Public Intellectuals in the Global Arena: Professors or Pundits? [1 ed.] 0268100241, 9780268100247

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Public Intellectuals in the Global Arena

Public Intellectuals in the Global Arena Professors or Pundits?

Edited by

Michael C. Desch

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu Copyright © 2016 by the University of Notre Dame All Rights Reserved Published in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Desch, Michael C. (Michael Charles), 1960 – editor. Title: Public intellectuals in the global arena : professors or pundits? / edited by Michael C. Desch. Description: Notre Dame : University of Notre Dame Press, 2016. | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016032991 (print) | LCCN 2016045449 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268100247 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 0268100241 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780268100261 (pdf ) | ISBN 9780268100278 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Intellectuals. | Scholars. | Intellectual life. | Scholarship and learning. Classification: LCC HM728 .P834 2016 (print) | LCC HM728 (ebook) | DDC 305.5/52 — dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016032991 ISBN 9780268100261 ∞This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [email protected].

Contents

Acknowledgments Public Intellectuals: An Introduction  . 

vii 1

Public Intellectuals in a Comparative Context

one

Historical Consciousness, Realism, and Public Intellectuals in American Society  

39

two

American Public Intellectuals and the Early Cold War, or, Mad about Henry Wallace  . 

63

three

The Public Intellectual in China  

90

four

Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in Latin America  

130

five

The Intellectual, Culture, and the State: The Experiences and Failures of Enlightenment in the Arab World  . 

148

vi Contents Public Intellectuals across Disciplines

six

The Philosopher as Public Intellectual  

163

seven

The Economist as . . . ? The Public Square and Economists .  

182

eight

Of Mirrors and Media: The Blogger as Public Intellectual  

214

nine

Science in the Crosshairs: The Public Role of Science and Scientists  . 

247

ten

Diplomats as Intellectuals: An Unlikely Combination  

268

Reflections

eleven

Reckless Minds: Caveat Lector  

299

twelve

Caveat Lilla: On Public Intellectualism in the Twenty-First Century  

314

thirteen

The Public Intellectual as Teacher and Students as Public: Declining and Falling Apart  . 

333

fourteen

The Ethical Imperative for Some Scholars to Be Public Intellectuals and for the Rest to Let Them Do So  . 

349

Concluding Thoughts: Toward a Typology of Public Intellectuals  

373

List of Contributors

397

Index

400

Acknowledgments

This volume had its origins in a conference I organized in the spring of 2013 after I spent the fall semester of that year as a fellow of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study (NDIAS). For his generous support of the conference, and also for his providing me with one of the best semesters I have had at Notre Dame, I am deeply indebted to my colleague Vittorio Hösle, the founding director of the Institute. Of course, the Institute, one of the jewels in the Notre Dame’s intellectual crown, would never have existed without the inspiration of former dean of the College of Arts and Letters, Mark Roche, and the generous support of the vice president for research, Robert Bernhard. Vittorio’s able successor, Brad Gregory, has generously continued to underwrite our efforts to turn the disparate conference papers into a coherent book. Directors of institutes come and go, but the permanent staff remains, and invariably does the hardest and most critical work in a project of this nature. This one would never have come to completion without the support and help of NDIAS’s executive director, Donald Stelluto, and his colleagues Grant Osborne and Carolyn Sherman. Jonathan Vandenburgh, a longtime NDIAS undergraduate fellow and a soon-to-be philosophy graduate student, helped immeasurably in the final production of the manuscript. My sincere thanks to all of them. We were fortunate to be able to enlist a large number of Notre Dame colleagues in helping to turn conference papers into chapters through vii

viii Acknowledgments

their detailed and astute commentary. In particular, I am grateful to Phillip Munoz, Michael Zuckert, Lionel Jensen, Paolo Carozza, Ann Astell, Rashied Omar, Richard Garnett, Jessica Hellman, Timothy Fuerst, George Lopez, Katherine Brading, Daniel Philpott, Rev. Wilson Miscamble, C.S.C., and Don Howard. The Institute succeeded admirably in its mission of bringing together Notre Dame’s brightest intellectual lights with some leading public intellectuals from across the country and around the world. Finally, I have been privileged to know some modern Max Webers who reassured me that it is still possible to pursue both science and politics as a vocation. Among the many terrific scholars who also found ways to speak to the broader public that I have been privileged to know, I would specifically mention Allan Bloom and Samuel Huntington. In gratitude for all they did for me in my career, I dedicate this book to their memories.

Public Intellectuals An Introduction  . 

Statement of Problem

What roles do public intellectuals— persons who exert a large influence in the contemporary society of their country through their thought, writing, or speaking — play in various countries around the world and by virtue of their different disciplinary and professional backgrounds? There is, to be sure, a small literature on the role of public intellectuals in general, but it is organized around various thinkers rather than focused on different countries in a comparative framework or on the unique opportunities and challenges inherent in different disciplines or professions.1 Indeed, in his comprehensive treatment of the U.S. public intellectual scene, Richard Posner notes that “a cardinal omission [in the literature] is the situation of the public intellectual today in countries other than the United States.” In his view, such a study “would be a fascinating project.”2

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The literature on their role in some specific countries is larger, but by no means comprehensive. Their role in the United States, both historically and in contemporary affairs, is pretty well covered.3 The problem is that this literature comes to very different and radically inconsistent conclusions as to whether public intellectuals actually influence the public.4 Coverage of other countries is spotty: France, not surprisingly, is well covered;5 the rest of Europe and other parts of the world are not.6 Moreover, these other studies also tend to be time-bound and focus on particular periods and eras.7 Finally, there have been a handful of efforts to gauge the effectiveness of public intellectuals, but the focus has been more abstract and general than what we have in mind.8 There are a handful of books that attempt a more comprehensive approach, but to our knowledge none do precisely what we do in this volume.9 Given all of this, we agree with Posner that “the phenomena of the public intellectual deserves more attention from sociologists, economists, philosophers, and other students of intellectual and expressive activity than it has received.”10

This Volume

Given this lacuna, and the reasonable assumptions that (1) public intellectuals play different roles in different countries, disciplines, and professions and that (2) these variations need to be systematically understood, we initiated this project to produce a volume that considers the role of the public intellectual around the world and across the disciplines today. Our overarching objectives are twofold: (1) to achieve a better general understanding of the phenomenon of public intellectualism and (2) to shed light on the U.S. experience, in particular, through a comparative context and an examination of its place within the different scholarly disciplines and professions. Specifically, we divide our volume into three sections. In the first, “Public Intellectuals in a Comparative Context,” we offer a series of indepth studies of the role of public intellectuals in the United States and a variety of important countries or regions of the world, including China, Latin America, and the Arab world. Next, in “Public Intellectuals across

Public Intellectuals 3

Disciplines,” we offer a series of studies that might provide insight into why the public intellectual varies so widely across the disciplines. Here we have chapters on changes in the disciplines of philosophy and economics, which have combined to dethrone the former and elevate the latter as the preeminent home of public intellectuals in the academy. We also have chapters considering the evolving roles of the natural scientist, the former diplomat, and the blogger as public intellectuals. Finally, our third section, “Reflections,” contains some overarching thoughts on the public intellectual from a one-time skeptic, a skeptic of the skeptic, an advocate of thinking about the changing place of public intellectuals in the academy from a moral perspective, and then a synthetic conclusion. This sort of inquiry is particularly appropriate for a Catholic university such as Notre Dame that values service more broadly to “God and Country.” Though hardly a proponent of strictly utilitarian education, cardinal and Oxford don John Henry Newman nonetheless persuasively argued “that a cultivated intellect, because it is a good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace to every work and occupation which it undertakes, and enables us to be more useful, and to a greater number. There is a duty we owe to human society as such, to the state to which we belong, to the sphere in which we move, to the individuals toward whom we are variously related, and whom we successively encounter in life.”11 In the rest of this introduction, I first propose a more precise definition of our subject — public intellectuals. Next, I outline a very schematic history of the phenomena, not as the last word but rather to highlight how contested it is. Finally, I pose some specific questions, which our various chapters answer.

Definition

What, precisely, is a public intellectual? This is a highly contested topic, with some arguing that there is no such thing. The concluding chapter in this volume by philosopher Vittorio Hösle is an insightful meditation on the deep issues associated with the deceptively simple taxonomical question of what we mean by “public intellectual.”

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But for now, most of us would probably agree with the late Tony Judt that the French scholar and commentator Raymond Aron qualifies as one, perhaps the archetype of the species.12 Ira Katznelson suggests C. Wright Mills as another exemplar of academic public intellectual, and again most of us would at least concede this designation as plausible.13 But to avoid simply applying Justice Potter Stewart’s methodology for identifying pornography to this task, we need a definition that goes beyond knowing a public intellectual when we see one. Although Posner’s definition as “someone seriously and competently interested in the things of the mind” is straightforward and makes sense, it also conceals some deep questions about where such people fit in, what shapes their basic attitudes, and what precise roles they play in society.14 Because public intellectuals come from various organizations and institutions, most have some connection with academia, and thus the changing nature and function of the university are inextricably linked to any discussion of the changing role of public intellectuals, at least in the United States. In terms of the motives of public intellectuals, Lionel Trilling argues that for most the decision to play that role is the result of “the impulse to make sure that the daemon and the subject are served, the impulse to insist that the activity of politics be united with the imagination under the aspect of the mind.”15 In other words, public intellectualism is more of a vocation or a calling than simply a profession, though, of course, this may be changing. Finally, Theodore H. White contrasts “the classic — or pure — intellectual, [whose] distinctive passion commonly voices itself in tone of outrage or despair as he looks down from the ivory tower on the man-inaction and scolds the hypocrisy or compromise which action forces on dreams” with what he calls, employing a martial metaphor, “the new action-intellectuals [who] have transformed the ivory tower. For them, it is a forward observation post on the urgent front of the future —and they feel it is their duty to call down the heavy artillery of government now, on the targets that they alone can see moving in the distance.”16 However, all of these definitional issues beg further elaboration and clarification, which many of our chapters offer.

Public Intellectuals 5 History

Another issue that could bear deeper examination is the historical evolution of the institution of the public intellectual. Some people believe that public intellectualism is a long-standing institution, tracing its roots at least as far back as Plato’s “philosopher-king.” Along these lines, Harvard historian Richard Hofstadter notes the continuity from “the great intellectuals of pagan antiquity, the doctors of the medieval universities, the scholars of the Renaissance, the philosophers of the Enlightenment, [who all] sought for a conjunction of knowledge and power and accepted its risks without optimism or naiveté. They hoped that knowledge would in fact be broadened by a conjunction with power, just as power might be civilized by its connection with knowledge.”17 But others agree with Arthur Melzer that public intellectualism is a “modern” development tied closely to more recent notions of “progress.”18 Students of the late political philosopher Leo Strauss, such as Michael Zuckert, who has a chapter in this volume, would no doubt endorse his interpretation of Plato’s Republic as teaching that, in his words, the emergence of a philosopher-king “is not possible [or at best, extremely improbable] because of the philosophers’ unwillingness to rule.”19 The reason that philosophers will not agree to rule is that they are, by definition, disengaged from the rest of society in the search for a truth that may or may not be politically salutary or even useful.20 This is undoubtedly why Thomas Pangle contrasts philosophers with the sophists, perhaps the better historical analogue of our contemporary public intellectuals, who “vulgarized, and what is worse, rendered confused, the earlier wisdom — by diluting, if not abandoning, the pure passion for knowledge, and by making knowledge, instead, into a tool or weapon for securing fame or fortune.”21 Given that, one can understand why Paul Rahe concludes that in “antiquity, statesmanship and philosophy remained distinct,” and suggests that public intellectualism is “a product of the Enlightenment.”22 The question, however, is this: How did the Enlightenment set the stage for public intellectualism? Perhaps the most common view is that the Enlightenment’s liberation of the mind from the tyranny of religious

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captivity and the advancement of “science” across the board in society set the stage for the marriage of intellect and rule. Along these lines, historian Marc Fumaroli traces the rise of the “Republic of Letters,” a postReformation secularization of the Roman Catholic notion of “scholars united in a mystical body working together toward a common good whose significance is universal.”23 Many of these scholars, according to historian Anthony Grafton, also “pursued their research largely, or even primarily, for partisan reasons: in order to ensure the triumph of a religion or ruling house,” making them prototypical public intellectuals.24

At the risk of proffering an unfashionably Americanocentric argument, one might hold up the American Founding Fathers as epitomizing this Enlightenment tradition of public intellectualism. As historian Gordon Wood reminds us, the Founders were not professional politicians, but rather aristocratic gentlemen, who combined classical learning with a sense of noblesse oblige that led them to abandon their farm or study to take up the reins of power.25 In this view, the founding philosopher-kings were eclipsed in early nineteenth-century America as the result of the religious revival known as the “Great Awakening,” the development of a more popular Jacksonian democracy, and the rise of intellectual currents like transcendentalism, which harkened back to the Platonic notion of the disjuncture between politics and philosophy.26 Complicating this stock Enlightenment narrative, which makes the secularization of the Christian intellectual tradition the sine qua non for combining the worlds of ideas and practice, is the Roman Catholic intellectual tradition, which not only sought to reconcile faith and reason in an earlier area but also offered a political-theological rationale for intellectual engagement with affairs of the world.27 In his 1851 series of lectures on education in Ireland, Cardinal Newman lamented the consequences of the secularization and hyperspecialization of academic knowledge and offered a theologically informed brief for a broader education as the prerequisite for engagement with practical affairs.28 Despite these possible pre- or post-Enlightenment sources of public intellectualism, it is nonetheless fair to say that secular intellectual currents and events have undeniably played a greater role in the emergence

Public Intellectuals 7

of what most of us recognize as the modern public intellectual. But what are they? Conservative thinker Russell Kirk, to my mind, implausibly argues that it is largely the intellectual legacy of Marxism.29 A much more compelling case can be made that the primary “ism” undergirding modern public intellectualism is liberalism. And its most salient American manifestation was progressivism, which provided the intellectual foundation for engagement of scholars with policy — epitomized by Woodrow Wilson, institutionalized in the New Deal Brains Trust, and brought to its apogee by Adlai Stevenson’s “eggheads” and John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier.30 This theme is explored at length in the chapters by Jeremi Suri, Andrew Bacevich, and, especially, Mark Lilla. But the rise of modern public intellectualism is not exclusively the story of the history of ideas. Real-world events also served to broker the marriage between the world of ideas and political engagement. Some regard the seminal event as the Dreyfus Affair in France, which dragged intellectuals and other soldiers of ideas out of their studies and positioned them on the barricades to combat the forces of religious and ethnonationalist reaction in late nineteenth-century France.31 In contrast, a bit later America went through a less dramatic process of public intellectuals emerging in response to events. One striking example was Robert LaFollette, who as governor forged a close working relationship with the University of Wisconsin to address a host of real-world policy issues, which would set the stage for a more general engagement of American intellectuals with policy.32 Most would agree that the apogee of American intellectuals’ participation in politics came with the Kennedy administration. Although the New Frontier hardly depopulated the groves of academe, it did thrust scholars into the policy limelight and for a time “subtly transformed our tree-shaded campuses from transmitters of knowledge to brokerage houses of ideas.”33 In a glossy article in Look on what he termed the “action intellectuals,” journalist Theodore White wrote that with Camelot “scholars have arrived at the junction of history where their role in politics demands definition. For it is as teachers, as cartographers only, that they must be seen. Their studies and surveys, however imperfect, are the only road maps of the future showing the hazy contours of a new landscape.”34

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If the New Frontier marked the acme of intellectual engagement in policymaking, it also sounded the first stanzas of its swan song.35 Indeed, the sad fate of the “best and the brightest” in the Kennedy administration, particularly their implication in the disastrous Vietnam decisions, represents a cautionary tale across the political spectrum about the perils of intellectuals meddling in the public sphere.36 Apropos of these changing attitudes, journalist David Halberstam recounted a conversation between Lyndon Johnson and his political mentor, Sam Rayburn, the legendary Speaker of the House, in which the latter dammed the new president’s gushing about the intellectually brilliant cabinet he had inherited from his murdered predecessor: “Well, Lyndon, you may be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say . . . but I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.”37 Given this history, it is not surprising that contemporary thinking about public intellectualism is so polarized between those who, along with Russell Jacoby, are nostalgic for the time before Camelot when intellectuals and policy regularly mixed, and those who today think we are on the dawn of a new renaissance of public intellectualism, ushered in by the Internet and mediated by the blogosphere. However, even scholars like Anthony Grafton, who find the lost Golden Age/New Dawn dichotomy overdrawn, nonetheless have to concede more to the pessimists than the optimists.38 In a recent opinion piece on nuclear proliferation in the New York Times, physicist Lawrence M. Krauss laments that “to our great peril, the scientific community has had little success in recent years influencing policy on global security.”39 This marks quite a change from the dawn of the nuclear age in which America’s atomic scientists had a seat at the policymaking table and a voice in our national public debates on these issues.40 In addition to clarifying the history of the American and other public intellectual cases, we also need some more conceptual work to explain the variation in the role and effectiveness of public intellectuals across time and space. Do secular trends— modernity, the Enlightenment, even postmodernism— explain these patterns?41 Conversely, does the influence of public intellectuals wax and wane as a result of cyclical trends, as Hofstadter suggests, with the emergence of particular policy problems,

Public Intellectuals 9

the engagement of intellectuals with them (both inside and outside of government), and the discontent and disappointment that inevitably comes as theory and practice clash, as they invariably do?42 The chapters in this volume shed light on all of these questions.

Specific Questions

Do policymakers or the public really listen to public intellectuals? This might seem an odd question with which to begin a project on public intellectualism, because a logical presumption of the investigation is that they do, at least at some times and on particular issues. But the question needs to be answered, because a recent investigation of the topic came to the conclusion that “there is little evidence that public intellectuals are highly influential.”43 There are two explanations for why this could be the case. First, one could argue, as Posner does, that “real-world events have a much greater impact on public opinion than academic theories do.”44 Second, one could maintain, as historian Bruce Kuklick does, for example, that the ideas of intellectuals merely serve policymakers as rationales or window dressing for doing things they want to do on other grounds, such as ideology or bureaucratic vested interest.45 But it is possible that Posner’s bold conclusion overstates the matter. Perhaps the influence of public intellectuals does vary by historical period, issue area, discipline, or country in important ways. For example, even while sharing some elements of Posner’s jaundiced view, Thomas Sowell admits that Posner may be right about the influence of “individual” public intellectuals, but he still believes that, in aggregate, they have a greater impact.46 This claim that the effect of public intellectuals as a group is greater than the influence of individuals certainly bears further investigation, which many of the contributions to this volume address. Another way to qualify Posner’s conclusion would be to disaggregate the policy process in a more detailed way, as political scientist John Kingdon does, into four discrete phases—(1) agenda setting; (2) specification

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of alternatives; (3) choice; and (4) implementation— and then ask if perhaps the influence of public intellectuals varies by stage in the policy process.47 Yet another approach is to conceive of the policy process, again following Kingdon, as “three process streams flowing through the system— streams of problems, policies, and politics. They are largely independent of one another, and each develops according to its own dynamics and rules. But at some critical junctures the three streams are joined, and the greatest policy changes grow out of the coupling of problems, policy proposals, and politics.”48 What joins these streams, in his view, are “policy windows” that periodically open and provide opportunities for outsiders to influence government policy.49 The questions, then, are these: When do such windows open, and what does it take to get public intellectuals to jump through them? Using this framework, Kingdon judges that “academics, researchers, and consultants” are the second “most important set of nongovernmental actors” in the policymaking process, and he concludes that they “affect alternatives more than the agenda, and affect long-term directions more than short-term outcomes.”50 Would a similar approach be applicable to other issue areas and countries? This question is addressed in a variety of different ways in the chapters by Suri, Bacevich, Willy Lam, Enrique Krause, Patrick Baert, Bradford DeLong, Kenneth Miller, Gilles Andréani, and me. Is their effect “good/beneficial”? Assuming the answer to our first question is in the affirmative, it begs a second important question: Is the influence of public intellectual good or bad? I suspect that most people think that the influence of public intellectuals is on balance positive. Who would deny that having smart people, with no vested bureaucratic interest at stake, weighing in on issues of public moment, would not produce better policy? Indeed, their participation in this process seems like a sine qua non for the effective functioning of the marketplace of ideas underpinning our system of deliberative democracy.

Public Intellectuals 11

Given that, it is striking how many thinkers— particularly but not exclusively from the Right of the political spectrum— come to the opposite conclusion. Paul Johnson, for example, says that “one of the principal lessons of our tragic century, which has seen so many millions of innocent lives sacrificed in schemes to improve the lot of humanity is— beware intellectuals. Not merely should they be kept well away from the levers of power, they also should be the objects of suspicion when they seek to offer collective advice.”51 Johnson maintains that since the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, we have been living under a “delusion” that the public activities of intellectuals could improve society.52 The Hoover Institution’s Sowell even blames such historical tragedies as the Holocaust and the crimes of communism on intellectuals.53 Speaking for many post-Vietnam academics and others on the Left, noted linguist and public intellectual Noam Chomsky concludes “that, as is no doubt obvious, the cult of the expert is both self-serving, for those who propound it, and fraudulent.”54 Offering a less polemical, but still pointed, indictment, one of our contributors, Mark Lilla, previously came to a strikingly similar conclusion, warning that “whoever takes it upon himself to write an honest intellectual history of twentieth-century Europe will need a strong stomach.”55 Reviewing the various arguments about the puzzling historical affinity of intellectuals for various forms of tyranny — which include the widely embraced view that blames religion and other pre-Enlightenment factors, Isaiah Berlin’s counterintuitive indictment of the Enlightenment itself, and his own perspective, which highlights the different socialhistorical context within which public intellectuals like Raymond Aron and Martin Heidegger operated—Lilla suggests a number of alternative answers to this question, including his own: “It depends.”56 Determining exactly upon what the potential impact of public intellectuals depends is another one of the central objectives of this volume. Suri, Bacevich, Lam, Ahmad Moussalli, DeLong, Lilla, Zuckert, Hösle, and I all discuss whether their effect is good or bad. Despite the dire tone of their assessments of the deleterious consequences of public intellectuals, Johnson and Sowell do raise valid concerns. One is how far specific, specialized knowledge of the sort that academic public intellectuals possess travels to broader issues of public

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policy?57 Hence, Sowell’s caution—“when people operate as ‘public intellectuals,’ espousing ideas and policies to a wider population beyond their professional colleagues, they may or may not carry over intellectual rigor into these more general, more policy-oriented, or more ideologically charged discussions”— is worth heeding.58 A second, and perhaps more profound, question: Does the distinction between “intellect” and “wisdom” that Sowell posits needs further development?59 Framed in a less polemical way, the question we might ask here is this: Is the distinction between “theoretical” as opposed to “practical” knowledge meaningful? And another related question his warning raises: What is the applicability of increasingly complex and abstruse academic approaches and scholarly methodologies to public policy debates? Our chapters on the various disciplines and professions engage this question directly. How often do intellectuals get things “right” when they engage in the public policy fray? Again, we might presume a consensus that they mostly do, but many recent commentators have come to the opposite conclusion. Typical is blogger and public policy professor Daniel Drezner, who laments the “dismal performance of intellectuals in proximity to power.”60 Johnson dismisses public intellectuals as “as unreasonable, illogical, and superstitious as anyone else.”61 Sowell agrees, arguing that the wisdom of crowds is a more reliable font of wisdom than the oracular pronouncements of individual public intellectuals.62 In perhaps the most rigorous analysis of this question, social psychologist Phillip Tetlock concludes that publicly engaged scholars are in fact worse at prediction than others.63 “When we pit experts against minimalist performance benchmarks— dilettantes, dart-throwing chimps, and assorted extrapolation algorithms,” Tetlock damningly reports, “we find few signs that expertise translates into greater ability to make either ‘well-calibrated’ or ‘discriminating’ forecasts.”64 Tetlock maintains that the most important element shaping the dynamics of contemporary public intellectualism is intellectual style. Employing a metaphor made famous by the British philosopher Isaiah

Public Intellectuals 13

Berlin, he distinguishes between Foxes—“those ‘who know many little things’”— and Hedgehogs, “those who ‘know one big thing.’” The problem, in his view, is that hedgehogs tend to be rigid and doctrinaire, and so are often wrong. But their bold and clear arguments nonetheless garner attention from the public and the media, and so they tend to win out in the intellectual marketplace of ideas.65 Assessing the effects of different intellectual styles and other related factors therefore seems like a productive line of comparative inquiry. Bacevich’s and Suri’s chapters on American Cold War intellectuals provide some leverage on this issue, as do the chapters by Krauze, DeLong, Lilla, Zuckert, and me. Finally, it may seem like an easy question to answer, but it is actually not clear by what standard we should judge the effectiveness of public intellectuals. Should we focus just on big instances that they get wrong, such as the end of the Cold War or 9/11, or should we compare their track record to other authoritative sources of information, such as academia, government officials, journalists, or even the general public?66 What are the various mechanisms by which public intellectuals might exercise influence? For example, public intellectuals may directly influence politics through holding public office, as did Boethius, Thomas More, or Francis Bacon. Conversely, they may serve as advisors to leaders or other political figures, along the lines of Plato and Aristotle. Public intellectuals have upon occasion sought to exercise direct influence upon public policy by serving in government, but the historical experience of “the best and the brightest,” at least in the United States, has not been uniformly positive, and there are good bureaucratic reasons to doubt that this mechanism would be very effective.67 Kingdon suggests an alternative direct route — what he calls “policy entrepreneurship”— available to those “who are willing to invest their resources— time, energy, reputation, money — to promote a position in return for anticipated future gain in the form of material, purposive, or solidary benefits.”68 Would it be useful to have a sense of how influential public intellectuals have been in those direct roles? Again, Bacevich and Suri touch upon this, as do Lam on China, Krauze on Latin America,

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Ahmad Moussalli on the Arab world, and Hösle in his conclusion. In addition, Paul Horwitz discusses how new social media are providing new avenues for public intellectuals to ply their trade, and Baert discusses the increasing role of narrow expertise in contemporary public intellectual discourse. I suspect that most of us would agree with the late James Q. Wilson, himself one of the most prominent American public intellectuals of recent years, that even his influence “was not to be found in the details of policy” but was more indirect. In his view, “intellectuals provided the conceptual language, the ruling paradigms, the empirical examples (note I say examples not evidence) that became the accepted assumptions for those in charge of making policy.”69 Such indirect roles might include building the frameworks,70 what Sowell calls the “general set of presumptions, beliefs, and imperatives” that structure how we think about policy.71 Another indirect role might involve the selection of alternatives. The classic indirect public intellectual role is as the independent critic, or what sociologist Robert K. Merton calls the “gadfly.”72 Among this group we might also include persons whose intellectual work moves large segments of society and thus indirectly influences politics, either in their time (e.g., Jürgen Habermas) or through the ages (e.g., G.W. F. Hegel). Do we agree with Wilson on the efficacy of this, or any other, indirect role for public intellectuals? Finally, as Patrick Deneen explores in his chapter, public intellectuals could play a very important indirect, though heretofore unacknowledged, role through undergraduate teaching. Is it fruitful to compare the social roles of public intellectuals within the same country over time and across different countries? The United States was a country founded by public intellectuals, but their subsequent standing has been mixed. Indeed, Hofstadter highlights the irony “that the United States should have been founded by intellectuals; [but] for throughout most of our political history, the intellectual has been for the most part either an outsider, a servant, or a scapegoat.”73 He attributes this anti-intellectualism to popular resentment, because we Americans chafe at being “at the mercy of experts.”74

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It appears that the tenuous standing of intellectuals is a global phenomenon, which might be because, in part, they have historically been part of a distinct social or economic class in their societies.75 But both the comparative standing of intellectuals in different countries and the reasons behind that raise some interesting questions worthy of further investigation. The chapters by Suri, Lam, Krauze, Moussalli, Baert, Andréani, Lilla, and me touch upon this question. What is the relationship between public intellectualism and the university? One of the more complicated issues, especially in the United States, is the evolving role of the university and the professoriate in public intellectualism.76 Indeed, this topic bears closer examination because, as Posner observes, although “not all intellectuals are professors, even today . . . most are.”77 Thus, the fate of public intellectualism is inextricably linked with developments within American universities. On the one hand, one might expect that professors and other university-based scholars would play an active role in larger public debates by virtue of their deep expertise in their fields and also given the protections afforded them by tenure and academic freedom, which should reassure them that they can weigh in on even very controversial debates at little professional cost. And, at least in the American case, there was a tradition of academic public intellectualism that persisted into the 1960s. To be sure, some universities and scholars continue to play this role, but there is, on the other hand, a widely shared sense that Russell Jacoby is right when he complains that “the missing intellectuals are lost in the universities.”78 How much this has changed, and why, is worth exploring, as is the related question of whether the same is true in other countries. Baert’s chapter on philosophy, DeLong’s on economics, Miller’s on the natural sciences, Zuckert’s discussion of the decline of political theory in political science, Deneen’s discussion of undergraduate education, and my own chapter on the ethical obligation of scholars to society all shed light on this question. If we agree with Jacoby and others that academic public intellectualism has declined, what explains that decline? Roughly speaking, there are two conceivable classes of answers. For example, it is possible that the

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public, for whatever reason, no longer values academic expertise. As mathematician Laurent Lafforgue admits, “our pride and self-confidence crumbles, however, when we realize that the majority of people outside academia demonstrate, whether through their words or their attitude of disdain, that they don’t see any great value in our learning, and that, at any rate, they don’t consider the pursuit of learning at all necessary to leading a good life.”79 This raises the question: Why have public attitudes about the academy apparently changed so dramatically? Another possibility that we need to consider is that these changes in public attitudes are a response to developments with the academic enterprise itself. “I believe that it is fair to say that the position, the contribution, most precisely the social significance of the public intellectual,” Posner maintains, “is deteriorating in the United States and that the principal reasons are the growth and character of the modern university.”80 Some commentators embrace this explanation because the decline of American public intellectualism seems tied to developments in the American university, particularly its dramatic expansion, which began at roughly the same time.81 Others focus not so much on the growth in size of the American university and the consequent change in the social and economic demographics of the students and faculty, but rather on the intellectual changes that have taken place over this time in the academic disciplines. Taking a long historical view, Habermas concludes that the shift from the ancient to modern view of the relation of theory and practice means that “the genuine area of praxis is withdrawn altogether from the discipline of methodical investigation.”82 Already in the nineteenth century, Newman lamented the increasing disaggregation of knowledge between universities and “the literary world.”83 This development, of course, worried him because the Catholic intellectual tradition he embraced maintained a commitment to both the unity of knowledge and its application for the betterment of man’s physical and social well-being.84 To be sure, Newman was an ardent enthusiast for the classical Liberal Arts and hardly a proponent of strictly vocational education.85 But he conceded that if then a practical end must be assigned to a University course, I say it is that of training good members of society. Its art is the art of so-

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cial life, and its end is fitness for the world. . . . a university training is the great ordinary means to a great but ordinary end; it aims at raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aims to popular aspiration, at giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at facilitating the exercise of political powers, and refining the intercourse of public life.86 Political scientist Ira Katznelson recounts how prior to the professionalization of disciplines, between 1870 and 1920, scholarly public intellectualism was more common. But, in his view, since then “our social science disciplines have changed beyond recognition. Increasingly separated from their lineages of political, social, and economic thought, confidently technical, and developed by distinctive scholarly subgroups, the social sciences mainly advance self-referentially, inside specialized conversations.”87 The result, as Thomas Bender notes, is that though “the academic disciplines in America have been astonishingly successful in producing new knowledge, . . . their almost complete hegemony in our intellectual life has left Americans with an impoverished public culture and little means for critical discussion of general ideas, as opposed to scientific or scholarly expertise.”88 It is precisely the increasing “professionalization” of academic disciplines that has made them more inward-focused and corporate in orientation.89 Such an attitude could explain the decline of public intellectualism by virtue of the fact that now scholars and public intellectuals working in the same area have different intellectual agendas: “Academic researchers aspire to be social scientists, while public researchers seek to be social scientists,” in Herbert J. Gans’s assessment.90 What has been the cause of these intellectual changes? Some candidates might include the increasingly rigid distinction between “science” and “policy,” with research in the former being defined as “basic” to the exclusion of “applied” knowledge relevant to the latter.91 Another might be that the growing intellectual division of labor —in important respects the sine qua non of intellectual progress— has also had the unfortunate result of fragmenting knowledge, which Lafforgue characterizes as “nothing short of tragedy for the University and for the research individually.”92

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Finally, professionalization may have also had the effect of giving the disciplines a more internal and self-referential caste. The result of these various disciplinary changes is, in Posner’s view, that “today, then, the typical intellectual is a safe specialist, which is not the type of person well suited to play the public intellectual’s most distinctive, though not only, role, that of critical commentator addressing a nonspecialist audience on matters of broad public concern.”93 Jacoby adds that academic “professionalization leads to privatization or depoliticization, a withdrawal of intellectual energy from a larger domain to a narrower discipline.”94 And Bender concludes that “rigor and intellectual security were gained at the cost of making the parts of American intellectual life more powerful than the whole.”95 The major question, therefore, is not how to overturn academic professional and political attitudes. But rather, it is, as Katznelson puts it, how to balance “a university career and a public voice, against odds, without lapsing into media glibness or scholarly hypercircumscription.”96 Our comparative disciplinary perspective in this volume hopes to illuminate how best to achieve this balance. What has been the role of different disciplines in public intellectualism and how have things changed within and among them on this score? There seems to be general agreement that the disciplinary center of gravity among public intellectuals has shifted over time. At one time, philosophy provided the “founding public intellectuals” because it was considered the architectonic science of knowledge spanning all of the other disciplines and uniting them under its rubric.97 In the heyday of American public intellectualism in the 1950s and early 1960s, historians such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and literary critics such as Lionel Trilling constituted the bulk of engaged intellectuals. Today, however, it seems as though economics has become the “universal methodology” of most public intellectuals.98 Why is philosophy no longer the wellspring of public intellectuals? Answering the question is the focus of Baert’s chapter. One might argue that philosophy was never a suitable disciplinary grounding for public in-

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tellectualism because the two are at root incompatible, a lesson that some believe we have failed to learn throughout history, to our collective peril.99 The cautionary tale on this score was the disastrous results of the efforts of the twentieth century’s greatest philosopher, Martin Heidegger, to become, if not a philosopher-king, at least an intellectual power behind the throne in Hitler’s Germany. “The problem of Heidegger,” Lilla observes, “was the problem of all great philosophers, nothing more, nothing less. Their thinking had to be cultivated and protected from the world, but they also must be kept from worldly political affairs, which are properly the concern of others— of citizens, statesmen, of men of action.”100 Following this reasoning, Paul Rahe explains “that the quest for theoretical wisdom does not eventuate in political prudence: this quest may, in fact, be antithetical to and subversive of political prudence.”101 Rahe’s contention that prudence and knowledge are incompatible bears further investigation. What, precisely, is the relationship between prudence and knowledge and upon what, if not the former, is the latter grounded? Whether in fact we agree that philosophy and public intellectualism are ultimately incompatible, we should ask whether its replacement by economics has proven more satisfactory. This is DeLong’s task. Some argue that the intellectual hegemony of academic economics undermines academic public intellectualism by reinforcing the narrowness and scientism of the contemporary social sciences. Indeed, many commentators have remarked on the economists’ “intellectual imperialism,” which leads, in Edmund White’s words, to “a desire on the part of many scholars to apply the aggregate techniques and arithmetical methods of the economists to the entire range of national problems.”102 Martha Nussbaum raises a different concern about the increasing predominance of economists among public intellectuals. She worries about the “philosophical recalcitrance of economists, and their refusal to admit that their work does make substantive philosophical commitments that need to be scrutinized,” and she concludes that philosophy should once again play a major role in public debates.103 Either way, we need a better sense of the potential contributions and limitations of members of the different disciplines as public intellectuals. In addition to the Baert and DeLong chapters, Miller’s discussion of the natural scientist as public intellectual, Suri’s

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chapter on history, and Horwitz’s discussion of law provide a comprehensive disciplinary perspective on the topic. Is public intellectualism more important in different issue areas? Another set of related questions we explore deals with the impact of public intellectualism in different issue areas. Are public intellectuals, as Sowell suggests, most influential in the softer legal, cultural, and political realms?104 Or are they, as longtime U.S. national security decision-maker Paul Nitze argued, more influential when they provide hard technical information to decision-makers rather than trying to influence broader policy decisions themselves?105 Again, our disciplinary and professions studies provide the most insight here, but almost every chapter in the volume touches upon it. What are the most serious limitations to public intellectuals making a positive contribution to broader public debates? The lack of high-quality public intellectualism today could be a function of either supply or demand. On the former, one possible reason public intellectuals might not make a positive contribution is that, following the previous discussion of developments within the modern university, today’s would-be academic public intellectuals have become intellectually hyperspecialized and therefore have little to offer of general interest to the rest of society.106 On the demand side, a source of weakness among today’s public intellectuals could be a failure of the intellectual marketplace of ideas.107 Tetlock, for example, suggests that the problem of public intellectualism may lie with “consumers,” who have little motivation to be discriminating judges among public intellectuals. Indeed, he suggests that we do not listen to public intellectuals because we think they can reveal to us the truth, but rather because they bolster our prejudices or provide a crutch giving us quick and simple answers to complex issues, rather than allowing us to think them through ourselves.108 Other commentators emphasize that the public simply treats public intellectuals as sources of enter-

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tainment and solidarity.109 Most of these reasons for public interest in public intellectualism are hardly conducive to public intellectuals making a positive contribution to public policy. This is another common focus in the volume: Suri looks at “American exceptionalism” as a set of blinders, Lam focuses on the close links of Chinese intellectuals with the state, Moussalli highlights the schizophrenic attitudes among Arab intellectuals toward the West, Lilla focuses on liberalism as a boundary upon our intellectual horizon, and Horwitz’s chapter on the blogger as public intellectual explores the promise and peril of this new medium of communication. Assuming we accept the broad consensus that public intellectualism is declining in both frequency and quality, how can it be made better? One camp suggests that the problem is not the overacademization of public intellectualism, but rather its relative lack of solid grounding in the norms and techniques of science —if only public intellectuals were more academic in their approaches, they would provide better advice to us. A related suggestion is that we improve public intellectuals by more consistently applying rewards and sanctions based upon their performance.110 The assumption here is that “unlike engineers, physicians, or scientists, the intelligentsia face no serious constraint or sanction based on empirical verification.”111 The solution that many observers across the political spectrum recommend is fostering greater accountability.112 Of course, not everyone is convinced that science and the market will dramatically improve public intellectualism.113 In either case, more careful consideration of this question is warranted. The exchange in the third section of this volume between Lilla and Zuckert touches on this last topic, but the chapters by Moussalli, Baert, Horwitz, and Miller are also relevant. What are the moral issues associated with public intellectualism? When most of us think about the potential or actual contributions of public intellectuals, we tend to focus on their role in clarifying meansends-relations involving natural or social facts, as did Albert Einstein

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and Max Weber in their respective spheres. But many public intellectuals also seek to address value issues, either through an appeal to traditional values (a common approach historically) or by rational value analysis, as in the case of modern ethicists, such as Jeremy Bentham, and James and John Stuart Mill. But opinion on the moral issue of public intellectualism varies widely today. Moral arguments against public intellectualism are made both in terms of the inevitable ethical compromises policy requires and on behalf of the proposition that the highest moral obligation a scholar has is to “science” or the “truth,” which many see as incompatible with policymaking. On the former, Niccolò Machiavelli famously exposed the moral limits of politics, advising the prince to learn “not to be good.”114 On the latter, political theorists John Schaar and Sheldon Wolin warn that the scholar needs to “think through the conflicting loyalties of political service and those stemming from his academic calling” and maintain “the precious element of detachment — which only a philistine would deride as ethical neutrality — so necessary if the serious thinker is to achieve a perspective broader than that of either the defenders or the attackers of the establishment.”115 However, this latter view is by no means universally shared. Journalist and English professor Louis Menand dismisses the pretentions to scientific purity of opponents of public intellectualism, arguing that there is no such thing as knowledge for its own sake.116 Similarly, Hofstadter challenges the argument that engagement compromises scholarly integrity, and notes, “To argue that no intellectual creativity is possible where there is a taint of concern with practice or with power would be to deny the significance of a large part of our heritage of political and social speculation, much of which has been left us by men who were up to their necks in practical matters of state. One thinks of men like Machiavelli, Hobbes and Locke; or Adam Smith, Ricardo and Keynes.”117 Given this wide diversity of opinion on the topic, there seems to be a great deal of room for further examination of the moral obligations of intellectuals, particularly scholars, to the world outside of the ivory tower. Suri, Lam, Miller, and Hösle touch upon this question, but I also engage it at length in my discussion of Max Weber as public intellectual in my own contribution to this volume.

