eds) 1998. Think Tanks Across Nations. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Swartz, D. 2003. From critical sociology to public intellectual: Pierre Bourdieu and politics. Theory and Society, 32(5/6), 791–823.

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Thompson, E.P. 1963. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Gollancz. Thompson, E.P. 1985. The Heavy Dancers. New York: Pantheon. Woolgar, S. 2004. Marketing ideas. Economy and Society, 33(4), 448–62. Young, J.O. 2001. Art and Knowledge. London: Routledge.

Chapter 3

From Public to Civic Intellectuals: Political Agency and Emerging Media Landscapes Peter Dahlgren

The contemporary discussions about public intellectuals (hereafter PIs) have a certain tone of lament about them. There is a sense of loss, that things were somehow better in the past, somewhat akin to the notion of ‘community’, which is often typecast as a major victim of modernity. Certainly the character, role, numbers and significance of PIs have evolved over the last century, perhaps most notably in the last few decades. And no doubt the picture today in some ways does look troubling, as much of the key US and UK literature underscores (Etzioni and Bowditch 2006, Jacoby 1987, Melzer, Weiberger and Zinman 2003, Michael 2000, Posner 2003, Small 2002, Myhre 2008). On the other hand, the phenomenon can be seen from a variety of angles, and while not disputing the evidence for ‘decline’ and ‘loss’, I would like here to offer an interpretation with a somewhat different trajectory. PIs operate in and are shaped by social, political, economic and cultural forces, as the literature makes clear. Curiously, the specific attributes of any given media landscape are usually not factored into the analysis of PIs, although Garnham’s (1995) conceptual approach is a notable exception. Also Posner (2003), in his large quantitative study that arrived at a list of 725 PIs in the US between 1995 and 2002 (of which, interestingly enough, 28 per cent were dead at the time …) used the criteria of scholarly visibility and media visibility. Yet the media as a significant factor has largely been ignored. My underlying argument is that we can understand the present fate of PIs at the general level via the large societal transformations associated with what is commonly termed late modernity, and more specifically through the evolution of the media. In particular, the transition from the mass media to the newer digital media is altering the communication ecology of PIs. Moreover, while PIs of the traditional kind are no doubt losing ground, I suggest that a newer type is emerging, one that has implications for democracy and its contemporary forms of civic participation. While my argument does not frame this picture as a cheery counterpoint to the dominant unhappy narrative, it does, however, invite a small degree of optimism. This perspective seeks to offer an alternative view of intellectual activity in the public sphere, one that is adapted to the newly emerging digital media environment of late modernity.

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I begin with a brief discussion of the key attributes of the traditional PI model. From there I sketch some of the major socio-cultural factors that render this model problematic. Thereafter I delve specifically into the contemporary media landscape as a key contingency for PIs. I conclude by offering the notion of civic intellectuals as a model better suited to capture the character of emerging PIs in the present historical situation and its media. Traditional PIs in the Contemporary World PI-Spotting If we briefly sketch the prevailing figure of the traditional PI, we might get the following portrait of an actor who has served an important function in the dynamics of modern democracies for well over a century. The context of modern democracy is essential, given that the important function of PIs largely has to do with the formation of political opinion. He (or she, though women have been very much a minority) has been imbued with an aura of rugged individualism, speaking out independently on matters of contemporary concern. While politically committed, his priority has been the truth; he has not sought power or a political career for himself. At times he has expressed a minority opinion that may then take hold and sway popular sentiment and/or decision-making by elites; at other times he has felt the harsh response from both those in power and the general public. The success rate of his causes has been less significant than the fact that he has participated in vitalizing democracy and animating the public sphere, even if, of course, success always adds to the heroic status. He has indeed been ‘intellectual’, he has had a communicative capacity to reach and engage larger audiences beyond the smaller circles of erudite scholars. This profile is of course a caricature to some extent, but it does capture something of the significance that democracies have attributed to PIs. A basic shortcoming of this view is that it is sociologically uninformed; it is fixed on individuals – and can easily veer towards a ‘Great Men of History’ stance. While the dimension of individual agency is of course essential here, we must also keep in sight the contingencies of PIs, that is, the circumstances that both make them possible and delimit them as a societal phenomenon in any given setting. Much of the research literature to which I referred above has been filling in the sociological horizon and we increasingly understand that, analytically, the phenomenon of PIs, like all social phenomena, resides in a conceptual force-field comprised of agency and very particular historical contexts, with their specific political and cultural climates. One important part of the context for PIs is, of course, the national setting and even today we can see a wide range of different national cultures in regard to PIs. While I will not be addressing national differences in my discussion – I aim instead for a general perspective for understanding the changing situation of PIs in Western democracies – it can be worth noting that France retains a degree of

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‘exceptionalism’ here; French culture still accords more weight to PIs than just about any other democracy. They have considerable visibility in the mainstream media; along with profiling individual PIs, the French media also continue to address the general state of PIs (recent contributions include, for example, Rimbert 2011, Le Nouvel Observateur 2010). Schematic Profiles There are many ways of being a PI; in fact, there are many ways of being public, with different degrees of visibility, operating in different media. Not all intellectuals are by definition ‘public’. They can also be obscure, especially in university settings, where many interact mainly with other academics; yet other intellectuals may simply be private hobbyists. Moreover, there are also different ways of being intellectual. PIs have no inner essence; in sociological terms, a PI is not a job, nor a career, but rather a role that certain people assume, and may even at some point leave behind them. A one-off intellectual venture into the public sphere can be a worthy step, but the role of PI implies an element of continuity and recognition by the public. Yet, various research efforts have developed a number of conceptual categories that help us in mapping the field of PIs (for an overview, Etzioni 2006). First of all, PIs can be identified either as generalists, or as specialists in a given discipline. The generalist PI will commonly address a range of issues, where preexisting knowledge is seen as less important than the ability to reason, analyze and argue. Discipline specialists as PIs base their authority on their expertise in a particular field, which means that in the long run, generalists often have more options and flexibility to operate as PIs. A further distinction has to do with the actual disciplines from which a PI derives: some PIs have their origins in the humanities, while others derive from the technical or natural sciences. PIs with a social science profile split the difference, with some leaning more towards the humanities – emphasizing norms and values, for example – while others present their expertise more as a form of ‘hard’ science Another distinction has to do with a PI’s proximity to power, be it political, economic, or cultural. There are PIs who have a decidedly elitist profile; they obviously interact with, or at least have access to, holders of power, while others are seen as more ‘popular’ (and are usually generalists), in the sense that they are situated outside the centres of power and their public persona thus differs less from that of their audience. Does a PI to speak to or with power? This is decisive; the classic PI wants to impact on society, usually via public opinion, but generally does not seek to hold power. However, we see governments making use of ‘house intellectuals’ (Tony Blair’s recruitment of the sociologist Anthony Giddens comes to mind). Though this enhances the power of the PI, it also risks eroding his/her perceived independence as an intellectual. We can also note a growing distinction between what I would call national and cosmopolitan PIs. National PIs are active in the public spheres of their own countries

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(even if this may involve only local or regional settings), while cosmopolitan PIs function in more ‘global’ contexts. This can mean traveling for live presentations as well as just publishing abroad. Thus, some cosmopolitan PIs from small language countries may publish extensively in English, and thereby have very small publics in their home countries. Finally, in today’s media world, we can also distinguish between traditional PIs and those of a less traditional character, who are emerging in the new online media. I will return to this development later. Institutional Anchoring Traditionally the university has been a major home for many PIs, but this is changing, as many observers have noted. Within academic circles, being a ‘popularizer’ has long been suspect and has rarely enhanced academic careers (despite admonishments by university deans that faculty members should ‘provide service’ outside the university). In recent decades, the growth of bureaucracies around academic appointments and promotions, the rationalization of evaluation criteria (for example, bibliometrics of citations), the increasing use of a managerial rationality in the organization of academic work, the difficulties in getting research funding, the emphasis on team efforts and so forth, all serve to impede the robustly independent PI – assuming that he/she is also trying to make an academic career. Noam Chomsky became a critical, global PI while his research in linguistics gradually became both less productive and more marginalized. It is unlikely that a young scholar today could follow such a path and still remain within the university, given the ever-increasing filtering mechanisms for university employment. Beyond academia, PIs have traditionally also been associated with ‘bohemia’, which signals generally weak institutional affiliations. Here we have the classic figures of the ‘writer’ and the ‘philosopher’. In today’s world they are increasingly rare, given the difficulty in subsisting largely on freelance publications. While there are many writers, and not least journalists, who do survive as freelancers, the demands of the market often get in the way of being a PI as such activity is usually not the most lucrative mode of freelancing. The somewhat romantic figure of the PI is in fact being replaced by PIs affiliated with think tanks. These tend to reflect technical expertise rather than the humanistic traditions. Some are independent, but most think tanks have some connection with interest groups, powerful organizations, or government. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have also become modern homes for PIs. Here too one sees connections with particular interests or advocacy causes and the status of ‘independent’ is increasingly in question. Alongside NGOs the terrain can blur into various extra-parliamentarian activist groups and networks, some very established, such as Greenpeace, which can provide research and engage in public debate, and include many networks that are transitory and indeed ephemeral. Even new styles of ‘organic intellectuals’, as Gramsci called them, can be seen working in education projects or loose social movement contexts (Borg and Mayo 2007).

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Contemporary Competitors to PIs Pulling together these lines of development, we can say that the traditional model of the PI is gradually being edged out by institutional changes, both within and beyond the university, that erode the viability of economic and ideological independence. At what point we should draw the line and say that a particular role or form of activity no longer qualifies as a PI will always be open to discussion. There have long been grey areas, for example, between pundits, in the sense of journalistic commentators, and ‘real’ PIs (Joffe 2003). While many intellectuals often view pundits as shallow and superficial, it is also true that many PIs have made use of journalistic formats to express their views in popular and accessible ways. However, the demarcation between PIs and public relations specialists, spin-doctors, image managers, and advertisers has become less problematic, even if boundaries can never be precise. These media-based practitioners have become increasingly important in recent decades in the dissemination of what count as ‘ideas’ in modern society, even if the intellectual dimension could be questioned. Spin-doctors and others make use of manipulative forms of instrumental communication. While such strategies for influencing thought and behaviour are dominant in the contexts of commercial marketing and corporate image management, the techniques, and the experts who wield them, have also rapidly gained ground in the political world in recent decades. Individual politicians, political parties, election campaigns, interest group politics, all make use of such approaches for spreading ideas, making arguments and mobilizing opinion, and the market for the services of these experts continues to expand. In the process, we witness how mediated political communication becomes typified by shorter sound bites and less authentic or transparent discussion. These developments have of course amplified the distress calls about the marginalization and decline of PIs, as well as the general erosion of public culture. The social and institutional conditions that shape the contingencies of contemporary PIs discussed above have counterparts that resonate at the level of culture and values, as I discuss in the next section. Moreover, as we shall also see, they interface with the difficulties facing contemporary democracy. Cultural and Political Contingencies The Late Modern Matrix of Reason If the sophisticated techniques of persuasion from the marketing world have become solidly established in the public sphere, there is yet another tendency that functions to sideline the traditional PI, at least those rooted in the humanities. In the prevailing contemporary world view, there is a strong and growing strand of scientistic and technicist thought. In a sense this is not new; the faith in science and technology has been with us since the eighteenth century, as part of the

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Enlightenment tradition. However, its expansion becomes problematic when it gains hegemony in domains that ultimately deal, not with the physical realities of the world, but with values, in other words, issues that are to be socially negotiated. This ‘colonization’ of ‘the life world’ (again, Habermasian terms) by a technical and instrumental logic signals a shift in the epistemic order of everyday life. Issues that cluster around how we should live and how we should confront various dilemmas have traditionally resided in the realm of norms, in politics. Increasingly such issues are now subjected less to reasoned interpretation than to technical expertise. Scientific experts in the media address many areas of life, such as economics, or even love relationships and childrearing, and offer guidance that makes use of discourses that often bypass reflection on values and politics. In the context of an evolution of this kind, the traditional normative and discursive domain of PIs appears to be shrinking in many quarters. If we jump back in time about 50 years, from today’s horizons to the early 1960s, we could say that the modernist vision of social progress, and the place of Reason in it, was still pretty much intact. Elements of the Enlightenment legacy had been facing critical challenges at least since Nietzsche in the late nineteenth century, while many others expressed a loss of faith in this legacy in the aftermath of the horrors of the world wars and rationally administered genocide. Yet in the immediate post- World War II era, the belief in truth and progress within Western democracies generally remained strong, at least at the popular level. In this context the status of the realm of ‘ideas’ retained its prominence; also, it was linked to the notion of discussion and debate as vehicles for continually improving ideas. There was a cultural understanding that, whilst we might not always be able to claim that we have the truth, we at least had the means to get ever closer to it and were thus equipped to participate in its discovery and in the march of progress. Of course, I am painting this picture using a very wide brush, yet even this very rough rendering should be sufficient to trigger recognition of some key contrasts with our contemporary situation. The belief in truth and progress, which has traditionally driven PIs, is certainly more problematic and complex today. While science and technology are still in a commanding epistemic position, there are counter-currents that harbor doubt and skepticism as to the ‘grand narrative’ that science automatically brings progress with it. The Frankenstein metaphor is frequently evoked; the Faustian bargain often appears not to have been such a good deal, as we witness nuclear power disasters, anguish over genetic manipulation, a dangerously damaged environment, and so forth. In Ulrich Beck’s (2009) terms ours has become an increasingly fear-filled ‘risk society’, where we are continually making small and large bets concerning our health, safety and well-being, both individually and collectively. Anti-Modernism Alongside such problematizing of the Enlightenment we can also observe today forms of outright rejection of its key pillars; these at bottom challenge the premises