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What are the politics of public intellectuals? Among many commentators, there is a consensus that tends to cluster to the Left of the political spectrum. For instance, Posner calculates that two thirds of the public intellectuals he studied fall on that end of the political spectrum.118 Philosopher Richard Rorty agrees, explaining that the dramatic decline in public intellectualism among social scientists means that most academic public intellectuals come from the humanities, where the leftward skew of academic politics is most pronounced.119 Critics on the Right directly link public intellectualism with leftwing politics, especially after the Vietnam War. For example, Sowell sees the two fitting together seamlessly: At the heart of the social vision prevalent among contemporary intellectuals is the belief that there are “problems” created by existing institutions and that “solutions” to these problems can be excogitated by intellectuals. This vision is both a vision of society and a vision of the role of intellectuals within society. In short, intellectuals have seen themselves not simply as an elite — in the passive sense in which large landowners, rentiers, or holders of various sinecures might qualify as elites—but as an anointed elite, people with a mission to lead others in one way or another toward better lives.120 What explains the connection? Conservative thinker Russell Kirk dismisses public intellectuals as “displaced persons, schooled beyond their proper expectations in life, severed from tradition but unable to find comfortable niches in the world of modernity.”121 The problem, in his view, is that they look at the world through spectacles with lenses tinted with a “defecated rationality, the exaltation of pure logic, presumptuous human reason unassisted by religious humility and traditional wisdom, [and above] veneration and conscience.”122 Sowell, in contrast, indicts our graduate educational system in this process: “The price of [a graduate student’s] professional training is spending years as a captive for academic intellectuals promoting” their agendas.123 If true, it is easy to see how this could produce a gap with the rest of society (where the distribution on the political spectrum is broader), which might explain the public’s decreasing

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interest in what professors have to say. It is indisputable that, with some notable exceptions, the professoriate is more to the Left than the public. But this should only account for the direction, not the extent, of changes in academic public intellectualism. Not everyone agrees that public intellectualism and leftist politics are inextricably linked. Former Brookings Institution president Bruce McLaury contends that the net effect of social science research is conservative because “it fosters skepticism and caution by shifting attention from moral commitment to analytical problems that rarely have clear-cut or simple solutions.”124 One important counterexample is the neoconservative public intellectuals associated with the quasi-scholarly journal The Public Interest, who were deeply engaged in the policy debates of the 1960s and 1970s, setting the stage for important aspects of the Reagan Revolution. They were hardly creatures of the Left, despite some having started out there earlier in their careers.125 Indeed, it was precisely their academic engagement with what scholars such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Daniel Bell, and James Q. Wilson saw as the failed policies of the Great Society that played a large role in exposing its limits.126 In other words, the experience of particularly the first generation of the neoconservative movement calls into question the widely embraced proposition that public intellectualism is a strictly leftist disorder. Conversely, the current generation of neoconservative thinkers, operating from think tanks and other nonacademic perches, raises the question: Was the Right driven from or did it abandon the ivory tower? An obvious question is whether and how different political orientations affect public intellectualism. In one way or another, nearly all of the chapters in our volume engage this political question, but this is a particular focus of Suri, Bacevich, Lam, Krauze, Moussalli, Baert, Andréani, and Lilla. One could go further and argue that like most professionals, academics face conflicting pressures and interests, of which ideology is just one among many. Jacoby, for example, argues that today, when push comes to shove among academics, bureaucratic interest trumps politics.127 The decline of academic public intellectualism could be tied to organizational developments in the academy and the disciplines, rather than to politics.128

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Does the decline in public intellectualism really matter? Skeptics might conclude that the answer is no, but there is a huge literature decrying this development, which suggests that for many people public intellectualism’s apparent decline is at least a source of anxiety.129 Thus it would be useful to determine what the costs are of this decline for both society and the various institutions (particularly academia) that were previously cradles of public intellectualism. For society, there are two possible costs. The direct costs result from the loss of the resources society devotes to these institutions. Indirect opportunity costs include the loss of expertise that, although not unbiased, nevertheless brings to the marketplace of ideas a different perspective than that of government, the media, and the private sector. The costs for these institutions of declining public intellectualism among their members could also be significant. First, they may be losing public support by not being engaged in the big issues that matter to society. The recent decision of Congress to restrict National Science Foundation funding for political science highlights the danger here. Second, the lack of real-world engagement may also be deleterious for the advancement of knowledge within these institutions. Hermann Hesse’s dystopic chronicle of the Glass Bead Game serves as a warning of the danger of intellectuals becoming an inward-looking and self-referential class of mandarins with no connection to the larger world.130 Again, this theme runs like a red thread throughout all of the chapters in our volume. What is the effect of variation in intellectual tradition on public intellectualism? It has often been noted that the standing of intellectuals varies across societies and over time. France, for example, seems to be a country where public intellectuals have a much more prominent role — not only institutionally but also in terms of their public standing — than is the case in many other countries. Likewise, the role of public intellectuals in the United States seems to have been very different before and after the Progressive Era than it was at its height. Russell Kirk argues that “only as

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Britain and America lost their comparative isolation from European ideology, and only as there began to grow up in these nations a body of persons educated beyond their expectations in life, opposed to established social institutions, did the word ‘intellectual’ obtain currency and the place of the intellectual in English and American society begin to be argued about.”131 These different observations suggest that further investigation of the intellectual tradition of a country would be worthwhile. Along with the Suri, Bacevich, Lam, Krause, and Moussalli chapters, Andréani’s contribution to our volume on the role of French diplomats as public intellectuals and Lilla’s broad historical comparison highlight this variation. Does the role of public intellectuals vary in different types of political systems? One might think that the answer to this question is straightforward. Public intellectualism is a democratic phenomenon, tightly linked with a free and open marketplace of ideas, but critics have pointed out that public intellectuals are not unknown in authoritarian systems. Lam’s chapter on China and Moussalli’s on the Arab and Islamic worlds examine two prominent cases. Further, some commentators feel that democracies are in fact more vulnerable than other types of political systems to public intellectual malpractice. Sowell, for instance, worries that democracies are more susceptible to the pernicious effects of intellectuals than other types of political systems because “along with the benefits of free and democratic societies comes a special danger from the vulnerability of a trusting public to the fashions and presumptions embodied in the visions of an intelligentsia seeking their place in the sun.”132 Indeed, the pedigree of such arguments is distinguished. Historian Gordon Wood, for instance, takes the lesson of the Jacksonian revolution in American politics to be that democracy and high-quality leadership are incompatible. Unfortunately, comparing those who followed Jackson to the Founding Fathers, he concludes that in the end, what made subsequent duplication of the remarkable intellectual leadership of the Revolutionaries impossible in America was

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the growth of what we have come to value most — our egalitarian culture and our democratic society. One of the prices we had to pay for democracy was a decline in the intellectual quality of American political life and an eventual separation between ideas and power. As the common man rose to power in the decades following the Revolution, the inevitable consequence was the displacement from power of the uncommon man, the man of ideas.133 Given these arguments, the source of the much decried decline in public intellectualism might be our democratic politics. This question comes up in the contributions by Suri and Miller, but it is at the heart of the debate between Lilla and Zuckert over the influence of liberalism on public intellectualism in the contemporary world. Is the American experience of public intellectualism unique? In the Republic, Plato’s Socrates did not argue that the coming to power of the philosopher-king was impossible, just that it was very unlikely that philosophers would agree to rule or that kings would become philosophic.134 But for some commentators, the American Founders came close to effectively uniting philosophy and rule.135 Hofstadter characterizes “the founding Fathers [as] sages, scientists, men of broad cultivation, many of them apt in classical learning, who used their wide reading in history, politics, and law to solve the exigent problems of their time. No other era has produced so many men of knowledge among its political leaders as the age of John Adams, John Dickinson, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Mason, James Wilson, and George Wythe.”136 Yet Hofstadter also recognizes a deep “ambivalence” about public intellectualism as a uniquely American trait: “Among the intellectuals of the Western World, the Americans are probably the most prone to such pricks of conscience, possibly because they feel the constant necessity of justifying their role. British and French intellectuals, for example, usually take for granted the worth of what they are doing and the legitimacy of their claims on the community.”137 In his view, American culture has a deep antiintellectual current, which resurfaces periodically as a result of political

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crises and religious awakenings. This is reflected in a certain hesitation among American public intellectuals themselves. Hofstadter captures this sense well: “While they do resent evidences of anti-intellectualism, and take it as a token of a serious weakness in our society, they are troubled and divided in a more profound way by their acceptance. Perhaps the most divisive issue in the intellectual community today arises over the values to be placed upon the old alienation and the new acceptance.”138 The uniqueness of our public intellectual tradition is explicit in the Suri and Bacevich chapters but comes up in Krauze’s chapter on Latin America, Baert’s discussion of French intellectuals, DeLong’s discussion of economics (a quintessentially American academic discipline), and Horwitz’s discussion of bloggers. What are the implications of new social trends and technological developments for public intellectuals? Many believe that the Internet and the blogosphere have opened up new vistas for public intellectualism.139 Do we agree with that optimistic technological deterministic view? Even if the optimists are proven correct, will public intellectuals in this realm operate differently than traditional public intellectuals? Is there any downside to this particular medium for public intellectuals? Horwitz and Miller, along with Hösle, explicitly explore these issues, but I would also point to related discussions in the Lam, DeLong, Baert, and Miller chapters. What are the advantages and disadvantages of nonacademics as public intellectuals? We tend to focus quite a bit on the changing role of academics as public intellectuals. In one respect, that emphasis is justified because the majority of American public intellectuals, at least, have had some sort of academic connection. But there are other potential sources of public intellectuals— particularly artists, former government officials and diplomats, scientists and military officers— and we ought to give some thought as to which careers or professions are likely to contribute to the ranks of public intellectualism in the future. And what about these public intellectuals would

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make them different from academics? This is, of course, precisely the issue that Andréani (diplomats), Horwitz (bloggers), Suri (theologians), Lam (bureaucrats), Bacevich (independent intellectuals and writers), and Krause ( journalists) engage in their chapters.

Conclusion

These definitions, history, and list of questions are by no means definitive or exhaustive of the issues that our contributors touch on in their chapters. Indeed, we by no means fully answer all of them, but our hope in raising them in this introduction is to give the reader some indication of how our subsequent chapters fit within this larger intellectual architecture of the evolving edifice of public intellectualism.

Notes For helpful comments on this draft, I am grateful to my colleague Vittorio Hösle. 1. General treatments include Paul Johnson, Intellectuals (New York: Harper and Row, 1988); Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001); Edward Said, Reflections of the Intellectual (New York: Vintage, 1994); and Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, trans. Peter Collier (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988). 2. Richard A. Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 12. 3. Recent examples include Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987); Posner, Public Intellectuals; Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society (New York: Basic Books, 2009); and Thomas Bender, Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). 4. Namely, the very different conclusions that Posner and Sowell reach. 5. In English, this is largely, though not exclusively, the work of one scholar: Tony Judt, The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), and Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

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6. Exceptions include Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), and Edward Shils, The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972). 7. Two important examples are H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890 –1930, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage, 1977), and Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2007 [1928]). 8. In addition to Posner, the most comprehensive effort is Phillip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 9. The best example is Arthur M. Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, and M. Richard Zinman, eds., The Public Intellectual: Between Philosophy and Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). 10. Posner, Public Intellectuals, 396. Also see Lyman Bryson, “Notes on a Theory of Advice,” Political Science Quarterly 66, no. 3 (1951): 321– 39. 11. John Henry Cardinal Newman, The Idea of a University (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1960), 126. 12. Tony Judt, “The Peripheral Insider: Raymond Aron and the Wages of Reason,” in Melzer, Weinberger, and Zinman, The Public Intellectual, 157– 59. 13. Ira Katznelson, “The Professional Scholar as Public Intellectual: Reflections Prompted by Karl Mannheim, Robert K. Merton, and C. Wright Mills,” in Melzer, Weinberger, and Zinman, The Public Intellectual, 189. 14. Posner, Public Intellectuals, 17. Also see Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, 4 – 7 and 503; Robert K. Merton, “The Role of the Intellectual in Public Bureaucracy,” Social Forces 23, no. 4 (1945): 406. 15. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, intro. Louis Menand (New York: New York Review of Books, 2008), 103. 16. Theodore H. White, “The Action Intellectuals,” Look, June 9, 1967, 57. 17. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage, 1962), 427. 18. Melzer, “What Is an Intellectual,” in Melzer, Weinberger, and Zinman, The Public Intellectual, 7. Also see Thomas L. Pangle, “A Platonic Perspective on the Idea of the Public Intellectual,” in Melzer, Weinberger, and Zinman, The Public Intellectual, 15. 19. Leo Strauss, “Plato,” in Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, eds., History of Political Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972 [1963]), 31– 32.

Public Intellectuals 31 20. Arthur M. Melzer, “What Is an Intellectual,” in Melzer, Weinberger, and Zinman, The Public Intellectual, 6. 21. Pangle, “A Platonic Perspective on the Idea of the Public Intellectual,” 20. 22. Paul A. Rahe, “The Idea of the Public Intellectual in the Age of the Enlightenment,” in Melzer, Weinberger, and Zinman, The Public Intellectual, 27. 23. Marc Fumaroli, “The Republic of Letters,” Diogenes 36, no. 145 (1988): 139. 24. Anthony Grafton, Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 24. 25. Gordon Wood, “The Founding Fathers and the Creation of Public Opinion,” in Melzer, Weinberger, and Zinman, The Public Intellectual, 69– 70. 26. John Patrick Diggins, “The Changing Role of the Public Intellectual in American History,” in Melzer, Weinberger, and Zinman, The Public Intellectual, 94 – 95. 27. The acme of this effort was St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Great Books of the Western World, Vol. 20, ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952). For a synoptic overview of this tradition, see Oliver O’Donovan and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, eds., From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Political Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999). 28. Martin J. Svaglic, “Introduction,” in Newman, Idea of a University, viii. For a useful recent biography of Newman, see John Cornwell, Newman’s Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (London: Continuum, 2010). 29. Russell Kirk, “The American Intellectual: A Conservative View,” in The Intellectuals: A Controversial Portrait, ed. George B. de Huszar (New York: The Free Press, 1960), 310. 30. Diggins, “The Changing Role of the Public Intellectual in American History,” 96 – 100. Also see Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, 197. 31. Diggins, “The Changing Role of the Public Intellectual in American History,” 91. Also see Posner, Public Intellectuals, 359. 32. Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, 198– 99. 33. White, “The Action Intellectuals,” 64. 34. Theodore H. White, “Chartmakers for Our Demanding Future (Part III, Action-Intellectuals),” Look, June 23, 1967, 85. 35. David M. Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Ballantine, 1992), xiv.

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36. Noam Chomsky, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” in The Dissenting Academy, ed. Theodore Roszak (New York: Pantheon, 1968), 262. 37. Quoted in Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 41. 38. Grafton, Worlds Made by Words, 258, 269– 70. 39. Lawrence M. Krauss, “Deafness at Doomsday,” New York Times, January 15, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/opinion/deafness -at-doomsday.html?ref=environment. 40. Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983); Gregg Herken, Counsels of War: The Revealing Story of the Experts and Advisers—Scientist, Academics, Think Tank Strategists—Who Have Influenced and Helped Determine American Nuclear Arms Policy Since Hiroshima (New York: Knopf, 1985); Robert Gilpin, American Scientists & Nuclear Weapons Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962); and James G. Herschberg, James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993). 41. Russell Jacoby, “Big Brains, Small Impact,” The Chronicle Review, January 11, 2008, http://chronicle.com/article/Big-Brains-Small-Impact/11624. 42. Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, 199. 43. Posner, Public Intellectuals, 52; also see 135. See also Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, 15. 44. Posner, Public Intellectuals, 335. 45. Bruce Kuklick, Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). See also Francis J. Gavin, Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America’s Atomic Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 4. 46. Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, 521. 47. John W. Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 2003), 2– 3. 48. Ibid., 19. 49. Ibid., 166; also see 19– 20. 50. Ibid., 53, 68. 51. Johnson, Intellectuals, 342. 52. Ibid., 1– 2, 26. 53. Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, 538. 54. Chomsky, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” 274. 55. Lilla, Reckless Mind, 198. 56. Ibid., 202– 7. 57. Johnson, Intellectuals, 339.

Public Intellectuals 33 58. Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, 13. 59. Ibid., 3. 60. Daniel W. Drezner, “Public Intellectuals, 2.1,” Soc, November 22, 2008. 61. Johnson, Intellectuals, 27. 62. Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, 17– 20. 63. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment, 62– 63. 64. Ibid., 20. 65. Ibid., 2– 3, 72– 75, 119, 217. 66. John Lewis Gaddis, “International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War,” International Security 17, no. 3 (1992– 93): 5– 58. 67. Graham T. Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 67– 100, and Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1957), 8, 10. 68. Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, 79. 69. James Q. Wilson, “‘Policy Intellectuals’ and Public Policy,” The Public Interest, no. 64 (Summer 1981): 33. 70. Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, 55– 56. 71. Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, 503. 72. Merton, “The Role of the Intellectual in Public Bureaucracy,” 412. 73. Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, 145– 46. 74. Ibid., 37. 75. Ibid., 378. 76. Bender, Intellectual and Public Life, 46. 77. Posner, Public Intellectuals, 5. 78. Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals, 16. 79. Laurent Lafforgue, “Does Basic Research Have Meaning? A Few Remarks by a Catholic Mathematician,” trans. Hélène Wilkenson (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), 6. 80. Posner, Public Intellectuals, 6 81. Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals, 72, 131. 82. Jürgen Habermas, Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel (Boston: Beacon, 1974), 46; also see 78– 79. 83. Newman, The Idea of a University, xlvi– xlvii. 84. Ibid., 76. 85. Ibid., 124. 86. Ibid., 134. 87. Katznelson, “The Professional Scholar as Public Intellectual,” 192.

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88. Bender, Intellectual and Public Life, 46. See also Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Noon Day Press, 1987), x. 89. Lawrence M. Mead, “Scholasticism in Political Science,” Perspectives on Politics 8, no. 2 (2010): 453– 64; Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010); and Ian Shapiro, The Flight From Reality in the Human Sciences (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 90. Herbert J. Gans, “Public Sphere Forum,” http://publicsphere.ssrc.org /gans-toward-a-public-social-science/. 91. Rejecting this distinction is Donald E. Stokes, Pasteur’s Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation (Washington, DC: Brookings, 1997). 92. Lafforgue, “Does Basic Research Have Meaning?” 15. 93. Posner, Public Intellectuals, 5. 94. Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals, 147. 95. Bender, Intellectual and Public Life, 13. See also Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals, 6– 7. 96. Katznelson, “The Professional Scholar as Public Intellectual,” 193. 97. Posner, Public Intellectuals, 323. 98. Drezner, “Public Intellectuals, 2.1,” 3. 99. Lilla, Reckless Mind, 44. 100. Ibid., 43. 101. Rahe, “The Idea of the Public Intellectual in the Age of the Enlightenment,” 30. 102. White, “The Action Intellectuals,” 57, and White, “Scholarly Impact on the Nation’s Past,” Look, June 16, 1967, 74B. 103. Martha C. Nussbaum, “Public Philosophy and International Feminism,” in Melzer, Weinberger, and Zinman, The Public Intellectual, 213. 104. Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, 534. 105. Paul H. Nitze, “The Role of the Learned Man in Government,” Review of Politics 20, no. 3 (1958): 275– 88. For a similar perspective, see Allen Whiting, “The Scholar and the Policymaker,” World Politics 24, Special Supplement (1972): 229– 47. 106. Posner, Public Intellectuals, 148– 49. 107. Ibid., 41, 164 – 65. See also Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, 10, 508, 510 – 11. 108. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment, 231– 32. 109. Posner, Public Intellectuals, 2– 3. 110. Ibid., 146– 47.

Public Intellectuals 35 111. See also Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, 517. 112. Posner, Public Intellectuals, 80, 154, 369, 382. See also Nicholas D. Kristof, “Learning How to Think,” New York Times, March 26, 2009, A23. 113. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment, 88, 233. 114. See Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (New York: Mentor Classic, 1952), 84. 115. John H. Schaar and Sheldon S. Wolin, “Essays on The Scientific Study of Politics: A Critique,” American Political Science Review 57, no. 1 (1963): 148, 150. 116. Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010), 13– 14. 117. Richard Hofstadter, “A Note on Intellect and Power,” American Scholar 30, no. 4 (1961): 594. 118. Posner, Public Intellectuals, 117, 182. See also Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, 174. 119. Richard Rorty, “When Work Disappears,” Dissent (Summer 1997): 111. 120. See also Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, 94; emphasis in original. 121. Kirk, “The American Intellectual,” 311; see also 313. 122. Ibid., 308. 123. See also Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, 524. 124. Bruce McLaury, “Forward” to Henry J. Aaron, Politics and the Professors: The Great Society in Perspective (Washington, DC: Brookings, 1978); see also 17, 159. 125. James Q. Wilson, “A Life in the Public Interest,” Wall Street Journal, September 21, 2009, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204488 304574424752913834312.html, and Justin Vaïsse, “Was Irving Kristol a New Conservative?” Foreignpolicy.com, September 23, 2009, http://foreignpolicy.com /2009/09/23/was-irving-kristol-a-neoconservative/. 126. Tom Alexander, “The Social Engineers Retreat under Fire,” Fortune, October 1972, 132– 48. 127. Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals, 140 – 41. 128. Ibid., 195– 96. 129. See, for example, Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Why Public Intellectuals?” Wilson Quarterly 25, no. 4 (2001): 43– 50. 130. Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game (Toronto: Bantam, 1970). 131. Kirk, “The American Intellectual,” 312. 132. Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, 524. 133. Wood, “The Founding Fathers and the Creation of Public Opinion,” 68. See also Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, 33.

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134. Allan Bloom, trans., The Republic of Plato (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 473a– e. 135. Wood, “The Founding Fathers and the Creation of Public Opinion,” 68, and Diggins, “The Changing Role of the Public Intellectual in American History,” 93. 136. Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, 145. 137. Ibid., 417. 138. Ibid., 4 – 23, 55, 74, 393. 139. Mark Thoma, “Public Sphere Forum,” http://publicsphere.ssrc.org /thoma-new-forms-of-communication-and-the-public-mission-of-economics/. See also Drezner, “Public Intellectuals, 2.1.”

Public Intellectuals in a Comparative Context

chapter one

Historical Consciousness, Realism, and Public Intellectuals in American Society  

Few public intellectuals in the United States have thought of themselves as historians, but most have chosen to make their arguments in historical terms. From Jefferson to Emerson to Lincoln to Dewey, America’s most influential thinkers have described their society as a modern manifestation of the ancient republics, a New Jerusalem, a union of Athenian democracy and Roman power, and a progressive embodiment of British common law and industrial capitalism. Liberty, democracy, and nation— the keywords of American history — have all found voice as forwardlooking claims planted upon the fertile seedbed of past experience. In this sense, the “old world” has been the historical “other” that allows American public intellectuals of every generation to point ahead and describe how their country can improve upon a relevant and nottoo-distant past. The concrete manifestations of this mind-set are evident in the ubiquitous monuments to Greece, to Rome, to Britain, and 39

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to God that Americans of nearly every community and era have constructed precisely when they confront new challenges and opportunities. Each generation of American public intellectuals has written of Athens, Rome, and Britain as inspirations and as warnings. Each generation of American public intellectuals has used familiar images of the past to interrogate, and often undermine, popular assumptions about the present. Are we losing our way? How can Americans return to their historical virtues? How can Americans avoid historical degeneracy? Paul Kennedy, John Mearsheimer, Robert Kagan, and Fareed Zakaria are only four of the most recent authors to diagnose the historical tendency toward a “rise and fall” in national power. Like all American public intellectuals, they do not believe history is destiny.1 They devote much of their energy, in fact, to showing how Americans can renew rather than decline. Nonetheless, the presumption of a historical arc to the flow of power — what some have described as the strong “cycles” of history — dominates predictions and advice about the future of the United States.2 To think forward in American society is indeed to look back.

American Historical Exceptionalism

The American model is hinged on historical narrative — stories about the growth of ideas, peoples, and a special place. The arrival of immigrants is a story of exodus to the promised land. The frontier is a story of struggle to build the New Jerusalem from barren soil. The American Revolution is a story of resistance to foreign tyrants. The Civil War, of course, is a story of bloody battle to expunge an inherited sin. The two greatest speeches in American history are about these recurring narratives. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address invokes a “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” who came from abroad, settled the frontier, and made a revolution.3 Lincoln’s Second Inaugural used this history to justify the Civil War as a moment of repentance for what he called the “offense” of slavery that threatened the union and required that “every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by an-

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other drawn with the sword.”4 The American narrative made sense because it embodied a compelling and vivid historical logic.5 More than many other societies, simple narratives play an especially powerful role in American society. They provide a common home for a population that shares few other common attributes. For citizens born to non-American families, standard narratives define belonging and acceptance. For wealthy and highly educated Americans, standard narratives explain their accomplishments and legitimize their position in a very unequal society. For poor and less well educated Americans, standard narratives offer hope for mobility and assurance that they are still fortunate citizens of the greatest land. The standard American narratives prove largely unfalsifiable, despite repeated attacks, because they are about identity formation, not evidence or truthfulness. The standard American narratives construct a national faith, a civil religion. They define American society as the heir to a long tradition of human achievement and the best embodiment of future human hopes. They justify a powerful and prosperous American society based on its indispensable historical role. American greatness, in this narrative framework, is the contemporary wellspring of human greatness. As anyone who runs for political office in the United States knows, it is perilous to define any daylight between the power of the United States and the interests of humanity as a whole. The national historical consciousness assumes that they are inherently compatible. To say otherwise is to challenge foundational narratives, and therefore to sound heretical or unintelligible. This means that the space for debate about the goodness of American power is very narrow in the United States. Most of the debate centers on specific uses of power, not its overall beneficence.

The Americanization of Other Peoples’ History

The retelling of American historical narratives dominates public intellectual discussions in the United States. Just visit a bookstore (if there are any left!), a library, or an online bookseller. The titles of the standard American histories (written as epics, period studies, or biographies)

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dwarf most competitors in nonfiction, and much of fiction too. In contrast, note the dearth of titles on contemporary foreign societies. When was the last time someone published a widely selling book on presentday Brazil or India or even America’s closest neighbors, Canada and Mexico? When foreign competitors like China draw attention, as they intermittently do, they are described in comparison to the assumed American historical experience. American narratives are the norm— the representative social portrait — against which other exotic abstractions are compared and judged. The most widely read recent books about China— especially Henry Kissinger’s On China— are precisely in this genre of comparison to an American norm that fails to question whether American narratives are even the correct place to begin.6 There is a presumption of permanence and progress built into accounts of American democracy that make other societies seem not only backward but also historically contingent. It is not that the Chinese or the Brazilians or the Mexicans are doomed to different lives, according to standard American accounts, but that they are stuck in a set of historical experiences that require change, often with American assistance. The emphasis on historical development in American thinking rejects explanations about culture and environment that defy easy historical redirection, even by the most powerful, self-righteous nation. The pasts of other societies must be moveable for Americans, because history must offer viable routes to a present that approximates American-style governance and economy. Writers in other societies (Germany, France, India, and Australia, for some examples) do not assume that their history has any relevance for understanding a place as distant as China, or the United States. Such historical modesty is unthinkable in the United States, even for sophisticated American thinkers. Such comparative open-mindedness is impossible, even for America’s most open-minded comparativists. Americans have always studied what they define as their past better than they have studied other present-day societies. The American historical consciousness is hegemonic and highly selective. Even when studying foreign societies, American writers have drawn on a consistent repertoire of remembered experiences, images,

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and words that are predictable. Greece and Rome captured the imaginations of every generation, as did Renaissance Italy, and the British, French, and Spanish empires before the creation of the United States. All of these historical references have pointed to powerful and prosperous societies that emerged from the ingenuity and freedom of their citizens. These societies all declined, in the eyes of successive generations of Americans, because the central governments grew too strong and too repressive of the freedoms that allowed for initial prosperity. The repeated historical references of American thinkers are, therefore, double-sided. The past is inspiration for freedom, democratic governance, and a benevolent nation, at home and abroad. The past is also a warning against repressions of freedom, corrupt governance, and imperial nations that defy historical change. Inspired by Hegel, Emerson flagged this fundamental dualism between democracy and degeneracy in American historical thought. Lincoln found the same dualism in Shakespeare and in scripture before he gave it new voice in his speeches.7

History and Irony

The history of other “great” societies was the legitimizing foundation for all American claims to greatness. The United States could do what its contemporary societies could not do because it was truer to the traditions of Greece, Rome, Renaissance Italy, Britain, France, and Spain in their years of greatest glory. America was the best of the past, and that was why Tories, Confederates, and communists who questioned this claim were so threatening and had to be eliminated, at almost all costs. This was the historical destiny that Lincoln defined, also in his Second Inaugural, as “God’s will.” Repeated reflection on the historical genesis of American greatness has justified striking intolerance to dissident historiographies, from Lincoln’s time to our own. This was an observation that Richard Hofstadter and Louis Hartz made in the middle of the twentieth century, when they lamented the narrowness of the American political tradition. Hartz, in particular, believed that a simple version of Lockean liberalism that emphasized individual rights, personal property, and representative

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government crowded out other creative alternatives for governance in the United States. As good historians, Hofstadter and Hartz recognized that Americans had never fully lived in Locke’s image — slavery, was a notable deviation—but they explained that the image of a Lockean past prevented serious discussion of alternative pathways. The Lockean narrative limited fuller understandings of a more complex historical reality.8 The narrowness of popular American historical thought, as diagnosed by Hofstadter and Hartz, answered the important question about American exceptionalism raised by the German socialist Werner Sombart. In the early twentieth century, virtually all the major developing countries of Europe, Asia, and Latin America experimented with forms of collectivism, socialism, and communism. Why, Sombart asked, was the United States so immune to these experiments? “Why was there no socialism in the United States?”9 There was no room in the public American historical consciousness for Marx or for Lenin. The country’s historical frame of reference was too different, too narrow, too intolerant. Socialism had its influence on American labor, municipal governance, and eventually the New Deal, but it could not enter the lexicon of American politics. “Anti-Bolshevism,” especially after the Russian Revolution, and anticommunism had an inherent legitimacy as historically sensible acts of defense against dangerous threats to Lockean rights and protections. Reinhold Niebuhr, the great mid-century American theologian, was neither an apologist for socialism nor a critic of tradition. Quite the contrary, he sought to promote the wisdom of traditional American liberalism, while also working to remove its naïve, narrow, and self-defeating elements. For Niebuhr, the modern world required Americans to acknowledge their imperfections and abandon self-righteousness. These qualities, he believed, made Americans too slow to react to the rise of fascism and other threatening political ideologies. Americans had criticized these regimes, but they had done too little, according to Niebuhr, to offer relevant, persuasive, and attractive alternative global leadership. Repeating the same old historical narratives was not enough. It did not prepare Americans for new challenges. Niebuhr called for Americans to see the irony in their own history: the unpredictable twists and turns, the deviations from expectations, the

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necessary gap between words and realities. Niebuhr was not rejecting standard historical narratives, only saying they were too simple. What the American historical consciousness needed, according to Niebuhr, was attention to the limits of its standard narratives. Americans knew some things, but not all things for all times. They were, in Niebuhr’s account, too certain of the teleology that led to their democratic society, too confident that they had the correct answers, too assured that their destiny was secure in the full realization of their basic principles. There was little space for doubt, for adjustment, for difficult compromise in Niebuhr’s diagnosis of the American mind.10 Idealism and the assertion of perfection were, for Niebuhr, profound sins with destructive international consequences. He advised Americans to abandon the pursuit of perfection, carefully weigh alternatives, and accept lesser evils for higher moral purposes. This sophisticated thinking about war and peace, and allies and adversaries, required a more mixed historical self-understanding than was common in the United States. Americans needed to grapple with the dilemmas of imperfect humanity and corrupting power in the pursuit of worthwhile goals. For Niebuhr, the presence of sin and fallibility in the American experience could not be ignored. He was a critic of simple American exceptionalism, but he also believed that the United States was different from other countries— that it had a different role to play as a democratic leader in the twentieth century. Niebuhr saw irony as a mechanism for focusing Americans on their shortcomings, encouraging more humility and care in the uses of power. Instead of a simple and shallow historical understanding of itself as a nation, a more globally engaged United States needed an intellectual framework for the difficult trade-offs that came with balancing security with democracy, and national interests with global principles. The United States had to do good in the world, but it had to accept that doing good sometimes meant doing bad, and at other times meant doing nothing at all.11 Choosing the correct battles, with the right purposes and the right limits, that was the “tough-minded” moral-strategic work of policymaking for Niebuhr. It was the fundamental challenge of the Cold War, as Niebuhr and many of his contemporaries perceived their predicament of reconstructing the global capitalist system, containing communist power,

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and protecting American democracy. The prominent theologian called upon public intellectuals to instruct American citizens on the presence of tragedy in the world and the complex duties of governance in that context. Niebuhr demanded a merger of principle and power that would force a rethinking of simple historical explanations for American greatness. The standard historical understanding, according to Niebuhr, dangerously encouraged too much American moral self-righteousness and too little reflection on the dilemmas of managing power across the globe. A wider historical lens, Niebuhr hoped, would temper these tendencies, just as irony tempers certainty and self-regard.12 Some scholars, including Andrew Bacevich, argue that Niebuhr went too far in his willingness to justify the use of power against perceived foes, the Soviet Union in particular. Other scholars, including Gilles Andréani, see a broader set of efforts among diplomats and thinkers in Europe, and in the United States, to match moral ideals with difficult military and political realities in an era of intense international competition. For Niebuhr, there was no formula for the correct mix of power and restraint, or the appropriate balance of freedom and security. His argument was for a constant reevaluation of these trade-offs and for a deep historical discussion about policy purposes that escaped the false simplicities of standard historical narratives. The role of the public intellectual, as exemplified by Niebuhr, was to encourage more complex and relevant historical debates, inspiring the critical thinking of citizens and policymakers. Historical irony was much more useful than complacent historical self-regard.13 For Niebuhr, the American experiment was a faith that justified difficult uses of power and moral compromises for a higher purpose. To sacrifice short-term purity for the sake of the national interest was a necessity, especially in a threatening world. To require a razor-sharp focus on core values was, simultaneously, the highest responsibility. Niebuhr’s model for the public intellectual was a powerful and engaged conscience that helped citizens navigate as moral men in an immoral world. Niebuhr was not only the most widely read public intellectual of the early Cold War, but he also articulated a model for the public intellectual that deeply influenced contemporary figures.14

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Realism, Intellectuals, and Policymaking

Niebuhr called himself a “Christian realist.” Many of the postwar public intellectuals who worked in foreign policy also called themselves “realists.” Realism included a focus on the ironies at the center of Niebuhr’s writing: the need to recognize the gap between expectations and experience, the requirement for adjustment and adaptation in the face of unpredictable circumstances, and, above all, the imperative to accept lesser evils. Cold War realists, like Niebuhr, believed that the United States had a special international role as a protector of democratic “civilization,” but they also believed that the United States had to recognize the limits of its power and prepare itself for difficult trade-offs. Realism required often unidealistic uses of power for idealistic purposes. Realism also assumed that the standard narratives of American history were not sufficient to explain or design U.S. foreign policy. The stories of freedom and national greatness left Americans unprepared for negotiations with communists, alliance politics, and nuclear deterrence. Following Niebuhr, realists believed that they had to enact new policies and educate Americans to accept the legitimacy of foreign activities that deviated from expectations. Americans needed a new historical understanding of themselves that replaced benevolence and self-centeredness with mixed motives and a multilateral landscape of legitimate actors. More than any other two figures in postwar America, George Kennan and Henry Kissinger made this case. Kennan began as a policymaker and then devoted the second half of his long life to educating the public about foreign policy. His writings were deeply historical. Kissinger began as an intellectual, writing history. He combined his scholarly work with efforts, at first informal, to advise policymakers in the 1960s. Kissinger’s appeal to policymakers was his historical perspective on key Cold War issues. Kissinger became the prime architect of American foreign policy (with Presidents Nixon and Ford) in the 1970s, and then returned to his role as a now famous public intellectual and sometime advisor to presidents. Kennan and Kissinger used their experiences as policymakers to buttress their work as public intellectuals. They wrote history from the

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perspective of those who have to make day-to-day decisions about war and peace. Kennan and Kissinger both agreed with Niebuhr: a realist foreign policy required a more ironic public understanding of history. In their long careers as prominent commentators, Kennan and Kissinger embodied the ironies of American history. Other intellectuals joined Kennan and Kissinger in this endeavor. They were not unique in their thinking or their ambitions. In the second half of the twentieth century, a large cohort of Cold War realists contributed to the emergence of a diverse but coherent canon of literature that was intellectually rigorous and accessible for policymakers. This literature challenged standard historical narratives and demanded the careful exercise of American power. Realists defended American greatness, but they did not believe that the United States was an exception to the ironies of history.15 Kennan

George Kennan was probably the most influential Cold War public intellectual who took inspiration from Reinhold Niebuhr and his historical criticism. Kennan was a career foreign service officer with extensive experience in Germany and Russia. Kennan was also an introspective, lonely man who, according to his biographer, consistently worried about the degeneracy of American society. John Lewis Gaddis describes Kennan’s cultural pessimism: “Kennan had begun to doubt whether what he thought of as ‘western civilization’ could survive the challenges posed to it by its external adversaries and its internal contradictions. He was never wholly reassured that it would.”16 At the height of his policy influence — in the months between the wide circulation of his February 1946 “Long Telegram” on the need for a foreign policy of Soviet containment and the July 1947 publication of his famous “X” article, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct”—Kennan returned to his cultural pessimism. Reflecting on conditions in the United States at the dawn of the Cold War, Kennan wrote: At work it is certainly admirable. At play, it could hardly be worse. Its liberal intellectuals are in large part below criticism. Its emotional

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strength lies largely in the smaller and quieter communities, where intellectual life is least developed. I have no doubt that as a people we have tremendous latent power of every sort. But it is buried behind so much immaturity, such formidable artificialities in manner of living, such universal lack of humility and discipline, and such strange prejudices about the organization of human society that I am not sure whether it can be applied . . . successfully in another crisis, as it was in this last.17 Kennan wrote these words in a letter to his half brother as he lectured to American military leaders and diplomats at the National War College in late 1946. Kennan would go on to serve a short but highly significant period as chairman of the State Department’s newly created Policy Planning Staff (1947– 50), an even shorter period as U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union (1952), and two years as U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia (1961– 63). In 1946, however, Kennan already realized that he was more intellectual than diplomat, more committed (and inspired) to influence public thought rather than internal government deliberations. “I might really be able to do something more worthwhile in scholarship than in diplomacy,” he predicted.18 Kennan was frustrated, often sickened, by the bureaucratic wrangles and political disputes that dominated daily policymaking. He felt there was little space for serious thought in the organs of government, which reacted to problems more than they planned and evaluated interests. He turned to “scholarship,” however, not because he sought to make original research contributions to knowledge, to teach eager undergraduates, or to attain respect within academic circles. He never pursued any of those things. Instead, Kennan believed— like Niebuhr and other contemporaries— that democratic citizens in the United States needed a better education about the “realities” of power. He believed that naïveté and principle — what he called “legalistic-moralistic thinking”— had left Americans ill-prepared for the power they had to exercise and the purposes they had to defend after World War II. Kennan turned, as most realist public intellectuals do, to history. He devoted more than half of his life, from roughly 1950 to 2005, to writing about how the history of modern diplomacy in the United States and

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Europe could better inform American thinking about foreign policy in the Cold War. Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton became his full-time occupation. Kennan published a range of books and articles that covered topics from the Monroe Doctrine to Bismarck’s Europe to the Russian Revolution and the origins of the Cold War.19 Kennan also penned two of the most widely read volumes of memoirs, probing the changes in American society and policymaking from the early twentieth century, when he entered the small U.S. Foreign Service, to the early days of the Vietnam War, when the United States had become a massive international presence.20 Kennan’s writings were not policy memos. He disdained the impenetrable jargon and technical obsessions that characterized ideas coming out of traditional planning bureaucracies and new think tanks like RAND. Kennan never worked closely with the “security specialists” who came to dominate the strategic debates about overseas bases, weapons systems, and military targeting. These were really issues of tactics for Kennan. They were ahistorical assessments of “options” that did not match with the actual practice and purpose of policymaking. Foreign policy, according to Kennan, was fundamentally about human society. The key questions he sought to address in his writing were Niebuhrian: What were the purposes of American foreign policy? How could the United States use its power to protect its core values? How could policymakers make the correct trade-offs between security and morality for the maximization of both in an anarchic world? American Diplomacy Kennan’s most enduring historical analysis came from a series of lectures he delivered at the University of Chicago in April 1951. Published five months later as a thin volume (approximately 100 pages) titled American Diplomacy, this was Kennan’s first book. It remains in print more than sixty years later. It is a frequent staple in undergraduate and graduate courses within the United States, and it is still widely read in other parts of the world. Kennan’s biographer reports that American Diplomacy “sold better than anything else he ever wrote.” It became his “‘long telegram’ to the American academy.”21

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Kennan opens American Diplomacy with the observation that although U.S. policy was made, since the late nineteenth century, by “men of exceptional intelligence and education, deeply respected for their integrity of character and breadth of experience,” they suffered from “the deficiencies of America’s understanding of her own relationship to the rest of the globe.” Kennan called this the problem of a “national consciousness” that was rooted in impatient absolutes rather than long-term processes.22 Americans, according to Kennan, had faith in an idealistic world of democracies. They avoided long-term diplomatic and military commitments that resembled traditional empires and alliances. When Americans found that their ideals were threatened, as they always were, they lashed out and fought excessive wars to eliminate “evil” enemies and restart politics. Too often, Kennan claimed, Americans wanted a world of ideals or power, when they really needed to pursue both at the same time. The simple historical assumptions of Americans prohibited a sophisticated and relevant understanding of their society, and its role in the world. According to Kennan’s narrative in American Diplomacy, U.S. leaders were more reactive than strategic, more erratic and undisciplined than consistent and focused. Kennan’s most famous and widely cited passage deploys a memorable metaphor to make this point: A democracy is peace-loving. It does not like to go to war. It is slow to rise to provocation. When it has once been provoked to the point where it must grasp the sword, it does not easily forgive its adversary for having produced this situation. The fact of the provocation then becomes itself the issue. . . . I sometimes wonder whether in this respect a democracy is not uncomfortably similar to one of those prehistoric monsters with a body so long as this room and a brain the size of a pin: he lies there in his comfortable primeval mud and pays little attention to his environment; he is slow to wrath— in fact, you practically have to whack his tail off to make him aware that his interests are being disturbed; but, once he grasps this, he lays about him with such blind determination that he not only destroys his adversary but largely wrecks his native habitat.23

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Kennan builds his historical narrative of U.S. foreign policy from the 1890s to the 1940s around this metaphor. Americans were latecomers to East Asia, latecomers to World War I, and latecomers to World War II. In each case, they were slow to understand the dynamics of rival foreign actors and the imbalances of power around China and Germany. In each case, Americans underrated their interests in developments abroad. They were “too proud to fight,” in Woodrow Wilson’s phrase. When Americans finally became convinced that conflict over access to China, control of the European continent, or the global spread of fascist power threatened the United States, then citizens turned to war and the pursuit of “total victory,” according to Kennan. The “prehistoric monster” was now stirred and anxious to annihilate a perceived aggressor. This meant excessive deployments of force, overextended military occupations, and demands for “unconditional surrender.”24 Kennan told this history not because he had any original research insights or unique interpretations. His account in American Diplomacy is simple, traditional, and clearly written. The power of the book is the ability of the narrative to explain contemporary affairs, which Kennan rarely addresses directly in the six chapters, starting with “The War with Spain” and ending with “Diplomacy in the Modern World.” Kennan’s method is to describe American rigidity and self-righteousness in both war and peace, showing how these qualities undermined national interests. This is a recurring pattern that he sees reaching from the past into the present. Kennan recounts, at the start of American Diplomacy, how Secretary of State John Hay’s famous Open Door Notes of 1899 and 1900 represented a “high-minded and idealistic” program that was, in fact, inapplicable to the rivalries of foreign countries, including the United States, around China.25 Kennan makes similar arguments about Wilson’s effort, after abandoning neutrality for war, to pursue a total victory in the name of democracy. Describing the Treaty of Versailles, Kennan writes: Truly, this was a peace which had the tragedies of the future written into it as by the devil’s own hand. It was a peace . . . which was too mild for the hardships it contained. And this was the sort of peace you got when you allowed war hysteria and impractical idealism to lie down together in your mind, like the lion and the lamb; when you in-

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dulged yourself in the colossal conceit of thinking that you could suddenly make international life over into what you believed to be your own image; when you dismissed the past with contempt, rejected the relevance of the past to the future, and refused to occupy yourself with the real problems that a study of the past would suggest.26 American Diplomacy offers a similar assessment of misguided idealism after the United States entered World War II: “The fact remains that it was a war poorly understood by the peoples who fought it on the democratic side, and particularly ourselves; and I am sure that this lack of understanding of what was involved in the conflict itself has much to do with the great bewilderment and trouble we seem now to be experiencing in our attempts to adjust ourselves to the situation it left in its train.”27 During World War II and the early years of the Cold War, Americans thought they were fighting for democracy, when in reality, according to Kennan, they were fighting to preserve a balance of power in light of German, Japanese, and Soviet power. Kennan’s history pointed to the failures of idealism and selfconfidence untempered by realism and humility. He showed how Americans had a tradition of ignoring the necessary trade-offs between power and principle, and also the difficult compromises that could bring the two into an effective and morally rich relationship. Americans conceived of their past as a string of victories for their ideals, but Kennan wanted them to see it as a warning against assuming they could do so much. American foreign policy had a mission to preserve an international balance of power and help protect the nation’s closest friends. U.S. foreign policy could not do much more, according to Kennan. Like Niebuhr, Kennan had large ambitions, but he recognized severe limits on America’s capabilities.

From Kennan to Kissinger, and Other Late Twentieth-Century Realists

In his long career as a retired diplomat and public intellectual, Kennan made similar arguments about diverse policy issues. His arguments were

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almost always historical, and they analyzed how simplistic readings of that past undermined the conduct of foreign affairs. In particular, Kennan criticized the Cold War division of Europe through NATO and other alliance institutions, he opposed U.S. entry into the Vietnamese civil war, he condemned President Reagan’s nuclear buildup in the early 1980s, and he disdained the U.S. invasion of Iraq—and the broader “war on terror.”28 Other prominent realists— including Walter Lippmann, Hans Morgenthau, and John Mearsheimer — joined Kennan in many of these positions. Kissinger, the most recognized realist in postwar American society, often disagreed with Kennan. It is, in fact, striking that the two men had very little direct contact during their long and overlapping careers. Their differences were greatest concerning Kissinger’s expansive uses of American power outside Europe — particularly in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Kennan believed these “adventures” were misguided and harmful to core American interests in Europe and Japan.29 Kissinger and Kennan found common ground on the need for a longer historical view that did not falsely assume American power and democratic ideas could create permanent solutions to inherited problems. There was not an “end of history,” they both contended, in the rise of capitalism and liberal democracy. Both Kissinger and Kennan advocated less of the American ideological utopianism that encouraged a schizophrenic alternation between self-satisfaction and self-flagellation from one decade to the next. They called, instead, for more balance and perspective, expressed through consistent international diplomacy and centralized commitment of U.S. resources to long-term interests.30 Both men had a strong pessimistic streak, but they rejected inclinations to accept perceived American “decline” on the political Left. They also dismissed urges to find a rapid Cold War “victory” on the political Right. The two realists agreed on the need for strong leaders who were insulated from public opinion, and therefore freed to participate in negotiations with adversaries that focused on international peace and basic principles, not ideological dogmas. They also advocated self-imposed limits on the possibilities for reforming undemocratic societies. They meditated on the limits of American power and principles as much as their possibilities.31

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Kissinger and Kennan both wrote dense works of history that set the American experience in a long and global setting, showing how this nation— though exceptional— was not capable of fundamentally altering the course of human societies. The American mission, for realists like Kissinger and Kennan, was much more modest than popular conceptions of the country’s triumphant history allowed. The American mission was also contingent, they believed, on clear-sighted strategic leaders. They favored intellect over character, historical sensibility over technical expertise. Realism had many diverse American advocates in the second half of the twentieth century. In many ways, it was the default position for what Arthur Schlesinger called “tough-minded” Cold War public intellectuals.32 Kennan set a standard for “big think” in this area that others, including Kissinger, followed. Kennan drew on direct policymaking experience, but he relied primarily on a deep, albeit selective, reading of history to explain the strengths and weaknesses of American national efforts. He used history to try to break his readers out of a worldview that assumed the simple righteousness of American power and principles. Above all, Kennan and other realists tried to educate citizens about the complex, unintended, and uncontrolled consequences of pursuing moral goodness and national greatness in a world filled with unavoidable Niebuhrian sin. The irony of the realist intellectuals is that they were skeptical of public opinion, but yet they focused their efforts on persuading the public. Kissinger was the exception, especially after he entered the Nixon administration. All of the other major realist thinkers followed Kennan’s model and did their most important thinking outside of government. They resided— like Kennan, Niebuhr, Morgenthau, Kennedy, and Mearsheimer — in quasi-academic institutions where they were free to interrogate difficult foreign policy questions without easy solutions or politically attractive remedies. They wrote thick articles and long books that they knew policymakers would never read but hoped could reach a learned and influential public. Most of all, they looked back into history to articulate the limitations, trade-offs, and ironies that Americans needed to recognize if they were to avoid disappointment — and even disaster.

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The most successful public statements of Cold War realism fit perfectly in this framework. They did not include data or difficult theory. They were works of history written by foreign policy intellectuals for general readers. Kennan’s American Diplomacy, Niebuhr’s Irony of American History, Morgenthau’s Politics among Nations, Kennedy’s Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, and Mearsheimer’s Tragedy of Great Power Politics were all widely read and enduring statements about why history required Americans to contemplate lesser evils in the use of power and the defense of core principles. Or, as Kennan put it at the end of American Diplomacy: “I am frank to say that I think there is no more dangerous delusion, none that has done us a greater disservice in the past or that threatens to do us a greater disservice in the future, than the concept of total victory.” Instead of total victories and absolute principles, Kennan called for what all of his fellow realists demanded: a change in the American public consciousness to embrace the length, complexity, and unpredictability of historical change: It will mean that we will have the modesty to admit that our own national interest is all that we are really capable of knowing and understanding — and the courage to recognize that if our own purposes and undertakings here at home are decent ones, unsullied by arrogance or hostility toward other people or delusions of superiority, then the pursuit of our national interest can never fail to be conducive to a better world. This concept is less ambitious and less inviting in its immediate prospects than those to which we have so often inclined, and less pleasing to our image of ourselves. To many it may seem to smack of cynicism and reaction. I cannot share these doubts. Whatever is realistic in concept, and founded in an endeavor to see both ourselves and others as we really are, cannot be illiberal.33

Impact

If Kennan’s vision accurately defines a “realistic” historical consciousness, he and other public intellectuals failed in their efforts to persuade policymakers and the American public alike. Kissinger has commanded sig-

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nificant policy influence since the early 1970s, but his attempts to shift American thinking away from liberal ideals also showed limited results. Throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Americans found it very difficult to think clearly about the necessary trade-offs among contradictory interests, capabilities, and limitations. Americans remained rooted in a view of international change on their own terms— what President Clinton called “democratic enlargement.”34 During the Cold War, the United States adopted a wide array of unprecedented international commitments. The leaders of the nation showed a repeated willingness to prioritize security over democratic preferences. In fact, many historians have criticized U.S. policymakers for going too far in their efforts to combat perceived communist evils, neglecting the core values that the Cold War was allegedly all about.35 Kennan himself joined these criticisms, excoriating his successors in government for exaggerating Soviet threats, overextending U.S. commitments (especially military deployments), and undermining freedom and decency as guiding principles for policy at home and abroad.36 At the same time that the United States succumbed to excessive fear and militarism in the Cold War, it pursued an ambitious ideological agenda. Inspired by the successes of the postwar Marshall Plan in Western Europe (that Kennan helped to design), successive policymakers committed the United States to expensive, dangerous, and often selfdefeating efforts at “development” and “democratization” in distant places. Washington spent billions of dollars on hydroelectric dams, new agriculture, and industrial capital throughout Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The United States also invested heavily in constitution-writing, elections, and counterinsurgency efforts to protect perceived paths to democracy. This was all part of a larger, historical American nation-building effort that far exceeded the limits on power diagnosed by realists and the prudent focus on core values close to home, emphasized by Kennan in particular.37 In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, leaders in Washington displayed a combination of power obsessions and idealistic fetishisms that drew on both vectors from the Cold War. This was, in many ways, Kennan’s nightmare. An existential and diabolical challenge elicited an overwhelming and narcissistic response.38

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The U.S. invasion of Iraq and the larger “war on terror” were, predictably, opposed by the most consistent realists in the United States. Nonetheless, President George W. Bush and his successor, President Obama, drew effectively on a simple American historical memory to justify their actions. They proclaimed that the United States was indeed on the right side of history, that it had a mission to spread democracy, and that it had succeeded most when it had acted for the highest, noblest purposes. Efforts by public intellectuals to tell a more complex and humbling history had little influence on policy. Especially when threatened, Americans had little tolerance for irony. The shock of 9/11 contributed to an overdetermined emphasis on limitless power and self-righteous ideals in the American self-understanding of history.39

The Promise and Tragedy of Public Intellectual Life

The promise of public intellectual life in the United States is that history really matters. Citizens deeply believe that their nation must live up to its historical purpose, especially in foreign affairs. This historical faith opens avenues for figures like Niebuhr, Kennan, and Kissinger to command attention as prophetic voices, steeped in the wisdom of study and experience. America’s oracles are the thinkers who can connect the present to the story of a longer past that also points to the future. The tragedy of public intellectual life in the United States is that the nation’s powerful historical consciousness is stubbornly shallow and selfreferential. American citizens know a great deal about a few parts of their history, and not much more. They know even less about other societies. This limited historical knowledge is not surprising, and it resists the complicating plot lines and evidence presented by those — like Niebuhr, Kennan, and Kissinger — who see less virtue in inherited power and revered principle than the standard historical narratives allow. Like most Americans, these realist public intellectuals affirm the many achievements of the United States, but they also see limits, warnings, and dilemmas. Those limits, warnings, and dilemmas are consistently ignored by citizens and decision-makers in moments of great potential change —

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when the challenges are daunting and the opportunities are simultaneously alluring. Even with new communications technologies in the twenty-first century, the dynamic between historical consciousness, realism, and public intellectual life in the United States remains consistent. What has changed, perhaps, is the willingness of leading thinkers to wade into these difficult waters. American society has become more professionalized, and in this setting success is often identified with specialization of study and audience. Internet communities seem to reinforce this academic trend. More than ever, the leading thinkers in the United States—especially social scientists and humanists— need to recognize the very real promise of public intellectual contributions, while also remaining mindful of the potential tragedy that accompanies this work. American society is unlikely to escape the limits of its historical consciousness anytime soon, but that flawed foundation is still a solid rock on which to build valuable policy edifices. That is, perhaps, the lasting irony in the careers of Niebuhr, Kennan, Kissinger, and other realists: they failed to convince Americans, but they still had enormous impact on how their nation redefined its power, principles, and mission. Although the record is mixed, America’s decisive transition from a largely regional setting to an overwhelming global presence in the course of the last century is, in part, a consequence of the ideas realist public intellectuals promoted. Niebuhr’s prophecies, Kennan’s complaints, and Kissinger’s ruminations are central to the history of our contemporary world.

Notes 1. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987); John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001); Robert Kagan, The World America Made (New York: Knopf, 2012); Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003). 2. See Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Cycles of American History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986). 3. See Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/gettyb.asp (accessed July 28, 2013).

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4. See Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln2.asp (accessed July 28, 2013). 5. On this point about Lincoln’s compelling historical logic, see James McPherson, Abraham Lincoln and Second American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 6. Henry Kissinger, On China (New York: Penguin, 2011). 7. See Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, “Compensation,” 1841, reprinted in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First and Second Series (New York: Digireads .com, 2009). 8. See Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1948); Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955). 9. Werner Sombart, Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? (New York: Macmillan, 1976); originally published in German in 1906. 10. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1952). 11. See Andrew Bacevich’s excellent introduction to a recent reprint of Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 12. The best overview of Niebuhr’s life and thought remains Richard Wightman Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (New York: Pantheon, 1985). 13. See the excellent chapters in this volume by Andrew Bacevich and Gilles Andréani. 14. For Niebuhr’s most impressive and authoritative statement of the moral difficulties of an immoral world, and the vital role of intellectual life, see Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1932). 15. On the history of realist thought in the United States, see Nicolas Guilhot, The Invention of International Relations Theory: Realism, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the 1954 Conference on Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 16. John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin, 2011), 66. 17. Kennan to his half brother, Kent Wheeler Kennan, December 31, 1946, quoted in Gaddis, George F. Kennan, 248. 18. Ibid. 19. Among many other publications by George F. Kennan, see Kennan, Russia Leaves the War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956); Kennan, The Decision to Intervene (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958);

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Kennan, The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979); Kennan, The Fateful Alliance: France, Russia, and the Coming of the First World War (New York: Pantheon, 1984). 20. George F. Kennan, Memoirs: 1925–1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), and Kennan, Memoirs: 1950 –1963 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972). 21. Gaddis, George F. Kennan, 434, 436. 22. Original foreword to George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012 [1951]), li. 23. Kennan, American Diplomacy, 70. 24. The historian Robert A. Divine made a similar point, inspired by Kennan, in his book Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000). 25. Kennan, American Diplomacy, 39. 26. Ibid., 73– 74. 27. Ibid., 79. 28. See Gaddis, George F. Kennan, 506– 692. 29. On the striking absence of direct contacts between Kissinger and Kennan, see Jeremi Suri, Henry Kissinger and the American Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007). 30. On this point, see ibid., 138– 96. 31. Ibid. 32. See Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949). 33. Kennan, American Diplomacy, 109. For an extended analysis of the illiberal consequences of American liberal ideals in foreign policy, see Michael C. Desch, “America’s Liberal Illiberalism: The Ideological Origins of Overreaction in U.S. Foreign Policy,” International Security 32 (Winter 2007– 2008), 7– 43. 34. On this point, see Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier, America between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11 (New York: Public Affairs, 2008). 35. See Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992); Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall, America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Robert J. McMahon, The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 36. For one of Kennan’s angriest and most extended attacks on U.S. foreign policy, see George F. Kennan, The Nuclear Delusion: Soviet-American Relations in the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1982).

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37. See David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Jeremi Suri, Liberty’s Surest Guardian: American Nation-Building from the Founders to Obama (New York: Free Press, 2011). 38. This is the central point of Fred Kaplan’s very insightful book; see Kaplan, Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power (New York: John Wiley, 2008). See also Seth G. Jones, Hunting in the Shadows: The Pursuit of al Qa’ida since 9/11 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2012). 39. On this point, see Melvyn P. Leffler, “The Foreign Policies of the George W. Bush Administration: Memoirs, History, Legacy,” Diplomatic History 37 (April 2013), 190 – 216.

chapter two

American Public Intellectuals and the Early Cold War, or, Mad about Henry Wallace  . 

In terms of basic policy, the United States made the transition from World War II to the Cold War with remarkable alacrity. In the summer of 1945, Washington viewed the Soviet Union as a valued, if difficult, ally. By the summer of 1947, in the estimation of U.S. policymakers, the Soviets loomed as something approaching an existential threat. By the summer of 1950, to have once entertained the possibility of a cordial Soviet–American relationship seemed in retrospect the height of folly — the equivalent of believing in 1937 or 1938 that the West could reach an accommodation with Nazi Germany. My study here assesses the role of American public intellectuals during this period of transition. I approach the subject with trepidation, not unlike an aging lothario taking stock of an adolescent infatuation that he recalls with embarrassment and would prefer to forget altogether. When,

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as a young graduate student in the 1970s, I first encountered (vicariously and at considerable remove) the world of postwar intellectuals, its members represented in my eyes the very embodiment of sophistication. They were virtually all New Yorkers, of course. To a rube raised in the outer precincts of Col. Robert McCormick’s (ostensibly) primitive “Chicagoland,” the West Side of Manhattan managed to combine the exotic with the alluring. To have an apartment off Central Park, shop at Zabar’s, take the subway each morning downtown to the scruffy editorial offices of some smart, if small-circulation, magazine, and then spend nights at smoky cocktail parties eavesdropping as the two Normans, Podhoretz and Mailer, picked fights with all comers— for a time, I confess, this defined for me the very essence of glamour. The inhabitants of this glamorous world did not suffer for lack of self-esteem. Indeed, they viewed themselves as an intellectual vanguard: enlightened, creative, uncompromising, and rigorously critical with a keen eye for cant and the merely trendy. Members of “the family,” as PNorman famously called them, charted the pathways that mere pedants subsequently followed.1 I readily accepted this generous self-assessment. Anyway, I once did. Today, with exceptions noted below, I am more inclined to see the family’s oeuvre as very much of its time and therefore more than a little stale, not to say hidebound and parochial. Viewed from a distance of several decades, the dominant attribute of the postwar public intellectuals who once caused me to swoon was not ingenuity but a pronounced gift for self-promotion— that and a capacity for alcohol consumption. As for the family itself, M-Norman was probably right when he described it as a “colony, aviary and zoo of the most ferocious, idealistic, egotistic, narcissistic, cultivated, constipated, brilliant, sensitive, brutally insensitive, half-productive, and near sterile,” that is, just like the rest of humankind, only more so.2 Or to put it another way, once you’ve actually shopped at Zabar’s a couple of times, the thrill wears off. At the end of the day, it’s just a grocery store, with an impressive array of cheeses no doubt, but also with annoyingly narrow aisles. To sentimentalize is to misperceive and misconstrue.

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Golden Age

Yet to suggest that the postwar American intellectual scene ended up producing more sizzle than steak is not to say that the scene’s leading lights didn’t matter. To a limited but not inconsequential degree, they did, at least for a time. What follows proceeds from this assumption. Although those who make their living by manufacturing and marketing ideas only rarely exercise an immediate or direct influence on policy, they nevertheless help shape the environment within which policymakers discern, deliberate, decide, and act. True today, this was emphatically true during the transition from World War II to the Cold War. The continuing ebb and flow of ideas, with yesterday’s novel insight becoming tomorrow’s relic, sets parameters, helping those in positions of power distinguish between what matters and what doesn’t, what is allowed and what’s impermissible, what qualifies as a priority and what deserves to be treated as an afterthought. Ideas also provide policymakers with the rationale and the vocabulary to justify or embellish a proposed initiative. So although York Harding, the writer whose scribblings serve as a recipe book for policy, may exist only in fiction, there are plenty of flesh-and-blood writers who indirectly (and probably without being acknowledged) leave their fingerprints on actions formally credited to others.3 History has enshrined Woodrow Wilson as author of the Fourteen Points, but behind the scenes Walter Lippmann, pioneering the role of intellectual as policy wonk, figured prominently in the actual drafting of Wilson’s blueprint for revolutionizing international politics.4 Similarly, although George W. Bush formally promulgated the Bush Doctrine of preventive war, the president was, in effect, ratifying propositions already nurtured by defense intellectuals such as Albert Wohlstetter, with Paul Wolfowitz, Wohlstetter protégé and key Bush adviser, midwifing their delivery to the Oval Office.5 In preparing this chapter, I have focused on public intellectuals whose books and magazine articles during the immediate postwar period left an imprint on policy. In surveying the periodical literature of the time, I focused on a relatively small number of influential middlebrow and

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highbrow American magazines. The designation “influential” may seem arbitrary, but I refer to publications that in one way or another shaped or reflected the zeitgeist. To a reader who may ask why some particular journal is absent from what follows, I have no good answer other than to say that for inhabitants of intellectual circles at the time it did not number among the publications that seemed to matter. For American print journalism, World War II and its aftermath constituted something of a golden age. The marketplace supported a range of periodicals that provided outlets for commenting on the political and cultural concerns of the day. Some of those periodicals, for example Commonweal, Commentary, The Nation, and The New Republic, still survive, albeit no longer wielding the clout they enjoyed in their heyday. Others, such as politics and Partisan Review, have long since folded. Leafing through issues of these journals several decades after they first appeared invites this overall judgment: for present-day readers, 95 percent of the contents are ephemera, perhaps of modest antiquarian interest, but that’s about it. This is not surprising. Journalistic products, hastily drafted responses to the here-and-now, tend to have a limited shelf life. What follows is an effort to take stock of the remaining 5 percent— content that, at least in my own judgment, reveals and instructs. The central (if very preliminary) findings from my research consist of these three points: • Postwar American public intellectuals viewed events primarily through the lens of ideology. That political belief systems constituted the chief determinants of contemporary life was, in their eyes, inarguable. Ideological competition— not technology, geography, resources, or demographics, and certainly not God or religion, not even the accumulated weight of the past — was driving history. In that regard, public intellectuals, both American and European, viewed totalitarianism not as some passing political fad, discredited by the events of World War II, but as a rising threat. A preoccupation— or perhaps obsession— with left-wing and right-wing totalitarianism formed the cornerstone of their worldview, permeating their interpretation of recent history, dictating their understanding of the present, and governing their expectations regarding the future.

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• The tenor of intellectual analysis during the immediate postwar period tended to be overwrought and apocalyptic rather than cool and judicious. Public intellectuals generally view debate as something of a blood sport. In the early years of the Cold War in particular, civility was not a virtue that leading lights on the American intellectual scene sought to cultivate. “We live in a cultural situation,” the eminent literary critic Lionel Trilling wrote in 1948, “in which it is the mark of intellectual power and virtue to deal with everything . . . in terms of polemic. This characterizes our intellectual life at every point.”6 Writers shared a tacit assumption that the United States and its allies were facing a situation virtually without precedent, fraught with danger and uncertainty far surpassing anything that earlier generations had ever experienced, with (according to John Dos Passos) “the masses of mankind . . . being plunged back into a regime of misery and servitude such as has not existed in the West since the days of serfdom.”7 In this dread circumstance, the “useable past” consisted of a single episode —World War II, typically defined as the war against Nazi Germany, even if terminated by the fearsome punctuation mark that was Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet what mattered was not the war as a complex event causing horrific destruction and exacting vast costs but as a source of warnings about the folly of appeasement and the imperative of standing firm— an event that revealed easily identifiable and unquestionably authoritative “lessons” rather than yielding consequences that would only become evident with the passage of time. • Faced with a dire threat defined in oversimplified ideological terms, postwar American intellectuals fashioned a faux ideological response. For reasons of convenience rather than precision, this response acquired the label “liberalism,” even though “democratic socialism” offers a closer fit. In the eyes of its intellectual proponents, liberalism—“a planned and socialized economy combined with the fullest political and cultural liberty”— constituted “the only possible perspective” for organizing a decent and humane society.8 Reassuringly situated midway between the extremes of the Left and Right, liberalism derived its appeal not from its intellectual coherence but from its political utility as the legitimate and essential alternative to totalitarianism.