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of intellectual endeavour itself. In what might be interpreted as defensive cultural responses towards the dislocations of modernity, alternative grounds for knowing, such as New Age personal subjectivity, deep and unquestioning ideological conviction, or most commonly, religious faith, are blossoming. In Europe and especially the US, for example, some members of the Christian right show a disdain for scientific facts and the logics and the rules of argumentation. The roots of this form of anti-modernism run deep in the social histories of specific religious currents, where strong elements of anti-rationalism have flourished, as Susan Jacoby (2008) illustrates in her analysis of the American situation. These diverse strands have led to a degree of uncertainty about basic Enlightenment principles in public culture that even half a century ago seemingly had a more self-evident standing. In this context it is also important to take reading abilities into account. While many proponents enthuse about how the new world of information is having an immensely positive impact on everything, from personal development to the character of our civilization, other voices, such as Carr (2010) argue that it is undermining our capacity to think, read and remember. Among younger generations reading ability seems on the decline in many parts of the Western world; obviously the Internet cannot be held exclusively responsible for this, yet it seems to accelerate the phenomenon. This does not say anything about intelligence, and certainly it can be argued that many young people today have information competencies via computers and the Internet that put them far ahead of their peers 50 years ago. The final verdict will probably have to wait a generation or two. However, the extent to which serious (and longish) texts are today seen by new generations as a challenge and not as a source of important ideas – something that also connects with the declining circulation of the quality press in most democracies – is a sign of a diminishing audience for traditional PIs. The media logic of the new communication technologies favours shorter texts. What this will mean in terms of the kinds of cognitive and communicative activities we associate with the Enlightenment remains an open, yet unsettling, question. I will return to the digital media below. Reason has not vanished, but many would argue that it is in fact being eroded on certain fronts, notably in the mainstream mass media, the terrain of PIs. One could say that the media logic there has become less Enlightenment-friendly in recent decades, with the increase in tempo, and the personification and trivialization of serious current affairs. While infotainment and other forms of popularization may well attract larger audiences, the discursive space left for informed discussion and rational debate continues to contract. The Dire Dilemmas of Democracy I indicated at the outset the important role of PIs for democracy. By the early 1990s there was a general consensus among the Western democracies that their political systems were not working as they should. The list of issues was and is long, but

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in brief, research has noted steady declines in voter participation, party loyalties, and civil society activities. There has been a growing distrust towards the political class, cynicism towards the system, and widespread feelings of disempowerment. Many citizens feel that the political parties offer no real options. Structurally, the margins of manoeuvrability for nation states have been shrinking in the face of global corporate power. At the same time, neoliberalism has led to an increased accumulation of democratically unaccountable power; there is a feeling that there is less and less left to vote about.1 Traditional PIs have operated on the premise that they can reach informed audiences who will pay attention to them, that they can impact on public opinion, and that citizens’ demands can be mediated into the political decision-making process. Moreover, PIs have banked on a degree of optimism and commitment on the part of citizens. As these expectations begin to wane, the basic raison d’être of PIs becomes less self-evident. However, our narrative about democracy also contains a more uplifting turn: if many citizens have become disenchanted with established electoral politics, we have seen over the past two decades an impressive increase in extraparliamentarian politics, a political landscape characterized by a heterogeneous array of social movements, network activists, single-issue groups, grassroots organizations, and instances of the spontaneous ‘outbursts’ of democracy at all levels: local, national, regional, and global (the Occupy Wall Street movement, for example, began locally in New York City, went national and then international). These initiatives are largely reformist, not revolutionary, and they are generally not guided by the ideological legacies of the nineteenth century. Many citizens are ‘doing’ democracy in new ways, finding new modes of commitment, and in some cases redefining what constitutes politics, by focusing on new kinds of issues, particularly in the realm of personal and private matters such as gender identity and sexual preferences. The realm of politics is transmuting; many citizens, alongside – or instead of – traditional politics are also exploring ‘life-’, ‘identity-’, and ‘cultural’ politics. This ferment of alternative politics is heavily dependent on the Internet; in fact the digital media have become both the major sites as well as the tools for such politics. There have been many fanciful predictions throughout history about what new technologies can do for us, and the Internet is no exception. We should be clear that the Internet will not ‘save’ democracy – the dilemmas of democracy are not fundamentally about keyboards or mobile phones. Indeed, centres of political and economic power can and do use such technologies for anti-democratic purposes, as Morozov (2011) cogently argues. Moreover, most people do not use the Internet for political purposes most of the time, and the Internet per se does not recruit people to politics. Media culture addresses us largely as consumers rather than as citizens. Nonetheless, the Internet is altering how democracy is done in a variety of ways, and the fact that it can be so readily appropriated for civic purposes is 1  There is of course a vast literature documenting these developments; for an overview see Dahlgren (2009).

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of central importance. Amid this turbulence, we find new opportunities for civic participation as well as new horizons for PIs. Citizens, PIs and the Media Landscape Mediated Citizenship All of the late modern socio-cultural developments that I refer to above, such as the modes of anti-rationality and the problematics of truth and progress, find ample expression in both the older mass media and the newer online media (a conceptual distinction that becomes increasingly difficult to maintain as the processes of convergence continue to integrate the two realms). The media in a sense recapitulate these dilemmas on a daily basis, while they at the same time have become a prime condition for political life. Particularly with affordable and accessible Web 2.0 technology, the Internet can be utilized by citizens to communicate with each other individually or in groups/ networks. Even social media such as Facebook and LinkedIn have proven to be very useful for when people have felt politically motivated to engage in debate, to mobilize and to organize for political purposes (Loader and Mercea 2012). And within the online mainstream media, discussion forums for the expression of opinion have flourished. The Internet has become a central institution of the public sphere; for those citizens who are in fact focused on news and discussion of politics, the possibilities are truly impressive. What these developments imply is the intensification of what can be termed mediated citizenship, where civic activities and skills increasingly centre on the media. While this began under the regime of the older mass media, today there is an ever-expanding repertoire of creative, civic communicative practices that is enriching the character of democracy and engaging many citizens in politics of all kinds. Most fundamentally, in regard to media, citizens are no longer just positioned as audiences, but can be active participants, ‘produsers‘, as it is sometimes called. This can become empowering, both in subjective and objective terms, especially as citizens generate networks, mini-public spheres, social movements, and engage in mobilizations. We should keep in mind that the numbers here at present may not yet be enough to counter the larger political disenchantment among the citizens of Western democracies, but political philosophers will remind us that innovation within democracies has usually been carried by a small number of very active citizens, with larger circles of ‘informed citizens’ gradually following along. The character of online public life is quite different from the one shaped by the older mass media, not least in regard to the status of ‘knowledge’ and longer texts, as I noted above, but also in terms of its sprawling, unstructured, ephemeral character. Summarizing the attributes of the new media landscape, Lievrouw writes: ‘Media culture in the digital age has become more personal, skeptical, ironic,

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perishable, idiosyncratic, collaborative, and almost inconceivably diversified, even as established institutions seek to maintain their grip on stable messages and audiences and to extend their business models online.’ (2010: 214) We see in this new online environment a reshaping of key contingencies for PIs. Media Structures: Books and Journalism As Lievrouw suggests in the above quote, in this sea of change, media institutions are generally scrambling to find a suitable economic model for their activities. The case of the book industry and book culture no doubt has particular relevance for PIs (see Thompson 2005 and 2010 for recent analyses of this media domain). We are witnessing a pluralization of selling platforms for books, with the growth of bookstore chains, supermarkets and department stores, and especially online suppliers like Amazon. Among publishers, the pattern is towards buyouts of smaller companies and consolidation of the larger ones – a part of the overall turbo-logic of contemporary capitalism. The intensified economic pressures for short-term profits lead to strategies aimed at launching bestsellers; this tends to reduce the likelihood of intellectual books aimed at smaller audiences being published, a discouraging development for PIs. However, the technological changes also provide new options. Pasquali (2011) argues that digitalization is impacting on the infrastructure of publishing, the social practices of reading, as well as on the ‘status’ of the book, and not least the relationship between authors and readers. The enhanced possibilities for dialogue between authors and readers, and collaborative writing environments, promote new, participatory forms of online writing. Authors might well reach an audience of a few thousand online readers and may therefore wonder if a traditional publisher can offer a better deal. Finally, the act of reading, as it evolves more and more into an electronic activity, becomes integrated into a broader array of cultural consumption spread over a variety of media platforms. The reader takes on a simultaneous status as a technology ‘user’, a ‘consumer’ and member of a ‘media audience’. In this makeover of the culture of books, and print generally, the playing field for PIs becomes modified in ways that can be promising for those who are willing and able to adapt to the new environment. There are no doubt nostalgic voices that (rightly) point to what is lost in this transition, but these circumstances signal various transformations of PIs, not their disappearance. If we look at another key domain of PIs on the media landscape, namely journalism, much of the development in the last two decades or so has served to further erode traditional news values, while audiences for journalism are both declining and fragmenting into more specialized niches. Among the Western democracies, this ‘crisis of journalism’ has probably gone furthest in the US as reflected in the annual reports State of the News Media 2012, now in its ninth year, from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. For our purposes we can note that journalism was quick to move onto the Internet in the 1990s and today we see this in many forms. Mainstream journalism institutions

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have been adjusting themselves to life online, with, amongst other things, their 24/7 schedules and uncertain financial models; they are also eliciting assistance from citizens (‘Are you at the scene of the riots? Send us your material!’), as well as making use of social media. There are also a variety of sites that blend news, commentary, group advocacy, and discussion forums, making journalism more de-centered, collaborative and participatory. What is called ‘opinion journalism’ has blossomed, spurred on in particular by the increased deployment of journalistic modes for advocacy purposes. At the same time we see many versions of citizen, amateur, or alternative journalism taking root (Papacharissi 2009, Rosenberry and St. John 2010), including full-blown alternative news networks (for example, Indymedia). This mix naturally gives rise to issues: the boundary between journalism and non-journalism becomes all the more blurred, and within this heterogeneity, as the import of traditional professional values recedes, we also see a decline in the controls for veracity, accuracy, balance, transparency and accountability, even if critics may rightly claim that these attributes have always been somewhat deficient. PR and news releases from special interest organizations may at times be disguised as news, while the broadened ideological terrain has also come to include hate groups and other anti-democratic actors. Yet overall, these developments are encouraging and have been embraced by a variety of pro-democracy theorists (Castells 2010, Benkler 2006). While the evolving online book industry clearly holds out potential for new initiatives by PIs, it is the growing field between traditional journalism and advocacy that offers a new setting for their activities. This most often takes the form of a blog. The Blogosphere as Public Sphere As noted above, there are a variety of tools and platforms being used by citizens in their online participation in democracy. Along with social media platforms and discussion sites, even the by now somewhat old-fashioned email send-lists are still used with great effect: a single individual can simply send out his or her own texts, and/or link to other texts, to a specific list of people, each of whom can respond to all others with comments and discussion. Effective for a small network, this mode becomes unwieldy beyond a list of a few dozen participants, and it is here that the tools for blogging, which began to become widely available about a decade ago, quickly showed their superiority for individuals who want to reach large numbers with their written thoughts (Rettberg 2008, Davis 2009). Bloggers disseminate content to express opinions, to share thoughts with others, to keep up to date on developments, to interact, create relationships and to feel connected (Kjellberg 2010). Most blogs are not political but rather based on social, business, personal, or identity themes. One recent study (Caslon Analytics 2011) found that less than 16 per cent of US blogs had any connection with news or politics; the same source suggests that the reading of political blogs is not extensive among general the public. Yet, we can still point to a robust political

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blogosphere, and for PIs it seems clear that blogging is becoming a dominant mode of expression in the new media landscape, supplemented by use of other platforms. From another direction we could also say that among all the people involved in blogging, a substantial number are PIs, even if many of them differ in some ways from the traditional PIs of the mass media era. Obviously not all who engage in the wide array of possible political communication should be deemed PIs. This raises the fundamental issue of what the concept of PI means in the contemporary media landscape. From Public to Civic Intellectuals Traditional PIs: Digitally Enhanced in the New Media Age We have seen that traditional PIs can be generalists or specialists, and if specialists, be associated with the humanities, social sciences or natural/technical sciences. They can have varying degrees of proximity to power, have a more national or a more cosmopolitan profile and differ in their degree of institutional anchoring. In today’s world they face competition from journalists, but also from PR-people, spin-doctors and marketeers of various kinds. Further, in recent decades, both the legacy of the Enlightenment as well as the character of democracy have become more problematic, rendering the role of PIs, and the faith in reason and progress that underlies their activities, less self-evident. Yet, what happens as we advance further into the Internet society? To begin with, much of the above remains the same. PIs are boosted by the web: online newspapers and major news organizations line CNN, BBC and Al-Jazeera all have bloggers, who function much like the commentators of the printed press, and among their ranks we also find PIs. The issue of deciding who is and is not a PI, even in this new setting, always remains problematic: many are journalists and established ‘pundits’, but some are academics or experts in a special area. Some bloggers appear regularly, others are very occasional. Less traditional news outfits like The Huffington Post aggregate many other blogging sites, offering high visibility to the connected bloggers, including many PIs. Such sites have become the home of a digitally enhanced, updated version of the traditional and prominent PI. Their texts are distributed by established media organizations, giving them both status and visibility. Usually the permanent bloggers are listed on the right of the page, with some websites even providing a photo, giving a certain ‘star’ quality to the blogger. The web ecology facilitates updates, hyperlinks, archiving, and even some interactivity: most such posts allow for the possibility of comments. It is rare, however, that a blogging PI in this situation will answer comments; usually that task is reserved for another blogging PI, and then only on the rather rare occasions that a debate emerges. One can also see a change in temporality: many contributions are posted quite quickly after a dramatic event or development, facilitated by the ease of the technology.