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Tough-minded liberalism, the editors of Commonweal wrote in January 1947, offered the sole plausible alternative to the “rugged individualism” of the Far Right and the Left’s “over-centralized statism even tending toward totalitarianism of the Russian stripe.”9 The liberal consensus, to which most (not all) postwar American intellectuals at least briefly subscribed, made a crucial contribution to enlisting the American people as foot soldiers in the antitotalitarian crusade and in empowering the state to wage that crusade. Note: With rare exceptions, American intellectuals did not even acknowledge the existence of an authentic ideological alternative to liberalism. In their eyes, for example, conservatism represented little more than a cover for the interests of big business. For its part, capitalism qualified as a spent force. As Partisan Review editor Philip Rahv wrote in 1948, “the trend the world over is irresistibly away from private capitalism.”10 Few public intellectuals of the time took issue with that assessment.11 So the plausible choices reduced to two: a nation could either endorse some version of liberalism or it could slide into the totalitarian abyss. As James Burnham put it, “There is no room left for the existence of a Third Force between freedom and slavery.”12 No exceptions allowed. The point of what follows is not to finger American intellectuals (or indeed the U.S. government) for starting the Cold War. Rather, the point is to suggest that public intellectuals less fixated on ideology and better able to take a balanced, historically informed view of developments immediately following World War II might have avoided its lemming-like embrace of Cold War liberalism, thereby fostering a more robust critical debate on basic U.S. policy — similar to the debate that emerged belatedly and only in passing when the liberal consensus fell victim to the Vietnam War and various domestic upheavals in the 1960s and 1970s.13 That such a debate conducted while the Soviet–U.S. rivalry was first taking shape in the 1940s would have created an environment more conducive to sound policy is impossible to say. That in the absence of such debate, policymakers went astray, making ill-informed and illadvised decisions—Vietnam offering one especially acute example — stands as irrefutable.

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Validating those three large claims would entail writing a book rather than a chapter. In the space permitted here, I will settle for a more modest goal, assembling evidence to suggest (even if not proving definitively) what postwar public intellectuals cared about and, by implication, what they did not care about. With that in mind, to illustrate the tendencies cited above, the remainder of this chapter will explore in greater detail the writings of three American intellectuals who cut a particularly wide swath during the formative years of the Cold War, and whose works do, in my judgment, retain considerable value today. They are (1) Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., among public intellectuals the very embodiment of Cold War liberalism; (2) Reinhold Niebuhr, for a time at least a valued fellow traveler; and (3) Dwight Macdonald, nominally standing apart, yet actually serving the cause.

Arthur Schlesinger: The Historian as Ideologue

Arthur M. Schlesinger was a prodigiously talented and equally ambitious wunderkind. The son of a renowned Harvard historian, and himself a Harvard graduate, Schlesinger in his twenties had already published two books, the second of which, The Age of Jackson, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1945. Following World War II, during which he had served in the OSS, he accepted an appointment as associate professor of history at Harvard— this despite the fact that he lacked a graduate degree. Yet Schlesinger always aspired to something beyond mere academe. He was a journalist, an activist, a speechwriter, and a political advisor.14 He was also an ideologue, a tendency that simultaneously energized and compromised his perspective. In manner, Schlesinger emanated cool. But when he wrote, he opted for hot. In an essay on communism that appeared in June 1946, for example, Schlesinger compared Communist Party adherents to members of a religious order or sect— not intended as a compliment. “To understand the Communists,” Schlesinger wrote, “you must think in terms, not of a normal political party, but in terms of the Jesuits, the Mormons, or Jehovah’s

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Witnesses.” Like religion, communism offered a crutch to those unable to cope with everyday reality. “The party,” Schlesinger continued, “fills the lives of lonely and frustrated people, providing them with social, intellectual, even sexual fulfillment.” To substantiate the point, he cited Los Angeles, where “Communism flourishes along with other weird cults.” The Party had “made particular headway among the intellectuals of Hollywood, who find in the new faith a means of resolving their frustrations and guilt.” Pretending to fight against injustice, “the Communists spread their infection of intrigue and deceit wherever they go.”15 A year later, Schlesinger published an equally hyperbolic essay in Partisan Review. The challenge facing the United States, he wrote, was to avoid the pitfalls of communism “with its despotism,” of capitalism “with its instability,” and of fascism “with its combination of the two.” Hope lay in the prospect of achieving what he foresaw as the “gradual advance of socialism in the United States through a series of New Deals.” Schlesinger expected the triumph of socialism to occur in “piecemeal” fashion, with the United States “muddling through” rather than adhering to some rigorous revolutionary philosophy. Three obstacles threatened to retard this happy prospect, however: “the death-wish of the capitalists; the betrayal of the intellectuals; and the counterrevolution of the Soviet Union.”16 For Schlesinger, the problem with the capitalists was not that they were overbearing but that they were invariably irresolute. “They have constituted a plutocracy, not an aristocracy,” he charged. “They have never been, in the political sense, an effective governing class.” The complaint that Schlesinger laid against the plutocrats, in other words, was that they were spineless. “Subject to spasms of panic and hysteria,” spooked by the possibility of change, “they lack the instinct, energy, and courage to govern,” he wrote. Such cowardice actually posed a threat to the nation’s survival. To drive home his point, Schlesinger noted that Joseph P. Kennedy, “that doyen of American capitalists,” had “recently argued that the US should not seek to resist the spread of communism.” He saw this as typical: “In America when the chips are down the businessmen have always been bailed out by the radical democracy.” Yet this time, he feared, the eagerness of the business class to “yield to the most ruthless blackmailer”

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might doom the nation before the next Jefferson, Jackson, or Roosevelt could intervene to save the day.17 Schlesinger’s problem with his fellow intellectuals stemmed from their naïveté. The Enlightenment had sown in their ranks “a belief in progress” and in “the benevolent unfolding of history.” The horrors unleashed by Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini, who had “transformed depravity into a way of life,” ought to have demolished such expectations. Yet as far as the Soviet Union was concerned, “the great thinkers who sought to combat Nazism by peace strikes, the Oxford oath, and unilateral disarmament” had not learned their lesson. To conceal or evade the reality of communism, they had erected “a system of intellectual evasion and subterfuge,” thereby either avoiding or denying outright self-evident truth. “The susceptibility to wishfulness, the need for the sustaining myth, the disbelief in man’s urge to destroy,” all combined, Schlesinger continued, “to reduce the capacity for critical judgment which the intellectual’s detachment from social loyalties should confer upon him.” Here, he concluded, was “the real trahison des clercs.” Rather than telling uncomfortable truths, the treasonous intellectual — by way of example, Schlesinger fingered Henry Wallace — devoted himself “to laminating his favorite myths.” Foremost among those myths was one that looked to the Soviet Union for salvation. “Soviet Russia,” wrote Schlesinger, “has become the opiate of the intellectuals,” at least of the weak-kneed, dishonest, and deluded ones. That anticommunism might itself become another sort of opiate was beyond his ken.18 The final obstacle impeding the triumph of democratic socialism was the Soviet Union itself. Skillful (and cynical) Soviet leaders had invested communism with very considerable allure. Communist ideology, Schlesinger wrote, constituted “a tremendous political weapon,” one that was “infinitely more exportable than Nazism.” Here is where danger lurked: “As a social faith, [communism] can penetrate to every corner of the world and rally its fifth columns wherever injustice and poverty exist. Communism gives Russian expansionism its warhead. On a pre-arranged signal, the Russian drive can explode internally in every country on the globe.” The challenge facing the United States, therefore, was “to prevent the Soviet Union from breaking out of the reservation during its period

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of messianic intoxication.” That the United States itself might manifest messianic tendencies did not occur to Schlesinger.19 The antidote to this troika of problems was for far-seeing and hardheaded intellectuals to lead a people very much in need of guidance. After all, Schlesinger observed, “A democracy is politically unreliable at best; the American democracy is notoriously unreliable on all questions of maintaining a continuous foreign policy.” The duty of the intellectual was to curb this unreliability. “As capitalism crumbles through the world,” he concluded, “someone must serve as the custodian of honesty and clarity in a turbulent and stricken society.” Given that “one false step may plunge the world into atomic war or deliver it into totalitarian darkness,” it was all the more imperative for the intellectually enlightened to intervene. Schlesinger was counting on “the politician-manager-intellectual type — the New Dealer” to move the nation “just fast enough for it to escape breaking up under the weight of its own contradictions.”20 That same year, Schlesinger collaborated with luminaries such as Reinhold Niebuhr, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Eleanor Roosevelt in founding Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), an organization that sought to perpetuate the aims of the New Deal while purging the American Left from any taint of communism. In 1948, the ADA issued a foreign policy manifesto entitled Toward Total Peace, with Schlesinger (along with Niebuhr, Mrs. Roosevelt, and a handful of others) among those signing onto an introduction that designated the document “Required Reading for American Liberals.” Although affirming that “the world is not yet condemned to the fatal choice between fascist reaction and communist totalitarianism,” Schlesinger and his confreres made it clear that there was no time to waste. Indeed, “the moment for decision” had arrived. “Today the future of the world,” they indicated, “may well depend on the ability of our own people to achieve greatness.”21 The body of the document, which Schlesinger in all likelihood played a considerable role in drafting, spelled out the implications of this call to greatness. To avoid the “bleak choice between Communism and reaction” and “preserve the world,” it was incumbent upon liberals “to bestir themselves.” Activism had become the order of the day. “This means that democracy must once again become a fighting faith.”22

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History had designated the United States as the chief exponent of that faith. History likewise had created an opportunity for its propagation, according to the ADA. World War II had instigated a vast “demand for social change — a profound interior compulsion toward tearing off old shackles and achieving a basic redistribution of wealth and power.” “It is a revolt against the landlords, against the money-lenders, against foreign political domination, against foreign economic exploitation. . . . We cannot dam up this revolution nor dodge the issue it raises. Imperialism is fatal, whatever the source. . . . The age of political colonialism is over.”23 Who would fill the void created by the passing of empire? This had emerged as the question of the day. In Europe, the ADA saw evidence of Soviet influence “oozing, trickling, filtering wherever the ground is soft and resistance weak.” Here was the primary testing ground for U.S. policy. Although rejecting preventive war as “morally unendurable for a democracy,” the ADA likewise rejected isolationism and appeasement. Americans dared not indulge their (supposed) inclination to turn inward. After all, “the U.S. requires a peaceful and prosperous world, if our own citizens are to have peace and prosperity.” Yet Americans would be equally mistaken to heed the siren call of appeasers like Henry Wallace. Here World War II offered clear and compelling lessons: “Has not the experience of appeasement been that it strengthens . . . those who insisted on aggression, and who will find proof, in a failure to resist, that they are right in demanding further aggressions?” To the ADA, World War II had made the answer to that question self-evident.24 Although many left-leaning American intellectuals (to include Schlesinger) questioned Harry Truman’s worthiness as FDR’s successor, the ADA supported the Truman administration’s emerging strategy of containment. Yet containing totalitarianism through military means alone was not likely to suffice. Military containment “means that we sit on the lid but do nothing to put out the fire which is bringing the pot to a boil.” The ADA advocated much more, namely, “to check the conditions which produce [totalitarianism]— the conditions of want, hunger, and chaos.” With this goal in mind, it had become America’s “job to activate and enlarge the center and the non-Communist left”— in essence,

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the democratic socialist camp — thereby “countering Soviet expansion by removing the conditions of want and chaos which invite this expansion.” In short, the key to achieving “total peace” was “to revivify the center.”25 In 1949, Schlesinger expanded on the themes of Toward Total Peace in a best-selling book of his own. He called it The Vital Center.26 In his introduction to the book, Schlesinger made no effort to conceal where his own loyalties lay. “During most of my political consciousness,” he announced at the outset, “this has been a New Deal country. I expect that it will continue to be a New Deal country.” For a historian and supposedly wizened observer of the political scene, this was an astonishingly silly position to stake out. Yet it was also revealing: Schlesinger believed that in his own time American politics had arrived at its intended destination. The journey had ended. History, he wrote with assurance, had “equipped modern American liberalism with the ideas and the knowledge to construct a society where men will be both free and happy.”27 Yet in this liberal garden of Eden, there lurked a serpent: totalitarianism, especially of the communist variety. As did the author of Genesis, Schlesinger told his story in a way that allowed little room for moral ambiguity. “The world tragedy, as it impinges upon Americans,” he warned, “strikes us in relatively simple terms. It is we or they; the United States or the Soviet Union.” Furthermore, militant, muscular liberalism offered the sole plausible means to resist the Soviet threat. To entertain any alternative set of political principles was to succumb to illusions, Schlesinger tagging as “ineffectual escapists” proponents of nonviolence in the tradition of Thoreau or Gandhi.28 For Schlesinger, the most worrisome threat to the noncommunist Left came from within its own ranks. He labeled this threat “Doughface progressivism.” The problem with Doughface progressives was that they refused to acknowledge the persistence of evil in the world. They were shallow, soft, and sentimental. They shied away from confrontation and conflict. For the Doughface, politics served as “a means of accommodating himself to a world he does not like but does not really want to change.”29 In his readiness to make excuses for Stalin and to blame the United States for the tensions producing the Cold War, Henry Wallace personified the Doughface progressive.30

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Schlesinger felt nothing but contempt for the Doughface’s refusal to look evil in the face. But he expressed equal contempt for those congressional witch-hunters who engaged in “a promiscuous and unprincipled attack on radicalism” of all persuasions. Communist espionage and subversion did threaten U.S. national security and required a firm government response, and Schlesinger pointedly noted that “civil liberties do not deny society its right of self-protection.” Yet red-baiting and scaremongering were counterproductive, serving chiefly to provide “a useful secret weapon for the enemies of a free society.” To project resolve without hysteria, firmness without rabid bellicosity, this defined the proper course. “Free society will survive,” he concluded, “only if enough people believe in it deeply enough to die for it.” Schlesinger’s vital center liberalism held the promise of creating a society worth dying for. Here was the standard around which the American people might rally. As Schlesinger saw it, no viable alternative existed— it was that simple.31

Reinhold Niebuhr and Europe’s Salvation

The founding of the ADA had provided the occasion for Schlesinger to meet Niebuhr. The young historian quickly came to admire the theologian, a generation older and already a dominant figure on the American intellectual scene. Over the course of several decades, Niebuhr’s own thinking had evolved considerably. Once inclined toward pacifism and radical socialism, he had become the principal exponent of “Christian realism.” Although acutely averse to utopianism, he had become equally opposed to those unwilling to recognize and stand up to evil— one of many points where his views and Schlesinger’s aligned.32 Where they differed was in Niebuhr’s greater willingness to acknowledge the mote in America’s own eye. When it came to forging intellectual alliances, however, such differences proved unimportant. Whatever his reservations, Niebuhr became, at least for a time, a reliable supporter of the Cold War consensus.33 In 1941, to promote Christian realism, particularly in matters of foreign policy, Niebuhr had founded Christianity and Crisis, a magazine to which he frequently contributed and which he edited for many years.

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In 1941, Christianity and Crisis had made the case for U.S. intervention alongside Great Britain in the war against Germany. After 1945, Niebuhr and his magazine focused on persuading Americans to stand firm against the Soviet Union, which Niebuhr saw as hell-bent on overrunning all of Europe. Yet Niebuhr contributed to many other publications and, like Schlesinger, found in Henry Luce’s Life magazine an attractive outlet for propagating his views. Of immediate concern to Niebuhr as early as 1946 was “the fight for Germany.” Here was where the West needed to stop any further advance of Soviet power. Here was where Niebuhr wanted once and for all to put an end to that American penchant for appeasement represented by the likes of Henry Wallace. “The confusion in American liberalism” on this particular point “must be regarded as catastrophic,” he insisted. Europe was in immediate jeopardy; Germany described the point of decision. In “resistance to Soviet expansion” Niebuhr saw “the only real hope of peace.” Liberals who failed to recognize this imperative — who in hopes of accommodating the Kremlin wanted to keep Germany prostrate — were “hastening war by a too desperate effort to avoid it.” Here “that traditional lack of tough-mindedness to which the liberal world is prone” was once more on display. “Russian truculence,” Niebuhr wrote, “cannot be mitigated by further concessions.” It was time to take a stand. “We are not really good enough for this struggle,” he concluded, sounding a characteristically Niebuhrian note. “No culture or civilization is as good as it pretends.” But faced with a choice between “relative justice and tyranny,” no “such scruples” should inhibit the United States from acting.34 For Niebuhr, saving Europe from communism took priority over all other considerations. What might happen or should happen elsewhere — in Latin America or the Middle East, in Africa or Asia— was secondary. He barely gave these regions of the world a glance. In Europe, directly menaced by totalitarianism, the fate of humankind hung in the balance. “America is no shining light of democratic justice,” he conceded in early 1947: “But that still does not change the fact that the generous nineteenth century Marxist dream of a universal classless society has changed into a nightmare of Russian tyranny, and that the free peoples of the world hope that they can count on our support in avoiding a new en-

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slavement. We may not be good enough to accept this responsibility; but men and nations are never good enough for the responsibilities they face. That is, however, no reason for avoiding them.” Niebuhr understood that, in a material sense, the Soviet Union was distinctively inferior to the United States. But to assess the threat in material terms, he believed, was to commit a fundamental error. The essence of the problem was ideological. The Soviet Union was “a dictatorship and, as such, insecure,” he wrote. The wellsprings of Soviet behavior derived from “a revolutionary faith, which envisions the redemption of the world through its power. The insecurity compounded by the illusion makes its future course in history unpredictable.”35 By unpredictable, Niebuhr meant exceedingly dangerous. Niebuhr spent the spring of 1947 assessing at firsthand the dangers facing Europe. He returned home “proud and grateful” that the United States “should seem so firm in its resolve to continue its responsibilities in Europe,” even while worrying that this resolve might not withstand the tests sure to come.36 In particular, he viewed Wallace’s continuing prominence in American politics as a warning sign. “We have not yet defeated the temptation of isolationism and irresponsibility,” he lamented. “We will have to face that temptation again and again in the coming years.” Whether the United States could muster an adequate response to an ideological threat remained to be seen. “Russia is weak,” he wrote. “And there is no prospect of her gaining the strength to challenge us in a war if we maintain our health and show a reasonable amount of wisdom in helping the Western world to regain economic and political health. The danger lies in our possible weakness and not in Russian strength.”37 In remarkably short order, the promulgation of the Truman Doctrine, the initiation of the Marshall Plan, and then the creation of NATO seemingly turned things around. Europe regained its footing, both politically and economically. Even so, Niebuhr continued to wring his hands about the possibility of Americans cashing in their chips and going home. “If we should be tempted to retreat once more from the world,” he warned in December 1949, “a world conflict would almost certainly result from our failure.” Yet in that same end-of-year assessment, suggestively entitled “Streaks of Dawn in the Night,” he declared the Marshall Plan a smashing success, noted with satisfaction the emergence of a Western-oriented

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Federal Republic of Germany, speculated that the Kremlin’s hold on Eastern Europe was likely to prove weak, and even predicted that the newly declared People’s Republic of China would soon find itself at odds with the Soviet Union.38 An observer who has witnessed with dismay latter-day U.S. efforts to “turn things around” in Iraq and Afghanistan might wonder how the United States managed to achieve such astonishing success so quickly in postwar Europe. There are many possible answers to that question. One possibility is that the actual threat to Europe was not as great as Niebuhr and others assessed it to be.

Dwight Macdonald and the Excommunication of Henry Wallace

The passage of time makes it increasingly difficult to understand why Henry Wallace became for Cold War intellectuals a target of such wrath and vituperation. To be sure, the former New Dealer who had served FDR as agriculture secretary, vice president, and then commerce secretary did not embrace the reflexive anti-Stalinism that in the wake of World War II became the nonnegotiable prerequisite for political respectability, much as, say, ardent support for Israel or disdain for Iran has become today. After his ouster from Truman’s cabinet, Wallace had served a term editing the New Republic at a time when that venerable journal was refusing to subscribe to the emerging Cold War consensus— another violation of contemporary political correctness. Yet in the realm of foreign policy, Wallace’s besetting sin was not malignity but innocence.39 Intent on promoting what he had famously called the “Century of the Common Man,”40 he was a sort of naïf — in the words of his most recent biographers, an “American dreamer.”41 By 1948, however, Cold War public intellectuals had long since lost patience with dreamers. They were united in their determination not only to block Wallace’s presidential aspirations but also to destroy Wallace himself, rendering illegitimate everything that he stood for. Toward that end, they portrayed him a dupe and a pawn— if not an out-and-out

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traitor — at the very least someone posing a clear and present danger to his own country. Thus did Partisan Review’s Philip Rahv describe Wallace as “the most useful quisling that Stalin has so far found in this country.”42 Asserting that “the Wallace Party would not have come into existence without the prior decision of the Communist Party (that is, of the Kremlin),” James Burnham bluntly declared that “a vote for Wallace is a vote for Stalin.”43 Writing in Commentary, James A. Wechsler declared that Wallace’s presidential aspirations were diverting the attention of progressives from the need to develop their own program, thereby benefiting only “the totalitarians of Left and Right.”44 In Commonweal, John Broderick mocked Wallace’s talk of “peace, abundance, and the common man” as “towering nonsense.” Although Wallace promised peace, “he and his friends are in for a day of unhappy reckoning if they think war can be wished out of existence.” Like it or not, Broderick concluded, “we are all stuck in an adult world.”45 Yet when it came to excoriating Wallace, Dwight Macdonald outdid all others. Among American public intellectuals, Macdonald occupies his own special category. If the postwar intellectual scene contained a free radical, he was it. In his profound aversion to state power, in his steadfast opposition to war, and in his savage wit, he formed a party of one. Like Wallace, Macdonald rejected the liberal consensus to which Schlesinger and Niebuhr adhered. Yet much like the Cold War liberals, Macdonald couldn’t abide Wallace and attacked him obsessively, using his remarkable, if sadly short-lived, journal politics as a bludgeon.46 According to Macdonald, Wallace managed to be both a buffoon and a menace. On the one hand, he was “the most boring and humorless egomaniac on the American political scene since William Jennings Bryan.”47 On the other hand, he was the equivalent to Adolf Hitler, “a demagogue whose rhetoric to an outside observer appears to be stylistically atrocious and intellectually puerile, but which strikes through to certain deep, confused mass emotions.” Wallace’s acolytes inhabited a place that Macdonald dubbed “Wallaceland,” where “perpetual fogs, caused by the warm winds of the liberal Gulf Stream [came] into contact with the Soviet glacier.” Like their leader, they spoke “Wallese,” “a debased

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provincial dialect” generously laced with “ritualistic adjectives: ‘forwardlooking,’ ‘freedom-loving,’ ‘clear thinking,’ and, of course, ‘democratic’ and ‘progressive.’” Wallace himself possessed no redeeming features. He was “cowardly, dishonest, a trimmer, a time-server, and an opportunist.”48 When he opened his mouth, what emerged was not fit for human consumption. “Wallace’s words don’t spring, don’t leap, and they don’t even stumble,” Macdonald complained, “they just ooze.”49 Wallace’s image as “a mystic” and “a man of profound moral convictions, and idealistic visionary” was completely undeserved. He was, in fact, “an advertising man’s Messiah,” shamelessly “adapting himself to the pressures of the moment, ready to foreswear his deepest convictions for immediate gain.” “An oratorical gasbag, a great wind of rhetoric blowing along the prevailing trade route of Stalinoid liberalism”— this, according to Macdonald, defined the execrable essence of Henry Wallace.50 Yet when it came to substance, what exactly was Macdonald’s gripe? In several respects, his own professed views overlapped with Wallace’s. When it came to Stalin, they differed. For Macdonald, that difference sufficed to put Wallace beyond the pale.

Heretic

Only by the loosest of standards did Wallace himself qualify as an intellectual, even if he professed certain intellectual pretensions. He was a career politician who trafficked in ideas, thereby fostering an image of being more than a mere office-seeker — someone to be taken seriously. (By way of comparison think of Al Gore in contrast to George W. Bush.) To assess the quality of Wallace’s thought, consider his small book Toward World Peace, published in the presidential election year of 1948. Intent on challenging Truman for the presidency, Wallace wrote Toward World Peace to promote his candidacy. It was, for all practical purposes, a campaign tract, its title echoing that of the ADA foreign policy manifesto, but its content differing in virtually every respect. Assessed from our present-day vantage point, the text contains some passages that are cringe-inducing and others that discomfit in their unvarnished rejection of myth. On the one hand, there is this:

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Anti-imperialism and raising the standard of living of backward peoples were at the very heart of the Roosevelt foreign policy. And this: The time has come for a modern Johnny Appleseed animated by the missionary spirit to go into all the world and preach the gospel of every creature. Broadcast the seeds of investment, science, technology, and productivity to all peoples. Bread cast upon the waters will come back many-fold after not too many days. And then there is Wallace’s characterization of Chinese communist leaders as “pretty much like the old Non-Partisan Leaguers of North Dakota— men interested primarily in agrarian reform.”51 On the other hand, Wallace — as did Macdonald— took issue with the depiction of World War II as an Anglo-American crusade pitting good against evil. Sustaining that interpretation entailed either minimizing or ignoring altogether the Soviet contribution to victory, which helped when portraying Soviet postwar actions as unjustified or illegitimate. Wallace begged to differ. Along with British courage and American productivity, “Russia’s heroic Red Army” had defeated the Axis, “and no one of the three nations should forget its debt of gratitude to the other two.” Wallace did not deny the brutality of Stalinism. He merely suggested that absent that brutality “Hitler might be ruling the world today.” Nor did Wallace dispute Winston Churchill’s greatness as a war leader. He merely noted that Churchill’s interest in preserving an empire stood on a par with his interest in liberating the enslaved. As for origins of the Cold War, Wallace had the temerity to suggest that domestic concerns within the United States might be playing a role. Some powerful groups had an interest in portraying the Soviet Union as an enemy. Anticipating Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Farewell Address” by more than a decade, he indicated that “elimination of the present Wall Street-military control in Washington” might hold the key to reducing international tensions. In that regard, Wallace (as did Macdonald) saw containment as counterproductive. “The more vigorously the United States has sought to isolate and contain Russia,” he wrote, “the more determined Russia

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has become to protect her every border with friendly governments.” As he saw it, hysteria about communism served chiefly to distract attention from the fact that “the number one problem in the United States in 1948 is civil liberties.”52 Again, Wallace’s emphasis on the primacy of civil liberties echoed Macdonald’s own views.53 Toward World Peace falls well short of being profound. Even so, a fairminded reader might judge it a mixed bag, a book of its time no doubt, but containing at least some suggestions worth pondering. In other words, a contrarian like Macdonald might have discovered within Wallace’s little tome a handful of commendable or at least inoffensive passages. That this was not the case — that Macdonald aligned himself with Cold War liberals committed to Wallace’s utter destruction— tells us something important about the postwar American intellectual scene. In an era when ideology served as the chief determinant of outlook, there existed certain matters where dissent was deemed intolerable. Preeminent in this category were two assertions related to Stalinism. According to the first, Stalinism — a term used interchangeably with communism — represented evil incarnate. According to the second, uncompromising opposition to Stalinism (and communism) had become for American intellectuals a first-order responsibility, something akin to duty. During World War II, of course, the U.S. government and the American intelligentsia had collaborated in waiving both of these propositions, the evil of fascism taking precedence over the evil of communism. For a time, Stalin himself became an assiduously courted U.S. ally. With the end of World War II, those waivers expired. The Truman administration had wasted little time in restoring the first proposition. With even greater alacrity, intellectuals like Schlesinger, Niebuhr, and Macdonald reasserted the second. To gain acceptance into the ranks of American public intellectuals, anti-Stalinism (and by extension anticommunism) became more important than a university degree. On this score the “herd of independent minds”54 would permit no disagreement. Failure to comply was tantamount to committing heresy for which the necessary punishment was excommunication. What can we say of these two propositions in retrospect? History has by and large sustained the first. Stalinism was indeed evil, while

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communism has everywhere failed. Yet as Wallace correctly noted, making common cause with Stalinist evil had enabled the United States to emerge victorious from World War II. From 1942 to 1945, Stalin, not Churchill, had been Franklin Roosevelt’s indispensable ally — the partner without whom the war could not be won. Writing in Partisan Review, the poet Delmore Schwartz accurately termed World War II “the war for the lesser evil.”55 He might have added that the exertions of the lesser (or at least less pressing) evil had determined the war’s outcome. However subversive of the mythic war enshrined in American memory — liberty and democracy versus slavery and oppression— this remains an indisputable fact. Adults should be willing to acknowledge the implications stemming from that fact: successfully waging a morally justifiable and necessary war had obliged the United States to make very large moral compromises. Regarding the second proposition, history has rendered a more ambiguous verdict. Arguably, the intellectuals who obsessed about the danger of Stalinism facilitated the postwar pivot of U.S. foreign policy toward what is today euphemistically called “global leadership.” One immediate product was the strategy of containment. A second product, maturing over time, was the emergence of the permanent national security state, which has demonstrated a remarkable aptitude for discovering substitutes for Stalinism long after the actual phenomenon all but disappeared.56 Yet if the Stalinist preoccupation instructed (in the eyes of its proponents, informed or educated), it may also have served to confine. The signature of American public intellectuals at the beginning of the Cold War was not breadth but narrowness, not playfulness but rigidity. When it came to politics, they were doctrinaire and inflexible. As a consequence, they accepted an oversimplified framework of analysis that foreclosed alternatives and impoverished debate. However helpful to mounting a vigorous response to the threat posed by the Soviet Union and world communism, this approach also shackled the United States to a state-centered, militarized version of liberalism. Writing off capitalism as foredoomed, postwar intellectuals looked forward to the emergence of a humane “democratic socialism” that recognized the dignity of all citizens. What Americans got was something else: gaping inequality and a culture that has made gods of choice, consumption, and an absence of

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self-restraint. Ensuring access to this shallow and insipid definition of freedom defines, we are led to believe, “the end of history.”57

Paths Not Taken?

Whether a cohort of intellectuals less preoccupied after World War II with the ostensible challenge posed by totalitarianism could have conceived of and promoted different and richer visions of what a free society might look like is hard to say. My own sense is that a more realistic — that is to say, less ideologically driven— appraisal of the Soviet threat might have allowed space for a wider debate not only about U.S. national security policy but about what sort of society Americans should aspire to create in the wake of two catastrophic world wars and an economic crisis of unprecedented scope and duration. Deprived of the trump card of the Red Menace, the militant liberalism to which Cold War obsessions gave birth might have faced one or more viable challengers. The point here is not to suggest that the Soviet threat was entirely the product of fevered imaginations. No doubt Soviet ambitions— the world revolution to which the Kremlin professed commitment — were at odds with the values and the interests of the democratic capitalist camp led by the United States. But what were the prospects of those ambitions achieving fulfillment? How great was the actual danger? By virtually any objective measure, whether military, economic, or technological, the Soviet Union, badly damaged by World War II, lagged well behind the United States. Officials in Washington understood this at the time.58 As for the states composing the Kremlin’s empire, rather than enhancing Soviet power they detracted from it. As early as 1948, the apostasy of Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito indicated that merely keeping that empire intact was likely to pose challenges. The East–West rivalry was never a contest between equals. Even taking ideology into account, the certainty that MarxismLeninism was doomed to fail — a constant refrain among anticommunists— might have tempered assessments of the danger facing the United States. That officials intent on frightening the American people into an attitude of compliance should exaggerate the peril is hardly surprising.

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In politics, this reprehensible practice is commonplace, as the George W. Bush administration’s response to 9/11 reminds us. From intellectuals, however, we should rightly expect something better. It is, therefore, not only reprehensible but also perplexing that leading figures on the postwar American intellectual scene — professing to believe that all human beings aspire to freedom— should attribute to a system that denies freedom diabolical powers purportedly threatening freedom’s very survival. Opponents of freedom by definition operated from a position of weakness— theirs was a losing game. Again, sadly, a post– 9/11 comparison presents itself. Recall the intellectuals who while proclaiming the inevitable worldwide triumph of liberal democracy nonetheless professed to take seriously Osama bin Laden’s pretensions of waging jihad against the West in order to unify all of Islam in a new caliphate with himself as caliph. In fact, what bin Laden had on offer as a way of living in the twenty-first century —basically a retreat into the grimness of the fifteenth century — was never going to gain mass appeal. The same, of course, could be said of Stalinism midway through the twentieth century. So did there exist at the time alternative paths that intellectuals might have explored leading to different futures? To answer that question with certainty is impossible. What we can say with some assurance is that the public intellectuals who so easily succumbed to the grip of the Cold War didn’t even try.

Notes 1. Norman Podhoretz, Making It (New York, 1967), 109– 36. 2. Norman Mailer, “Up the Family Tree,” Partisan Review 35 (Spring 1968): 245. 3. Graham Greene, The Quiet American (London, 1955). 4. Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston, 1980), 128– 40. 5. Andrew J. Bacevich, “Tailors to the Emperor,” New Left Review 69 (May–June 2011): 101– 24. 6. Lionel Trilling, “The Repressive Impulse,” Partisan Review 15 ( June 1948): 720.

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7. John Dos Passos, “The Failure of Marxism,” Life, January 19, 1948, 108. 8. Philip Rahv, “Disillusionment and Partial Answers,” Partisan Review 15 (May 1948): 521. 9. “Americans for Democratic Action,” Commonweal, June 17, 1947, 340. 10. Rahv, “Disillusionment,” 521. 11. One such dissenter was John Dos Passos, who between the 1920s and the 1940s had moved from Left to Right. Socialism was nothing short of a nemesis, he had come to believe. But these were the views of an outlier and they cost Dos Passos his standing among leading intellectuals; see John Dos Passos, “The Failure of Marxism,” Life, January 19, 1948, 108. 12. James Burnham, “Rhetoric and Peace,” Partisan Review 17 (December 1950): 870. 13. One might render a similar judgment about the way public intellectuals responded to 9/11. The panic enveloping the Bush administration is to a very considerable extent understandable. Yet public intellectuals less fixated on ideology and better able to take a balanced, historically informed view of prior U.S. actions in the greater Middle East might have been able to offer an alternative to the administration’s misguided Global War on Terrorism along with its poisonous fruits. 14. By his own account, Schlesinger was also something of a devotee of celebrity culture; see Arthur M. Schlesinger, A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917–1950 (Boston, 2000); Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Journals, 1952– 2000 (New York, 2007). 15. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “The U.S. Communist Party,” Life, June 29, 1946, 85, 87, 90, 93. 16. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “The Perspective Now,” Partisan Review 14 (May –June 1947): 230 – 32. The essay is one of six commissioned as part of a symposium on “The Future of Socialism.” 17. Ibid., 232– 34. 18. Ibid., 235– 36, 238. 19. Ibid., 238– 39. 20. Ibid., 241– 42. 21. Americans for Democratic Action, Toward Total Peace: A Liberal Foreign Policy for the United States (Washington, DC, [1948]), 3. 22. Ibid., 4. 23. Ibid., 14. 24. Ibid., 8, 15– 17. 25. Ibid., 17, 20 – 21, 43.

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26. A year before, Schlesinger had previewed the book’s thesis in a short essay. See Schlesinger, “Not Right, Not Left, but a Vital Center,” New York Times Magazine, April 4, 1948, 7, 44 – 47. 27. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston, 1949), viii, x. 28. Ibid., 2, 7. 29. Ibid., 41. 30. This represented a considerable shift on Schlesinger’s part. In 1945, he had “regarded Wallace as FDR’s heir,” while dismissing Truman as the inept pretender to the throne; see Schlesinger, A Life in the Twentieth Century, 406. 31. Schlesinger, Vital Center, 204, 208, 213, 245. 32. The scholarly literature on Reinhold Niebuhr and his thinking is vast. But the standard biography remains Richard Wightman Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (New York, 1985). For more on the relationship between Niebuhr and Schlesinger, see Daniel F. Rice, Reinhold Niebuhr and His Circle of Influence (Cambridge, UK, 2012). 33. Niebuhr’s commitment to that consensus was conditional, however. So when Cold War liberals during the administrations of Kennedy and Johnson committed the United States to war in Vietnam, Niebuhr refrained from offering his support and spoke out against the war. 34. Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Fight for Germany,” Life, October 21, 1946, 65– 67, 72. 35. Reinhold Niebuhr, “Our Chances for Peace,” Christianity and Crisis, February 17, 1947, 1. 36. Reinhold Niebuhr, “European Impressions,” Christianity and Crisis, May 12, 1947, 2. 37. Reinhold Niebuhr, “Editorial Notes,” Christianity and Crisis, May 26, 1947, 2. 38. Reinhold Niebuhr, “Streaks of Dawn in the Night,” Christianity and Crisis, December 12, 1949, 162– 64. 39. In recent years, a charge of conscious malignity has emerged. The noted Cold War historian John Gaddis has stated publicly that in 1945 and 1946, while still secretary of commerce, Wallace was “regularly reporting to the Kremlin,” serving as a de facto Soviet agent; see “Witness to History,” C-SPAN, November 30, 2012, http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/309872-1 (accessed May 15, 2013) (Gaddis’s remark is at 58:00). Yet Gaddis offers no specifics. Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev did find evidence in Soviet archives of an October 1945 meeting in Washington between Wallace and the NKVD

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station chief, in which Wallace proposed that Soviet scientists should visit the United States to meet with American counterparts engaged in nuclear research. Wallace also described an American political scene divided into a large antiSoviet faction and a much smaller pro-Soviet group and suggested that Soviet authorities should support the latter in the common cause of peace. Historians will differ on whether such talk constituted treason or mere stupidity; see Weinstein and Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—the Stalin Era (New York, 1999), 283– 85. More to the point, Wallace’s contemporary critics did not charge him with being an outright traitor, which presumably they would have done had any evidence of treason been available at the time. Even Schlesinger’s memoir, published in 2000 after the (partial) opening of Soviet archives, contains no suggestion that Wallace was consciously engaged in serving Stalin. 40. This was the title of a speech that Wallace delivered on May 8, 1942. In it, Wallace called for a “people’s revolution,” leading not to an “American Century,” but to a world in which there are “no privileged peoples”— all enjoying peace and freedom, and all sharing equally in a prosperous global order. For the complete text, see http://newdeal.feri.org/wallace/haw17.htm. 41. John C. Culver and John Hyde, American Dreamer: A Life of Henry A. Wallace (New York, 2000). 42. Philip Rahv, “Disillusionment and Partial Answers,” Partisan Review 15 (May 1948): 528. 43. James Burnham, “The Wallace Crusade,” Partisan Review 15 ( June 1948): 703– 4. 44. James A. Wechsler, “The Liberal’s Vote and ’48,” Commentary, September 1947, 218. 45. John Broderick, “Henry Wallace,” Commonweal, June 27, 1947, 253. 46. Michael Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald (New York, 1994). 47. Dwight Macdonald, “Periodicals,” politics, March–April 1947, 63. 48. Dwight Macdonald, “The Wallace Campaign: An Autopsy,” politics, Summer 1948, 187. 49. Dwight Macdonald, “Henry Wallace (Part 1),” politics, March–April 1947, 36. 50. Dwight Macdonald, “Henry Wallace (Part 2),” politics, May–June 1947, 97, 110, 114. 51. Henry A. Wallace, Toward World Peace (New York, 1948), 19, 45, 94. 52. Ibid., 56, 68, 73, 111, 112.

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53. A representative Macdonald zinger: “All of the criticisms made of the USSR . . . could also be made of the USA. Ours, like theirs, is an unjust society. . . . Ours is an imperialistic State, like theirs, whose leaders lie like troopers and equivocate like lawyers; a militaristic State, like theirs, busily preparing for World War III; a repressive State like theirs, which is about to draft its youth against their will” (Dwight Macdonald, “USA vs. USSR,” politics, Spring 1948, 76). 54. The phrase is Harold Rosenberg’s, the title of an essay that he published in the September 1948 issue of Commentary. 55. Delmore Schwartz, “The True, The Good, and The Beautiful,” Partisan Review (March–April 1947): 146. 56. Terrorism and radical Islamism are two recent examples. 57. A prescient warning from the journalist Dorothy Thompson of the consequences of idolizing American-style freedom: “The civitas dei will forever remain an incomplete realization on this earth, men being men. But there is something of the totalitarian spirit in all political universalisms, even the universalism of parliamentary democracy. The idea that there is only ONE good system . . . ends in corrupting the world. . . . No human system can claim or expect immortality” (Dorothy Thompson, “Symbol and Myth,” Commonweal, April 25, 1947, 35). 58. See, for example, Section V of “NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs in National Security,” April 7, 1950, https://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs /nsc-hst/nsc-68.htm (accessed May 18, 2013).

chapter three

The Public Intellectual in China   

Introduction: The Emergence of the Chinese Public Intellectual

Thanks to its three-decade-old “economic miracle,” China is poised to attain the level of development that is deemed a prerequisite for the flowering of democracy. The Global Trends 2030 report compiled by the National Intelligence Council of the United States indicated that China could become ripe for Western-style democracy by the year 2018, when its per capita GDP (using purchasing power parity [PPP] calculations) is expected to reach the critical threshold of $15,000.1 Economists Liu Yu and Dingding Chen noted that China’s GDP (expressed in PPP terms) should reach $12,000 by 2017, and $15,000 by 2020. This would be equivalent to the level of per capita GDP in South Korea and Taiwan in 1998, when universal-style democracy began to take root in these predominantly Confucianist societies.2 Yet as veteran China correspondent Jim Mann pointed out in his book The China Fantasy, it would be foolhardy to suppose that China’s 90

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fast-paced development and the integration of the Chinese economy with the global marketplace alone would predispose the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) administration toward adopting democratic norms and institutions, such as universal-suffrage elections.3 One stumbling block to democratization could be that China lacks a sufficiently potent civil society — particularly, opinion leaders and political activists who are often identified as “public intellectuals”— to spearhead revolutionary changes. In a 2002 article entitled “The Poverty of China’s Civil Opposition,” Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo asked this question: “Why is it that, to date, China’s civil opposition, having received both the attention and support of the international community, has not been able to form an organized civil pressure group . . . [and that] China’s civil opposition forces have not achieved the results as in other countries going through transformation?” Liu ascribed the plight to the shortfall of public intellectual-like figures. “The success or failure of civil opposition movements depends to a great extent on the actions of the civil society elite,” he wrote. “A mature civil opposition movement must bring forth symbolic figures who can rally popular opinion, inspire courage, and enlighten the masses.”4 Liu’s characterization of these “symbolic figures” matches most definitions of public intellectuals (gonggong zhishifenzi) that have been put forward by Chinese scholars who have written about the traits and contributions of socially and politically influential intellectuals.5 For example, East China Normal University social scientist Xu Jilin, an internationally known theorist of the Chinese intelligentsia, provided this definition of gonggong zhishifenzi: “The modern meaning of intellectuals points to that group of cultured people who with an independent status and relying on the strength of knowledge and spirit express a fervent public concern towards society and embody a sort of public conscience and spirit of public participation.”6 Similarly, Peking University law professor and social activist He Weifang pointed out that gonggong zhishifenzi should “transcend his area of specialty and demonstrate concern for issues such as democracy, the rule of law and the development of a market economy.” “A public intellectual should not only be concerned with his field of expertise, but also demonstrate concern for society as a whole . . . through means such as criticism and exposure [of sociopolitical ills],” he noted.7

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That there are no serious disagreements about the definition— and roles— of Chinese public intellectuals is evidenced by the fact that an official publication, albeit a liberal one, has laid down similar views about the identity and calling of gonggong zhishifenzi. In September 2004, the Southern People Weekly selected fifty top public intellectuals in China. The well-regarded publication defined gonggong zhishifenzi this way: “They have academic backgrounds and professional knowledge; they address and participate in public affairs; they maintain a critical spirit and moral ideals.”8 Western Sinologists who have studied the Chinese intelligentsia, including Merle Goldman and Timothy Cheek, have also given more or less similar definitions of the socially and politically engaged intellectual.9 My study in this chapter sets out to examine the factors that have hindered public intellectuals in China from satisfactorily fulfilling sociopolitical goals, ranging from scrutinizing and critiquing the CCP administration to pluralizing and liberalizing the political system. It looks at the emergence of different subsets of public intellectuals within the country’s inchoate civil society. I also examine how these brave individuals have, despite overwhelming odds, laid the groundwork for more radical changes in the future.

The Traditional Role of Intellectuals

The contributions— and limitations— of Chinese intellectuals must be gauged against the backdrop of Confucianism, which still forms an integral part of the Chinese mind-set despite the encroachment of “alien” worldviews, ranging from Christianity to Marxism. Contrary to conventional wisdom, explicit concepts of democracy could be found in the multitudinous sayings of Confucius. Take, for example, this well-known dictum on the relationship between the ruler and the ruled: “Water can support a boat, but it can also capsize the vessel.”10 A casual examination of Chinese history has revealed a sizeable number of intellectuals who have risked their lives to promote social justice and hasten the pace of political change. However, there is little doubt that until the end of the Qing dynasty in 1911, most learned Chinese clung to the quasi-Confucianist

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belief that they could best function as the “conscience of society” by unquestioningly serving their emperors and promoting evolution within the system.11 Moreover, feudal authorities were effective in co-opting men of letters partly through according them a prominent place in the sociopolitical hierarchy. The shi or shidafu— learned mandarins at the service of the monarch— were the cream of the nation. Shidafu were ranked ahead of farmers, industrialists, and merchants in the long-standing pecking order of the professions.12 The imperial court was in charge of selecting the best minds to become officials through the time-honored keju (imperial government examination) system. For budding intellectuals down the centuries, the burning ambition of life was to do well in the keju exams and bring honor to their clans by becoming a senior official. The idea that intellectuals could have an identity separate from the powers that be — and that they should take part in overthrowing evil emperors— simply did not develop within the learned mandarins.13 According to the Chinese American historian Ying-Shih Yu, intellectuals failed to develop a “group consciousness” — in the sense of a largely independent social sector that is separate from the regime — until China’s defeat at the hands of the Japanese in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1895. The debacle led to a series of humiliations for the Qing government, including ceding Taiwan to the Japanese. Kang Youwei, a nationally known scholar-official, organized a signature campaign to urge the Qing court to adopt radical reforms. Intellectuals had a lot more room for maneuver after the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911. This was expressed fully in the May Fourth Movement of 1919, which Yu called “the first modern social movement organized by intellectuals.”14 The May Fourth Movement has been described as a Chinese renaissance that liberated the Chinese from not only the rule of corrupt monarchs but also the yoke of feudalism. For the first time, Chinese intellectuals realized that each individual is a self-sufficient entity — not a mere adjunct of the authorities that be — and that a key role of intellectuals is to work together for the common good of society.15 This renaissance, however, proved short-lived: the CCP, which was founded in 1921, would soon impose on the land a form of Leninism with feudalist Chinese characteristics.

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The Party’s EFForts to SuFFocate the Intelligentsia: Asymmetrical Warfare between Public Intellectuals and the Authorities

Maoism vs. the Self-Sufficiency of the Individual and of Knowledge Before he seized power in 1949, Mao went on the record as singing the praises of Western-style or universal democracy and liberal values. In 1945, he even pledged to adopt Abraham Lincoln’s principles of democracy.16 However, during the years that he held sway over China— from 1949 to the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966– 76)—Chinese citizens and particularly intellectuals were subjected to the most horrendous tyranny. A particularly pernicious aspect of Maoism was that it not only consigned intellectuals to the role of virtual slaves of the Party machinery, but the authoritarian creed also insisted that knowledge itself must be at the service of the regime. In his infamous “Talk at the Yen’an Forum on Literature and Art” of May 1942, the Great Helmsman admonished all proletariat writers and artists to always “keep to the stand of the Party, keep to Party spirit and Party policy.” According to Mao, art — together with other forms of knowledge and expertise — has no innate self-sufficiency of its own: it must subserve the higher cause of the revolution. “There is in fact no such thing as art for art’s sake, art that stands above classes, or art that is detached from or independent of politics,” Mao said. “Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause; they are, as Lenin said, cogs and wheels in the whole revolutionary machine.”17 The same ethos applies to intellectuals of different backgrounds and sectors and to their specialized knowledge. That the CCP leadership still practices Maoist epistemology and statecraft is evidenced by the lavish anniversary functions that Beijing held in 2012 to mark the seventieth anniversary of the Yen’an talk.18 It is also interesting that the government-controlled Chinese Writers Press asked 100 well-known authors and intellectuals to hand-copy the Mao text, which was later published as a special anniversary edition. Writers who took part in this task included Nobel Prize –winning novelist Mo Yan, former Minister of Culture Wang Meng, and Tie Ying, chair-

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woman of the official China Writers Association and a member of the CCP Central Committee.19 This age-old subjugation of the individual— and the intellect — was well expressed by a noted man of letters and advisor to the Gang of Four radicals, Zhu Yongjia. Zhu used a familiar proverb to express the intimate connection between intellectuals and the powers that be: hair growing on the skin. “There is this old saying that if the skin is no more, from where can hair draw its sustenance?” said Zhu. “In traditional Chinese society, intellectuals have little choice other than working for the administration. There were few other means of making a living.”20 The first task of the public intellectual, therefore, is to wean the individual from the socialist system: to confer independence and selfsufficiency on the intellectual. In an essay entitled “The Quintessence of Global Values Is to Treat the Individual as Individual,” Bao Tong, the former secretary of the late Party general secretary Zhao Ziyang, pointed out that one of the greatest failings of the CCP was precisely its refusal to treat the people as individuals who can pursue agendas separate from those of the state. “The Four Cardinal Principles [of Marxism and Party leadership] has led to the degradation of the individual,” he wrote.21 For Xu Jilin, “intellectuals’ first calling is to safeguard the zizhuxing [“innate self-sufficiency”] of knowledge.” “The zizhuxing of knowledge and learning is fundamental to intellectuals’ ability to reach [the goal of improving] public life and to implement the critique of the politics [of the day],” he added. The knowledge and values propagated by intellectuals must be “independent of religion, politics, economics and other spheres of influence,” he pointed out.22 The CCP’s Confucianist Campaigns and the Apparent Contradictions between Confucianism and Liberalism Since the Cultural Revolution, the CCP administration has been reviving Confucianism with gusto so as to fill the spiritual vacuum within citizens who have lost faith in socialism. The socialist regime’s resuscitation of Confucianism parallels efforts by the Lee Kuan Yew administration in the 1980s in Singapore to revive Confucianist teachings, such as filial piety and respect for authority.23

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Ex-president Jiang Zemin pronounced in the mid-1990s that Confucianism— together with Taoism and Buddhism— was representative of guocui (“the essence of national wisdom”) and should be taught in schools and propagated in society. The establishment of several hundreds of Confucius Institutes overseas testifies to the newfound respect that supposedly “antifeudalist” communist leaders have accorded the pillar of traditional Chinese learning.24 Quite a few of the policies of Jiang and ex-president Hu Jintao have clear-cut Confucianist roots. This is true particularly of measures aimed at boosting the qualifications of Party officials and the Party’s relationship with the people. In 2001, Jiang put forward the doctrine of “running the country according to moral values.”25 That the ruler should try to win over the populace through moral acts and policies is a well-known Confucianist doctrine. And in the mid-2000s, ex-president Hu unveiled his ambitious goal of nurturing a “harmonious society,” an ideal that has distinctly Confucianist roots.26 According to Ying-shih Yu, the CCP establishment is “sloughing off Mao Zedong Thought and making a move toward [adapting] Confucianism, even though it will not admit this openly.” Yu saw the revival of Confucianism as both a “cultural strategy as well as a means of boosting control” over intellectuals and citizens.27 Most public intellectuals do not see an insurmountable contradiction between Confucianism and liberalism. This is despite the fact that a popular slogan during the May Fourth Movement of 1919—China’s major renaissance movement — was “Smash the Confucius Shop.” After all, Confucianism has traditionally conferred a high status on men of letters, who have been encouraged by orthodox theorists down the ages to use their influence to do good in society. Twenty-first-century scholars, of course, take a pragmatic attitude toward interpreting individual Confucianist tenets. They tend to focus on the innately democratic doctrines of the Sage while jettisoning those teachings that focus on intellectuals’ obligations to the emperors or the powers that be.28 For example, Fudan University liberal philosopher Bai Tongdong does not think there are irreconcilable differences between Confucianism and liberalism. “Confucianists have, apart from the functions of the political elite, consistently stressed the importance of the will of the people,” he indicated. “Ideally, Confucian politics is one that encourages the

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participation of both the elite and popular opinion.”29 For Shanghaibased writer Yang Hengjun, Chinese citizens can “learn about [social] equality and justice from Confucianist thought.” He added that Confucius had much to say about the treatment of disadvantaged sectors in society and righteous reactions against social injustices. “Confucianism is not just about siding with authority or seeking legitimacy for the ruling regime,” he wrote.30 “Controlling People” Is a Key Factor behind the Longevity of CCP Rule One of the secrets of the longevity of CCP rule is its ability to control people, especially intellectuals who could pose a threat to the regime. Many of the CCP’s cruelest political campaigns, such as the Anti-Right Movement (1957– 59) and the Cultural Revolution (1966– 76) were designed to tame and emasculate intellectuals. Party commissars and propagandists tried to brain-wash potentially free-thinking intellectuals into copycats of Lei Feng, the self-sacrificing “proletariat paragon” lionized by Mao as the model for all Chinese.31 Guanren, which can be translated as “controlling people” or “keeping people on a tight leash,” is a central tenet of the CCP’s human resources strategy. Even relatively liberal leaders, such as the late state president Liu Shaoqi, who was hounded to death by Mao during the Cultural Revolution, contributed to the Party tradition of nurturing robot-like cadres who unthinkingly toe the Party line. Liu’s most famous work, The Cultivation of a Communist, is a primer on how to turn cadres into model proletariats who profess undying loyalty to the Party.32 The guanren mentality is also reflected in the dictums laid down by the CCP Organization Department (CCPOD)— which is in charge of personnel issues— on recruiting well-educated Chinese for Party and government posts. In Mao’s days, the CCPOD was looking for college graduates who were “both red and expert,” with emphasis being put on “redness” or devotion to the Party. In the current era of reform and the open door, Chinese who are deemed to have “both [professional] competence and moral values” are to be groomed for senior positions. Priority, however, is being given to “moral values,” which are code words for “total readiness to toe the Beijing line.”33

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The new supreme leader, General Secretary and President Xi Jinping, has continued this tradition by launching a rectification campaign within the CCP to weed out what he calls the evil trends of “formalism, bureaucracy, hedonism and extravagance” among officials and Party members.34 Given that the major slogan of his first year in office was “to realize the China Dream and the Great Renaissance of the Chinese Race,” it seems probable that the “core” of the Fifth-Generation leadership would continue the Maoist tradition of trying to mold every Chinese into a patriotic if not nationalistic Lei Feng.35 Intellectuals versus an Unprecedented Weiwen Apparatus Chinese society has become more pluralistic in the past ten years in tandem with the marketization of the economy and the leaps-and-bounds growth of the non-state-sector economy. The Party’s grip on intellectuals has loosened considerably because although a government job is still much sought after, college graduates and professionals can find equally attractive careers in private firms and China-based multinationals. Intellectuals who are interested in political participation, however, are up against an unprecedentedly potent quasi-police-state apparatus. The Hu Jintao administration (2002– 12) perfected a computerized, allweather weiwen (“preserve sociopolitical stability”) network to uphold what Hu called a “harmonious society,” or one where discordant noises coming from destabilizing social elements will not threaten the CCP’s status as “perennial ruling party.”36 The weiwen apparatus is overseen by the Central Political-Legal Commission (CPLC), which reports directly to the Politburo Standing Committee. It consists of several million officers from the Ministry of Public Security, the Ministry of State Security, and the quasi-military People’s Armed Police (PAP). Units under the CPLC also deploy state-of-the-art surveillance equipment to keep track of the movements of dissidents and public intellectuals. For example, more than 2 million surveillance cameras have been constructed in the Pearl River Delta alone. In both 2011 and 2012, the weiwen budget exceeded that of the publicized expenditures of the People’s Liberation Army. In 2012, weiwen expenditures reached an astronomical 701.7 billion yuan, or 11.5 percent above that of the year before.37

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Since the 2008 Summer Olympics, the CCP has revived Mao’s “people’s warfare” to ward off destabilizing elements in society. One million vigilantes were recruited in the capital to ensure “harmony” during the Olympics period. Long-dormant neighborhood committees have been revived. One of their tasks is to report to police activities of “suspicious characters” in the vicinity. Security personnel are paying special attention to the Internet. In Beijing alone, the authorities have recruited 2.06 million part-time “propaganda workers” to police the information superhighways. These Net nannies are charged with keeping the Internet free of criticisms of the CCP or any materials that may prove embarrassing to the regime.38 A large number of public intellectuals are routinely beaten up and detained by police on trumped-up charges. What is worse is that even their spouses and children are subject to harassment, including house arrest. Since the Tiananmen Square crackdown, dozens of intellectuals, including labor leader Han Dongfang, journalist Chang Ping, blogger Wen Yunchao, writers Yu Jie and Liao Yiwu, and AIDS activists Wan Yanhai and Gao Yaojie, have been forced to leave the country out of fear for their personal safety.39 The Carrot: The CCP’s Effort to Co-opt Intellectuals One key reason why the CCP has been able to survive — and, in a way, prosper — despite the wholesale collapse of authoritarian regimes in the Soviet bloc in the 1990s— is the Party’s successful co-optation of intellectuals. Traditionally, the three pillars of support of the CCP— which calls itself the “vanguard of the proletariat”— have been workers, peasants, and soldiers. Even though intellectuals were subsumed by Deng Xiaoping under the category of “workers,” they were traditionally not considered to be trustworthy custodians of the Marxist faith.40 A seminal change took place in the mid- to late-1990s with then General Secretary Jiang Zemin’s introduction of the elitist “Theory of the Three Represents.” The theory states that the CCP should “represent the most advanced productivity; the foremost culture; and the comprehensive interests of the broad masses.”41 Given that the bulk of the Party’s traditional heroes and role models— peasants and workers— have not even finished high school, let alone college — they cannot be

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called upon to pursue IT-enabled industrial production or to promote high-level culture. By contrast, university-educated intellectuals, businessmen, and professionals— including “returnees” who received their postgraduate diplomas from universities in the West — are a better fit as far as twenty-first-century CCP role models are concerned. At a watershed speech on July 1, 2001— which marked the eightieth birthday of the Party —Jiang formally allowed private entrepreneurs into the Party. The ex-president’s move was criticized by the Party old guard as going against the basic doctrines of Marx and Mao, but he managed to persuade the majority of cadres and CCP members that enlarging the talent base of the Party was the only way to avoid the fate that befell the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.42 Indeed, an important factor militating against the rise of gonggong zhishifenzi is that many members of the intelligentsia consider themselves beneficiaries of the economic prosperity engineered by the Party. At world-renowned colleges such as Peking University and Tsinghua University, students enthusiastically apply for Party membership. One important reason behind the Arab Spring revolutions in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt in 2011 was the large number of unemployed and alienated college graduates who had lost hope in the future. Yet in China, most college graduates can find jobs. Many even consider themselves stakeholders in the system— and it would be unthinkable for these well-paid members of the middle class to risk possible imprisonment by openly criticizing the Party.43 “Performance-based Legitimacy” and the Lure of Nationalism In the wake of the global financial crisis that began in late 2008, the state propaganda machinery has made much of the fact that the “China model of development” is superior to that of the “Western laissez-faire capitalist system.” The fact that China’s GDP grew by at least 9 percent during most of the era of reform has given the CCP a kind of “performancebased legitimacy.”44 It is true that ordinary Chinese resent that the nation’s “new class”— the Red aristocracy incorporating about 100 big clans at the top of the Party — has helped itself to a lion’s share of the economic pie. Yet as long as the economy keeps expanding, members of the

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middle and lower classes will still see a palpable increase in their standard of living. Then there is the lure of nationalism, one of the most effective cards that the CCP regime can play to bolster its legitimacy — and to parry attacks from liberal intellectuals who favor the Western or “universal” model of governance. Chinese and Western theorists have written much about how whenever Party authorities are engulfed in a crisis, they will play up confrontation with one or more foreign countries so as to generate patriotism and divert public attention away from domestic woes.45 For example, the horrendous anti-Japanese demonstrations in September 2012— caused by heightened Sino-Japanese conflicts over the sovereignty of the Diaoyu or Senkaku islands— coincided with signs that China’s high-growth trajectory might be coming to an end. In 2012, the GDP grew at 7.8 percent, the lowest rate in two decades. And most projections said that the growth rate would be a mere 7.5 percent in 2013.46 There is evidence that Beijing has successfully used nationalism to blunt the attack of liberal intellectuals. This is partly attested to by the fact that few of the nation’s gonggong zhishifenzi have challenged the CCP leadership’s harsh tactics toward Tibetans and Uighurs. Although the majority of these two minorities do not want independence, they are after a high degree of autonomy, comparable to that enjoyed by the special administrative region of Hong Kong.47 Most public intellectuals have shied away from discussing the issue of ethnicity. For example, very few scholars or writers have given their opinion on the more than 100 cases of self-immolation involving Tibetans living in the Tibet Autonomous Region and neighboring provinces, such as Gansu and Sichuan.48 Reacting to Chinese intellectuals’ refusal to criticize Beijing over its intolerant Tibetan policy, former CASS political scientist Zhang Baoshu said, “The apathy is appalling.” Zhang ascribed the conspiracy of silence to intellectuals’ fear of offending the leadership. “No one wants to be accused of being a separatist,” said Zhang.49 However, Wei Chengsi, a scholar based in Hong Kong and Guangzhou who has written a book on the Chinese intelligentsia, said that many scholars and writers had chosen not to talk about Tibet “simply because they don’t know much about the issues concerned.” “It may also be true that China’s zhishifenzi are focusing on areas where they can more effectively promote changes,” he indicated.50

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Groups of Notable Public Intellectuals

Most Chinese public intellectuals have familiar professional backgrounds and traits. They are professors, writers, bloggers, and artists who are concerned about the fate of their fellow countrymen and, in particular, the possible transformation of a despotic political system into something closer to universal norms. Their highly moral and altruistic interests are well reflected by this famous saying of Northern Song dynasty official and writer Fan Zhongyan (989– 1052): “They worry about the fate of the country earlier than other people; they enjoy the fruits of plenty later than others.”51 Next I offer descriptions of three groups of public intellectuals who have made notable contributions to pluralizing the public discourse — and to putting pressure on the CCP regime to live up to its rhetorical commitment to political reform. Scholars, Writers, and Net-based Commentators As in the case particularly of fast-modernizing developing countries, scholars, writers, and retired officials are deemed natural leaders in the community of public intellectuals. China’s most famous dissident and public intellectual, Liu Xiaobo, was both a scholar (a popular lecturer of literature at the well-known Beijing Normal University) and a writer.52 Notable professors, particularly those based in Beijing, which is still the center of Chinese thought, have made great contributions to a wide range of causes. For example, Peking University law professor He Weifang and former Chinese Academy of Social Sciences historian Zhang Lifan have been indefatigable advocates of universal-style democratic institutions. Economist Hu Xingdou of Beijing Institute of Technology and sociologist Yu Jianrong of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences have periodically commented on social inequality and deep-seated contradictions between the people and cadres.53 Much has been written about how in the absence of any mainstream religion or ethical system, China has become an amoral society whose members are excessively obsessed with making money and keeping up with the Joneses. Apart from zeroing in on the structural deficiencies of a Leninist-style regime in the twenty-first century, public intellectuals

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provide much-needed criteria for the public to not only tell right from wrong but also to hasten the country’s integration with global norms, such as the values enshrined in the charters of the United Nations. Yet perhaps the biggest contribution of public intellectuals is educating the public to differentiate between service to the community and the country, on the one hand, and service to the Party, on the other. This is despite the herculean efforts made by the CCP to convince the people that all patriotic Chinese must serve the Party well.54 The influence of public intellectuals was indirectly attested to when after Southern People Weekly unveiled its list of fifty notable public intellectuals in September 2004, the CCP Propaganda Department dispatched a national circular asking all media to avoid using the term gonggong zhishifenzi. Yet nonofficial websites and blogs have not only continued using the term but have also regularly compiled lists of outstanding public intellectuals and their contributions. For example, the Beijing-based intellectual zhengyoujingzuo blog has since 2010 published annual lists of the 100 most influential public intellectuals in the Greater China region.55 Members of Liberal Think Tanks Some of the nation’s best-trained intellectuals and professionals work for brain trusts, which are in effect offshoots of the government. According to an annual report on think tanks compiled by the International Relations Program at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), China in 2012 boasted 429 think tanks, making it the country with the second largest number of such institutions. Moreover, ten among the UPenn list of the forty-five “most influential East Asian think tanks” are based in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Four outfits were among these top ten institutions: the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (ranked no. 1); the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR); the Carnegie China Center at Tsinghua University for Global Policy; and the China Institute of International Studies (CIIS).56 The bulk of Chinese think tanks, however, are subsidiaries or adjuncts of the Party/state apparatus. Units such as the CICIR are widely known as “front organizations” of government or even state security departments.57 Only a small proportion of the well-known brain trusts, for

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example, the Unirule Institute of Economics and The World and China Institute (TWCI), are bona fide private organizations. That Mao Yushi (b. 1929), a founder and principal researcher at Unirule, is subject to surveillance by state security agents illustrates the difficulty of setting up unofficial think tanks.58 Even though they usually steer clear of direct confrontation with the authorities, leaders of private think tanks have acquitted themselves well in providing alternative perspectives regarding political and economic policies. Unirule’s Mao is a noted critic of the tendency, which became particularly obvious after the global financial crisis of 2008, of the selfaggrandizement of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) at the expense of the private sector. Under his supervision, Unirule came out with a study on how SOE conglomerates, many of which make tens of billions of yuan a year, might actually be losing money if hidden government subsidies such as land costs are taken into account.59 An expert in Chinese elections, TWCI founder Li Fan has become a tireless advisor to nonParty-affiliated rural residents who want to contest in village elections and other grassroots-level polls. Li’s numerous reports have put pressure on the CCP to, in selective cases at least, make more efforts to stem out vote-rigging in rural districts.60 Human Rights Lawyers Among the myriad sectors of activist zhishifenzi to have emerged after the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, weiquan (“rights-defending”) lawyers have stood out because of their high degree of professionalism and selfless dedication to the common good. At the early stage, most publicly engaged attorneys chose the strategy of defending specific cases of violations of human and civil rights while steering clear of challenging the overall sociopolitical system. Several weiquan lawyers, including Gao Zhisheng, who was jailed in 2009, initially won government recognition for their integrity and skills in upholding justice.61 Yet an increasing number of human rights lawyers soon realized that unless the political and judicial system was overhauled, it was not possible for them to help clients win cases in court or demand compensation for miscarriage of justice. “Lawyers actively use legal institutions and other platforms to

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challenge China’s authoritarian system,” wrote Hong Kong– based legal scholars Fu Hualing and Richard Cullen. “Radical weiquan lawyers increasingly take an oppositional attitude and see themselves as working against the system and playing a transformative role.”62 By the second half of the Hu administration, weiquan lawyers were increasingly being hounded by the weiwen juggernaut. This was best illustrated by the plight of Chen Guangcheng, the blind, self-taught legal worker who made global news in 2012 by seeking shelter in the U.S. embassy in Beijing. He subsequently went into exile in New York City. It was revealed that authorities in Linyi County, where Chen was based, spent millions of yuan each year on imposing a twenty-four-hour surveillance on Chen and his relatives.63 Though there are no indications that the authorities would in the foreseeable future substitute Partydominated rule by law with universal-style rule of law, there is no denying that human rights lawyers have made two major contributions. First, at least for the sake of improving China’s global image, Beijing has indicated a willingness to consider revising a bevy of laws and administrative regulations that are clearly unconstitutional. And weiquan lawyers deserve the credit for raising this point in both the Chinese and international media.64 More importantly, ordinary citizens, with the help of attorneys who have been inspired by the examples set by weiquan lawyers, are much more aware of the rights that at least in theory have been granted them by the PRC Constitution and the law.65

Trajectory of the Broadening Role of Public Intellectuals: Their Achievements and Limitations

The Formation of a National Coalition of Concerned Intellectuals By the second term of the Hu-Wen administration (2007– 2012), a number of game-changing developments had taken place in the body politic that boded well for the work of public intellectuals. The first is the crystallization of a nationwide community of intellectuals and socially concerned citizens. Informal but strong networks of professors, writers,

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journalists, lawyers, and other professionals are being formed despite the CCP’s prohibition against the establishment of quasi-political parties.66 This has been facilitated by the faster-than-expected growth of Netizens, especially the users of weibo, or microblogging, devices, such as the Chinese equivalents of Facebook and Twitter. As of early 2013, there were more than 530 million Netizens in the country, about 350 million of whom were regular weibo users.67 On the one hand, few zhishifenzi are naïve enough to think that their action can make a big dent in the current system of one-party authoritarian rule. On the other hand, new horizons have been opened up. The public sphere has been expanded. This renders possible the popularization of ideas that challenge the CCP’s notorious “one-voice chamber.” We have also witnessed faster mobilization of concerned citizens for the public airing of views on issues ranging from environmental protection to promoting political reform through the ballot box. Peking University’s Xia Yeliang, an outspoken supporter of political reform, is convinced that a bigger role for public intellectuals and NGO activists is possible despite Beijing’s strict prohibition against the establishment of formal political organizations. “It’s well-nigh impossible for an ‘opposition party’ to be formed within China,” he indicated in 2013. “It is also not possible for a foreign-based opposition party to affect developments in China. We can only rely on [the growth of ] a civil society.” He said that through means such as the Internet “a kind of ‘unorganized state of organization’ has been formed.” This meant that while China’s public sphere lacks organizations that have specific names and addresses, “once the opportunity comes, [concerned citizens] can quickly come together to influence events.”68 Examples of the consolidation of “informal” networks of public intellectuals— and how they have affected the course of sociopolitical development since the late 2000s— are discussed next. Cases Where Public Intellectuals Have Made a Difference The state’s rigorous control mechanisms notwithstanding, public protests against government-induced social injustices began not long after the end of the Cultural Revolution. In the wake of the bloody crack-

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down of the 1989 student democracy movement, however, most demonstrations have been isolated and based more on economic than political factors. China-based sociologists have estimated the number of qunzhong shijian (“mass incidents”)— including protests, riots, and labor strikes— at around 150,000 a year, but these acts of defiance were scattered all over the country. Moreover, about 60 percent of these incidents were caused by so-called land grabs or forced evictions, that is, farmers and urbanites are compelled to vacate their land or apartments by officials and developers with little or no compensation.69 The picture began to change by the end of the last decade, as the following instances demonstrate. The Sichuan Earthquake and the Charter 08 Movement. The year 2008 will go down in Chinese history as the critical time when elements of the “public sphere” came together in a big way to influence political development. In the wake of the Sichuan earthquake in May of that year, tens of thousands of volunteers spontaneously poured into the hard-hit areas. More significantly, intellectuals involved soon broadened their concern, from collecting money and materials for reconstruction to unearthing official corruption. This was because a sizeable proportion of the estimated 69,197 victims were found dead in shoddily built tofu buildings, including schools and student dormitories.70 Artist Ai Weiwei and writer Tan Zuoren were among a few dozen public intellectuals who effectively mobilized a nationwide community of concerned citizens to pressure the Sichuan and central governments into launching an investigation into corruption behind the tofu buildings. Eventually, only a small number of minor local officials were penalized. Ai and Tan were beaten up by thugs hired by police. In 2010, Tan was sentenced to five years in jail for “inciting subversion of state power.”71 However, their gestures of defiance taught a whole generation of intellectuals and citizens about the importance of collective political activism. On December 10, 2008, the sixtieth anniversary of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 300-odd intellectuals launched the Charter 08 movement to push for a faster pace of democratization. They included the cream of China’s dissidents and public intellectuals: Liu Xiaobo, Bao Tong, Ding Zhilin, Yu Jie, Yu Haocheng, Mao Yushi, Dai Qing, Teng Biao, He Weifang, Liu Junning, Zhang Youyu, and so forth.