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Intellectuals with Web Roots Beyond what are largely Internet-equivalents of traditional mass-mediated PIs, however, we find some other developments. For one thing, many people, mostly without elite status, launch their own blogs, on their own sites; if we were to sift through these bloggers we would find many that qualify as PIs even if it gets ever more challenging to distinguish PIs from non-PIs, as is the case with journalists. Today we can see a new generation of PIs emerging who differ from traditional PIs in two basic ways, namely their adept use of the opportunities offered by the new media and their status as ‘intellectuals’. Contemporary PIs whose intellectual formation has been strongly shaped by digital media and who thus have late-modern ‘web roots’ – generally the younger generation – engage in a variety of media practices. They use the multimedia opportunities in more technically creative ways, with audiovisual productions of various kinds and even remixing materials from other mainstream or alternative sources. The multimedia angle prompts a comparison with politically oriented documentary film makers: it could be argued that people like Michael Moore, Errol Morris, D.A. Pennebaker and Emile de Antonio are PIs, though generally the definition has not included media activities beyond the written and spoken word. Yet, ideas can be expressed in other ways than the classic, linear text and its particular mode of cognitive activity. As the customary platforms and audiences for PIs recede, people are discovering and inventing new modes in which one can be intellectual on the Internet. This is a historically exciting development, even if the challenge of maintaining standards and criteria of evaluation, of identifying the spurious, and so forth, becomes even more difficult in this online context. We must also accept that there will be less of a consensus on these matters than in the past, given the strong strand of relativism in late-modern culture. If ‘truth’ cannot be guaranteed by any one voice, we will have to hope that the collaborative, participatory, interactive, interventional environment of the Internet will at least promote a sense of the open and provisional. This perspective is no less true of journalism, as many citizens have come to engage in journalistic activities (Tunney and Monaghan 2010). At bottom, not just PIs, but all of us as citizens are becoming increasingly dependent on the Internet – and on our Internet skills – for both our knowledge and for the development of our critical thinking. Most PIs who operate online use the basic blog, however, and this retains the classical form of a text. Even if blogs tend to be shorter than their traditional print equivalents, they still offer analyses and develop arguments. Some PIs might also use Twitter; the arrival of the terse tweet format of 140 signs as an established standard for communication in the public sphere no doubt marks a new – and controversial – phase in the history of political communication. Generally speaking, traditional PIs have had to – and still must – go through various filters of quality control in order to gain access to a public. This has been integral to their status; they have not been ‘just anybody’. Today, just about

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anybody can in fact put materials out online. While it is a democratic principle that everyone has the right to engage themselves politically in the public sphere, editorial selection processes for access to the limited channels of the past have put restrictions on whose voice will be mediated. This has radically changed with the Internet; indeed, its accessibility and openness to free speech give credence to the claims about its democratic character. Thus, an important mechanism of the new media environment is precisely the ease of entry; many are drawn to participate via political blogs, resulting in a larger, broader, and more diverse range of voices. Some citizens are obviously more intellectual, articulate, and imaginative than others in their political communication; they tend to gain recognition for this within their circles and networks. They gain audiences, become opinion leaders of some kind (though it goes without saying that having an intellectual voice does not automatically ensure that one attracts an audience). For those who do not attract an audience at once, the Internet can be seen as an important training ground, where one can gain experience and hone one’s craft. Whether or not society benefits from ‘lowering the standards’ and from allowing more people to engage in whatever project is at hand, or whether it would be better off letting the experts stay in charge is an old debate currently being replayed in the age of the Internet. Thus, some today are horrified by the web-based onslaught of amateurs (Keen 2006), while others claim that it is precisely the ‘wisdom of crowds’ and the participatory ‘wiki-logics’ that we should support (Surowiecki 2004, Tapscott and Williams 2006). The debate promises to be a long one. Towards Civic Intellectuals While there is a layer of elite bloggers, many of whom have strong connections with political and economic centres of power, or with major media organizations, there also exists a vast and disparate array of bloggers beyond this. They are in fact not always so disparate: while many individuals have their own personal sites, there are many umbrella sites that aggregate blogs according to themes, providing each with enhanced visibility. Further, though we find many bloggers on advocacy and discussion websites, among them are no doubt many whom we would classify as PIs, even allowing for the newer modes of multimedia and/or compressed textual expression. These are people with developed civic identities who are immersed in political issues. Though usually lacking the elite status of bloggers in the major media, they are contributing to the expansion of the intellectual character of the public sphere. To distinguish them from traditional PIs and taking into account the contingencies of late modernity and its media landscape, I propose that we call them ‘civic intellectuals’. This term seeks to signal the continued importance of intellectual activity for democracy, but involves a shift away from the more distinct and renowned figures we associate with the term PI and the print-based public sphere. Instead, the concept of civic intellectual emphasizes the origins of politically motivated intellectual communication in the broad and diversified tapestry of politically

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committed citizens. Civic intellectuals are generally less ‘grand’ than traditional PIs, though some may attain an equivalent stature. They are no less public than traditional PIs, though I would imagine that many are less self-conscious about their intellectual profiles. They are less likely to reach extensive audiences than traditional PIs; online public spheres are generally smaller and more fragmented than was the case during the reign of mass media. On the other hand, they are more likely to have more interaction with those who read their texts. Civic intellectuals are thus a larger, more diffuse social category than traditional PIs; there are, by definition, more of them. Their intellectual modes can and do vary greatly. They are largely an online phenomenon (though in principle civic intellectuals could make use of the older mass media). They are probably mostly generalists, but certainly we can find many civic intellectuals who build upon their specialized knowledge (for example, environmental activists with ecological expertise); certainly some among them are also specialists in digital technologies. Most speak to, but not with, the centres of power. In particular, I would assume that there is a growing number of cosmopolitan civic intellectuals, as alternative politics increasingly deals with issues that cross national borders, and as transnational public spheres, albeit frail and vulnerable, continue to develop. No doubt members of diasporic populations are also found among the ranks of cosmopolitan civic intellectuals. The institutional anchoring of civic intellectuals is at least as broad as that of traditional PIs, probably broader. Many are based in universities, some are ‘bohemian’ independents, while many others are associated with NGOs and various social movements. Still others are associated with formalized political groups. As with traditional PIs, we must allow for grey areas where civic intellectuals blur into pundits, entrepreneurs, and others. Civic intellectuals engaging with politics face a rather different set of contingencies than those confronted by traditional PIs. As I have indicated, the socio-cultural contours of late modernity, the dilemmas of democracy, and the character of the media landscape all combine into daunting circumstances to be navigated. In this sense, the notion of civic intellectual is emblematic of how the dynamics of democracy are evolving in the face of very difficult historical circumstances. Thus, we should not see civic intellectuals as some new force that will lead democracy forward to a new golden age, but as a potentially positive step in the chronicles of civic commitment and the evolution of the public sphere. References Baym, N.K. 2010. Personal Connections in the Digital Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, U. 2009. World at Risk. Cambridge: Polity Press. Benkler, Y. 2006. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Borg, C. and Mayo, P. (eds) 2007. Public Intellectuals, Radical Democracy and Social Movements: A Book of Interviews. New York: Peter Lang. Caslon Analytics (2011). Blog Statistics and Demographics. [Online]. Available at: www.caslon.com.au/weblogprofile1.htm#many [accessed: 26 November 2012]. Castells, M. 2010. Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coleman, S. and Ross, K. 2010. The Media and the Public. Oxford: WileyBlackwell. Dahlgren, P. 2009. Media and Political Engagement: Citizens, Communication and Democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Davis, R. 2009. Typing Politics: The Role of Blogs in American Politics. New York: Oxford University Press. Etzioni, A. 2006. Are public intellectuals an endangered species?, in Public Intellectuals: An Endangered Species?, edited by A. Etzioni and A. Bowditch. Lanham, MD and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 1–27. Etzioni, A. and Bowditch, A. (eds) 2006. Public Intellectuals: An Endangered Species? Lanham, MD and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield. Garnham, N. 1995. The media and narratives of the intellectual. Media. Culture & Society, 17(3): 359–84. Habermas, J. 1985. The Theory of Communicative Rationality (2 Vols.). Boston: Beacon Press. Jacoby, R. 1987. The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe. New York: Basic Books. Jacoby, S. 2008. The Age of American Unreason. New York: Pantheon. Joffe, J. 2003. The decline of the public intellectual and the rise of the pundit, in The Public Intellectual: Between Philosophy and Politics, edited by A.M. Melzer, J. Weinberger and M.R. Zinman. Lanham, MD and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 109–22. Keen, A. 2008. The Cult of the Amateur. New York: Doubleday. Kjellgren, S. 2010. I am a blogging researcher: motivations for blogging in a scholarly context. First Monday [Online], 15(8), August. Available at: http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/issue/view/317 [accessed: 18 August 2012]. Le pouvoir intellectuel. 2010. Le Nouvel Observateur, 2376 (20–26 May): 16–28. Lievrouw, L.A. 2011. Alternative and Activist New Media. Cambridge: Polity Press. Loader, B. and Mercea, D. (eds) 2012. Social Media and Democracy. Abingdon: Routledge. Melzer, A.M., Jerry, W. and Zinman, M.R. (eds) 2003. The Public Intellectual: Between Philosophy and Politics. Lanham, MD and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield. Michael, J. 2000. Anxious Intellectuals: Academic Professionals, Public Intellectuals, and Enlightenment Values. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.

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Morozov, E. 2011. The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World. London: Allen Lane. Myhre, J.E. (ed.) 2008. Intellectuals in the Public Sphere in Britain and Norway after World War II. Trondheim: Akademika Publishing. Papacharissi, Z. (ed.) 2009. Journalism and Citizenship. London: Routledge. Pasquali, F. 2011. Participating audiences, authorship and the digitalization of the publishing industry. CM: Communication Management Quarterly, (21): 203–19. Posner, R.A. 2003. Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rettberg, J. 2008. Blogging. Cambridge: Polity Press. Rimbert, P. 2011. La pensée critique dans l’enclos universitaire: Enquête sur les intellectuels contestaires. Le Monde Diplomatique, 682, 1 (January). Rosenberry, J. and St. John III, B. (eds) 2010. Public Journalism 2.0: The Promise and Reality of a Citizen-Engaged Press. London: Routledge. Small, H. 2002. The Public Intellectual. Oxford: Blackwell. The State of the News Media 2012 (2012). The Pew Research Center’s project for excellence in journalism, ninth annual report. [Online]. Available at: http:// stateofthemedia.org [accessed: 18 August 2012]. Surowiecki, J. 2004. The Wisdom of Crowds. New York: Anchor Books. Tapscott, D. and Williams, A.D. 2006. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. New York: Portfolio (Penguin). Thompson, J.B. 2005. Books in the Digital Age. The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States. Cambridge: Polity Press. Thompson, J.B. 2010. Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Polity Press. Tunney, S. and Garrett Monaghan, G. (eds) 2010. Web Journalism: A New Form of Citizenship? Brighton: Sussex Academic Press.

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PART II The Internet and the Public Intellectual

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Chapter 4

Intellectuals, the Public Sphere and Dissemination Strategies France Aubin

Introduction The doctoral thesis that inspired this chapter looked at strategies used by intellectuals who had criticized globalization1. The overall assumption was that intellectuals ought to be challenged by the new global order being proposed, that they could not remain silent about what had been happening since the end of the Cold War and needed to offer their interpretation of what Fukuyama called ‘The End of History’. Since intellectuals are sometimes presented as people who can define the (political) situation (Fortin 1993), it was therefore legitimate to ask how they perceived the 1990s and how they read the general discourse concerning the ‘New Global Order’. The 1990s were important because of the adoption of trade agreements which turned GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) into a permanent WTO (World Trade Organization), creating a world in which nationstates were no longer the sole legitimate political actors, and which paved the way for a globalized free market. The organizational, discursive and dissemination strategies of some 20 intellectuals from Québec, France and Belgium during the period 1994–2005 were studied. In this chapter, only dissemination strategies are discussed. Some controversial but necessary terms are first referred to (Section 2), such as ‘intellectual’, ‘commitment’ and ‘public sphere’. Then, the elements that have been examined are studied in order to document the dissemination strategies of intellectuals (Section 3). In conclusion, the predominance of the public is outlined.

1  The results were presented in my Ph.D. thesis La ‘nouvelle résistance’: les stratégies de publicisation déployées par des intellectuels critiques de la globalisation: 1994–2005. [The New Resistance: Strategies Exhibited by Intellectuals Critical of Globalization: 1994–2005.]

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Conceptual Framework The Intellectual and Commitment (‘Engagement’) Although there is no consensual definition of the term ‘intellectual’, it is generally agreed that intellectuals should participate in the formation of public opinion.2 Whether they are researchers, journalists, writers or artists, intellectuals must speak in the public sphere. They speak on behalf of a cause that is rooted in their conception of the common good. Their position is explicitly ideological. Their commitment or engagement is to publicly express their views. In French the epithet engagé is used to refer to intellectuals because they put their reputation on the line, as in the Dreyfus Affair where intellectuals were opposed to the state.3 English uses the term public intellectual because intellectuals speak out on social or political issues that affect the (political) public. In brief, an intellectual is a person with some legitimacy who comes out publicly for social or political issues, putting at risk his/her legitimacy with an explicit ideological point of view. There are many reasons for intellectuals to go public. The transition from an international political system resting on a fragile balance of power to a system of global governance led by the free market, the apparent impasse of the Copenhagen and Cancun summits on environmental issues, the recent crisis of capitalism and the Arab Spring, which exposed the double standards of liberal democracies, are among the numerous factors challenging intellectuals to make statements in the public sphere. However, it is true that this might be risky, due to the poor symbolic capital left to intellectuals after a series of disenchantments (Hourmant 1997). There are several reasons for this poor symbolic capital or the discrediting of intellectuals in public opinion, beginning with their absence, which is often misconstrued as silence. Russell Jacoby (1987) showed that intellectuals who once earned their living as journalists now have careers in colleges and universities. Their career transitions have been accompanied by specialization, driven by knowledge development and the needs expressed by both the state and the business world. According to Jacoby, intellectuals stopped talking to the public and then stopped being able to do so. The mode according to which they were recognized changed as the intellectual field gained autonomy, confining those intellectuals who work as scholars to seek their legitimacy within academia rather than with the public or the politicians with whom they were able to debate in the past (Fortin 1993). The circle of peers capable of assessing their work decreased due to increasing specialization so that the legitimacy of intellectuals eventually came to be associated with their capacity as researchers to obtain research grants, a self-reproducing capacity in a circle getting smaller and smaller. With specialization, it also became more difficult for intellectuals who were scholars to analyse political issues requiring 2  In my dissertation, I examine different definitions of the term intellectual, derived from Bourdieu, Ory, and Sirinelli. 3  About the history of Intellectuals and the Dreyfus Affair see Charle (1990: 272).