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Charter 08 was modeled upon the Czech 77 movement, but it was significantly less confrontational: there was no call for the demise of the Party. Actually, a key demand of the intellectuals was only that the CCP abide by PRC Constitution, which in theory grants rights to citizens, including freedom of expression, assembly, and religion. More than 10,000 Chinese signed the petition before the authorities shut down the campaign in early 2009.72 Liu Xiaobo was sentenced to eleven years in jail on Christmas Day 2009. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for 2010.73 The Wukan Village Rebellion of 2011. Wukan became world famous in late 2011 as the 13,000 inhabitants in this sleepy fishing village in southern Guangdong staged a singular act of defiance: they threw out the corrupt members of the village administrative committee (VAC) and demanded a reelection. Earlier in the year, village administrators had, without consulting the peasants, sold their land to a Hong Kong real estate developer. When authorities in Guangzhou, the provincial capital, responded by sending thousands of police and PAP officers to Wukan, the feisty villagers refused to budge. The law enforcement officials surrounded the village, cutting off electricity and water supplies.74 However, the awakened civil society came to the rescue. First, public intellectuals, including internationally known blogger Han Han, gave Wukan moral support on the Internet and through weibo. Writers, professors, and lawyers began visiting the remote Guangdong outpost. Reporters not only from Guangdong but other provinces congregated in Wukan, despite the fact that the CCP Department of Propaganda had prohibited all reporting of the protests. For several reasons, including that the Wukan incident was widely reported by the New York Times, the BBC, and other global media, the Guangdong government caved in by allowing residents to hold new elections in March 2012. Lin Zuluan, a leader of the rebel villagers, was elected head of the VAC.75 As of early 2013, the villagers had not been able to get their compensation, and Lin openly vented his frustrations to the local and foreign media. However, the so-called Wukan model of the relatively conciliatory treatment of rural dissent was cited in conferences held by units under the CPLC as an effective and bloodless means to uphold “sociopolitical harmony.” Even

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Zhou Yongkang, the hardline Politburo member in charge of CPLC at the time, praised Guangdong’s handling of the Wukan rebellion.76 The Southern Weekly Incident of 2013. It has been a long tradition for Southern Weekly, which is famous for its muckraking exposés of social ills, to run controversial New Year’s messages that call for political reform. The piece they meant to run on January 1, 2013, was actually quite conservative by its usual standards. It was titled “The China Dream: The Dream of Constitutionalism.” It called for international-style rule of law, but the paper was also echoing statements made by new General Secretary Xi Jinping about promoting “Constitutional socialism with Chinese characteristics.”77 However, Tuo Zhen, the head of the provincial Propaganda Department, stunned the nation by ordering last-minute changes to the New Year’s message. The doctored version focused on glorifying the achievements of the CCP and took out references to legal reform. The reactions of the journalistic community and the intelligentsia, including numerous public intellectuals, were swift and strong. The bulk of editors and reporters in Southern Weekly went on strike. Newspapers such as the New Beijing Post in Beijing disregarded warnings by the national CCP Propaganda Department and ran articles supporting the Guangdong paper. The issue was hotly discussed by tens of thousands of Netizens on weibo. And public intellectuals, including He Weifang, Li Changping, and Teng Biao, gave their support to the paper — and their thumbs down to Tuo and other censors.78 Limitations of China’s Liberal Public Intellectuals Owing to such factors as the horrendous odds against them, it is perhaps not surprising that gonggong zhishifenzi suffer from structural and other limitations. Despite signs of worsening contradictions within the country and the continuous rise of the number of “mass incidents,” there are no indications that a mass-based movement can grow big enough to force the CCP to liberalize —let alone bring down the regime. Moreover, as China becomes a full-fledged quasi-superpower whose global clout is second

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only to that of the United States, fewer Western governments and institutions are willing to jeopardize their relationship with Beijing by laying into the CCP’s horrendous human rights records. For example, human rights— or China’s treatment of Tibetans— were hardly mentioned during Premier Li Keqiang’s visit to Germany in May 2013 or during Xi’s “informal summit” with President Obama in California one month later.79 Moreover, some of the new trends of Chinese society and culture that seem to favor the growth of a civil society are actually double-edged swords. The most obvious example is the Internet, which has been credited with expanding the reach of intellectuals. A number of media scholars have pointed out that in light of the prowess of the CCP’s “Net police,” the Internet has also facilitated efforts by Beijing’s quasi-police apparatus to locate potential sources of opposition. Take, for example, Internet-based political petitions calling for a faster pace of democratization. Even if pseudonyms are used, it is not difficult for the authorities to find out the “black hands” behind such sociopolitical movements.80 Gady Epstein, an expert on the Chinese information superhighway, points out that “the Internet was expected to help democratize China. Instead, it has enabled the authoritarian state to get a firmer grip [on society].” Moreover, the Net could serve the purpose of a safety valve for the regime. Popular grievances that are so graphically expressed on weibo and other vehicles have alerted CCP administration about what they must do to defuse imminent political crises.81 Public intellectuals are also divided as to their agenda for reform. Although the great majority of gonggong zhishifenzi want an end to oneparty dictatorial rule, they do not seem to have put together a comprehensive road map on what institutions should replace the CCP— and how the new and supposedly more liberal regime should govern. Unlike dissidents in the former Eastern bloc, almost all of whom were committed to ending Communist Party dictatorship, a good number of China’s public intellectuals seem contented with the role of “within-the-system” critics. Historian Zhang Lifan expressed doubts as to whether some intellectuals’ residual attachment to the CCP could affect the moral underpinning of their advocacy for democratization. Zhang noted that due to their apparent unwillingness to totally wean themselves off the CCP,

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these veterans sometimes failed to realize that political change can only come about through a robust civil society — and not through petitioning leaders. “They want political reform so the party can continue to rule, because saving the party is saving a part of their own lives,” Zhang noted.82 As we shall see next, liberal public intellectuals face competition from “establishment intellectuals,” whose major preoccupation is to persuade the Party leadership to pick up on the threads of liberalization that were stymied by the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.

The Relevance and Contributions of “Establishment Public Intellectuals”

The archetypal “establishment intellectual” in China could be the great poet and patriot Qu Yuan (343– 278 BCE), who lived in the Warring States period of ancient history. In 278 BCE, Qu, who had been spurned and banished by his emperor, committed suicide by drowning in a river to protest massive corruption in the imperial court. To this day, Chinese all over the world observed the Dragon Boat Festival, which was first established to commemorate Qu. There seems little doubt that many among “within-the-system” reformers would identity with Qu’s lofty levels of morality and self-sacrifice.83 “Old Revolutionaries” within the Establishment This group of establishment intellectuals consists of retired cadres who are in their seventies and eighties (and a few in their nineties). They first made their mark in Chinese politics and society as the colleagues and underlings of the two reformist icons of the 1980s: former general secretaries Hu Yaobang (1915– 89) and Zhao Ziyang (1919– 2005). Notable figures within this group include the former secretary of Mao Zedong, Li Rui; former secretary of Zhao Ziyang, Bao Tong; former director of the State Administration on News and Publications, Du Daozheng; former Xinhua News Agency senior editor Yang Jisheng; and the recently deceased former People’s Daily chief editor Hu Jiwei.84

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These intellectuals and retired cadres were marginalized after the Tiananmen Square incident of 1989. Almost none of them have challenged the right of the CCP to rule, but they have fulfilled the role of public intellectuals by not only lambasting the aberrations of the administration— and of the CCP system—but by also proposing novel solutions for governance. The advantage of this group of intellectuals is their seniority in Party membership and their lofty moral station in society. Given the remnant Confucianism in Chinese society, Fourthand Fifth-Generation leaders, ranging from Hu Jintao to Xi Jinping (who typically joined the party in the 1960s and 1970s), have to profess respect for these elders. This subset of gonggong zhishifenzi mostly exercises their influence through the printed word and in cyberspace, including interviews given to the Hong Kong and overseas Chinese media. Many of them are editors and contributors of the vastly influential journal Yanhuang Chunqiu. Basically a journal of Party history, Yanhuang Chunqiu has carried scores of forward-looking articles on alternative, more liberal models of development, including the ideas of liberal icons such as Zhao Ziyang.85 Yang Jisheng (b. 1940), is the author of the much-acclaimed Tombstone, which has been translated into English and other languages. This book records the horrendous famine of 1959– 61, which killed an estimated 36 million people. Even though the tome contains no direct criticism of the CCP as such, it is a stern reminder that the kind of dictatorial and shoddy decision-making that was responsible for the famine is still integral to the Party’s mentality and statecraft. Yang has also published extensively on Zhao Ziyang’s political-reform ideas.86 Equally effective is this group of intellectuals’ advocacy of the “socialist democratic party (SDP) model” as an alternative for China. Their central idea is that the kind of humanitarian and democratic socialism found in Scandinavian countries has most aptly manifested the ideals of Marxism. In other words, SDPs in Europe, and not the CCP, have best lived up to the teachings of Marx and Engels. Thus, Xie Tao (1922– 2010), a former vice president of Renmin University in Beijing, pointed out in an article in the February 2007 issue of Yanhuang Chunqiu that “the CCP’s only way out is through [embracing] the democratic socialism” of the Western European variety. “Only constitutional democracy can fundamentally

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solve the ruling party’s problems of corruption and graft,” he added. “Only democratic socialism can save China.”87 Some of Xie’s ideas could have been partially incorporated into the Hu Jintao administration’s “Scientific Theory on Development,” one of whose central planks was to boost social welfare spending, particularly for peasants in the heartland provinces.88 It cannot be denied that given the larger context of the viability of CCP-directed authoritarianism, establishment intellectuals, such as the large number of senior Party members who had worked for reformist general secretaries Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, can at least promote incremental changes in both the political and the economic arenas. As befits a society that runs on guanxi (“connections”), many establishment intellectuals work through their personal relationships with the powers that be. For example, the son of Hu Yaobang, Hu Deping, who is a longtime friend of President Xi’s, has since mid-2012 tried to impress upon the “core” of the Fifth-Generation leadership the imperative of picking up on the threads of political reform.89 Hu (b. 1942), who used to be a vice-ministerial-level official at the CCP’s United Front Department — one of whose jobs is to promote relations with private entrepreneurs— also lobbied Xi to expand the public sphere by giving more leeway to NGOs and politically inclined private businessmen.90 Liberal Members of Official Think Tanks and “Reconstructed Dissidents” Occasionally, intellectuals in think tanks and even full-fledged departments in the Party/State apparatus could serve the purpose of generating momentum for various kinds of economic and political reforms. A case in point are officials who work in the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau (CCTB), which is often deemed one of the most liberal departments of the Party/State apparatus. Yu Keping, the former deputy director of the CCTB and a much-published scholar, has been identified as a liberal advisor to ex-president Hu Jintao, particularly in the area of political changes. His 2006 article “Democracy Is a Good Thing” has provided at least indirect support to the nation’s intellectuals who want to speed up reform during the Hu administration.91 Lai Hairong, a researcher at the CCTB, is also a prolific author of the experience of political reform in Vietnam and in former communist countries in

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Eastern Europe. In 2112, Lai coedited a volume on democratic reforms at local-level administrations; the book was published in the United States and has attracted the attention of Sinologists interested in grassroots democratic movements.92 Zhou Duo (b. 1946), a Marxist philosopher and former academician at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, is a Tiananmen Square dissident who has opted to cooperate with the authorities. Zhou, a close friend of Liu Xiaobo’s, and Liu himself were among four celebrity scholars who staged a hunger strike in order to lobby for a compromise among students, protestors, and the authorities. From the late 2000s onwards, Zhou has chosen to gradually disengage himself from active politics so as to concentrate on his research about political and constitutional reform. He even arrived at a compromise with the police in early 2011: in return for not challenging the CCP, he is allowed to see his friends without police surveillance and even to go abroad. “The price to pay is tremendous,” he said. “Yet if we insist upon ‘overturning the verdict on June 4,’ nothing can be accomplished.”93 Chen Ziming (1952– 2014), a so-called black hand behind the student movement of 1989, was an even more prominent dissident who had taken on the role of an establishment intellectual. Jailed from 1989 to 1996, Chen had since his release written several books on Western democratic institutions and on the prospects of political reform in China. Given his decision not to directly challenge the CCP’s rule, his essays and blog were freely available in China’s cyberspace. Chen performed the useful function of educating a new generation of scholars and intellectuals about the values of critical thinking. In a recent essay on President Xi’s visit to the “revolutionary mecca” of the town of Xibopo, Hebei Province, Chen made an indirect appeal to the current leadership to embrace political liberalization. “China’s economy, culture and thoughts have become diversified,” Chen wrote. “The future China must be a colorful and beautiful China, not one dominated by ‘redness.’”94 The Dubious Role of “Strategic Intellectuals” And by the early 2010s, Beijing began grooming “strategic intellectuals”— those who are willing to make propaganda for the “China model” and to

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contribute to the “China Dream” of wealth and power — in an apparent effort to counterbalance the rise of liberal public intellectuals. The term “strategic intellectuals” became fashionable in policymaking and media circles after an influential official journal, the People’s Tribune (an offshoot of the People’s Daily), ran a cover story on a symposium entitled “The Renaissance of a Great Power and Strategic Intellectuals” in September 2010. The main theme of the participants, who included senior cadres from Party and government units, was that the Party/State apparatus needed “strategic-thinking” intellectuals who could point the way to the renaissance of China.95 Given that shortly after coming to power in November 2012 President Xi enthusiastically raised the slogan of “the China Dream” and the “Great Renaissance of the Chinese race,” the editors of People’s Tribune demonstrated a remarkable degree of foresight. Among the speakers at the People’s Tribune conference was Li Zhongjie, who is the deputy director of the CCP Party History Research Office. Li pointed out that the Party leadership was looking for experts who could provide advice “on comprehensive, long-term, fundamental strategies” that the Party and government should undertake to speed up China’s renaissance.96 Liu Yingjie, who is a senior staff member at the Policy Research Office of the State Council, spoke for many when he said at the People’s Tribune meeting that China lacked “thinkers who have a global outlook, a strategic way of thinking as well as capacity for deep [theoretical] penetration.” “We have to nurture and produce talents who can have worldwide influence,” he indicated.97 Yet the most basic requirement for strategic intellectuals is that they have to perform useful functions for the powers that be. According to Renmin University Marxist expert Tao Wenchao, one of the earliest proponents of the concept of “strategic intellectuals,” scholars and experts with “a strategic outlook that could lead to China’s great renaissance” are needed at this critical time of China’s development into a great power. “The strategic thinking and insights of intellectuals can provide guidance to government officials and entrepreneurs,” said Tao.98 Similarly, Xie Zhiqiang, a professor at the CCP Central Party School, said although the Party needed far-sighted and high-minded intellectuals, the latter “must work in unison with society and the government . . . and there must be a [satisfactory] synthesis between their theories and practice.”99

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A 2010 survey of more than 6,500 professors and officials by People’s Daily showed that 71.3 percent not only recognized the concept of strategic intellectuals but also thought they were “critical for the development of China.”100 However, “strategic intellectuals” do not seem to have made concrete contributions in such areas as economic or political reforms. The Constraints of Establishment Intellectuals Constraints facing even the most dedicated establishment intellectuals, however, are obvious. Given their dependence on official patronage, the ability of these scholars and former officials to influence the course of reform is dependent on the enthusiasm— or its lack — on the part of the Politburo and other senior cadres. Nearly one year after he became Party chief, President Xi had not only failed to implement new liberalization measures but had demonstrated signs of retrogression in political reform. For example, the CCP Central Committee circulated in May 2013 a document forbidding journalists and college professors to discuss seven “forbidden topics,” which included “universal values” and “independence of the judiciary.”101 Under this scenario, it is not surprising that a number of establishment intellectuals, including the two sons of Hu Yaobang, have kept a relatively low profile. In an internal discussion among establishment and liberal public intellectuals, Hu Dehua criticized Xi for harboring lingering reverence for Chairman Mao. Hu also faulted Xi for saying in an internal speech that the Soviet Communist Party collapsed because the Soviet army failed to come to the Party’s rescue. Hu called upon Xi to “learn from [the late Taiwan president] Chiang Ching-Kuo, who earned the good will of the Taiwanese by making an apology for the February 28 Incident.” (On February 28, 1947, soldiers under Chiang’s father, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, fired on Taiwanese who refused to profess allegiance to the Nationalists.) Implicit in Hu’s statement was not only a demand that the Party apologize for the 1989 massacre but also that the Xi administration should contemplate Taiwan-style democracy, which was introduced by Chiang in the mid-1980s.102 Given that the “forbidden topics” mentioned by the May 2013 document included “the

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CCP’s past mistakes” and Western-style democracy, the likelihood of Beijing accepting Hu’s suggestions was very low. Moreover, the reputation of quite a few establishment intellectuals— particularly the kin of Party elders—has suffered from the innuendo that they have reaped substantial financial benefits from their “princeling” status. For example, two children of Hu Yaobang had close ties with large state-owned enterprises, such as China Resources Group, a Hong Kong– listed conglomerate that was implicated in a corruption scandal in July 2013.103 It can be argued that, compared with dissidents who have risked their lives for their ideals, establishment intellectuals who are assured of a comfortable livelihood— if not perks that are accorded senior retired cadres— could at times find it difficult to occupy the moral high ground.

Conclusion: The Achievements of China’s Public Intellectuals

While assessing the achievements— and limitations— of China’s public intellectuals, it is useful to compare them with counterparts in the West. Since the 1980s, noted American scholars, such as Russell Jacoby, Edward Said, Richard Posner, and Thomas Sowell, have debated the identities, role, and effectiveness of intellectuals, particularly with reference to their influence on public policy. For example, Jacoby in The Last Intellectuals and other writings has deplored university- or think tank– based intellectuals’ lack of the breadth of vision and action-oriented passion of an earlier generation of public figures, such as Irving Howe, Gore Vidal, or John Kenneth Galbraith.104 In a somewhat similar vein, Posner in his Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline cited shortcomings among contemporary intellectuals, which included academic overspecialization, lack of transparency, and insufficient commitment to the common good.105 In China, however, the toughest challenge facing public intellectuals — except the minority among them known as establishment intellectuals— is survival. The CCP administration, which has a stranglehold over vital political and socioeconomic resources, has not yet granted

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what can be called an official raison d’être to the country’s zhishifenzi. The Party’s view on public intellectuals was made clear in an editorial symposium on the subject that was carried by the official Guangming Daily almost a decade ago. The title of the discussion was none other than “Beware the Trend of ‘Public Intellectuals.’” Guangming Daily cited Zhongshan University academic Zheng Yongting as decrying China’s gonggong zhishifenzi for “challenging all traditions and authority.” And Zhan Tianxiang, a researcher at the Guangdong Province Social Sciences Academy, faulted the nation’s nascent cadre of public intellectuals for putting priority on their “independence [from authority] and critical ability.”106 After the Guangming Daily episode, Beijing’s treatment of public intellectuals became harsher by the day. Many intellectuals, even those who have made it clear that they are not after regime change, are subject to routine harassment. And with China attaining the status of quasi-superpower, Beijing feels no compunction about targeting activists who have won widespread admiration in the West. For instance, not only is Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo locked up, his wife, Liu Xia, has since 2010 also been subjected to totally illegal house arrest. Several Hong Kong NGO organizers and journalists who tried to visit her in early 2013 were beaten up by plainclothes police stationed outside her apartment block.107 Establishment intellectuals appear to be faring better. This is due to either their personal links with the Party’s top echelons or their well-articulated intention not to make frontal criticism of Party leaders and the CCP regime in general. However, whether their views can affect official policy depends on the proclivities of the powers that be. Despite these overwhelming odds, China’s public intellectuals have with the aid of the information superhighway gradually nurtured a nationwide community of citizens who are concerned about popularizing universal values in their fast-changing nation. Big-name bloggers like Han Han and Li Changping have attracted several millions of followers. The Wukan incident and the Southern Weekly incident have demonstrated the degree to which public intellectuals can quickly mobilize support around the country, even regarding highly sensitive political matters. For the first time since 1949, the possibility is real that the balance of power may slowly shift toward China’s increasingly active and bold intelligentsia.

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As Xu Jilin pointed out, “Modern society is centered on knowledge, and intellectuals control the core nexus of the production of knowledge (in schools) and the circulation of knowledge (the media).”108 Upon assuming the office of CCP general secretary and commander in chief in November 2012, Xi talked much about the fulfillment of the “China Dream.” He also waxed eloquent about “the great renaissance of the Chinese people.”109 The new supremo’s conception of the “China Dream” or the “China model,” however, only encompasses economic prosperity and military strength— not democratic developments or the rule of law. Despite their susceptibility to a regime of repression, China’s gonggong zhishifenzi seem determined to contest Xi’s authoritarian persuasion by ushering in their own version of China’s future. Whether China’s Net-empowered public intellectuals can beat the CCP’s legions of spin-doctors, censors, and police — and win over China’s increasingly well-educated and pluralistic citizenry — could be one of the major stories of this century. Notes 1. Cited in Global Trends 2010: Alternative Worlds, National Intelligence Council, November 2012, http://globaltrends2030.files.wordpress.com/2012/11 /global-trends-2030-november2012.pdf. 2. Cited in Yu Liu and Dingding Chen, “Why China Will Democratize,” The Washington Quarterly, Winter 2012, 41– 63, http://csis.org/files/publication /twq12winterliuchen.pdf. 3. James Mann, The China Fantasy: Why Capitalism Will Not Bring Democracy to China (New York: Penguin, 2007). 4. Cited in Liu Xiaobo, “The Poverty of China’s Civil Opposition: On the 13th Anniversary of June Fourth,” Human Rights Forum, Human Rights in China, New York, May 14, 2012, http://www.hrichina.org/crf/article/6424. 5. Liu himself is a noted theorist on the traits and role of the Chinese intellectual; see Liu Xiaobo, Contemporary Chinese Politics and the Chinese Intellectual (Taipei: Tangshan, 1990). 6. Cited in Timothy Cheek, “Xu Jilin and the Thought Work of China’s Public Intellectuals,” The China Quarterly 186 ( June 2006): 412; also see Xu Jilin, “What Future for Public Intellectuals?” China Perspectives (Paris), no. 52, 2004, http://chinaperspectives.revues.org/799.

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7. Cited in He Weifang, “The Role of the Public Intellectual,” Aisixiang .com (Beijing), November 17, 2011, http://www.aisixiang.com/data/46717.html. 8. Cited in “50 Public Intellectuals Who Have Influenced China,” Southern People Weekly (Guangzhou), September 2004, http://business.sohu.com /s2004/zhishifenzi50.shtml. 9. For samples of characterizations of Chinese intellectuals given by scholars outside China, see Merle Goldman, China’s Intellectuals: Advise and Dissent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Merle Goldman and Edward Gu, eds., Chinese Intellectuals between State and Market (New York: Routledge, 2013); Timothy Cheek, Propaganda and Culture in Mao’s China: Deng Tuo and the Intelligentsia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Timothy Cheek, Chinese Establishment Intellectuals (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1986); Edward X. Gu, “Cultural Intellectuals and the Politics of the Cultural Public Space in Communist China (1979– 1989): A Case Study of Three Intellectual Groups,” The Journal of Asian Studies, no. 2 (May 1999): 389– 431; Wei Chengsi, The Rise and Fall of Chinese Intellectuals (Taipei: Ku Lao Cultural Enterprises, 2010); and Chen Ying-Zhen et al., eds., The Intellectual (Taipei: Li Xu Cultural Enterprises Press, 2006). 10. This saying was attributed to Confucius in the Chronicle of the Late Han Dynasty, written by Fan Hua (398– 445), http://chengyu.soouo.com/list /chengyu_9106.htm. 11. For a discussion of the influence of Confucianism on the identity of the Chinese intellectual, see Edward Shils, “Reflections on Civil Society and Civility in the Chinese Intellectual Tradition,” in Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity: Moral Education and Economic Culture in Japan and the Four Minidragons, ed. Tu Wei-ming (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 38– 71. 12. For a discussion of the traditionally high sociopolitical status accorded intellectuals, see Tan Kai and Chen Xianchu, “Theories of ‘the Intelligentsia’ in the Media of Republican China,” Journal of Hunan University, no. 5 (2011): 137– 41. 13. Cited in Yu Ying-shih, “The Re-creation of the Spirit of the Intellectual in a Commercialized Society,” in Chen Ying-Zhen et al., The Intellectual, 35– 36. 14. Ibid. 15. For a study of the genesis of the modern intelligentsia during the May Fourth Movement, see Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 55– 93.

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16. For example, in an interview with Reuters in September 1945, Mao pledged that universal suffrage would be practiced in the new China, and that the CCP would follow Abraham Lincoln’s democratic principles; see “Mao Zedong Talks to Reuters about Negotiations in Chongqing,” Xinhua Daily (Chongqing), September 27, 1945, http://www.360doc.com/content/12/1017/13/1093078 _242000557.shtml. 17. Cited in Mao Zedong, “Talks at the Yen’an Forum on Literature and Art,” from Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung Online, http://www.marxists.org /reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-3/mswv3_08.htm. 18. Cited in “China Marks 70th Anniversary of Mao speech,” Xinhua News Agency, May 23, 2012, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2012-05 /23/content_15368183.htm. 19. Zhang Hong, “Tie Ying, Wang Meng and Other Writers Do Hand Copies of Mao Zedong’s ‘Talks at the Yen’an Forum on Literature and Art,’” China News Service, May 28, 2012, http://news.ifeng.com/mainland/detail _2012_05/28/14869452_0.shtml. 20. Cited in Zhang Jianfeng, “Memorable Things about the Shanghai Writing Team during the Cultural Revolution,” Southern Reviews (Guangzhou), April 14, 2010, http://news.163.com/10/0414/17/648ECOQT00011SM9.html. 21. Cited in Bao Tong, A Collection of Essays by Bao Tong (Hong Kong: New Century Media, 2012), 479. 22. Cited in Xu Jilin, “From the Specialized to the Common: The Possibility of the Emergence of Public Intellectuals in the Age of Specialization,” in Theoretical Studies of Intellectuals, vol. 1 (Nanjing: Jiangsu People’s Press, 2002), http://www.aisixiang.com/data/37021.html?page=1. 23. For a discussion of Singapore’s Confucianist education campaign, see Colin Campbell, “Singapore Plans to Revive Study of Confucianism,” New York Times, May 20, 1982, http://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/20/world/singapore -plans-to-revive-study-of-confucianism.html. 24. For a study of the political underpinning of Confucius Institutes, see James F. Paradise, “China and International Harmony: The Role of Confucius Institutes in Bolstering Beijing’s Soft Power,” Asian Survey 49, no. 4 (2009): 649– 69. 25. Cited in “President Jiang Zemin Emphasizes Running the Country according to Moral Values,” China News Service, January 10, 2011, http://www .chinanews.com/2001-01-10/26/65768.html. 26. For a discussion of the Confucianist roots of Hu Jintao’s “harmonious society,” see Yongnian Zheng and Sow Keat Tok, “‘Harmonious Society’ and

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‘Harmonious World’: China’s Policy Discourse under Hu Jintao,” China Policy Institute, Nottingham University, October 2007, http://nottingham.ac.uk /cpi /documents/briefings/briefing-26-harmonious-society-and-harmonious -world.pdf. 27. Cited in “Taiwan Scholar Yu Yingshi: Mainland China Is Reviving Traditions in Search of National Identity,” Sina.com.cn, April 26, 2007, http:// news.sina.com.cn/c/2007-04-26/102111720034s.shtml. 28. For a study of the influence of Confucianism on Chinese intellectuals and cadres, see Daniel A. Bell, “The Confucian Party,” New York Times, May 11, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/opinion/12iht-edbell.html?_r=0; see also Daniel Bell, “The Chinese Confucian Party?” The Globe and Mail, February 19, 2010, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/the-chinese -confucian-party/article1365495/?page=all. 29. Cited in “How Can Confucianism and Liberalism Find Common Ground amidst Differences,” Huaxiajingwei Net (Shanghai), October 19, 2011, http://big5.huaxia.com/zhwh/gxjd/2624710.html. 30. Cited in Yang Hengjun, “Confucianism, Liberalism and Universal Values,” Yang Hengjun blogspot, May 15, 2011, http://www.yanghengjun.com /?action-viewnews-itemid-674. 31. For an official view of the contemporary relevance of Lei Feng, see “China to Step Up ‘Learning from Lei Feng’ Campaigns,” Xinhua News Agency, March 2, 2013, http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2012-03/02/c_13144 3074.htm. 32. Liu’s book was translated into English as How to Be a Good Communist (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1964). 33. For a discussion of the Maoist ideal of “red and expert,” see Richard D. Baum, “‘Red and Expert’: The Politico-Ideological Foundations of China’s Great Leap Forward,” Asian Survey 4, no. 9 (1964), http://www.jstor.org/discover /10.2307/2642397?uid=2&uid=4&sid=21101842052003. 34. Cited in Willy Lam, “Rectification Campaign to Boost Cadres with ‘Red DNA,’” China Brief, Jamestown Foundation, Washington, DC, July 12, 2013, http://www.jamestown.org/programs/chinabrief/single/?tx_ttnews%5Btt _news%5D=41118&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=25&cHash=dd1f6afd64be47 1c16631a4104c6b302. 35. For a discussion of the implications of Xi’s “China Dream,” see Robert Lawrence Kuhn, “Xi Jinping’s Chinese Dream,” New York Times, June 4, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/05/opinion /global /xi-jinpings-chinese -dream.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

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36. For a discussion of the seamier aspects of the harmonious society, see Marcus Anthony, “The New China: Big Brother, Brave New World or Harmonious Society?” Journal of Futures Studies (Taipei) 11, no. 4 (2007): 15– 40, http:// www.jfs.tku.edu.tw/11-4/A02.pdf. 37. For a discussion of China’s internal security apparatus, see Willy Lam, “China’s New Security State,” Wall Street Journal, December 9, 2009, http://online .wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704240504574585120857399040.html. 38. Cited in John Kennedy, “Beijing Orders Its 2.06 Million ‘Propaganda Workers’ to Get Microblogging,” South China Morning Post, January 18, 2013, http://www.scmp.com/comment/blogs/article/1130801/beijing-orders-its-206 -million-propaganda-workers-get-microblogging. 39. For a discussion of dissidents forced to leave China, see Edward Wong, “From Virginia Suburb, a Dissident Chinese Writer Continues His Mission,” New York Times, February 25, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/world /asia/yu-jie-dissident-chinese-writer-continues-his-work-in-us.html?page wanted=all&_r=0; and Peter Ford, “Another AIDS activist, Wan Yanhai, Flees China,” Christian Science Monitor, May 10, 2010, http://www.csmonitor.com /World/Asia-Pacific/2010/0510/Another-AIDS-activist-Wan-Yanhai-flees -China. 40. Cited in “Deng Xiaoping’s Speech at the Opening Ceremony of the All China Science Conference, March 18, 1978,” People’s Daily, April 5, 2006, http:// scitech.people.com.cn/BIG5/25509/56813/57267/57268/4001440.html. 41. For a discussion of the significance of the “Theory of the Three Represents,” see Joseph Fewsmith, “Studying the Three Represents,” China Leadership Monitor, Hoover Institution, 2003, no. 8, http://media.hoover.org/sites/default /files/documents/clm8_jf.pdf. 42. Cited in “Full Text of Jiang’s Speech at CPC Anniversary Gathering,” Xinhua News Agency, July 26, 2001, http://news.xinhuanet.com/english /20010726/433646.htm. 43. For a discussion of the political orientations of college students, see Yan Wang, “Value Changes in an Era of Social Transformations: College-educated Chinese Youth,” Education Studies 32, no. 2 (2006): 233– 40. 44. For a discussion of “performance-based legitimacy,” see Zhu Yuchao, “‘Performance Legitimacy’ and China’s Political Adaptation Strategy,” in Reviving Legitimacy, ed. Deng Zhenglai and Sujian Guo (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2011), 175– 94. 45. For a discussion of the CCP administration’s use of the “nationalism card” to bolster its legitimacy, see Peter Hays Gries, “Nationalism, Indignation,

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and China’s Japan Policy,” SAIS Review of International Affairs 25, no. 2 (2005): 105– 14 ; Bruce Gilley, “Legitimacy and Institutional Change: The Case of China,” Comparative Political Studies 41, no. 3 (2008): 259– 84. 46. For a discussion of why a 7 percent growth rate is deemed the “minimal” level of economic expansion for guaranteeing stability, see Peter Ford, “Why China Is So Worried about 7 Percent Growth,” Christian Science Monitor, July 31, 2013, http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2013/0731/Why-China -is-so-worried-about-7-percent-growth. 47. For an example of Beijing’s reaction to the Dalai Lama’s views about applying Hong Kong–style autonomy to Tibet, see “Article Criticizes Dalai’s Distortion of Autonomous Region,” People’s Daily (English edition), July 28, 2006, http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200607/28/eng20060728_287716.html. 48. Cited in Andrew Jacobs, “Many Chinese Intellectuals Are Silent amid a Wave of Tibetan Self-immolations,” New York Times, November 10, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/world/asia/educated-chinese-are-silent -amid-tibetan-self-immolations.html?_r=0. 49. Ibid. 50. Author’s interview with Wei Chengsi, February 2013, Hong Kong. 51. For a discussion of Fan Zhongyan’s philosophy, see Rao Xinxian, “Fan Zhongyan’s legal reform ideas,” Chinalawinfo.com, March 12, 2013, http://article .chinalawinfo.com/Article_Detail.asp?ArticleID=20257. 52. For a discussion of Liu Xiaobo’s political ideals, see Geremie Barme, “Confession, Redemption, and Death: Liu Xiaobo and the Protest Movement of 1989,” China Heritage Quarterly, Australian National University, issue 17, http:// chinaheritagequarterly.org/017/features/ConfessionRedemptionDeath.pdf. 53. For a discussion of the sociopolitical impact of a host of influential bloggers, see Zhai Minglei, Mighty Bloggers in China (Hong Kong: Cosmos, 2009). 54. For a discussion of the contributions of China’s liberal public intellectuals in widening the perspectives of citizens, see David Kelly, “Citizen Movements and China’s Public Intellectuals in the Hu-Wen Era,” Pacific Affairs 79, no. 2 (2006): 183– 204. 55. Cited in Robert Marquand, “China ‘Gray Lists’ Its Intellectuals,” Christian Science Monitor, November 30, 2004, http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1130 /p01s03-woap.html; for a list of noted public intellectuals for the year 2011, see http://zhengyoujingzuo.blog.com/. 56. Cited in “2012 Global Go-To Think Tank Report Released,” Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program, University of Pennsylvania, January, 2013,

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http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=think _tanks. 57. For a discussion of the government affiliations of the CICIR, see “Profile of MSS-Affiliated PRC Foreign Policy Think Tank CICIR,” Open Source Center, August 25, 2011, http://www.fas.org/irp/dni/osc/cicir.pdf. 58. For a study of private think tanks, including Unirule, see Xufeng Zhu, The Rise of Think Tanks in China (New York: Routledge, 2013), 77– 90. 59. For a discussion of Mao Yushi’s economic reform ideas, see Simon Montlake, “China’s ‘Privilege Powers’: An Interview with Mao Yushi,” Forbes, April 25, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/simonmontlake/2012/04/25/chinas -privilege-powers-an-interview-with-mao-yushi/. 60. Cited in Li Fan, “Grassroots Democracy in China,” Project Syndicate, December 1, 2010, http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/grassroots -democracy-in-china. 61. In 2001, Gao was named one of “China’s Ten Best Lawyers” by the Ministry of Justice; see Edward Wong, “Missing Chinese Lawyer Said to Be in Remote Prison,” New York Times, January 2, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012 /01/02/world/asia/gao-zhisheng-missing-rights-lawyer-turns-up-in-remote -prison.html. 62. Cited in Fu Hualing and Richard Cullen, “Climbing the Weiquan Ladder: A Radicalizing Process for Rights Protection Lawyers,” The China Quarterly 205 (March 2011): 41. For a discussion of the plight of human rights lawyers in China, see also Eva Pils, “Asking the Tiger for His Skin: Rights Activism in China,” Fordham International Law Journal 30, no. 4 (2006), http://ir.lawnet .fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2065&context=ilj&sei-redir=1#search =%22gao%20zhisheng%20hunger%20strike%22. 63. Cited in Associated Press, “Chinese Activist Chen Guangcheng Tells Council of Foreign Relations His Country Is Moving toward Democracy,” NY Daily News, May 31, 2013, http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york /chinese -activist-chen-guangcheng-tells-council-foreign-relations-country-moving -democracy-article-1.1087510#ixzz2PTzqeBTt. 64. Some of the legal and judicial reforms being entertained by Chinese authorities are contained in an official paper released in late 2012; see “Full Text: White Paper on Judicial Reform in China,” China Daily, October 9, 2012, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2012-10/09/content_15803827.htm. 65. For a discussion of human rights awareness in China, see World Report 2012: China, Human Rights Watch, New York, January 2012, http://www.hrw .org/sites/default/files/related_material/china_2012_0.pdf.