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the production and use of fundamental knowledge and interdisciplinary studies, far from the specialization practices advocated in academia. The discourse of universities emphasizing the need to increase their share of income by hiring the ‘best researchers’, in other words, the most specialized experts, was not a good omen in this regard. The media also contribute to the absence of intellectuals. The media tend to request interviews from the same intellectuals, mainly ‘experts’, asking them technical rather than political questions. Moreover, they interview intellectuals that are not very critical of government. For the conglomerates who own the media, information is seen as a merchandise rather than a common good (Gingras 1999) so that the information produced by experts will do just fine. The extensive triumph of capitalism that has been taken for granted has led to the devaluation of any alternative discourse from intellectuals who are in a position to offer other interpretations of history. The insufficient training of journalists as mediators to address complex issues makes it more difficult for them to work with intellectuals who could help explain the challenges of globalization. Also worth mentioning is the format of the news itself, as it isolates the economy from human rights, often presented in the brief section devoted to foreign news – as if there was no link between them. These are some of the reasons that limit media access to the intellectuals who want to criticize the new global order Politicians are also to blame for the absence of intellectuals. In addition to extreme measures, such as the political repression of dissident intellectuals that has plagued many countries, restrictions on the public’s right to know are imposed in the name of the war against terrorism, condemning to silence experts working for the state, not to mention journalists. Research funding also shows a strong imbalance in favour of those research laboratories that are ‘in line’ with the ongoing globalization of economies (Charle 1999, Noreau 2005). Finally, one might think that some intellectuals who are critical of the established order (or the order being established) still suffer from l’effet Soljénitsyne4 and dare not speak publicly on complex issues for fear of being wrong, as was the case with Sartre who in his time was one of the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century, and is now mostly regarded as the one who misinterpreted history. I once did believe in the silence – or death, or end – of intellectuals. For some time in the late 1980s, I was under the impression that we were facing such a huge crisis of meaning (crise du sens5) that ‘History’ had stalled, at least the history of intellectuals. A crisis of intelligibility so dramatic that it seemed no one would even try to understand how the world was to continue after 1989. The disappearance of the late great dichotomies that shaped our Weltanschauung – East versus West, civil 4  ‘L’effet Soljénitsyne’ refers to the crisis of Communist ideology in the 1970s caused by the public revelations of Solzhenitsyn in France. By extension, it also refers to the crisis of the figure of the maître à penser. 5  Difficult to translate literally, crise du sens refers both to a crisis of meaning/ signification and a crisis of direction/project/orientation.

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and political rights versus economic and social rights, socialism versus capitalism, left versus right – seemed to have created a vacuum effect and put an end to major debates. I realize now it was not so. Despite the shock, alternative think tanks such as the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (Canada, 1980), the Council of Canadians (Canada, 1985), the Groupe de recherche sur l’intégration continentale (Québec, 1988), the Lisbon Group (International, 1992), the International Forum on Globalization (International, 1995), the Polaris Institute (Canada, 1997), la Fondation Copernic (1998) and Raisons d’Agir (France, 1995) were formed at the time that I thought that critical intellectuals6 had disappeared. Nonetheless, their lack of visibility caused them to lose the battle for public opinion more than once. In Le décembre des intellectuels français (Duval et al. 1998), published to shed light on the involvement of intellectuals in the French social movement of 1995, some of them realized that it was not enough to acquire a broad scholarly reputation in order to be heard in the media; indeed, they noted an inverse relationship between media reputation and scholarly reputation.7 The fact remains that intellectuals must be heard in public if they want to participate in the shaping of public opinion and to have a chance to influence the course of events. What strategies are needed to fight the ideological battle? ‘How to win the war of ideas?’, (George 1997). Various elements can be examined to answer the question posed by Susan George. As indicated, I shall discuss the dissemination strategies selected by intellectuals to occupy the public sphere in order to debate what they consider the common good. But before addressing the work of intellectuals, it is necessary to take a closer look at the public sphere they intend to occupy. Public Space and Public Sphere (‘L’espace public’) In French, the concept of espace public encompasses two aspects: one, a social space, a physical location, likely to produce social ties linked to the idea of people gathering, and two, a set of procedures involved in the formation of public debate. English researchers refer to the first as ‘public space’ and to the second as ‘public sphere’ while in French the distinction is not as clear-cut. Research on the public space as source of social ties may be about the street, architecture, or playgrounds while research on the public sphere for collective deliberation can be about governance issues, civil society and public opinion. One can also combine both meanings, as in the case of the liberal model of the bourgeois public sphere, which Habermas examined in his book published in 1962. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, which has served and continues to serve as a conceptual reference, rational discussion on the common good leading to a consensus (public sphere) takes place face to face in public or semi-public places (public space), such as literary salons and cafés. Reading, the comment sections 6  About intellectuals and critique, see Pelletier (1997) and Discepolo et al. (2009). 7  In French, I use the terms: notoriété médiatique and notoriété scientifique. For a more detailed description of different species of symbolic capital, see Bourdieu (1984).

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of newspapers in particular, also contributes to the shaping of public opinion as an element that can serve public discussion. More recently researchers, such as Bernard Miège or Dominique Wolton, developed a conceptualization whereby the various functions are either integrated, as for Miège, or clearly separated, as for Wolton. For Miège, for example, an espace public is not limited to the political debate (politics) but includes all structures as well as social and cultural mediation (1997: 172). Wolton (online) insists on distinguishing between espace commun (common space), espace politique (political sphere) and espace public (public sphere). What I am primarily interested in are the arrangements surrounding the production of public opinion (public sphere), that is, the institutionalized arena of discursive interaction (Fraser 1990). I shall now focus on the fragmentation of the public sphere and the distinction between a deliberative and a decision-making public. The Fragmentation of the Public Sphere Like Habermas, many authors have noted the fragmentation of the public sphere. As succinctly expressed by Dahlgren ‘The term ‘public sphere’ is most often used in the singular form, but sociological realism points to the plural’ (2005: 148). For Bernard Miège (1995), as mentioned before, one should avoid reducing the public sphere to its political component: the public sphere perpetuates itself while expanding its bases for intervention and fragmentation. Concerned about the disappearance of the public sphere (rather than its fragmentation), Marc Raboy believes that the media ‘as social institutions, have become a key component of the public sphere in which the democratic life evolves’ (1991: 184) and consequently, the public sphere must be protected by regulatory policy to promote the emergence of a truly democratic public sphere. In the context of globalization though, this implies not only the necessity to get involved in the national political public sphere (filing of pleadings, representations to the public authority that regulates broadcasting) but also to demand that the issues of privatization and the concentration of media ownership be on the international agenda. According to Fraser (1990: 61), the public sphere has always been fragmented: Not only were there always a plurality of competing publics but the relations between bourgeois publics and other publics were always conflictual. Virtually from the beginning, counterpublics contested the exclusionary norms of the bourgeois public, elaborating alternative styles of political behaviour and alternative norms of public speech. Bourgeois publics, in turn, excoriated these alternatives and deliberately sought to block broader participation.

In stratified societies, subaltern publics have a dual nature: ‘On the one hand, they function as spaces of withdrawal and regroupment; on the other hand, they also function as bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed toward wider publics’ (Fraser 1990: 68).

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Like Fraser and Miège, John Keane (1995: 8) believes the design of a single public sphere should be abandoned, but unlike the others, he also gives up the idea of a public sphere that is territorially bounded: ‘The ideal of a unified public sphere and its corresponding vision of a territorially bounded republic of citizens striving to live up to their definition of the public good are obsolete.’ For Keane (1995: 8), contemporary public life is now part of re-feudalization, not in the sense of Habermas in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, but in that of the ‘development of a complex mosaic of differently sized, overlapping, and interconnected public spheres that force us radically to revise our understanding of public life and its “partner” terms such a public opinion, the public good, and the public/private distinction’. He believes that the public sphere does not need to have a representative size or defined duration – essential criteria in the thinking of Habermas. Removing the focus of researchers on media, Keane defines the public sphere as follows: A public sphere is a particular type of spatial relationship between two or more people, usually connected by a certain means of communication (television, radio, satellite, fax, telephone, etc.), in which non-violent controversies erupt, for a brief moment or more extended period of time, concerning the power relations operating within their given milieu of interaction and/or within the wider milieux of social and political structures within which the disputants are situated. (1995: 8)

He suggests however, distinguishing between micro (sub-national), meso (national) and macro (global) public spheres. Today the idea of a global public sphere is beginning to gain ground, and some researchers, including Fraser (2009) and Dahlgren (2005), are focusing on the role that the Internet, transnational social movements, and major international meetings like the World Social Forum (WSF) could play. While some authors have adopted toward the Internet an enthusiasm that is reminiscent of the euphoria of technological determinism that often accompanies the emergence of a new technology, Raboy, Gingras and Eric George are cautious ‘nothing is definitely played in NICT’ (Gingras 1999: 223). Eric George (2003) identifies three barriers relativizing the creation of a truly international and even global public sphere out of the Internet: the inequality of access, linguistic diversity and the diversity of experiences. These barriers jeopardize both the public space, considered by Miège as a producer of social ties, and the public sphere ‘a theater in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk’ according to Fraser (1990: 57). Furthermore, if the public sphere is fragmented and delocalized, what role can an intellectual be induced to play? Is it possible for new figures, or new networks of supranational public intellectuals, to emerge that would act as intermediaries between all those publics, or as regional representatives adapting to the contour of the territorial redeployment of globalization? Can there be intellectuals that would be involved in ‘a comprehensive public sphere’ (Fraser 1990)?

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Weak and Strong Publics In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere Habermas called for a sharp separation of civil society and the state, and considered that this separation had not been maintained because the state had appropriated the functions of economic regulation and public management (administration) once reserved for civil society. In Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962) and L’espace public, 30 ans après (1992), Habermas does not seem to use the expression ‘civil society’ in the same sense. Borrowing from Calhoun (1993), I would say that in the 1962 book, civil society referred to Hegel’s conception, one that is self-organizing and economic, while the article published 30 years later refers to the Anglo-Saxon and French conceptions: social relations established by autonomous agents that are not associated with the state. Habermas emphasizes the impossibility of finding a definition of civil society but lists the following elements: The institutional core of civil society is constituted by these voluntary groupings outside the spheres of state and economy, which include, just to name a few, churches, associations and cultural circles, independent media, sporting and recreational associations, debating clubs, forums and civic initiatives, professional organizations, political parties, unions and alternative institutions.8 (Habermas 1992: 185)

Calhoun and Fraser also reflect on the concept of civil society as a network of associations. Fraser (1990: 74) speaks of a ‘nexus of nongovernmental or ‘secondary’ associations that are neither economic nor administrative’. In fact, civil society defined by Calhoun, Fraser and Habermas is based on what it is not: it is outside the economy and outside the state. Calhoun is concerned about the semantic vagueness surrounding the notions of civil society and public sphere. One must be careful not to isolate the public sphere (a type of political participation and discourse) from its corresponding civil society (a type of social organization): ‘I will argue that we need to exercise care not to wrench the concept from its theoretical context and especially not to sever it from the notion of civil society or to collapse one into the other’ (Calhoun 1993: 269). To address the separation of civil society and state, Fraser distinguishes between different publics. Civil society separated from the state is a weak public: ‘publics whose deliberative practice consists exclusively in opinion-formation and does not also encompass decision-making’ (Fraser 1990: 75). The model of 8  ‘Le noyau institutionnel de la société civile est constitué par ces regroupements volontaires hors des sphères de l’État et de l’économie, qui vont, pour n’en citer que quelques exemples, des églises, des associations et des cercles culturels, en passant par des médias indépendants, des associations sportives et de loisirs, des clubs de débat, des forums et des initiatives civiques, jusqu’aux organisations professionnelles, aux partis politiques, aux syndicats et aux institutions alternatives.’

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the bourgeois public sphere theorized by Habermas assumed that by depriving its members of decision-making powers, it ensured the maintenance of a critical function. Parliamentary sovereignty is a strong public, since it straddles two functions (opinion and decision), thus blurring the separation between civil society and state. However, Fraser considers that this development represents progress compared to previous democratic political systems: ‘This is because, as the terms ‘strong public’ and ‘weak public’ suggest, the ‘force of public opinion’ is strengthened when a body representing it is empowered to translate such ‘opinion’ into authoritative decisions’ (Fraser 1990: 75). But civil society as a whole cannot be confused with the parliamentary system, which, in turn cannot itself be confused with the state since not all members of Parliament exercise power. As Fraser points out, some important questions remain unanswered ‘about the relationship between parliamentary strong publics and the weak publics to which they are supposed to be accountable’ (Fraser 1990: 75). Within civil society, or close to it, intellectuals occupy a role difficult to define. Those who chose to criticize the new global order refuse to be designated as mentors or ‘leaders’ of the global justice movement and their specific contribution remains unclear. The declaration by 19 intellectuals produced after the WSF 2005 and known as the Consensus of Porto Alegre, suggests a major strategic shift since the first edition of the WSF in which the emphasis was placed on the origin and spontaneous nature of the popular movement. Riccardo Petrella, who was among the 19 intellectuals who signed the declaration in 2005, had insisted in 2001 that Porto Alegre was not a movement of intellectuals. This shift can be seen as a part of the general tension between the tendency to favour the spirit of the WSF, as found in its charter and embodying the weak public status that is, dedicated solely to deliberation) and the trend promoted especially by the Honorary President of ATTAC, France, Cassen in Le Monde Diplomatique, who called for a shift towards a strong public: ‘Rethinking the ‘format’ of social forums, taking political action’ (2004).9 In other words, this suggests moving from a weak to a strong public. Dissemination Strategies In my doctoral dissertation, I examined the strategies used by 20 intellectuals10 chosen according to criteria derived from the definitions of ‘intellectual’ reviewed above in the section entitled The Intellectual and Commitment (engagement) and who had all taken a stand against globalization (Aubin 2005). Since the 9  ‘Repenser le « format » des forums sociaux, passer à l’acte politique’. 10  Normand Baillargeon, Gérard Bouchard, Dorval Brunelle, Monique ChemillierGendreau, Gérard de Sélys, Michel Éliard, Michel Freitag, Serge Halimi, Nico Hirtt, Christian Laval, Gérard Mauger, Sylvie Paquerot, Riccardo Petrella, Franck Poupeau, Philippe Quéau, Philippe Rivière, Guy Rocher, Jean Tardif, Louis Weber and Dominique Wolton.

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intellectuals who are critical of globalization are part of, or close to, civil society, they belong to a weak public.11 This is precisely what interested me: how, as a weak public, intellectuals could reach the public sphere. In order to address this issue, I applied the concept of public sphere from a perspective not limited to media, hence the expression ‘dissemination strategies’12 (stratégie de diffusion) instead of ‘communication’ or ‘media strategies’. In order to describe the tools used by intellectuals, over and above the media and the Internet, I adopted the expression dissemination platforms supports de diffusion). In this section, reverting to my earlier ideas about the Internet, which were mainly wrong as we shall see later, I first introduce the concept of social networks before addressing their impact on publics, dissemination platforms, media and the Internet in terms of the choices intellectuals make when they want to occupy the public sphere. Indeed, when I decided to study the dissemination strategies used by intellectuals critical of globalization, I was particularly interested in seeing their use of the Internet. Was the network of networks going to radically change their access to the public sphere? Would it be possible to overcome once and for all the difficulties outlined in Le décembre des intellectuels français (Duval et al. 1998), particularly in terms of access to media? At the same time, I noticed a return of the open universities (universités populaires) in the form of ‘teach-ins’, especially since the WTO Seattle protest in 1999. The public lecture increasingly played a role in the dissemination strategies, something that amazed me. It was before I came to realize the importance of social networks – not the Web 2.0 type of social network – but the social network defined by Lemieux:13 [Social] networks are made up of links, strong or weak but generally positive, providing a direct or indirect connection between each and every participant and allowing them to pool resources internally. Connections can also assist in organizing resources in relation to the external environment, which is characteristic of the apparatuses. [my translation]

The importance of social networks in the dissemination strategies of the intellectuals I interviewed is so great that it affects the choices they make with respect to publics, media, dissemination platforms, the Internet as well as issues

11  Experts, a special type of organic intellectual, may be part of a strong public when they are close to structures of power. 12  I would like to thank Marc Raboy for suggesting this translation. 13  ‘Les réseaux sont faits de liens, généralement positifs, forts ou faibles, tels qu’il y a une connexion directe ou indirecte de chacun des participants à chacun des autres, permettant la mise en commun des ressources dans le milieu interne. Il arrive que des connexions servent aussi à la mise en ordre des ressources par rapport à l’environnement externe, ce qui est caractéristique des appareils.’ (Lemieux, 2000: 18).

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of legitimacy. To account for the dissemination strategies,14 I will address the first four elements. In the process, I will also report on the way intellectuals act in concordance with the two functions of social networks: pooling of resources and mobilization (or organizing resources). Publics The dissemination channels of social networks are very diverse. They may include thematic activities (advocacy, political cafés, conferences of the Friends of Le Monde diplomatique, teach-ins, summer universities), statutory meetings (general meetings, annual conventions), activist meetings, association newsletters, magazines and websites. These channels appear to be sufficiently many and varied to allow their users to reach out to the ‘general public’. In reality, the intellectuals essentially target members of social networks to which they already belong or are close to. Social networks therefore provide intellectuals with multiple dissemination channels as well as an audience. When I asked them ‘Whom they wanted to talk to?’ most of the intellectuals I met said they have no preference, they would talk ‘to everyone who would listen to them’; they want to talk ‘to all citizens’, they have ‘no target audience’, etc. I got more precise answers when I asked about where they intervened (‘Where do you speak?’; ‘Where do you publish?’). In fact, it appears that intellectuals often respond to ‘special invitations’ or ‘requests’, either through lectures or articles. These usually come from social networks they are close to, and solicitations are particularly numerous after the publication of a book. Intellectuals reach out to a public consisting of members of the network, and they find this totally convenient. They are not at all concerned about what I call the effet de Chapelle or ‘preaching to the converted’. I asked the intellectuals I studied if they evaluated the success of their interventions, for example in terms of attendance or informal press reviews. I learnt that quantifiable targets are rare, due to the fact that few intellectuals are involved in logistical issues. They do not dispense with benchmarks altogether though. These can take various forms: a summary assessment of the composition of the public in terms of professional backgrounds, number of participants, place of residence, potential influence, proximity issues (trade unions, strikers), number of copies sold, of letters to newspapers, of emails or conversations face to face. One might think that such a vague appraisal cannot measure the difference between the target audience and the one actually reached. Yet some of the intellectuals expressed their preferences when I wanted to find out if they imposed conditions for their interventions. Most of the conditions related to the format (the time provided for discussion). Some had serious reservations about the French talk shows, saying they engendered unproductive debates, but some conditions applied specifically to 14  The issue of legitimacy is not dealt with in this chapter because it entails an array of questions beyond the scope of this discussion. It is discussed in depth in my doctoral dissertation.

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the public. They wanted the public to be really interested to the point that it might be willing to take action. Dissemination Platforms Public talks and other face-to-face interventions  Face to face interventions by intellectuals, such as public lectures, summer schools and debates (which are not contradictory) are likely to target and reach the membership of social networks. In Quebec, the Centre Justice et Foi and the Centre St-Pierre, which have historically played an important role in the dissemination of progressive thought (left-wing Catholics), host many public lectures by intellectuals who criticize globalization. In Europe, the Friends of Le Monde diplomatique and ATTAC associations play the same role. Although all my respondents give lectures, some of them are uncomfortable with speeches, at least when they are delivered to an audience different from the one to which they are accustomed (students). They avoid this type of direct intervention, either in public or on radio, and, when possible, suggest another speaker. They much prefer writing, but this is more a personal choice than a dissemination strategy. Small publications (papers, small books)  The intellectuals enjoy publishing in magazines or newspapers but also produce a large number of short documents for the networks they are close to, often without signing them or in collaboration with other authors. For some this reminded them of the small publishers that were so numerous at the end of the 1960s, the time of May 1968. The publication of small books also helped some of them counter the censorship they face as journalists. Although they can serve as basic documents for training members, that is, as pooling activity for a social network, small books and articles in magazines and newspapers are first and foremost considered a form of mobilization. Intellectuals appreciate them because they allow them to react readily to what is going on. Small books also serve as a mobilizing activity when social networks have sufficient time to produce them using new technologies to speed up the process. These aim at very precise publics, as is the case with books designed to respond to government proposals for major reforms or for an election. Intellectuals feel they provide people the data they need to understand and take part in what is being discussed in the public sphere. The public that participates in pooling through reading and the ensuing discussions then take part in outreach, as we see during strikes and demonstrations. Finally, books can also be used for pooling when they deal with more general considerations, initiating a new utopia or producing a new narrative, as in the case with the book published by the Lisbon Group chaired by Riccardo Petrella: Limits to Competitiveness. In general, as the intellectuals I have met require little or no copyright, their works are also more likely to be translated or adapted for other contexts. Petitions, appeals and declarations  Petitions, appeals and declarations are mobilizing activities par excellence and are often seen as acts characterizing

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intellectual activity despite the fact that this is a collective undertaking. The author of La sociologie des intellectuels (2003), Gérard Leclerc, goes as far as measuring intellectual activity by the number of petitions signed by an individual. It is true that ‘Intellectuals’, as a group of individuals claiming the status of legitimate interlocutor, emerged with the Dreyfus Affair, and therefore virtually from a letter published by Zola and the manifesto that followed the next day. It is also true that in 1995, two petitions in the French media were used by the media to create a division between two camps, placing at the heart of the debate a process of differentiation between intellectuals who did not see themselves in opposition. But petitions, for reasons still obscure, seem to have less impact on public opinion today. Some mentioned that nowadays the media do not publish left-wing petitions, but that many exist on the Internet. It is also possible that the petitions are fewer, or less likely to be relayed by the media, precisely because they are now hosted online, something that may have contributed to their devaluation. However, appeals and declarations are still an important part of the dissemination strategies of advocacy networks. I have not directly addressed the issue of petitions with respect to intellectuals because I wanted to work on interventions that intellectuals had duly signed, and, in a sense, had involved committing themselves, but I did note, however, that some of the associations they were part of – along with the social networks they helped to create – were born of petitions. The vast majority of the intellectuals I have studied not only prefer writing to any other dissemination tool but they also feel strongly about the actual printed book. This may explain why they care so little about publishing online or for other uses of the Internet such as forums or blogs. Media The relationship with the mainstream media differs from one intellectual to another but all of them exhibit a minimum of media-friendliness: they published at least one opinion piece in a newspaper, gave a radio interview or participated in a television program. Those who were close to institutionalized networks participated in the media more than others. If they appeared more regularly, it was partly because they were solicited more often than others, for example through the university departments who served as intermediaries in identifying the best ‘experts’ on a particular issue. In France, the relationship between media and intellectuals seems more polarized than in Quebec or Belgium where someone can show great mediafriendliness without being branded a ‘media intellectual’ (intellectuel médiatique) in the pejorative sense given by Pierre Bourdieu. Quality Papers Within the media, journalism often plays a special role, especially the elite press, which is seen by opinion leaders and intellectuals as likely to exert a real influence on them (Merrill 1968). According to John Merrill, the elite press must meet a

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set of criteria among which are the presence and the abundance of readers’ letters of ‘high quality’. This shows how the elite press has been identified (wrongly or rightly) as the ultimate embodiment of the public sphere. Historians such as Yvan Lamonde (2004), or political scientists like Denis Monière (2011), systematically analyse readers’ letters in the Québec quality papers (Le Devoir) to study the history of ideas, elites and ideologies. In France, it is generally the pages ‘Rebonds’ in Libération, ‘Horizons’ in Le Monde, and in Québec, the page ‘Idées’ in Le Devoir that serve as indicators of intellectual notoriety. The majority of intellectuals I have met publish in those readers’ pages. Unfortunately, there are no tools to evaluate the processes of selection of the letters published by the daily press in Quebec, but in France, the authors of Le décembre des intellectuels français compared the media coverage (print and television) of authors attached to the two major petitions that circulated during the 1995 social movement. They showed that the intellectuals associated with the petition in favour of the strikers were less well covered than those associated with the petition in support of Nicole Notat. The authors observed that the polarized positions respectively associated with Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Touraine were created by the media themselves, but they also identified a series of factors explaining differential treatment. These included an ability to mobilize that was lower among intellectuals close to Bourdieu, and which would motivate them to call for the creation of networks. As for electronic media, intellectuals tend to prefer radio to television but when they speak of efficiency or impact, they rate television more. They prefer non-commercial media, and some mention that it is always the same intellectuals who are invited by the media. Alternative media  Oddly enough, the intellectuals in my research found it difficult to give a definition of alternative media. Yet they say they use these sources to get information because they feel mainstream media are not good enough. As they say, the public is not well-informed and some social groups with less cultural capital do not have the cognitive tools to resist the symbolic violence of the mainstream media. It is therefore by criticizing the mainstream media that they evoke the need for the alternative media. They also mention the need for the popular education of those publics Fraser would classify as subaltern. Alternative media have been difficult to define because they are always described in relation or opposition to something else, such as mainstream media, corporate media, dominant media, etc. For the purposes of my argument, the distinction made by Raymond Williams between oppositional media and alternative media is very interesting: alternative media seek to find a place in the existing hegemony while the oppositional media rather seek to replace them (Atton 2001: 15). Transposed in terms of functions of social networks, this suggests that the ‘oppositional media’ are more likely than the ‘alternative media’ to take a position against and to participate in mobilization in order to voice this opposition. In terms of the public sphere, oppositional media claim participation in

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the discussion of civic affairs, calling into question the apparent consensus present in the mainstream media. Oppositional media therefore target a counter-public (Fraser) and can be used for ‘agitational’ activities, or for mobilization, while alternative media are not all focused on political or social issues. The attraction for other media, or alternative media, may equally reflect the feelings experienced by some of the intellectuals who no longer need the dominant public sphere. All in all, the intellectuals I have met are big users of ‘alternative media’. The vast majority of them published a paper in Le Monde diplomatique, which might be called a hybrid media. In Quebec, the magazine Possible is published which plays a similar role. Internet Similarly to platforms and media, the Internet has generated feedback from the intellectuals either as consumers or as content producers. The most common uses are email, online collaborative work and research. There is a gap between what they expect as consumers of information and what they expect as producers. Few seem interested in investing in its possibilities, even though they use the information they find online. They appear to be waiting to see how the Internet will evolve. Neither technophobic nor technophilic sentiments were expressed. Certainly the interest of the intellectuals in printed publications contributes to the devaluation of this online medium. For the majority of them, a publication on the Internet is not a ‘real publication’. Most see the Internet as a medium which reproduces original content. They rarely see the real possibilities of the Internet and, as suggested by Gingras et al. (2005), the low scientific reputation in the humanities and social sciences accorded to the writings available online (unlike what happens in the so-called exact sciences), was not helping to change their point of view. However, its speed of production, and therefore participation in mobilization, is appreciated by non-academic intellectuals who are not required to seek a solid scholarly reputation. If speed of production and ready opportunity to disseminate a text are major attractions for some intellectuals, they also believe that the texts available online have a short lifespan due to poor or chaotic archiving. The status of these texts can be likened to that of an improvised conference before a meeting of activists. Nevertheless, once a text is online, it is out of the author’s control. Anyone can copy it and ensure that it comes up among the first results displayed by a search engine like Google. All that is needed is a link to a blog updated daily so that it always reappears at the top. Hijacking of agendas (or reputations) is indeed possible on the Web through ‘googlewashing’, as some intellectuals have experienced. In sum, the Internet can be effective as long as it is used in conjunction with a social network. Without it, the network of networks seems rather useless, or even harmful.