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66. No political parties have been formed in China since Beijing successfully crushed the China Democracy Party, which was established in 1998; see Jan van der Made, “The Rise and Fall of the China Democracy Party,” Human Rights in China, September 2000, http://www.hrichina.org/en/content/4737. 67. Cited in Phil Muncaster, “China Turns the Screws on Netizens with Real-name Registration Plans,” The Register, December 31, 2012, http://www.theregister.co.uk /2012/12/31/tech_news_in_asia/. 68. Cited in “Xia Yeliang: The Future of China Depends on a Coalescing Civil society,” Radio Free Asia, January 18, 2013, http://www.rfa.org/mandarin /yataibaodao/ck1-01182013103115.html. 69. Cited in Tom Orlik, “Unrest Grows as Economy Booms,” Wall Street Journal, September 26, 2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111 903703604576587070600504108.html. 70. Cited in Richard Spencer, “China Earthquake: Building Work Blamed for Child Death Toll,” The Telegraph (London), May 16, 2008, http://www .telegraph.co.uk /news/worldnews/asia/china/1969382/China-earthquake -Building-work-blamed-for-child-death-toll.html. 71. For a discussion of the work of Ai Weiwei and Tan Zuoren, see Austin Ramzy, “Ai Weiwei Held in Sichuan,” Time, August 12, 2009, http://world.time .com/2009/08/12/ai-weiwei-held-in-sichuan/. 72. For a discussion of the significance and long-term impact of the Charter 08 Movement, see Jean-Philippe Beja, Fu Hualing, and Eva Pils, eds., Liu Xiaobo, Charter 08 and the Challenges of Political Reform in China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012) , 97– 162. 73. Cited in Andrew Jacobs and Jonathan Ansfield, “Nobel Peace Prize Given to Jailed Chinese Dissident,” New York Times, October 8, 2010, http:// www.huaren.org/chinese-communities/uploadedFiles/1286702904331-7393.pdf. 74. For a discussion of the Wukan phenomenon and the rise of the civil society in China, see Johan Lagerkvist, “The Wukan Uprising and Chinese State-Society Relations: Toward ‘Shadow Civil Society’?” International Journal of China Studies 3, no. 3 (2012): 345– 61, http://cmsad.um.edu.my/images/ics /IJCSV3N3/lagerkvist.pdf. 75. Ibid. 76. Cited in “Zhou Yongkang Gives Full Endorsement to Guangdong’s Handling of the Wukan Incident,” Nanfang News (Guangzhou), July 4, 2012, http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2012-07-04/102524711201.shtml. 77. For a discussion of public support for Southern Weekly, see “Special Feature: The ‘Southern Weekly’ Controversy,” Freedom House, January 18, 2013, http://www.freedomhouse.org/cmb/2013_southern_weekly.

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78. For a discussion of He Weifang’s views on the Southern Weekly incident, see “Beijing University Professor He Weifang Says the Fate of Southern Weekly Has a Significance That Goes beyond That of a Single Newspaper,” Liberty Times (Taipei), January 9, 2013, http://www.libertytimes.com.tw/2013/new /jan/9/today-int3.htm. 79. For a discussion of the disappearance of human rights as a major issue in meetings between Chinese leaders and foreign dignitaries, see “Obama-Xi summit: A Chinese dissident’s views,” BBC News, June 7, 2013, http://www .bbc.co.uk /news/world-asia-china-22814479. 80. Cited in George Yeo and Eric X. Li, “The Rise of the Dragon: China Isn’t Censoring the Internet. It’s Making It Work,” Christian Science Monitor, January 23, 2012, http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Global-Viewpoint /2012/0123/Rise-of-the-dragon-China-isn-t-censoring-the-Internet.-It-s -making-it-work. 81. Cited in Gady Epstein, “China’s Internet: A Giant Cage,” The Economist, April 6, 2013, http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21574628 -internet-was-expected-help-democratise-china-instead-it-has-enabled/print. 82. Cited in Verna Yu, “The Taste of Betrayal,” South China Morning Post, March 5, 2011, http://www.scmp.com/article/739970/taste-betrayal-veterans -count-cost-lives-sacrificed. 83. For a discussion of the kind of “feudalistic” patriotism exemplified by Qu Yuan, see M. Keane and Q. Lin, “Patriotism Is Not Enough: Chinese Intellectuals and the Knowledge Economy,” Asia Pacific Media Educator 11 (2001): 164 – 79. http://ro.uow.edu.au/apme/vol1/iss11/13. 84. For a discussion of the “older generation” of liberal Chinese intellectuals within the Party, see Feng Chongyi, “Democrats within the Chinese Communist Party since 1989,” Journal of Contemporary China 17, no. 57 (2008): 673– 88. 85. For a discussion of the significance of the Yanhuang Chunqiu magazine, see Du Daozheng, “The Systemic Exploration of Yanhuang Chunqiu Is successful,” Yanhuang Chunqiu (Beijing), March, 2012, http://www.cqvip.com /qk /80474x/201203/41070166.html. 86. For a discussion of Yang Jisheng and other researchers’ works on the great famine, see Verna Yu, “Chinese Author of Book on Famine Braves Risks to Inform New Generations,” New York Times, November 18, 2008, http://www .nytimes.com/2008/12/18/world/asia/18iht-famine.1.18785257.html?page wanted=all&_r=2&. 87. Cited in Willy Lam, “Hu Jintao Battles the CCP’s Crisis of Confidence,” China Brief, Jamestown Foundation, Washington DC, May 17, 2007,

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http://www.jamestown.org/programs/chinabrief/single/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news %5D=4163&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=197&no_cache=1. 88. For a discussion of Hu Jintao’s interest in Socialist Democratic parties, see Willy Lam, Chinese Politics in the Hu Jintao Era (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2006), 154– 56. 89. For a discussion of Hu Deping’s “lobbying” of Xi Jinping regarding reforms, see Edward Wong and Jonathan Ansfield, “Many Urge Next Leader of China to Liberalize,” New York Times, October 22, 2013, http://www.nytimes .com/2012/10/22/world/asia/many-urge-chinas-next-leader-to-enact-reform .html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. Also see Staff Reporter, “Leading Liberal Hu Deping in Call for Reform,” South China Morning Post, November 4, 2012, http:// www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1074995/leading-liberal-hu-deping-call -party-reform. 90. Ibid. 91. For a discussion of Yu Keping’s views on democracy, see David Bandurski, “Yu Keping: Prizing the Will of the People,” China Media Project, University of Hong Kong, April 16, 2012, http://cmp.hku.hk /2012/04/16/21469/. 92. See Ann Florini, Hairong Lai, and Yeling Tan, eds., China Experiments: From Local Innovations to National Reform (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2012). 93. Cited in “Zhou Duo Immerses Himself in Studies about Political Reform,” Ming Pao, May 30, 2013, http://news.mingpao.com/20130530/gaa1.htm. 94. Cited in Chen Ziming, “What Is ‘the Spirit of Xibopo’?” Aisixiang .com, July 19, 2013, http://www.aisixiang.com/data/65928.html. 95. For a discussion of “strategic intellectuals,” see “Does China Need Strategic Intellectuals?” People’s Daily, September 14, 2010, http://politics.people .com.cn/GB/1026/12724776.html. 96. Cited in “Symposium on China’s Strategic Intellectuals,” People’s Tribune (Beijing), September 9, 2010, http://www.rmlt.com.cn/qikan/2010-09-07 /8708.html. 97. Ibid. 98. Cited in Tao Wenzhao, “The Origins of ‘Strategic Intellectuals,’” People’s Tribune, October 22, 2010, http://www.rmlt.com.cn/qikan/2010-10-21/10389 .html. 99. Cited in “Symposium on China’s Strategic Intellectuals,” People’s Tribune. 100. Cited in “Does China Need Strategic Intellectuals? People’s Daily. 101. Cited in Raymond Li, “Seven Subjects Off Limits for Teaching, Chinese Universities Told,” South China Morning Post, May 11, 2013, http://www

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.scmp.com/news/china/article/1234453/dont-teach-freedom-press-or-communist -party-mistakes-chinese-academics?page=all. 102. Cited in Ching Cheong, “Outspoken China Princeling Takes on President Xi,” The Straits Times (Singapore), June 28, 2013, http://www.asianewsnet .net/Outspoken-China-princeling-takes-on-President-Xi-48566.html. 103. For a discussion of the business interests of the children of Hu Yaobang, see “Power Struggle Erupts among Princelings,” Apple Daily, July 19, 2013, http://hk.apple.nextmedia.com/news/art/20130719/18340010. 104. See Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Basic Books, 2000); see also Russell Jacoby, “Intellectuals and Their Discontents,” The Hedgehog Review, Fall 2000, http://www.iasc-culture .org/THR/archives/University/2.3EJacoby.pdf. 105. See Richard A Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 106. Cited in “Beware of the Trend of ‘Public Intellectuals,’” Guangming Daily (Beijing), December 14, 2004, http://www.gmw.cn/01gmrb/2004-12/14 /content_148146.htm. 107. Cited in Verna Yu, “Hong Kong Journalists, Activist Beaten outside Home of Wife of Dissident Liu Xiaobo,” South China Morning Post, March 9, 2013, http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1186681/hong-kong -journalists-activist-beaten-outside-home-wife-dissident-liu?page=all. 108. Cited in “Xu Jilin: What’s Happening to Intellectuals,” Legal Daily (Beijing), September 28, 2011, http://culture.people.com.cn/h/2011/0928 /c226948-2799438037.html. 109. For an interpretation of Xi’s “China Dream,” see Cary Huang, “Just What Is Xi Jinping’s ‘Chinese Dream’ and ‘Chinese Renaissance’?” South China Morning Post, February 6, 2013, http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article /1143954/just-what-xi-jinpings-chinese-dream-and-chinese-renaissance.

chapter four

Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in Latin America   

A Smaller Cast of Characters

We could hold a congress about the definition of the word “intellectual.” Fortunately, I believe that is not our intention. The Mexican Gabriel Zaid, one of the most brilliant and original intellectuals of the Spanishspeaking world, defines the term as follows: “An intellectual is a writer, artist, or scientist with moral authority among the elites who opines on matters of public interest.” I prefer an even more limited definition: “An intellectual is a writer with moral authority among the elites who opines on matters of public interest.” There have always been intellectuals in Latin America, but it is one thing to be an intellectual in Latin America and another quite different thing to be a Latin American intellectual, that is to say, an intellectual whose scope and perspective encompass the entire subcontinent. One reason for this has been the lack of demand: traditionally, Latin Ameri130

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can countries are interested only in themselves, not in what goes on in the other eighteen nations. Paraguayan readers have tended to ignore what takes place in Peru, Argentineans, what is happening in Mexico, and so on. For a long time, the pattern was one of reciprocal and collective indifference. But there have also been limitations in terms of supply. Hundreds of renowned writers can stand up and be counted in Latin America (poets, novelists, short story writers, journalists, memoir writers, chroniclers, historians, philosophers), but not all of them have played the role of “intellectuals” in their own countries, and even fewer have projected that role across the continent. Proof of this can be found in the ample roster of writers of all nationalities that, since its foundation in 1976, have been published by the Ayacucho Library in Venezuela (starting with their first volume, Doctrine of the Liberator, by the well-known and brilliant intellectual Simón Bolívar). According to Zaid’s definition, there are few on that list —Bolívar, by the way, is one of them— who can actually be considered “Latin Americans.” It is obvious that Rubén Darío, Amado Nervo, Euclides da Cunha, Leopoldo Lugones, and Rómulo Gallegos were read by many across the continent; just as in the nineteenth century Andrés Bello or Faustino Domingo Sarmiento were read by many; just as Borges, Neruda, Carpientier, Asturias, and Lezama Lima would be later on. But what was being avidly read and recognized were their novels, short stories, or poems rather than their essays, much less their possible reflections regarding affairs of continental public interest. That is what would have transformed them into “Latin American intellectuals.”

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the philosophy of positivism had a great vogue in Latin America, as originated by Auguste Comte and developed into the evolutionism of Herbert Spencer. It was inscribed on the national flag of Brazil (“Orden y Progreso,” derived from a statement by Comte), and in Mexico it inspired the foundation of the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, based on strict Comtean principles. With its organic vision of power and its ladder of human evolution, positivism was used to justify various authoritarian regimes. In Mexico, Francisco Bulnes and Justo Sierra were outstanding representatives of

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this current of thought. Its representative book (much read near the beginning of the twentieth century) was Las democracias latinas de América by Francisco García Calderón. Although these were vigorous ideologies, a new direction appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, one that was truly continental in its influence. It was formed in response to the Spanish-American War of 1898. All of a sudden the liberal writers of Latin America were moved by an instinct of political solidarity with the defeated Spanish empire and by fear in the face of the first imperial gestures of the United States in the Caribbean and the Philippine Islands. They would reencounter (and reconcile with) their Spanish roots, which, along the course of the nineteenth century had been the exclusive patrimony of the conservative and Catholic elite. From this notable convergence a new, long-lasting Ibero-American nationalism was born. Their prophets were the brilliant Cuban writer and journalist José Martí (1853 – 95) — who lived a great deal of his life in New York, in “the belly of the monster,” studying it, admiring it, and cursing it — and the taciturn Uruguayan thinker José Enrique Rodó (1871– 1916), whose brief treatise Ariel (inspired by Renan) postulated the essential incompatibility between the Anglo-Saxon world (the materialist Caliban) and the spiritual and aesthetic Hispanic orb (represented by the winged Ariel). Martí was the first intellectual to be read in various capitals of what precisely he, in a memorable essay, called “Our America.” It was a shame that, following his darker impulses, he chose a heroic death over the life of an intellectual: with his moral stature and experience, his ideas would have wielded an enormous practical influence. The history of Cuba and perhaps even of the United States would have changed. He was, moreover, an excellent editor. As for Rodó, his Ariel became a lay catechism of Ibero-American identity through the 1960s. Ibero-American nationalism radically opposed to the United States was the ideological matrix of twentieth-century Latin America. All the antiestablishment and antiliberal ideologies of the century in Latin America (anarchism, socialism, communism, populism, fascism) developed from that fundamental opposition. Within this tendency, an intellectual of enormous influence in the first half of the twentieth century was the Mexican philosopher José Vas-

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concelos (1882– 1959), a secretary of education whose public achievements (in the 1920s) were so extensive as to almost take on the dimensions of myth, as he conceived (and in large part put into place) an ambitious cultural and educational project for Mexico, which he also wished to extend to Latin America. To his great prestige as an educator (nourished in 1922 by his famous passage through the major capitals of Latin America) he would add the strange poetic visions of his book La Raza Cósmica, which projected Ibero-America as a future ethnic and cultural promised land. (Miguel Unamuno called him “the great fantasist.”) Unfortunately, he shifted from his vocation of an intellectual educator to becoming a presidential candidate. His aim was to become a philosopher-king in the mode of Plato’s Republic, and, naturally enough, the revolutionary generals who governed Mexico did not sympathize with his ambition. Another notable Latin American intellectual was the Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui (1894 – 1931), whose original synthesis of indigenism and Marxism (reflected in his essays and his legendary journal Amautla) transcended the frontiers of his country and his time. They would even inspire the Zapatista movement in 1994 in the state of Chiapas in Mexico. In the 1930s, Vasconcelos gravitated toward fascism, and Mariátegui foreshadowed the ascent of Marxist socialism, two conflicting currents that left little space for liberal intellectuals, who began to seem like relics from the past. Starting in the 1920s, another Spanish-speaking writer was read respectfully by our elites as an intellectual (and a philosopher). But he was not a Latin American: José Ortega y Gasset (1883– 1955). Books such as The Rebellion of the Masses and The Theme of Our Time wielded a great deal of influence (in terms of historical conception, intellectual method, and style) over several generations, but it was perhaps his Revista de Occidente, which circulated in major capitals, that truly left its mark. Following his example, a friend and admirer, the Argentinean writer Victoria Ocampo (1890 – 1979), took it upon herself to start her own magazine. Ortega y Gasset baptized it in 1931: it was called Sur. It appeared without interruption for more than three decades. It became the magazine of Borges and José Bianco, of Alfonso Reyes, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, and Adolfo Bioy Casares. Through Sur, Victoria Ocampo succeeded in building a common space for the authors and readers of

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Latin America. And it was much more than that: a bridge between literature written in Spanish and the literatures of Europe, England, and the United States; a major introducer (albeit neither the first nor the only one) of modernism and the avant-garde; a representative of a critical tradition none too frequent in countries that had branched out from the Hispanic trunk. The distance marked by Sur from fascism and communism, its decidedly opposing position regarding the Axis powers, its critique of Nazism, anti-Semitism, and Peronism (above all, in those extraordinary texts by Jorge Luis Borges, entrusted in those years with the critical mission of the intellectual), all conferred moral authority upon the continent’s first intellectual magazine. As the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War drew near, generations of Spanish artists, humanists, writers, and scientists went into exile in the Americas. The countries that benefited from this unexpected cultural boon were Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Venezuela, and, above all, Mexico. During those same years, a Mexican writer conceived of an ambitious publishing concept on a parallel with his friend Ocampo’s, albeit clearly focusing on reflection, essays, history, and the social sciences. He was Daniel Cosío Villegas (1898– 1976). It is worthwhile to linger for a moment on his biography. He was, I would argue, the most complete Latin American intellectual of those decades. Daniel Cosío Villegas: A Paradigmatic Case

Cosío Villegas had two exceptional teachers, the same ones Borges recognized as his own: Pedro Henríquez Ureña (1883– 1945) and Alfonso Reyes (1889– 1959). The first, of Dominican origin, was perhaps the most complete humanist Latin America has ever produced. “The immediate magisterial nature of his presence” (Borges’s phrase) guided the humanist training of several generations of writers in Cuba, Mexico, the United States, and Argentina. His work Literary Trends in Latin America (his Norton Lectures from Harvard, in 1946) is, to date, unsurpassed. His closest friend and disciple was, in fact, Alfonso Reyes, who according to Borges was also the finest Spanish-speaking prose author of the twentieth century. Henríquez Ureña left behind a broad, valuable opus with an erudite, academic flair. Reyes, on the other hand, published more

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than twenty volumes of literary essays. Although they wrote profusely and profoundly about Latin America (“practically inventing it,” as Borges would say), they were wary about political themes, left social issues nearly untouched, and perhaps never even mentioned economics. In short, they were Latin American intellectuals in a philosophical sense: read by the intellectual elite of the national elites. He was all of this, but he also possessed great practical and entrepreneurial skills. He had admired the Latin American dimension of Vasconcelos, who believed that culture was the realm in which Bolívar’s old continental project could be sown. With that legacy and the humanist baggage of Henríquez Ureña and Reyes, Cosío Villegas founded in 1934 an extraordinarily successful publishing house: the Fondo de Cultura Económica (FCE). Later on, it was he who thought up and promoted the Spanish cultural exile in Mexico. And starting in 1940, in collaboration with those editors, translators, and authors from Spain, he started to publish books of general Latin American interest and distribute them in all the capital cities. In other words, he succeeded in getting Latin Americans interested in Latin America. It is no exaggeration to state that during the 1940s and 1950s, the FCE educated the Latin American elite (on historical, political, and philosophical subjects) with its original books and translations. In an analysis of the role of the intellectual in Latin America, the case of Cosío Villegas is paradigmatic. Although he once dreamed of it, he understood very soon that intellectuals should not aspire to the role of philosopher-king. He was aware that in the nineteenth century certain cases had arisen, particularly that of Faustino Domingo Sarmiento: journalist, novelist, thinker, educator, and president. But that antecedent was very remote. It was enough to see Vasconcelos fall into bitterness and fascism to become discouraged. The fate of novelist Rómulo Gallegos, ephemeral president of Venezuela, was no better. His countryman Rómulo Betancourt — twice president, a man of letters, and a deep thinker — played a major role as the founder of Venezuelan democracy, but his profile corresponds more to that of a great statesman than an intellectual. The same can be said of Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, ideologue and creator of the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA, “Popular Revolutionary American Party”) in Peru, who aspired

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to but did not attain the presidency of that country. In fact — as Mario Vargas Llosa, who has fallen into the same temptation, recalled— the only philosopher-king to have ruled freely in Latin America during the twentieth century was the torturous (and tortured) Dominican poet Joaquín Balaguer. Anyone who has read The Feast of the Goat knows that the moral price he had to pay (cynicism, degradation, criminal coverups) in order to reach the top was horrifying. Nor was the role of Fouché— the power behind the throne, the gray matter, the consigliere to power — all too convincing to a mature Cosío Villegas. Certainly, by performing that service, many thinkers of the nineteenth century had stood out across Latin America: builders of institutions, legislators, diplomats, educators. And following the Mexican Revolution, the young intellectuals of the “Generation of 1915” (Manuel Gómez Morín, Vicente Lombardo Toledano, and Cosío Villegas himself, among many others) had contributed to creating the institutional framework of Mexico. But as the years passed, the presidents of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) did not ask intellectuals for their advice, or when they did ask for it, they did not follow it. Moreover, while awaiting that presidential call, many of them had sacrificed what mattered most: their personal work. Cosío Villegas considered that kind of sacrifice to be useless. He was even less interested in becoming an ideologue to those in power. That was a role taken on by positivist thinkers in most Latin American countries at the turn of the twentieth century. Figures like the Mexicans Justo Sierra and Francisco Bulnes, or Francisco García Calderón (who was provisional president of Peru), or the Venezuelan Laureano Vellenilla Lanz had justified the illustrated despotism of their respective countries with specious arguments taken from Comte or Spencer. Becoming the ideologue of a popular and progressive movement such as the Mexican Revolution (1910 – 20) must have held a particular attraction (Vasconcelos played that role, solely with the conception of Mexican muralism), and Cosío Villegas attempted it fleetingly in his youth, but once again he met with indifference (if not hostility) from successive administrations. His conclusion was to distance himself from the circle of power and plow his own field: that of intellectual life and personal projects. He

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founded the FCE and El Colegio de México (only partially dependent on state money) and dedicated himself to writing a political history of Mexico from 1867 to 1911. But what to do with his heartfelt commitment to criticism, that which makes an intellectual an intellectual? In late 1946, Cosío Villegas published a devastating essay: “The Crisis of Mexico.” It was a recount of the original goals of the Mexican Revolution (democracy, higher standards of living, and social justice in the fields and the factories, universal education, cultural support) that, little by little, had been distorted or abandoned by inefficiency, ignorance, and corruption. As the years passed and his study of the nineteenth century continued to advance, he became convinced that Mexico (and, by extension, Latin America) should take up the liberal and republican project of its origins once again. Essentially, this had always been his conviction. He used to call himself a “museum Liberal” (pure and anachronistic). Thanks to this liberalism, he had moved forward gracefully between the Scylla and Charybdis of fascism and communism. During the Cold War, he published some highly perceptive essays on Latin America. He distrusted the United States but Russia even more. He believed in individual freedom and material prosperity (especially the former) as essential aims of humanity, but he never shut his eyes on the frightful social problems of Latin America. In a text he wrote in 1947, he predicted the advent of a communist regime because he felt the region to be so desperate, poor, unjust, and dominated by tyrants. Given his career, few were surprised by the extremely courageous stand taken by Daniel Cosío Villegas against the government during the 1968 student movement. His final uniform was that of the political opinion writer, a typical variation on the theme of the public intellectual, frequent in the liberal Latin American universe of the nineteenth, but not the twentieth, century. The books he wrote in his old age sold tens of thousands of copies and, in time, would influence Mexico’s democratic transition because they inaugurated a type of political criticism (directed toward government) that had been unknown in Mexico. Like the vast majority of authors included in the Ayacucho Library, and like Martí, Rodó, Vasconcelos, Mariátegui, and Victoria Ocampo,

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Cosío Villegas was not an academic intellectual. Like them, he was first and foremost a writer (and like some others, an editor too). He used the printed word (not a chair, not a classroom) to orient the public (not students) regarding their civil rights and to criticize power. This distinction between the intellectual who serves a free culture and an academic intellectual, who acts only within the university arena, was insignificant at the time, but it became crucial years later. The moral lesson of his life (d. 1976) is crystal clear: intellectuals should not seek out power, they should not advise power, they should not ideologically justify power. They should keep their distance from power and strengthen their own (limited) power by using the printing press and writing to improve public life.

The role of cultural magazines was vital. During the first half of the twentieth century, intellectual debates were not ventilated in ivory towers but in intellectual and literary magazines. Essays on the subject of Latin America by Cosío Villegas (like “The Crisis of Mexico”) appeared in Cuadernos Americanos, an Ortega y Gasset– inspired quarterly publication edited in Mexico by Jesús Silva Herzog. There, the most diverse themes, of continental scope, were debated: the historic condition of America, indigenism and Hispanism, the social conditions of Latin America, the dilemmas of the Cold War, economic policy, the future of communism and democracy in the region, relations with the United States. In its golden age (1940s– 1950s), Cuadernos Americanos compiled the thoughts of dozens of Spanish-speaking philosophers, sociologists, historians, and thinkers ( José Gaos, Leopoldo Zea, Mariano Picón Salas, Luis Alberto Sánchez) and had the merit to incorporate the substantial analytical and critical contributions of U.S.-based “Latin Americanists” (Frank Tannenbaum, Waldo Frank). Each country produced its own set of magazines, but only a few achieved a certain continental projection: aside from Sur, I am thinking of Orígenes, the prodigious Cuban magazine by José Lezama Lima. These were eminently literary magazines. Perhaps there were not many Latin American intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century, but here was, however, a supply of magazines that in terms of high critical

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standards and literary quality were on a par with the great intellectual magazines in the West. Any history of Latin American culture that does not touch upon them is not a history of Latin American culture.

The Watershed of the Cuban Revolution

One historic event split the Latin American twentieth century in half: the Cuban Revolution. Across the continent, it awakened the grandest hopes: it seemed as if the dream of Bolívar and Martí had come true. Not long before he died, Vasconcelos wrote to Fidel Castro to congratulate him for what, in his judgment, was the historical vindication of “Our America,” that of Ariel, as opposed to the other America, the alien, Saxon, materialist, arrogant America of Caliban. Cosío Villegas and a few other liberal intellectuals reacted with caution, even more so when in 1962 it became clear that the Caribbean David would confront the Goliath to the north by throwing itself into the arms of another Goliath, the Soviet Union. But the younger generation of leftists experienced the rise of Castro as redemption. Born between 1920 and 1935, this literary generation shared Sartre’s vision of the politically committed intellectual and thought, as he did, that Marxism was the “insurmountable horizon of our time.” Its members were committed to the Cuban Revolution in various ways: they traveled to the island, they believed in its promises, they (prematurely) sang its praises. They were living the dawn of history. Of great importance to the initial legitimacy of the revolution was the rubber stamp endorsement provided by the writers of the “Boom” generation. However, in less than a decade, accumulated discontent, slogans like “with the Revolution, everything, without the Revolution, nothing,” and the Stalinist procedures employed by Castro in the famous “Padilla Case” led some to rethink their commitments. Carlos Fuentes did so stealthily, and Mario Vargas Llosa did it with a determination that led to a final break. Positioned on the opposite extreme was the other great novelist of their generation, Gabriel García Márquez, an ongoing defender of his admired friend Fidel Castro. Read at the time by the entire world, they represented two confronted paradigms of the committed Latin American

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intellectual: García Márquez put his prestige to the service of revolutionary power; Vargas Llosa was devoted to criticizing revolutionary power. Beyond its faults and achievements, the Cuban Revolution gave Latin America an urgent awareness of itself. Never before (or since) had Latin Americans thought and discussed the collective destiny of their region before a broad reading public (whose emergence in America and Spain was another great novelty in that era). Before 1959, there were only a handful of intellectuals who were, strictly speaking, Latin American. After 1959, countless poets, novelists, essayists, historians, and social scientists discussed in public their opinions regarding the status of the continent. Practically all of them coincided in repudiating the ubiquitous right-wing dictators, their military coups, and their U.S. allies. But together with that rejection arose an issue of greater public interest that (aside from other issues and debates) occupied (and continues to occupy) the intellectual imagination for several decades: the convenience or inconvenience of a revolutionary future for Latin America, the benefits or downsides of the Cuban experiment, and the nature of Latin American guerrilla warfare. The story of intellectuals and the Cuban Revolution has not yet been written. Among other things, this is because it is an open story, present even today. However, it is worthwhile to point out that two intellectual generations— that of the “Boom” (born 1920– 35) and that of the Sixties (born 1935– 50)—became in their majority guardians of orthodoxy and ideologues of revolutionary power. The list is long, filled with influential signatures, many of them famous and distinguished—and it continues to grow. The list of those who were disappointed is far shorter. Sympathy for the Cuban Revolution is a deep-seated, complex phenomenon that has several explanations: social, cultural, political, historical. I have explored its cultural roots (its direct link to Rodó and the antiAmericanism of the Southern Cone) in Redeemers. Its impact was vast: the critical consciousness of many youths in nearly all countries in the region was radicalized to the point of taking them to the hills in order to exercise “criticism through weapons” or, at any rate, to wield “weapons through criticism” in cafés, university classrooms, and newspapers. Impatient with liberal, democratic, and republican values (which they called “bourgeois”), they wanted to emulate Ché Guevara. That kind of will-

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power was a decisive motor in the guerrilla movement of the region: the Sandinista revolution, the Colombian guerrillas, the Shining Path in Peru, the Salvadorian and Guatemalan guerrillas, the Argentinean Monteros, and the Uruguayan Tupamaros. There were, of course, real grievances, unacceptable inequalities in each country before which— it was sustained— the only way out was armed struggle. As a result of the coup against President Allende in Chile, U.S. interference was an additional, irritating, reiterated, inadmissible factor. But was revolution the only way out, the best option? We independent intellectuals who, together with Octavio Paz, made the magazine Vuelta did not think so, we believed the way out was liberal democracy. But we were (always) a minority. An entire intellectual class had been cast that sustained exactly the contrary. Academic Intellectuals

In terms of cultural sociology, a great innovation had taken place: the apparition and rise of a new kind of intellectual. The academic intellectual’s natural environment was no longer — as in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century — the printing press: literature destined directly for the reading public, or the publication of magazines to service the market of ideas. The new space was the cloister, the classroom, the cubicle of public universities. And the new paradigm was teaching and research (above all in the political and social sciences, in economy and philosophy, in history and literature). The process was continental, but it was violently truncated in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, triggering an exodus toward various countries in the region, particularly Mexico and its public universities. Since the 1970s, Mexico (and, above all, Mexico City) became a mecca for academic intellectuals. As a result of the student movement of 1968, the populist administration of Luis Echeverría (1970 – 76) decided to co-opt the intellectual class and students, and with that political agenda (disguised as a crusade for higher education) he exponentially increased university subsidies, especially to the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) (by 1,688%). The registration of students and research professors skyrocketed accordingly.

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This new university conglomerate adopted Marxist ideology in all its diverse variants. From a global perspective, it was a bizarre case study, because after Solzhenitsyn’s revelations, the Soviet Union (fatherland of socialism) entered the final phase of a disrepute that had begun a half century before (if not earlier) with the exposé of the Moscow trials. But in our own “Russia with palm trees,” revolutionary Marxism was gathering new steam. This process of ideological radicalization found support in the influential publishing house Siglo XXI, born in 1966. It was directed by the brilliant Argentinean editor Arnaldo Orfila Reynal, who in 1948 had succeeded Cosío Villegas at the FCE, and who, among other works of universal interest, published and promoted with vast success across Latin America the modern classics of Marxism: Marta Harnecker, Ché Guevara, and others. Siglo XXI was to Marxism what the FCE was to liberal humanism. The syllabi of various university faculties were focused on a Marxist canon. Lavished with solid budgeting support, academic intellectuals grew, prospered, and multiplied. Many sympathized with the Cuban Revolution and defended its Central American avatars. Aside from their work in classrooms and cubicles, they founded magazines and literature sections, and they contributed to newspapers, literature sections, and magazines of wide circulation that represented their points of view.

The Mission of Vuelta

Given this panorama, Octavio Paz (1914 – 88) founded in 1976 Vuelta, the only liberal magazine in Mexico. A handful of independent writers became contributors. Unlike its contemporaries, Vuelta circulated outside Mexico. Paz was already by then one of the most influential and transcendent Latin American intellectuals of the century. He embodied a figure almost unheard of in our region: that of dissident with regards to a hegemonic, revolutionary ideology that, although only in power in Cuba (and soon, in Nicaragua also) dominated the institutions of higher education and cultural systems of many countries, especially Mexico.

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What was Vuelta? In a phrase that condenses— as if such a thing were possible —261 issues, 23 years, hundreds of authors, dozens of polemics, and a passionate, committed editorial team, the mission of Vuelta was to exercise criticism of power on a triple front: criticism of the authoritarian, corrupting power of the PRI, criticism of the genocidal military regimes in the Southern Cone, and criticism of revolutionary Marxism (its governments, its guerrillas, its propaganda machine, its journalism) in Latin America. Vuelta was a magazine of writers who chose to follow the example of Cosío Villegas: they did not want to be politicians, or advisors to power, or ideologues of power. They wanted to critique political and intellectual power. Vuelta consolidated liberal criticism of the political system that Vargas Llosa called “the perfect dictatorship.” Thirty years ago, in its pages, we proposed a viable alternative: “a democracy without adjectives.” Distancing themselves from revolutionary canons, a sector of the political Left — spearheaded by a visionary leader, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas— made this idea theirs to the point of dress-rehearsing it in 1988, launching their own presidential candidacy. After an ensuing fraud, the offended party made the historical decision of founding the Democratic Revolutionary Party, the first democratic organization in the history of the Mexican Left. The liberal intellectuals of Vuelta confirmed thus the guidelines of Cosío Villegas: writing for the public and, in this case, for a leftist public was worthwhile. And thus “democracy without adjectives” finally arrived, with the defeat of the PRI and the rupture of a political system that had governed for seventy-one years. Vuelta defended the values of democracy and liberty. It was a pluralist publication in which voices that were self-declared as liberal, democratic, and socialist found room (or even revolutionary Marxists, if they were willing to participate in a tolerant and civilized dialogue, but these were few). With the passage of time, the long list of academic intellectuals who criticized Paz and his magazine for their “conservative” stances wound up adopting (without explaining how or why) the ideas of Paz and the positions of Vuelta. Among the protagonists of this cultural battle (which was never fully won, having survived the fall of the Berlin Wall, and persisting until

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the present day) were intellectuals such as Leszek Kołakowski, JeanFrançois Revel, Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, François Furet, Jorge Semprún, and Milan Kundera. In Latin America, outstanding participants included Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Jorge Edwards, and Mario Vargas Llosa (b. 1936). I will hardly touch upon here Vargas Llosa’s intellectual career, which was complementary, if not parallel, in many ways to that of Paz. (I have tackled this in my book Redeemers.) For decades, long before winning the Nobel Prize, through his novels, essays, journalistic articles, and seminars, Vargas Llosa had positioned himself at the center of the intellectual debate of our time. He was not just a Latin American intellectual (and had been since the 1960s). Like Camus, Orwell, Russell, Revel, Isaiah Berlin, Popper, and Paz himself, Vargas Llosa has defended the values of liberty and democracy against fanaticisms of any brand: national, racial, class-oriented, tribal, religious, or ideological. He is a universal intellectual. At Vuelta we committed the heresy of criticizing the revolutionary passion of young students and the sympathy many academic intellectuals felt toward the Cuban Revolution and the Central American guerrilla movement. But this multitudinous sympathy required a sociological explanation. We needed a knowledgeable sociologist in order to understand it. That was one of the many contributions of Gabriel Zaid (b. 1934) to Vuelta.