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Conclusion Whether in terms of platforms or media, all the dissemination strategies of the intellectuals I have studied can be associated with their public. The preferred platforms – public talks, short texts and small books – are intended to target publics belonging to social networks. The Internet can promote the production and circulation of certain interventions in urgent situations, but it is social (human) networks (as defined by Lemieux) that make the Internet a medium that can play a semi-editorial role via mailing lists or websites that post, comment and review the interventions of intellectuals. Pooling therefore precedes any use of the Internet. When I started working on intellectuals who had criticized globalization, it was clear that they were adopting a counter-hegemonic stance, hence their need for a public associated with a social network providing its own platforms and media. The numerous crises that occurred since then – environmental, financial, as well as economic or food-price related – should have changed the situation. The dominant discourse about globalization, as inevitable as it was profitable, should have been challenged by most of us. And so it was, but for a very short time; then the world went back to business as usual. It is not enough to be right about something to change it. As Bouveresse (2004) asserts, knowing how things work sometimes leads to cynicism. What can you do when being right doesn’t help to win the war of ideas? Is there a limit to staying close to your social network? Debates about intellectuals are still ongoing, but research into intellectuals has shrunk. Indeed, working on intellectuals in the public sphere is not easy because the object keeps slipping out of one’s hands, not to mention the evanescent nature of the public sphere itself. To find intellectuals, it might mean looking elsewhere than activism, and this is paradoxical. At present, the academia that Jacoby was so interested in 25 years ago is the subject of many conferences dealing with a new crisis, the crisis of the universities namely in France (Caillé 2007). Researchers realize so-called intellectual autonomy, which consists mainly of peer judgment, is actually subject to criteria that reflect either the principle of capital going to capital (if you get funds for research, your students are likely to get some as well, and if you get funds you will get more) or a sound commitment to the reproduction of symbolic capital devoted to the reproduction of a capital that is not so symbolic. Both criteria keep academics from activism, from playing the role of intellectuals. The crisis of universities might be, after all, the crisis of intellectuals as well. References Atton, C. 2001. Approaching Alternative Media: Theory and Methodology. International Communication Association Conference, Washington, DC, 24 May 2001. Available at: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/ summary?doi=10.1.1.108.9424 [accessed: 8 April 2011].

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Aubin, F. 2006. La ‘nouvelle résistance’: les stratégies de publicisation déployées par des intellectuels critiques de la globalisation (1994–2005) (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Montréal: Université du Québec à Montréal. Bourdieu, P. 1984. Homo Academicus. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Bouveresse, J. 2004. Les médias, les intellectuels et Pierre Bourdieu. Le Monde diplomatique, February, 28–9. Calhoun, C. 1993. Civil society and the public sphere, Public Culture, 5(2): 267– 80. Cassen, B. 2004. Repenser le ‘format’ des forums sociaux, passer à l’acte politique. Libération [Online]. Available at: http://www.france.attac.org/archives/spip. php/images/5/spip.php?article2316 [accessed: 19 May 2011]. Charle, C. 1990. Naissance des ‘intellectuels’ 1880–1900. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Charle, C. 1999. La nouvelle orthodoxie contre la science. Université et recherche dans le carcan technocratique. Le Monde Diplomatique, September, 24–5. Dahlgren, P. 2005. The Internet, public spheres, and political communication: dispersion and deliberation. Political Communication, 22: 147–162. Duval, J., Gaubert, J., Lebaron, F., Marchetti D. and Pavis. F. 1998. Le ‘décembre’ des intellectuels français. Paris: Liber-Raisons d’Agir. Fleming, P., Gallichan, G. and Lamonde, Y. (eds). 2004. Histoire du livre et de l’imprimé au Canada. Vol 1. Des débuts à 1840. Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal. Fortin, A. 1993. Passage de la modernité: les intellectuels québécois et leurs revues. Sainte-Foy: Presses de l’Université Laval. Fraser, N. 1990. Rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social Text, 25(26): 56–80. Fraser, N. 2009. Scales of Justice. Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World. New York: Colombia University Press George, E. 2003. Les usages militants d’Internet: vers un espace public transnational? Communication, 22(2): 99–123. George, S. 1997. How to win the war of ideas: lessons from the Gramscian right. Dissent [Online], 44(3): 47–53. Available at: http://www.globallabour.info/ en/2007/07/how_to_win_the_war_of_ideas_le.html [accessed: 8 April 2011]. Gingras, A-M. 1999. Médias et démocratie. Le grand malentendu. Sainte-Foy: Presses de l’Université du Québec. Gingras, Y. and Vincent, L. 2005. Les pratiques de publication des chercheurs québécois en sciences sociales. Cahier de l’ACSALF [Online], 2(2): 10–11. Available at: http://www.ost.uqam.ca/Portals/0/docs/articles/2005/pratiques_ publications_ACSALF.pdf [accessed: 19 May 2011]. Habermas, J. 1978. L’espace public. Archéologie de la publicité comme dimension constitutive de la société bourgeoise. Paris: Payot. Original edition: Habermas, J. 1962. Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Neuwied/Berlin: Luchterhand. Habermas, J. 1992. L’espace public, 30 ans après. Quaderni: Les espaces publics, 18 (Autumn): 161–91.

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Hourmant, F. 1997. Le désenchantement des clercs : figures de l’intellectuel dans l’après-Mai 1968. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, Res Publica. Jacoby, R. 1987. The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe. New York: Basic Books. Keane, J. 1995. Structural transformations of the public sphere. The Communication Review, 1(1): 1–22. Leclerc, G. 2003. La sociologie des intellectuels. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Lemieux, V. 2000. À quoi servent les réseaux sociaux? Québec: Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture. Merrill, J.C. 1968. The Elite Press: Great Newspapers of the World. New York: Pitman Pub. Miège, B. 1995. L’espace public: au-delà de la sphère publique. Hermès, 17–18, 49–62. Miège, B. 1997. La société conquise par la communication. II. La communication entre l’industrie et l’espace public. Grenoble: PUG. Monière, D. 2011. Les débats politiques: l’année politique au Québec 1997–1998. Montréal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal. Available at: http://www. pum.umontreal.ca/apqc/97_98/moniere/moniere.htm [accessed: 8 April 2011]. Noreau, P. 2005. Aller au-delà de la politique des deux sous. Un signal d’alarme pour réinvestir dans la recherche en sciences humaines et sociales, en arts et en lettres. Le Devoir [Online], 24 January. Available at: http://www.ledevoir. com/non-classe/73226/aller-au-dela-de-la-politique-des-deux-sous [accessed: 23 November 2012]. Pelletier, J. 1997. Situation de l’intellectuel critique. La leçon de Broch. Montréal: XYZ éditeur. Raboy, M. 1991. L’économie politique des médias et le nouvel espace public de la communication, in Communication publique et société, repères pour la réflexion et l’action, edited by M. Beauchamp. Boucherville: Gaëtan Morin éditeur, 183–213. Thierry, D., Jacquier, C. and Olivera, P. (eds). 2009. Les intellectuels, la critique & le pouvoir. Agone, 41–2(13): 288. Wolton, D. 2011. Glossaire: espace public. [Online]. Available at: http://www. wolton.cnrs.fr/spip.php?article67 [accessed: 18 May 2011].

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Chapter 5

How Salonfähig Are Online Political Forums? The Curious Case of Politics.be Peter Thijssen

Introduction Following the work of Speier (1950), Coser (1970) and Habermas (1989) many public opinion researchers focus on the French salons1 of the eighteenth century as a prototypical institution of the public sphere (Goodman 1989, Herbst 2001, Splichal 1999, Roberts and Crossley 2004). Advocates of deliberative democracy even go a step further because they often present the salons as an ideal-typical and normative model for contemporary public opinion and intellectual life (Brants 2005: 144). In this respect they are echoing the glorifications of some of their eighteenth-century visitors: ‘A salon is like a political stock exchange, where the most gallant and wittiest heads of every estate come together. They engage in wide-ranging and edifying talk, issue well-founded judgements on matters concerning the political and the scholarly world, converse sagaciously about the most secret news from all courts and states, and unveil the most hidden truths’(Van Horn Melton 2001: 243).2 Insofar as people deliberately went to these establishments to rationally discuss matters of common interest it seems obvious that these institutions are appealing to contemporary students of public opinion, especially those that are living in postindustrial societies and are wrestling with the political side-effects of mediatization, commercialization and hyper-individualization. ‘Media democracy … is characterized by an absence of direct political debate; voters have become spectators rather than participants in a debate. What should be a deafening but necessarily discordant chorus of democratic voices has been reduced to a carefully orchestrated silence.’ (Franklin 1994: 23) Moreover, similar criticism can be detected with regard to the most popular contemporary method of studying public opinion: the opinion poll. Echoing the classic critiques of Blumer (1948) many 1  Because we are aware that there are considerable differences between the French salons on the one hand, and the English coffee houses and the German Tischgesellschaften on the other hand, we will focus on the French salon. However, many public opinion theorists usually do not distinguish between them. 2  This observation was made by Theodor Johann Quistorp in1743 and is cited by Van Horn Melton (2001: 243).

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researchers of public opinion nowadays agree that the aggregation of individual opinions of randomly chosen respondents can hardly be called ‘public’ opinion (Splichal 1999). The standard opinion poll at best measures ‘mass’ opinion because there is no place for critical discourse between the respondents which is a crucial ingredient for a genuine public. Even if there are still discordant voices in the poll choir we often do not notice them because they are muffled by the humming of unmotivated chorus members. It therefore comes as no surprise that researchers of the public sphere and public opinion are eagerly looking for a way to bring the deliberating public back in as the disappearance of the historical salon also seems to imply the loss of their own object of research. The deliberative opinion poll, which combines random sampling with small group discussion, is clearly an interesting endeavour in this respect (Fishkin 1995), not least because this methodology does not seem to provoke a systematic tendency toward group polarization (Fishkin 2009). Anyhow, due to the formalization of the deliberative opinion poll it can never be more than an artificial approximation of the more spontaneous encounters that took place in the salons of the eighteenth century (Sunstein 2009: 55). However, another, contemporary infrastructure that defines, embodies, and diffuses public opinion (Herbst 2001), namely the online political forum (OPF), might be unjustly disregarded in this respect. OPFs are spaces of discussion that are hosted on the Wold Wide Web where people can spontaneously engage to learn about the opinions of others, to give their own opinion, or to discuss with others on public issues.3 In this chapter we will explain why OPFs are unjustly discarded as genuine public spheres and public opinion infrastructures. Indeed, while others have also noticed the similarity with the historical salons (Soukup 2006, Papacharissi 2004), prominent commentators often voice disparaging opinions of OPFs (Sunstein 2001, 2009, Manin 2005). We will argue that the idea that OPFs are not deemed Salonfähig has been prompted by erroneous historical reasoning and false generalizations. Just as Habermas’s initial, universal glorification of the Enlightenment salon was at least partially based on wishful thinking, so the demeaning images of the online public forums are often inspired by criteria that are too finicky. The overly optimistic historical generalization, inspired by the early work of Habermas, states that the salons of the eighteenth century constituted a universalistic and inclusive public sphere characterized by impartial, civil and substantiated discourse that was functioning as a normative basis for contesting established authority (Habermas 1989). Because of these qualities, the salons increasingly functioned as a model public sphere and the ultimate point of comparison. However, by bringing together the findings of cultural-historical and feminist studies of the public sphere it can easily be demonstrated that this theory needs some amendments.

3  Postings within an online forum are displayed using web-based visualization, either in chronological order or as threaded discussions.

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The overly pessimistic modern-day generalization, inspired by Sunstein among others, states that contemporary OPFs are particularistic and exclusive enclaves dominated by an insulated and ever more polarizing counter-public which is totally detached from the mainstream political arena. Because these characteristics are manifestly contradictory to the meritorious qualities of the historical salon, the common conclusion is that OPFs are not Salonfähig. Obviously this conclusion is only tenable if the constitutive premises are reliable. In the first section we present a concise ensemble of analytical and empirical amendments regarding the optimistic assessment of the historical salon. In the second section we will scrutinize Sunstein’s pessimistic assessment of the modern cybersalon. Finally, in the third section we will empirically test the new re-contextualized theory of the online public sphere. This last empirical section is a crucial element because the existing literature on the contemporary public sphere is often exclusively theoretically oriented. Concretely, our empirical investigations will deal with three assumptions that will be tested against a matched dataset, comprising of both logfile and websurvey data, for the independent OPF Politics.be. This OPF is Salonfähig because it can match and even out-perform their eighteenth-century equivalents, as an intermediary sphere where 1) opposing counter-publics meet, 2) are generally informed, and 3), are not polarizing. Habermasian Wishful Thinking Despite the fact that Habermas’s norm of a universal and inclusive salon sphere where the public reaches self-consciousness and engages in rational and civil discussion on public issues may be intuitively appealing, many theorists have strongly criticized it (Calhoun 1992, Mansbridge 1996, Fraser 1990, Mah 2000, Asen 2000, Downey and Fenton 2003, Crossley and Roberts 2004, Sinekopova 2006, Dahlberg 2007, Splichal 2012). These theorists prefer multiple publics to a single public sphere. Spaces of publics, public sphericles or subaltern counterpublics are needed because disadvantaged groups need safe spaces where they ‘can rework their ideas and their strategies, gathering their forces and deciding in a more protected space in what way or whether to continue the battle’ (Mansbridge 1996: 47). A universal and inclusive public sphere might therefore be a dangerous utopia because it would be impossible to bracket the existing inequalities and to speak to one another as if all were peers. Similarly, by surveying samples of fairly uninterested and acquiescent respondents, public opinion researchers may be creating a permissive consensus which is functioning as a normative basis for supporting, rather than contesting established authority (Splichal 1999). In that sense the quest for a representative universal public might be a dangerous illusion. Hence, to avoid a ‘conservative’ research bias, it might make sense to complement the mass opinion surveys with inquiries of specific counter-publics that embody the critical undercurrent of society. However, the fact that individual members

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of these counter-publics are often extremists with an atypical ideological point of view disqualifies them as meaningful research objects for many researchers because listening to zealots is often perceived as a fruitless and even dangerous experience. Zealotry is increasingly regarded as one of the principal threats to liberal democracy in the twenty-first century (Olson 2007: 685). But this might be a mistake because Hellevik and Bjorklund (1991) found out that political opinion leaders are disproportionately present at the extreme sides of a left-right axis. Because many of them are the prime movers of public opinion, zealots might be worth listening to after all. One may even wonder empirically to what extent the salons of the eighteenth century actually were illustrations of a universal and inclusive public sphere where impartial rational discussion was functioning as a normative basis for contesting established authority. Although Habermas stressed that the salons of the eighteenth century marked the development of a more inclusive and more egalitarian bourgeois public sphere detached from the court (1989: 31–7), more recent socio-historical and feminist studies have cast serious doubts on the use of these institutions as a valid operationalization of this kind of public sphere (Ozouf 1988, Chisick 2002). According to these studies the singularity of the public was only realized to the extent that a very limited part of the population, the bourgeois gentleman, was considered to be relevant. Ultimately, even Habermas admitted that inclusiveness was an unjustified idealization: ‘[A] certain homogeneity of the bourgeois public enabled the conflicting parties to consider their class interest’ (1989: 424–5). Furthermore, even the bourgeois homogeneity may have been utopic. Although merit was an important selection criterion, salons were still dominated by noblemen. Moreover, the bourgeois visitors of the French salons were actually invitees who were invited by an influential salonnière who functioned as hostess, moderator, and sometimes even censor. ‘Intellectuals and artists who attended salons were indebted to their hostesses for the food they provided and often the patronage they extended’ (Chisick 2002: 77). Theoretically, the mixed constitution of the French salons could have stimulated inter-discursive encounters between bourgeois and nobility, but in practice the highly-stylized and a courteous style remained the norm for any discursive interaction. As a consequence the power of the better argument counted for little in polite salon conversations. The only way to avoid the reprimands of the policing salonnière was to adopt a cynical rhetoric (Shea 2010). Even the philosophes gradually formed a closed, privileged elite that kept out newcomers (Darnton 1995). In other words, even if the message of the bourgeois public of the eighteenth century may have been universalistic, their thinking and idiom were nevertheless particularistic. At least in this respect the salons of the eighteenth century did not constitute a universal public sphere but came closer to what we would call a ‘mainstreamed counter-public’; spheres where kindred spirits sympathetic to the new bourgeoisie met in a privatized environment and engaged in polite, courteous conversation.

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Similar criticism could also be levelled at the information that was often used as input for the salon discussions: the forbidden books and the pamphlet journalism. In the absence of a stable and critical press these writings could hardly be seen as sources of general reliable information. In retrospect we must say that the information that was often used as raw material for salon discussions was rather eclectic and of an extremist nature. Darnton (1995), for instance, has made it painfully clear that the ‘philosophical books’ that were the talk of the salon were full of pornography and political slander. Moreover, this political slander was often produced by anonymous political extremists. ‘The occasional outbursts of seemingly revolutionary rhetoric in pre-revolutionary pamphleteering were not so much the cris du coeur of an oppressed intellectual lumpenproletariat as the passionate exhalations of ideological zealots among France’s upper classes’ (Popkin 1989: 367). In contemporary terms one could therefore state that though the media literacy of the salon public might have been reasonably high, the media quality was generally of a dubious nature. Sunstein’s Finicky Expectations OPFs are usually not considered Salonfähig because the technologically mediated discussions of the Internet seem to deviate considerably from the ideal-typical model of impartial, civil and substantiated salon discourse. According to normative theories of the public sphere, discussions should be based on open, reciprocal exchange of validity claims so that in the end the better argument can hold sway (Gutmann and Thompson 2004). However, in the ‘real’ online world, posters often do not listen to each other and frequently use irrational arguments and abusive language (Wilhelm 2000, Dahlgren 2005). The fact that the content as well as the style of online discussions often deviate from the proper rules of courteous conduct is usually attributed to two factors: the anonymity and peculiarity of the forum public (Papacharissi 2004). Recent empirical work, however, made it highly plausible that anonymity is actually an essential attribute of an open and publicly accessible online forum that could function as a normative basis for contesting established authority (Witschge 2007). The use of nicknames guarantees that the participants feel safe to ‘reveal the most hidden truths’. As Oscar Wilde aptly stated: ‘Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth’ (1891: 178). Moreover, the cynicism of some of the philosophes in the salon may have functioned as a similar rhetorical guise. In this respect objections that are related to the peculiarity of the forum public are probably more crucial. Ideally a public sphere should be open and accessible to all those who are potentially affected by a certain issue (Gutmann and Thompson 2004). In this sense they are mimicking Habermas’s premise that the public sphere should be singular: universal and inclusive at once. This norm is appealing because it comes close to similar legal and methodological principles. On the

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one hand, it is a commonly accepted legal principle that every side of a conflict should be equally heard in a court of law: audi alteram partem. On the other hand, every survey researcher will agree that it is an important methodological aspiration to choose a sample that is representative of the general population. Nevertheless, the Internet seems to be populated by specific issue publics, or even worse, concentrations of like-minded extremists who agree in disagreeing with the dominant mainstream (Galston 2003, Manin 2005). Even if the discussions taking place in such a deliberative enclave are rational and civilized, their outcomes will often lead to less understanding of others situated differently (Dahlberg 2007). Furthermore, Sunstein (2001, 2009) argues that the participants, who are not extremists when they enter the discussions, will often gradually get more extreme or leave the forum. Numerous socio-psychological experiments indeed point out that discussions taking place in groups of like-minded people often lead to group polarization. Under group pressure discussants gradually adopt more extreme positions. The Internet seems especially prone to produce groups of like-minded extremists that fuel group polarization because online group members cannot resort to nonverbal forms of communication to acquire group endorsement. Sunstein (2009) aptly coins the polarization effect of the Internet as ‘cyberbalkanization’. In the ‘cyberbalkan’ there is increasing ‘second-order diversity’; ‘the kind of diversity that comes when society consists of many groups that do not have a lot of internal diversity’ (2009: 150). Even Fraser and her fellow critics of Habermas’s norm of a singular public sphere stress the need for inter-discursive contestation: ‘To interact discursively as a member of a public – subaltern or otherwise – is to disseminate one’s discourse into ever widening arenas.’ (Fraser 1990: 67). One crucial element in this respect is the external openness of the discussions of these subaltern counter-publics. Another element is the internal openness to outside information. The discussions may take place in a sheltered environment, but they must always be infused with the ‘general’ information traditionally distributed by broadcasting media. ‘Otherwise they are only parochial separatist enclaves with little role to play in a process of solving problems that cross groups, or problems that concern relations among groups’ (Young 2000: 172). However, also in this respect, Sunstein is rather sceptical: ‘With greater specialization, people are increasingly able to avoid general interest newspapers and magazines’ (Sunstein 2009: 80). In other words, general news media use will be weak in a counter-public. In order to avoid socially estranging psychological effects there must be inter-discursive encounters. If people only hear consonant voices it often leads to a phenomenon called false consensus (Wojcieszak 2008). It is the situation where individuals perceive their opinions and behaviour as ‘normal’ and all other opinions as strange. Especially when there is substantial second-order diversity it is important to have ‘intermediaries’, which ensure that counter-publics are not walled off from competing views and that there is an exchange of views between the counter-public and those who disagree with them (Sunstein 2009: 154). In Republic.com, Sunstein calls them ‘general interest intermediaries’: institutions

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that provide similar general information and draw different publics into shared spheres (2001). However, it remains an open question how general the interest and the information can be. While Sunstein is not very specific in this respect, his notion seems to come close to Habermas’s idea of an all-encompassing public sphere. As we argued before this is an ideal-typical notion, hence it comes as no surprise that Sunstein did not really find ‘general interest intermediaries’ on the Internet. As a matter of fact, it would even be problematic if counter-publics had to go ‘public’ through a ‘general interest intermediary’. What is of general concern will be decided through inter-discursive contestation and in this struggle oppositional discursive positions often come off worst. Hence it is better to choose a middle range strategy and to look for what we would call ‘counter-public intermediaries’. Subaltern counter-publics will be more efficient in disseminating their discourse when they know in what respect it differs from clearly opposing discourses. ‘[S] ubjects are able to experience themselves as free only when faced with a human opposite’ (Honneth 2010: 50). The discomfort associated with the recognition of the fundamental otherness of the opponent may stimulate self-consciousness, which does not necessarily produce discomfort or polarization. Etymologically speaking, dis-cussion presupposes a certain amount of dis-sensus. The best place to find ‘dissensus’ is in intermediary online spheres where different and in some respects even opposing subaltern counter-publics meet. In these intermediaries, counter-publics can learn to defend their views in an inter-discursive context, against the background of mainstream news but in the absence of a mainstreaming dominant discourse. In other words, according to this logic, intermediary polarization is a necessary antidote to Sunstein’s counter-public polarization. Many critics of the Internet may have looked for the wrong publics but perhaps they have also searched in the wrong places. Most research has hitherto focused on online participation and online discussion in general (Best and Krueger 2005). However, this universalistic approach does not take into account the enormous division of labour that characterizes the Internet (Wright and Street 2007).4 Similarly, the salons were highly diversified too. ‘Every salon had its own temperament and its own cast of characters.’ (Blom 2010: 5) Just as in the salons, most exchanges taking place on the Internet are of a sociable nature, while the kind of exchanges that characterize a genuine public sphere imply a substantiated and problem-solving perspective on public issues (Schudson 1997). Additionally, most online forums attract specific issue publics because they are attached to a website with a specific focus. Consequently, online forums in general do not have 4  Unlike the Internet newsgroups that function as a mailing list which automatically delivers new messages to the subscriber, online forums require visitors to check a website for new posts. Forums also differ from chat rooms because their discussion threads are more stretched out in time. This asynchronous communication makes forum discussions depart more strongly from ordinary face-to-face conversation but at the same time it may lead to more informative exchanges.

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the general interest orientation or interest in public issues that characterizes a real public sphere (Habermas 1989). Nevertheless, the proliferation of specialized online forums also has important merits. Because online forums tend to specialize, some forums focus on public issues: OPFs. Typically these kinds of political forums also discourage personal exchanges or reserve them for a separate sub-forum. In this respect Dahlberg (2007) refers to online initiatives that aim to encourage open debate online in an independent forum, such as Minnesota e-Democracy and openDemocracy, and suggests that further empirical research is needed both on the nature of the public assembling there and their interdiscursive contestation. Why Are Some OPFs More Salonfähig than Others? On the one hand we criticized the Habermasian premise that presents the salon as a singular public sphere where a representative and generally informed public gathered to impartially and critically discuss public issues. In reality even the prototypical salons of the eighteenth century were fairly exclusive counter-public spheres where rather eclectically informed sympathisers of the new bourgeoisie engaged in highly stylized encounters that had a mainstreaming effect. On the other hand, we also criticized Sunstein’s premise stating that forums on the Internet are populated by insulated and increasingly polarizing counter-publics with no meaningful use of general news media. Analogous to Habermas, Sunstein’s antithetical reasoning is bestowed by a misleading universalism. If Sunstein focused on specific, independent OPFs, rather than on Internet discussion in general, he probably would have found the counter-public intermediaries that he was so eagerly looking for; institutions that draw opposing but non-polarizing and media-literate counter-publics into a shared sphere. If this is true, the publics of these intermediaries might match or even outperform that of the eighteenthcentury salons. In this case we could rightfully proclaim a new conclusion: some (independent) OPFs are Salonfähig, both as a public sphere and as a public opinion infrastructure. However, this new conclusion is only tenable if it makes sense to recontextualize the theory of the public sphere. Although authors such as Mah (2000), Crossley and Roberts (2004), Sinekopova (2006), Dahlberg (2007) and Honneth (2010) have given us good theoretical arguments, additional empirical analyses are necessary to rigorously test them (Fraser 1990: 69). In order to do this, we will deduce three testable assumptions that are related to basic elements of the public sphere: its structure, the amount of general news media their members use, and the kind of discussants (Table 5.1). These assumptions will be elaborated and tested in the following section.

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Table 5.1

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A comparison of salon and OPF Salon

OPF

Optimistic Historical Premise

Amendments

Amendments

Pessimistic Contemporary Premise

Habermas’s Norms X

Eighteenth-century Facts X’

Contemporary Facts Y’

Sunstein’s Assessment Y

Singular public sphere

Mainstreamed counter-public intermediary

Counter-public intermediaries (assumption 1)

Balkanized counter-publics

Generally informed

Eclectically informed

Generally informed (assumption 2)

Decreasingly generally informed

Striving for power of the better argument

Polite consensus

Extremist non-polarizing (assumption 3)

Extremist and polarizing bias

Assumptions Based on a Re-Contextualized Theory of the Public Sphere Although the notion of ‘counter-publics’ refers to subordinated social groups it can easily be applied to political groups that are structurally excluded from the mainstream political arena. To the extent that people holding extreme political ideologies are members of ‘subaltern’ political groups it makes sense to focus on those that occupy extreme positions on the classical Left/Right self-placement scale. The advantage of this focus is that it enables us to go beyond the particularity of specific issues because ‘for many individuals, Left/Right attitudes are a summary of their positions on the political issues of greatest concern’ (Dalton 2002: 117). In short, the ideological extremities in terms of a left-right self-placement scale will be the general focus in each of our three assumptions. First, we will test to what extent an independent OPF can be rightfully called an intermediary of opposing counter-publics. The simultaneous presence of substantial groups of opposing ideological counter-publics in one and the same sphere is a crucial assumption in our amended modern-day premise. It activates a learning process, whereby opponents inter-subjectively recognize their interests – in the absence of the bulk of ideological centrists – in order to become more resourceful in defending them. Moreover, it is the zeal of the ideological extremists

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that creates a basis for contesting established authority. Whereas for Sunstein, the polarizing logic is monomaniac insofar as gradually only very extreme counterpublics will remain. Assumption 1: OPFs Attract a Disproportional Amount of People from Both Extremes of the Political Spectrum Compared to the General Population Secondly, we will test to what extent the inter-discursive contestation of opposing counter-publics is infused with political news made available by traditional media, for example general newspapers and public broadcasters. ‘Do netizens also test their opinions in the light of day?’ (Wilhelm 1999: 175). Research on the agendasetting effect of traditional media suggests that the opinions of posters on Internet forums are clearly influenced by the news they have picked up from the traditional news media (Lee, Lancendorfer and Lee 2005). Yet authors such as Sunstein (2009) point out that due to processes of selective attention and selective exposure the use by extremist posters of general news media will often gradually decrease. Assumption 2: OPFs Attract Significantly More People Who Intensively Follow the Political News Compared to the General Population Thirdly, we will test whether the visitors of an OPF are gradually becoming more ideologically polarized. Ideally, we need panel data to test this assumption. However, if we take the duration of the involvement in the OPF into account, we can do a similar test for a cross-sectional dataset. The basic assumption here is that newcomers on the OPF have only had a limited exposure to the polarization effect of discussion compared to longstanding discussants (Sunstein 2009). This effect can have two causes: long-time participants may adopt a more extreme ideology or ideologically more moderate participants may leave the forum. Unfortunately, cross-sectional data do not enable us to disentangle both explanations, but we are at least able to test if the polarization logic holds tout court. Moreover, because Sunstein (2009: 41) argues that individuals who start out in an extreme position are especially prone to significant further shifts in extremism, a fairly heterogeneous counter-public intermediary might be a good place to test the polarization assumption. However, in order to adequately test the assumption it is important to point out that the ‘public of an OPF’ generally is not a monolithic entity, certainly not in terms of their various degrees of activity. Is it necessary to (heavily) participate in the discussion in order to get more extreme, or is just overhearing the discussions enough? According to Blumer (1948: 189) we should be restrictive because he defines a public as ‘a group of people who are confronted by an issue, who are divided in the ideas as to how to meet the issue, and who engage in discussion over the issue’. Consequently, the relevant public of an OPF gets much smaller because many visitors, the so-called ‘lurkers’, are just eavesdropping on the discussions (Nonnecke and Preece 2001). Moreover, some ‘posters’ posted regularly while

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others only on a rare occasion. Hence, in order to stringently test the polarization assumption we will take into account both the length of participation and the intensity of posting in the form of an interaction effect. The basic assumption is that if there is no significant polarization effect for the heavy and long-standing posters, we will not find an effect for the other forum members either. Assumption 3: Heavy and Long-standing Posters of an OPF will be more Extreme in Terms of Left/Right Self-Placement Compared to other Forum Members Data In order to test these assumptions we will use data from the public of a fairly active Flemish-Belgian OPF, namely Politics.be (www.politics.be/forum). Politics. be is ‘a discussion platform for political topics’ with five general sub-forums (domestic and international politics, party discussions, societal discussions, press announcements) and eight thematic sub-forums. The forum originated in 1999 as an initiative by students experimenting with the possibilities of the Internet as a political meeting and discussion place. Initially they started with an un-moderated forum where freedom of speech was absolute. However, in 2002 they switched to a moderated forum with 14 moderators who watch over the serenity of the discussions. This moderated forum still exists today, after more than 10 years. With about 5 million postings and more than 18,000 registered members in March 2011, Politics.be ranked twelfth of the 55 OPFs that are registered worldwide at the overview website Big Boards (www.big-boards.com). This is a remarkable result because the official language at the forum is Dutch. Only the Norwegian forum Transact.no and the Italian forum Politica online can present similar results. Actually more than 93.1 per cent of the forum participants seem to be living in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. In order to get to know the public of Politics.be, we conducted a web survey in the period from 25 August to 14 October 2006: 1,330 members participated. At that time there were 7,433 members registered. You have to be a member to actively post but everyone is able to read the postings without having to register. Accordingly, forum members must at least have intended to take part in the political discussions. At first sight the response rate does not seem substantial. However, from the ‘objective’ log files, which could be linked to the ‘subjective’ survey data, we learned that out of the 1,115 forum members who posted once in 2006, 438 responded to our survey. Thus, the response rate for those who actively posted in 2006 equals 39.3 per cent. Moreover, our 1300 respondents sent 188,042 posts in 2006, which was 51.1 per cent of the total number of posts. Actually, this kind of response rate is exceptionally high and can only be explained by the fact that the survey was initiated by a personal email sent by the moderators of the forum. Only for those forum members who did not post in 2006, the ‘lurkers’, the response

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rate was substantially lower. Only 892 (14.1 per cent) of the 6,813 lurkers in 2006 responded to our survey. Probably, the small percentage has something to do with the limited life span of many email addresses and Internet memberships. Of course, we do not know to what extent Politics.be is representative for the independent OPFs in general. However, we have reason to believe that Politics. be is a very interesting test case. Due to the fact that the official language of this Belgian forum is Dutch, 1,193 (93.1 per cent) respondents come from Flanders. As a result the political context that is functioning as a frame of reference is fairly homogeneous for most of them. This is a rather exceptional situation on the Internet where (sub-)national differences abound and a ‘sense of place’ is usually far away (Meyrowitz 1985). Consequently, it is very difficult to reliably characterize virtual publics because we lack proper points of reference. Yet the public of Politics.be is clearly an exception to this rule. Because most of them are Flemings we can easily compare them with a representative probability sample of the general Flemish population. More specifically, we will compare the 1193 Flemings that participated in the web survey of the members of Politics.be with the Flemish respondents that participated in the European Social Survey of 2006 and the ISPO-survey of 2004 (Billiet et al. 2004). Moreover, we should take into account the fact that the ‘public of an OPF’ in general is not a monolithic entity. Based on the linkage of the ‘objective’ log files and the ‘subjective’ survey data we learn that only 438 Flemish respondents actively participated in the forum discussions (‘posted’) in 2006. The majority of the Flemish respondents of our web survey (892; 67.1 per cent) do not belong to the active public because they did not engage in any discussion in 2006. Although they did not have any impact on the contents of the forum they nevertheless constitute an interesting control group. Anyway, hitherto Sunstein’s antithetical arguments were mainly confirmed in experiments involving face-to-face interactions where single individuals were confronted with an overwhelming majority of dissenters. In this respect large N tests on people who deliberately participate in a public discussion will probably be very illuminating. Findings Forum Public versus Representative Sample (Assumptions 1 and 2) In Table 5.2 we compare the left-right distributions of the Politics.be sample with the Flemish respondents in the probability sample of the European Social Survey of 2006. In both cases the survey question was identically formulated: ‘In politics, people sometimes talk about ‘left’ and ‘right’. When you think about your own ideas on this, where would you place yourself on this 0 to 10-scale?’

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Table 5.2 In politics, people sometimes talk about ‘left’ and ‘right’. When you think about your own ideas on this, where would you place yourself on this scale?

0 (extreme left) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (extreme right)

Online forum Politics.be 4.9% 5.7% 9.3% 7.8% 6.2% 12.4% 7.4% 14.5% 17.3% 6.1% 8.2%

Probability sample Per cent point ESS3-2006 (%p) differences 2.4% + 2.5%p 1.4% + 4.3%p 6.9% + 2.4%p 9.4% - 1.6%p 9.4% - 3.2%p 35.2% - 22.8%p 12.2% - 4.8%p 12.1% + 2.4%p 7.9% + 9.4%p 1.8% + 4.3%p 1.4% + 6.8%p

100% (1062)

100% (1099)

Source: Websurvey Politics.be 2006. European Social Survey 2006.

The chi2 value for the corresponding frequency distributions equals 971.6 (P< 0.001) and clearly points out that both distributions are extremely different. Figure 5.1 makes things clear. The scores for the probability sample are strongly concentrated around midpoint 5, while extreme scores are very rare. In short, the distribution looks a bit like a sombrero. The scores for the forum sample reveal a totally different picture. Someone seems to have trampled on the peak of the sombrero. As a result the tails of the distribution are inflated. The modal left-right value for the Flemish forum members equals 8. The sombrero has become a slug. To the extent that a probability sample of the ESS enables us to get a representative image of the Flemish population, the public of the online forum Politics.be is clearly not representative of the general population. However, as we argued before, the price of representativeness may sometimes be too high, for instance because the voice of the extremists is often drowned in a sea of disinterest and uniform acquiescence. Despite the fact that the members of Politics.be might be unrepresentative for the global population they nevertheless constitute a genuine ‘counter-public intermediary’, in the sense that it is a public sphere that enables inter-discursive encounters of pronounced competing ideologies, notably the ideologies of the extreme left and the extreme right (first and last decile). Our analyses clearly point out that the OPF Politics.be simultaneously attracts a disproportionate number of people with an extreme left and an extreme right ideology. Hence, contrary to what some critical theorists argue, the forum public

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is not confined to one pole of the left-right continuum or to one distinctive counterpublic. Assumption 1 is clearly confirmed.

Figure 5.1  Ideological public of Politics.be versus that of general Flemish population In order to test if these extremists are ‘generally informed’ (assumption 2) we again compare the public of Politics.be with the respondents of a random sample of the Flemish population (ISPO 2006). In Table 5.3 we see that 61.6 per cent of the forum members are (almost) always following the political news on radio, television, or in the newspaper, while the corresponding percentage in the representative sample of the Flemish population equals 24.8 per cent. This is a remarkable result which points out that online forum members are certainly not politically ignorant. They might be overconfident but more probably the finding is related to the fact that Politics.be is a forum with a specific thematic focus. Moreover, if we focus on the relationship between ideological extremism and attention to general political news, we find a positive and statistically significant correlation of 0.10 (P= 0.001; N= 1171).5 Not only do forum members report a higher use of general news media, but additionally we see that the ideologically 5  The correlation is based on the dichotomized variables ‘ideological extremity’ (1: left-right scores 0,1,2, 8, 9,10 and 0: left-right scores 3,4,5,6,7) and ‘use of general news’ (1: (Nearly) Always and 0: Less Frequent).

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more extreme forum members score even better than the ideologically more moderate ones. Furthermore, in the next section the ‘general news media use’ will be used as predictor of ‘ideological extremity’ and also in these multivariate analyses the positive effect will be statistically significant. Table 5.3

How often do you follow political news on radio and television or in the newspaper? Online forum Politics.be

(Almost) always

24.8% (301)

27.4% (323)

26.1% (316)

+1.3%p

8.0% (94)

26.0% (315)

-18.0%p

2.2% (26) 0.8% (9) 100.0% (1177)

13.5% (164) 9.7% (117) 100,0% (1213)

-11.3%p -0.9%p

Now and then Never Total

Per cent point (%p) differences +36.8%p

61.6 % (725)

Often Seldom

Probability sample ISPO-2006

Source: Websurvey Politics.be 2006. General Election Survey Belgium ISPO 2006

Getting to Extremes? In order to test the polarization tendency (assumption 3) we perform a multivariate regression analysis with the ‘ideological extremity’ as dependent variable. De facto, we use ‘absolute ideological deviation scores’: the midpoint 5 is subtracted from the left-right self-identification scores on a scale of 0 to 10, and subsequently the absolute value of this deviation score is taken. As a result we get the scores of the dependent variable which range from 0 (no ideological extremism) to 5 (maximum ideological extremism). In the absence of repeated measures we cannot test whether individual forum members get more ideologically extreme over time. However, because we know for each forum member how he has been registered on the forum, we can compare the ideological extremity of the recent forum members with those of forum members that were registered for a longer period. The underlying assumption here is that the exposure to the polarizing discussions on the forum will increase with the length of time the individuals are registered at the forum. Accordingly, we expect a positive correlation between ‘membership length’ and ‘ideological extremity’. However, because the utility of membership length will probably decrease, we do not assume a linear effect but rather posit a loglinear effect, in this case, membership length will be measured in terms of the natural logarithm of the number of months registered plus one.6 6  We increased the scores by 1 to avoid computing logarithms of 0.

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New Public Spheres

Additionally, because the polarization effect of repeated engagement in discussions is probably more intense than the mere attendance of repeated discussions we also take into account the ‘post intensity’. We have already mentioned that most visitors to an online forum are lurkers. This is also the case for Politics.be. Hence, we also take into account the total number of posts being sent by each respondent. Here again we postulate a decreasing utility function by incorporating a loglinear effect of the number of posts being sent by each individual member (according to the objective log files). In short, the polarization effect will be tested in terms of an interaction variable X*Y: ‘membership length’ (X) multiplied by ‘post intensity’ (Y). Based on the work of Sunstein (2009) we expect the interaction ‘X*Y’ to have a positive effect on ‘ideological extremity’. Those who are registered for longer and post heavily at Politics.be will be more extreme in terms of their left-right self-placement. However, the results of the multivariate testing in the first column of Table 5.4 prove otherwise. Although the sign of the interaction ‘X*Y’ is indeed positive, the effect is not statistically significant (b= 0.03; S.E.= 0.02). Moreover, the effects are similar if we focus exclusively on the leftist or the rightist respondents. In column 2 and 3 similar results are reported, respectively focusing on the left-side of the ideological axis (scores 0–5) and on the right-side of the ideological axis (scores 5–10). In both cases the effect of ‘X*Y’ is positive but not statically significant. Furthermore, the effects of the constituting variables ‘membership length’ and ‘post intensity’ are negative and also not statistically significant.7 Last but not least, the global explanatory power of our regression models is extremely small. Hence, we clearly do not find confirmation for Sunstein’s polarization effect, neither for the counter-public intermediary Politics.be in general, nor for the separate leftist and rightist counter-publics. Conclusion We have argued that the paradise-lost feeling with respect to the French salons of the eighteenth century might not be appropriate because revisionist sociohistorical studies do not confirm Habermas’s ideal-typical characteristics. Moreover, nostalgic theorists unjustly disregard the qualities of a contemporary institution, namely the OPF. OPFs are not deemed Salonfähig because they seem to be functioning as a battle ground for ever more polarizing counter-publics that are detached from the general news media. However, this assessment seems to be questionable both on analytical and on empirical grounds. Based on a review of the revisionist theory of the public sphere, we argue that similar arguments could be made for the historical salons. As a matter of fact, both the historical salon and the contemporary cybersalon seem to be functioning as counter-public 7  The coefficients of ‘membership length’ and ‘post intensity’ are not significantly different when the interaction term X*Y is omitted.

How Salonfähig Are Online Political Forums? The Curious Case of Politics.be 105

Table 5.4

Which members of Politics.be are more ideologically extreme? All members left-right score 0-10 B

S.E.

Leftist members, left-right score 0-5 B S.E.

Rightist members, left-right score 5-10 B

S.E.

Membership length (X)

-.041

.006

-.076

.091

-.005

.081

Post intensity in 2006 (Y)

-.117°

.057

-.143

.085

-.092

.076

.026

.019

.034

.029

.009

.025

-.004

.003

-.014*

.005

-.002

.004

.000 .015

.122

.000 .043

.186

.000 -.086

.165

Interaction X*Y Age Gender Male Female General news media use Less frequent (Nearly) always Constant N R2

.000 .309** 2.641** 1140 .016**

.000 .094

.000

.167

.148

.521**

.122

.256 2.738**

.391

2.282**

.344

537 .022**

745 .034**

*Note: Linear regression analysis, Dependent variable: absolute ideological deviation scores, left-right score 0–10 minus midpoint 5 (minimum = 0 and maximum =5); ** p < 0.001; * p