A Sociology of the “Universitarians”

Zaid is a Catholic, liberal, and anarchist intellectual. He is a poet and an engineer. He is a highly original economist and religious philosopher. He doesn’t give interviews, no one has seen a photograph of him, and he has no social life. He defines himself with a single word: critic. Some of his books and essays have been translated into more than a dozen languages. His sociology of the Latin American university class is a contribution deserving of being treated by various academic theses in the United States (if such openness to nonacademic intellectuals were imaginable). According to his theory, “the universitarians” do not seek knowledge, but rather credentials of knowledge in order to gain access to power. This

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process began to be empirically demonstrable during the 1970s and 1980s, with the significant participation of academic intellectuals in the administrations of Echeverría and López Portillo: once more, the intellectual as ideologue or advisor or minister. The history of literature and ideas in Latin America had been the work of writers and magazines (not professors or researchers), but academic intellectuals lodged in universities began to reclaim a monopoly on intellectual legitimacy that had never been theirs. On the outskirts of a publishing market they did not depend on, living within the “socialism” of their safe institutions, they developed a natural inclination for the ideology utopianly destined to perpetuate their condition and generalize it, by appealing to all citizens to become . . . universitarians. In the 1980s, the radical wing of this new class did not operate in the classrooms, but in the mountains of El Salvador, or in power in Nicaragua. A culminating moment in the criticism of these movements (and of the confrontation between liberal intellectuals and academics) was the publication in Vuelta of two essays by Zaid that circled the globe — “Enemy Colleagues: A Reading of the Salvadorean Tragedy” (1981), and “Nicaragua: The Election Enigma” (1984). In these, he denied that the bloodshed had anything to do with the historic struggles of rural farmers rising up in arms or a revolutionary action of the masses. On the contrary, he read both processes as a war by and for universitarians at the cost of the people: they were former students of Catholic schools, unconscious but active heirs of the medieval members of religious orders who wanted to impose their “monastic miniature” on society, “intoxicated with power” and with a “heroic” and narcissistic impatience, the guerrilla fighters of El Salvador and Nicaragua— university students in their great majority, members of the elites, not workers or farmers— had become embroiled in internal disputes that Zaid documented. The solution he proposed was democracy: in El Salvador, by isolating the “death squads” and guerrilla fighters and propitiating clean elections; in Nicaragua, by subjecting the Sandinista mandate to popular vote. Dozens of international magazines and newspapers reprinted or commented on both essays. In Latin America and in Mexico, the intellectual and academic leftist establishment lynched Zaid. One academic intellectual dismissed as “coarse” and “absurd” the idea of removing the

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violent agents “so that the remainder of the people can participate in elections and put an end to their tragedy.” Soon thereafter, the Salvadorean and Nicaraguan masses showed “little awareness of their path to revolution,” pushing aside the violence and exercising their democratic rights. None of Zaid’s critics recognized their mistake. But many of them paid him the silent tribute of adopting his “absurd” and “coarse” solutions. The dispute between Vuelta and the universitarian intellectual establishment was not a matter of people or temperaments, but rather of different conceptions of what constitutes an intellectual. In a 1990 article titled, precisely, “Intellectuals,” Zaid himself made a distinction vital to understanding the Latin American intellectual debate: Intellectuals are a set of personalities, intelligentsia are a social stratum. Intellectuals are critics, intelligentsia are revolutionaries. Intellectuals are inclined to journalistic and literary work, to operating without degrees, to working free-lance. Intelligentsia is more inclined to the academic, bureaucratic world, graduations, appointments, paychecks that correspond to changing calendars. Intellectuals go from books to literary prestige, intelligentsia go from books to power. Incredible as it may seem, in Mexico and in several countries of Latin America, this distinction between intellectuals and intelligentsia continues. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the democratic transition in Mexico, and the rise of majority-elected governments in most Latin American countries did not change the equation for an obvious reason: the Revolution — as an intellectual horizon, as a utopia, as a political alternative — continues to be an article of faith in very broad areas of the university academic establishment (students, professors) and in its governing class, its nomenklatura, the intelligentsia. This anachronistic validity of the myth of the Revolution in its many variants (from the radical pro-Castro and pro-Chavez wing to the populist wing, in its more moderate guise) presupposes a fundamental disagreement about the selfsame constitution of political life. There is a consensus in various countries of democratic and republican tradition: Chile, Costa Rica, Colombia, Uruguay. Still more recently, it also seems to have been

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consolidated in Peru. But it definitely does not exist in Venezuela and its satellite countries, or in Ecuador or Argentina. And, surprising as it may seem, despite our transition, it does not exist in Mexico, either. We live in perpetual suspense regarding our political legitimacy. The reason for this paralyzing condition is not found in our vast social problems, but in the dogmatism of our intelligentsia. As long as it persists, there will be room for that liberal, critical minority: the intellectuals.

chapter five

The Intellectual, Culture, and the State The Experiences and Failures of Enlightenment in the Arab World  . 

This chapter treats the experiences and failures of the cultural renaissance, or enlightenment (al-Nahda), in the Arab world through studying the pioneering and leading positions of Arab intellectuals (al-muthaqqaf ) in the late nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century whose influence continues today. I also analyze the causes of the marginalization or failure of their projects. First, I focus on explaining and analyzing al-ishkaliyya (the problematic) between al-turath (heritage) and al-hadatha (modernity), and, second, on explaining and analyzing al-ishkaliyya between al-thaqafa (culture) and al-sulta (authority). Today’s Arab intellectuals now stand defeated before those in other parts of the world, especially those of Western civilization. On the one hand, Western civilization has imposed its concepts on dazzled liberal Arab intellectuals, who, instead of absorbing and transcending Western 148

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ideals, have upheld its slogans, yielded to its dominance, and lost their power to resist. On the other hand, traditional Arab intellectuals have totally rejected Western civilization in favor of their traditional religion. The two types of Muslim intellectuals (liberal and traditional) have thus confronted each other instead of filtering their own heritage and absorbing it — and instead of filtering Western thought and transcending it. And both types of intellectuals have found different justifications for the rise of the authoritarian nationalist state: the liberal under the pretext of secularism, and the traditional under the pretext of morality, traditions, and religion. By adhering to the supremacy of Western thought and its institutions, the liberal Arab intellectual, in reality, has lost his benefits, such as the ideals of human rights and public freedom, and has justified the authoritarianism of the ruling elites under the banner of progress and development (al-taqaddum wa al-tanmiyya). The traditional Arab intellectual, on the other hand, has further deepened his attachment to a heritage that no longer can be read under the pretext of authenticity (al-asala) because it is based on a collection of texts and languages that are beyond modern grasp and contexts. In fact, he has lost the benefits of Islamic thought, such as its concepts of morality, unity, and justice, and instead has justified the authoritarian nature of the ruling elites under the banner of religion and tradition. Intellectual reform (islah) was to some extent related to the shock transmitted through the first missions sent to France in the early nineteenth century by Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha, the ruler of Egypt, as is made clear in Rifa‘at al-Tahtawi’s book Takhlis al-Ibriz fi Talkhis Bariz, published in 1834. Al-Tahtawi (1801– 73) laid the foundation for combining (tawlif ) the principles of the French Revolution— liberty, justice, and fraternity — and the doctrine of watan (homeland) with Islam and its traditions. He started an intellectual trend that offered the Arab world the bases for a liberal renaissance (nahda) or “modernism” (al-hadatha). Al-Tahtawi was followed by other pioneers of secular modernism, such as the Syrian Christian intellectual Adib Ishaq (1856– 85), the Lebanese Christian philosopher Farah Antun (1874 – 1922), the Lebanese Christian intellectual Shibli al-Shumayyil (1850 – 1917), the liberal and reformist clergy ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi (1854 – 1902), the Egyptian

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poet, thinker, and reformist clergy ‘Abd Allah al-Nadim (1843 – 96), the Egyptian political writer and leader Mustapha Kamil (1874 – 1908), and the well-known Egyptian Christian intellectual Salama Musa (1887– 1958). Muslim reformers, especially Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838– 97) and Muhammad ‘Abdu (1849– 1905), were also influenced by al-Tahtawi’s thinking and by the ideals of the French Revolution. Egyptian followers of Muhammad ‘Abdu, such as Ahmad Lutfi alSayyid (1872– 1963), Qasim Amin (1863– 1908), Ahmad Fathi Zaghlul (1862– 1914), and Sa‘ad Zaglul (1859– 1927), formed a liberal wing in the Arab world. The same applies to the Grand Shaykh of Al-Azhar, Mustafa ‘Abd al-Raziq (1885– 1947), and his brother, ‘Ali ‘Abd al-Raziq (1888– 1967), and to Ahmad Amin (1886– 1954) and Khalid Muhammad Khalid (1920 – 96). The battles for ideas and dominance between the two intellectual trends— liberal and traditional— will first be discussed in terms of two problematics: that of heritage and that of modernity. The former occupies a central space in today’s Arabic-Islamic discourse. Studies that treat this problematic began with Arab scholars and intellectuals, such as the Lebanese Husayn Muruwwa, and continued with the Syrian Tayyib Tizani, the Egyptian Hasan Hanafi, and the Moroccans Muhammad ‘Abid al-Jabiri and Muhammad Arkoun. In this respect, Abd al-Razzaq ‘Id, a Syrian activist and intellectual exiled in France, maintains that the West brought the Arabs into history because of what it was capable of doing during its colonialist and imperialist stages. Westerners concluded that Arab culture had become senile or had moved outside the flow of history, existing now on its margins. Thus, the West’s formation of a global culture is not viewed as being affected by an Arab heritage. Anwar ‘Abd al-Malak, an influential Egyptian Marxist intellectual and exiled university professor, maintains that there were two phases in the confrontation between the Egyptian National movement and the West. The first was the struggle against European domination and the reconstruction of the Egyptian National state (1798– 1882); the second was the struggle against British occupation to gain independence and democracy (1822– 1939). Both phases focused on the necessity of establishing a democratic nationalist revolution.

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The movement known as Pan-Islamism promoted both Islamic unity and national unity. Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, a pioneer of Islamic reform, opposed differentiating between people on the basis of their national identity —Arab or non-Arab —because religion is based on belief and not on tribalism and nationalism. The feudal system of the Ottoman Empire, however, was based on exploitation, which thwarted nationalist aspirations. The coming to power of Muhammad ‘Ali in Egypt and Syria challenged the basis of the feudal system and led to the development of other productive social and political systems. For these reasons, Muhammad ‘Ali’s attempt to unify Egypt and Syria was aborted by the Ottoman Empire with the help of European powers. The policies of the Young Turks led to sharply focused attention on Arab concerns, which caused a rupture in relations between Arabs and the Young Turks. After the collapse of King Faysal’s rule over Syria in 1920, Arab nationalism spread widely. It was fed by other developments in world politics and intellectual currents, ranging from World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to rising secular philosophies calling for the separation of religion from politics and the restoration of the importance of cultural and linguistic factors. Influential secular Syrian thinkers such Najib ‘Azoury, Butrous al-Bustani, and Sati‘ al-Hussari epitomize such secular philosophies. As early as the eighteenth century, the Ottoman Empire recognized a threat to its existence from external factors, such as the scientific revolution that turned Europe into an economic and political force. Hence many intellectuals in the Ottoman world believed it was necessary to imitate European models in state-building. However, they did so in the middle of the nineteenth century, at a time when Arab sensibilities were piqued and nationalism was born. Salama Musa, an Egyptian intellectual, reminds us that the first Arab attempts, either by the Egyptians under the leadership of Ibrahim Pasha or by the Wahhabis, the radical and conservative Saudi fundamentalist movement that was created in the eighteenth century, failed in establishing an Arab state or uniting Arab land. He pinpoints the middle of the nineteenth century as the starting point of nationalist thinking, during which Arab intellectuals in Syria began forming secret and literary associations that called for

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reform. Among them were ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi and Najib ‘Azoury. In 1916, during World War I, Sharif Husayn, the leader of Mecca and later king of Hijaz (1917– 24), declared the birth of revolution against the Ottomans. His followers in Hijaz decided in 1926 to set up an Arab state with Husayn as its king. The history of the Arab world between the two world wars is the history of the Arab nationalist movement. Although aiming at independence, this movement regarded religious and political reform as the means, following European trajectories of change. The best representatives of this movement were influential Egyptian thinkers, such as Taha Husayn, Mansur Fahmi, ‘Ali ‘Abd al-Raziq, and Salama Musa, in addition to the Syrian secularist thinkers Shibli al-Shumayyil and Farah Antun. However, most Muslim thinkers believed that the causes of the rise of civilization in the West were the result of scientific progress. Science should be valuable in and of itself, but the nationalist movements opted for the ideologization of science, as it did with religion and other disciplines. So, instead of becoming scientific in their approaches, they employed science as an ideology to criticize the antiscientific nature of religious thought and traditions. For other thinkers, the defining moments of the Arab renaissance are varied: they include the French invasion of Egypt (1798– 1800), which brought Egypt into contact with modern Western civilization and its political doctrines, administrative systems, and science; the scientific missions to Egypt begun by Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha, the founder of modern Egypt and its ruler from 1805 to 1848, and the importation of French experts and technicians starting in 1820; the great waves of missionaries and founding of missionary schools in the nineteenth century, such as ‘Ayntoura school in 1834, al-Jami‘iyya al-Suriyya in 1847, the Protestant Syrian College in1866, and the Jesuits’ St. Joseph University in 1874, which led to the active spread of translations and modernization of Arabic — an act that sparked the idea of an Arab renaissance; modern printing, which led to the propagation of great, historic books and translation of European books; and finally, the modern press, which publicized the political campaign for Arab unity. In addition, in Syria there was a great demand for translations, though this was mostly restricted to religious books. Muhammad ‘Ali,

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however, advocated translating European books as an instrument of the modernization of the state. The European presence also led to the spread of literary and scientific associations, such as Jam’iyyat al-Adab wa al‘Ulum (1847), al-Jam‘iyya al-‘Ilamiyya al-Suriyya (1852), and Jam‘iyyyat Shams al-Bir (1869), which was a branch of the American YMCA. In Egypt, new literary and scientific associations, such as al-Ma‘had alMasri (1859) and al-Jam‘iyya al-Jughrafiyya al-Khiduawiyya (1875), were set up by the French. Thus, two trends galvanized Arab intellectuals: admiration of Western civilization and acceptance of Arab backwardness. It is no wonder that the Arab renaissance focused on both reviving the Arab spirit and imitating the “advanced” European peoples. However, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Shaykh Muhammad ‘Abdu, who became the central figures of reformism in the nineteenth-century Arab world, thought it necessary to study both the components and elements of Western civilization that the Muslim should adopt and also those Islamic religious components and elements that they should maintain. Therefore, they tried to distinguish between Islam as a religion and as a civilization. But as they discovered, politics, not Islam as such, had a major role in Muslims’ backwardness. Although al-Afghani paved the way for an intellectual Muslim modernist and reformist trend, its potential was not realized. It was cut short by the rise of a nationalist trend inspired generally by Western liberal secular thinking and particularly by the doctrines of the French Revolution. Al-Afghani and ‘Abdu educated a whole generation of intellectuals who would constitute the vanguard of secular reformism in Egypt, including Lutfi al-Sayyid, Muhammad Hasanayn Haykal, Taha Husayn, and Ahmad Amin. But this generation chose to tie their thinking to Western thought and cut it off from Islamic thought. The Arab renaissance thus remained superficial and did not penetrate deeply into the social fabric of the Muslim world. The Arab renaissance intellectuals blindly and unconditionally adopted Western thought and assumed its suitability to the Arab and Islamic worlds. Their embrace of Western thought paralyzed the possibility of developing Islamic civilization from within and, in addition, linked liberation movements of that time to the very doctrines used to exercise and justify Western domination. Therefore, Western domination was replaced by its local reflection, namely,

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authoritarian Arab domination, which, like the Western powers, mouthed the slogans of freedom, development, science, and secularism. Some scholars explain this problem by arguing that the doctrine of progress adopted by the renaissance intellectuals was the result not of any direct experience with the European Enlightenment and its intellectuals, but rather of a deep awareness of the gap between the West, on the one hand, and the East, including the Arab and Islamic worlds, on the other. In addition, they argue, these Arab intellectuals were conditioned by their reading of the great medieval Arab historian Ibn Khaldun’s theory of progress manifesting itself in urbanization and civilization and their awareness of the current backward and regressive state of the East. The trend of understanding progress as urbanization and civilization is represented by nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernist Arab thinkers, such as Rifa‘at al-Tahtawi and Khair al-Din al-Tunusi, while the trend of understanding progress in terms of Enlightenment ideals is best represented by ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi and Qasim Amin. AlTahtawi’s doctrine of progress is linked to Shaykh Hasan al-Attar’s call for change and development through reviving knowledge and science. It was al-Attar who instructed al-Tahtawi to chronicle everything that he saw or heard during his stay in France, leading to al-Tahtawi’s influential Takhlis al-Ibriz fi Takhlis Bariz. Al-Attar was not the source of alTahtawi’s ideas of progress, but he was certainly a catalyst for transmitting knowledge from other civilizations. The Lebanese thinker and poet Amir Shakib Arsalan (1869– 1946), who lived through the political defeats and victories and the weakness and renaissance of the Ottoman Empire, embodied personally the movement that confronted Western challenges. He devoted his writings to demonstrating Islam’s capacity to stage a revival and Arabism’s ability to respond to political invasions. For him, the challenges between Islam and Arabism, on the one hand, and between Islam and the West, on the other, had established the underlying characteristics of an Arab renaissance, which developed within a situation of regional and social fragmentation. Thus, Islamic reformism turned into a movement that linked political bankruptcy to religious bankruptcy. Arsalan launched an antiWestern campaign revolving around the West’s claims of civilization and progress. His famous book Limadha Ta’akhar al-Muslimun, wa limadha

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Taqaddam Ghayruhum (Why the Muslims Regressed and Why Others Progressed ) is an example of such a revolt against both the Islamic world and the West, which led the French to confiscate his writings. Arsalan concludes that the central cause for Arab backwardness is the Muslims’ deficiency in developing science. In this respect, Arsalan was in agreement with al-Afghani, al-Tahtawi, and al-Tunusi. Islam is civil in nature, and its call for deep belief in a divine creed as a source of unity among mankind and a means to combat ignorance and injustice was the cause of the rise and expansion of the first state of Arabs and Muslims. However, the backwardness and deterioration of Muslim society is the result of the loss of this belief, which undermined its intellectual foundation and political power. Clearly, the story of the Islamic heritage (turath) is an attempt to reconcile it with the modern age as the means to foster an Arab revival. However, this reading led not only to acknowledgment of the supremacy of Western thought but also to making it central to Islam’s cultural heritage. Thus, the discourses of the Arab enlightenment and renaissance turned into attempts to forge (talfiq) doctrines such as nationalism, democracy, and socialism into selective components of an Islamic heritage. The discourses of the Arab renaissance took root in societies that were fragmented after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and these discourses turned into radical discourses of struggle and independence. Thus, they were the result of the intersection between Western culture and Islamic culture at the moment of the collapse of universal Islamic empires. Consequently, the relationship between the West and the Islamic world led to a question about the factors that led to the latter’s collapse. The birth of the culture of the renaissance took place during the weakness of the Islamic nation, and, as a result, both the questions and the answers about failure and success were distorted. The concept of heritage was one of the problematics of the renaissance and the pivot of both religious and secular intellectual debates. The discourse of the renaissance regarding the Islamic heritage is one of confrontation and clash with the West, and, consequently, intellectuals read Islamic heritage through the same lens. The different readings of heritage were discourses concerning what happened in past events, the state of the status quo, and hopes for the future. Syrian philosopher Tayyib

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Tizani views the renaissance as a hybrid (hajin); Egyptian thinker and university professor Hasan Hanafi regards it as alienated; and Moroccan thinker and university professor Muhammad ‘Abd al-Jabiri describes it as removed from realities. All of these descriptions indicate the state of confrontation with the West and the fracturing of reading al-turath. The discourse of the renaissance tried to distinguish between two methods, one divine and the other human. This was an attempt to elevate the Qur’anic text above modern epistemological, social, and political frameworks. The ideologues of the renaissance thought that the reading of Islamic heritage from a liberal perspective would foster the rise of a democratic national revolution under the umbrella of Islam itself. Islam was to be turned into a conceptual justification for democracy, social justice, and modernization. Muhammad ‘Abdu, for instance, holds that genuine modernization is identical with Islam. Under the pretext of absorbing the dominant Western concepts, the Islamic heritage fell under the epistemological and political domination of Western thought during a period of imperialist and capitalist expansion. Muhammad Arkoun, a Moroccan academic and thinker, classifies Muslim intellectuals into two groups. The first are modernists open to Western culture and scientific socialism, and the second are the traditionalists who stick to Islamic values. The consciousness of the latter is linked fundamentally to the Qur’an, and the traditional intellectual lives out a state of interpretation and development of his most dynamic and productive historic period within the Greek epistemological space. Greek thinking was the instrument for interpreting and developing Islamic sciences, including theology. Thus, the traditional intellectual faces all of the tensions and crises resulting from the lived heritage and modernization because of his rupture from his basic fundamentals and proximity to the modern West. This proximity to the West creates a resistance ideology that distorts the Muslim intellectual’s ability to criticize his own lived heritage. The difficulties that the traditional Muslim intellectual faces are threefold. First, the narrowness of his intellectual horizons and his fragile discovery of bourgeois Western culture led to an imbalance in his consciousness. Second, the crises resulting from the political wars of liberation from colonialist and imperialist powers produced a sense of infe-

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riority vis-à-vis the West. And third, the struggle against ideological backwardness, such as belief in predestination and the inability of humans to change their lives and futures, led to political paralysis. According to Arkoun, Islamic consciousness is predicated on the experience of the Prophet’s Medina (a city-state) as the myth of the formative age and is centered around the ideas of the medieval theologian and scholar Ibn Hajar al-‘Askalani and his predecessors. These revolve around on the issue of the caliphate, the leadership of the Muslim nation for the Sunni Muslims, and the imamate, the leadership of the Muslim nation for Shia Muslims. Unfortunately, Muslim intellectuals did not deal with the issue of heritage in an analytical framework and did not try to reexamine the root fundamentals of religion or attempt to reinvent them. However, Burhan Ghalyun, an exiled Syrian professor and intellectual living in France, attempts to show that the crisis of the Arab culture lies between the traditionalism of Islamic heritage and an imitation of the West. The Islamic heritage, he argues, prevents the sweeping away of the Muslim community and the embrace of every new fad. This heritage limits the elite’s ability to manipulate the public, who lack any culture of resistance but use the heritage as an empowering authority. This is why, he argues, any modernist experiment in the Muslim world is considered an elitist authoritarian move to sunder the community from its authority. Abd al-Razzaq ‘Id, in contrast, disagrees with this assumption and maintains that the sacralization of heritage inhibits any enlightened activity or modernist idea from infiltrating the fabric of the nation and bringing it into the modern age. As a result he rejects Ghalyun’s view that secularism has become an instrument of social and political repression used by the elites. It stands to reason that the past cannot be abolished as either history or consciousness. This is why it should be studied, absorbed, and then transcended in a process similar to what the West did with its Greek heritage. This heritage represents the accumulation of the nation’s consciousness of itself; its analysis leads to the study of the rise of Islamic and Arab consciousness and then to the move to deconstruct it and reconstruct it from a modern cultural perspective. Therefore, the intellectual who rejects this heritage is doing no less than smashing this consciousness

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and linking it with the liberal or Marxist West, which emerged from a very different experience. But the traditional thinker who looks at this heritage as a sacred text nullifies the cumulative experience of consciousness. The works of alAsh‘ari, one of the main founders of Islamic theology, al-Ghazali, one of the greatest medieval thinkers in Islam, Ibn Sina, another very important medieval philosopher, and Ibn Khaldun are only moments of these intellectuals’ consciousness and views of their own ages. They also represent views limited by a specific time and space. Absolutely denying the importance of heritage or affirming without reservation the sacredness of heritage are extreme expressions of a misunderstanding of the role of heritage in the construction of nationhood and knowledge. Thus, the belief in either the total sacredness or the rejection of heritage prevents the possibility of learning through transcendence and accumulation of knowledge necessary for the advancement of science, society, and politics. This is why the journey back into heritage must be a return to rediscovering its essentials (al-usul al-fa‘ila); otherwise, this culture remains reactive, absorbing and developing under the repercussions of social realism, existentialism, and surrealism, which are the products of a Western context. This reactive context is ultimately superficial and cannot lead to a genuine renaissance. Muhammad Jabir al-Ansari, for example, finds such a context symbolized by the glorification of certain great thinkers of the heritage in a way that amplifies the spirit of traditionalism, aborts any reformation, solidifies stagnation, and freezes ideas in history. It is therefore absolutely necessary to spark a genuine internal renaissance that engages the deepest core of Islamic thought and enables Islamic culture to respond to all kinds of challenges, to prevent all forms of aggression, and to confront all invasions, whether military, economic, or intellectual. A real enlightenment necessitates the return to first principles so that a process of absorbing and filtering may produce something new but still truly authentic. Unfortunately, liberal intellectuals (al-muthaqqafun al-libraliyyun) are still deriving their views from the margins (hawamish) of Western thought, while cultural intellectuals (al-muthaqqafun alturathiyyun) find they are on the margins of heritage. But a new culture cannot be founded either on the margins or on philosophies such as

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structuralism or some other mythological method. Such approaches produce a cultural schizophrenia, splintering both meaning and structure. Anwar ‘Abd al-Malak has argued that the beginning of modern Arab thought is the result of the momentum of the national liberation movements in the Arab world since World War II. The initial victories of those movements sparked profound debates over the foundations of its intellectual, political, and religious systems. These discussions centered on the direction and the content of the Arab world’s relations with the rest of the world, with an awareness of its own distinguished civilization as being at least equal to other civilizations. The battle of the Arab intellectual today, then, is a struggle within himself. For when the Arabs trusted themselves, they were able to establish dominant intellectual systems and effective military and political institutions. Such trust enabled the Arabs to absorb, digest, and transcend the then dominant cultures for many centuries.

Public Intellectuals across Disciplines

chapter six

The Philosopher as Public Intellectual         

Right from the beginning of the street the crowd were pushing and shoving to get into the hall where Jean Pulse Heartre was going to give his lecture. People were using all kinds of tricks to needle through the eagle eye of the chastity belt of special duty policemen who had cut off the district and who were there to examine the invitation cards and tickets, because hundreds and thousands of forgeries were in circulation. . . . Others got themselves parachuted in by special plane. There were riots and fighting at Orly too to get on to the planes. . . . Others, in a desperate attempt, were trying to get in through the sewers. . . . The sewer rats took over from there. But nothing could dampen the spirits of these aficionados. . . . In the great hall on the ground floor . . . more and more people were gathering, and late-comers found they had to resort to standing on one foot at the back — the other being required to kick away any neighbours who got too close. . . . Heartre was getting ready to read his notes. An extraordinary radiance emanated from his ascetic athletic

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body and the throng, captivated by the overpowering charm of his slightest gesture, waited anxiously for the starting signal. Numerous were the cases of fainting due to intra-uterine exaltation which affected the female section of the audience in particular. . . . Jean Pulse opened his mouth. . . . The audience which had been fairly well-behaved until then began to get worked up and showed its admiration for Heartre by repeated shouts and acclamations after every word he said— which made perfect understanding of what he was saying rather difficult.1 This passage from Boris Vian’s novel L’Écume des jours is a thinly disguised critique of the furore around French existentialism at the end of World War II, with the characters Jean Pulse Heartre ( Jean-Sol Partre, in the original French) and the Countess de Mauvoir (la Duchesse de Bovouard, in French) obviously based on its main protagonists. The depiction of the scene of Jean Pulse Heartre’s talk acts as an ironic commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s conference “L’Existentialisme est un humanisme,” which was held at the Palais des Congrès in Paris on a cold autumn night just after the war. But it is more than just a parody. For all its absurdity and grotesqueness, this passage captures something of the frenzy and excitement surrounding Sartre’s lecture of October 29, 1945. Indeed, in the actual lecture people also struggled to get in and to get a glimpse of the new prophet; and Sartre, like the character in the novel a charismatic speaker, managed to captivate his audience. Sartre spoke authoritatively without notes about a wide range of subjects. Leaving aside the slapstick of Vian’s depiction, it reveals the exhilaration and exaltation that Sartre’s lecture generated. Indeed, the philosopher as public intellectual brings up images of, say, Sartre and Bertrand Russell speaking to huge crowds of students and affecting the politics in their respective countries and beyond. It is my contention that this type of public intellectual, epitomized by those two iconic characters, is no longer as viable today as it was in the middle of the twentieth century. But this is not to say that there is no scope today for philosophers as public intellectuals, or that there is less space for public intellectuals in general. As I will explain later on, too often commentators have mistaken the decline of a particular type of public intellectual

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for the fall of the public intellectual in general. It will become clear that the current climate encourages a type of public engagement, whether from philosophers or nonphilosophers, which is of a very different kind from the one exercised by the likes of Sartre and Russell. In what follows, I will try to outline this shift and provide some tentative explanations. I draw mainly on examples from France and the UK, but I would argue that my main points are applicable more broadly. Although I do recognize that cultural and national variations exist, the aim of this study is to present the broader picture. Before I do this, I would like to make three qualifications. First, I would like to clarify that I will be talking here about public engagement, as in engagement outside the formal curriculum of the university structure. Of course, professors employed in universities, through the teaching of students, engage with wider society. This also applies to professional philosophers who simply by teaching their undergraduates and postgraduates can influence the broader societal and political realm. But when we mention public intellectuals, we are not talking about academics simply addressing a student audience within the contours of their regular courses. We are referring to primarily political engagement that goes beyond the limited setup of academic courses. This might involve engagement with students outside the normal curriculum, as in the case of Herbert Marcuse, who in the late 1960s became the guru of the student movement. It might even involve political interventions outside the academy altogether. The two public intellectuals whom I just mentioned— Sartre and Russell— typically addressed a broader audience well beyond the formal setup of the university structure. As a matter of fact, Sartre never held an academic position as such; he was a high school teacher for a while until the mid-1940s, when he decided that he could live off his royalties. Russell had to resign his fellowship at Trinity College Cambridge because of his stance towards World War I and subsequently taught sporadically at universities in the United States until that was cut short too because of his political stances. In sum, I am talking about this broader engagement, often political. Second, I would like to introduce briefly my theoretical framework. I will be drawing loosely on positioning theory.2 According to this perspective, intellectuals use various devices to position themselves within

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the specific arenas in which they are operating. They position themselves through their books, lectures, newspaper articles, television and documentary film appearances, or blogs. What is positioning? It refers to the process through which intellectuals, like other people, attribute characteristics to themselves. For example, they might locate themselves as situated with the progressive pragmatist heritage of the United States, as Richard Rorty did in Achieving Our Country.3 Or they might position themselves as somehow Marxist-inspired critics of the contemporary constellation, as did Alain Badiou or Slavoj Žižek. Self-positioning often goes hand in hand with the positioning of other people or entities: Rorty’s positioned himself politically in juxtaposition to the American New Left and the Cultural Left, and Badiou’s and Žižek’s self-positioning rests on their fierce criticisms of capitalism today. Positioning is an ongoing practical achievement that requires considerable rhetorical skills and resources. Take Sartre, Camus, and Beauvoir, for instance, who used their journal Les Temps modernes to position themselves as dealing with issues of contemporary significance; indeed, they used the preface of the first issue to position themselves in opposition to those writers in the past who had failed to engage with the present.4 My underlying thread is that intellectuals, including public intellectuals, are constantly involved in various forms of positioning and, crucially, that new societal conditions encourage novel forms of positioning while discouraging others. I do not aim to elaborate on positioning theory in what follows, but my arguments will draw on the theory implicitly. Third, it is worth mentioning that I will be using a rather restrictive notion of what it is to be a philosopher. Sometimes the notion of philosopher is used loosely to refer to scholars or writers who make broader theoretical claims. I will be talking instead about intellectuals who are formally trained within the discipline of philosophy and who, in addition, position themselves at least partly in relation to this formal training. The advantage of this more restrictive notion is that it allows me to identify more clearly who counts as a philosopher. Of course, the discipline of philosophy, and the training provided within it, differs from society to society and it also changes over time. This means that some of the people I will be talking about, in particular Sartre and Russell, might prima facie not have much in common. But I will try to argue that at some

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level those two do share certain characteristics—characteristics rarer now, for reasons I will explain. So let’s return to the transition within public engagement I mentioned earlier. Let’s start with Sartre, the quintessential public intellectual in the eyes of many. Sartre came to public prominence just after the liberation of France. He was known beforehand but mainly to a specialized public. Between the middle of 1944 and the end of 1945, Sartre made a meteoric rise and managed to turn his dense philosophy into a digestible product for a mass audience. The autumn of 1945 was particularly crucial. Later portrayed as the “existentialist offensive,” it was during this period, September and October 1945, that Sartre turned himself into a public figure. The publication of the two volumes of L’Âge de raison, the launch of his flagship journal Les Temps modernes and his famous public lecture “L’existentialisme est un humanisme”— all contributed to his new persona as a public figure. But becoming famous as an intellectual does not make you a public intellectual. To be a public intellectual, you also need to be able to engage with broader issues of societal significance well beyond your specialized expertise. Sartre managed to do this straight away. Between 1944 and 1947 he wrote extensively on social and political issues relevant to the French at the time and helped them assimilate and come to terms with the recent past: he tried to portray the Resistance spirit, he made sense of what it was like to live under German occupation, or he depicted the mind-set of collaborators and anti-Semites. These writings and interventions were mainly reflecting on the recent past. They did so in ways that resonated with the public, which, as I have argued elsewhere, partly explains his sudden public status.5 But very soon Sartre would leave behind the experience of World War II and tackle present concerns, commenting on the postwar political situation in France and later on the Cold War, Algeria, the student movement, and so on. And it is these interventions, rather than the popularization of existentialism, that made him the public intellectual we still remember today. Now, what kind of public intellectual was Sartre? He was what I call an “authoritative” public intellectual.6 This type relies on high cultural capital acquired from being trained in a high-profile discipline like philosophy and from being brought up in a very privileged background. They straddle neatly the inside –outside divide: they are so respected

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through privilege and intellectual achievement that they can oppose the establishment without ever substantially losing status or authority. They address a wide range of subjects without being experts as such. They speak from above — at, rather than with, their audience. And they have a strong moral voice, condemning, praising, and spurring people on to act. Sartre was the archetypal authoritative public intellectual. Brought up in a highly educated upper-middle-class family, he was raised partly by his grandfather Karl Schweitzer, a considerable intellectual in his own right, who took it upon himself to educate his grandson when Jean-Paul’s mother moved back to the ancestral home after the premature death of her husband. His grandparents on both sides belonged to what one could, at least in the French context, legitimately call intellectual aristocracy. Not only did Sartre manage to gain entry at the École Normale— the elite institution par excellence —but he also studied philosophy, which was at that point the most revered academic discipline in France. Sartre drew on all this cultural capital to speak authoritatively about numerous topics on which he was not really an expert.7 His book about anti-Semitism, Réflections sur la question juive, was a case in point: relying on anecdotal evidence from his entourage and on his reading of anti-Semitic literature, Sartre not only generalized about the psychological dispositions of the anti-Semite, but he also centered the core of his argument in the remainder of the text around a dubious distinction between the authentic and inauthentic Jew. No systematic research or expertise underscored this book. But this dilettantism didn’t stop Sartre from speaking authoritatively about what it would be like, as a Jew, to live life authentically.8 The very same moral vigor —and, to a certain extent, lack of expertise — underscored his later interventions, whether about the Soviet Union or colonialism. Throughout his “public career,” Sartre was particularly adept at straddling the inside –outside divide: part and parcel of the establishment, he styled himself unequivocally as in opposition to it. Nothing more exemplifies how the security of privilege enabled Sartre to choose the position of outsider than his refusal to accept the Nobel Prize. Sartre was not an isolated case, nor was his type of public intellectual exclusively French. Bertrand Russell, the eccentric British gent, was as much an authoritative public intellectual as Sartre was. Like Sartre, he came from a privileged background, raised in a rare intellectual microcli-

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mate within the otherwise anti-intellectual British aristocracy, with J. S. Mill as his godfather and an arsenal of private tutors at his disposal. Like Sartre he went through elite educational channels and made his name as an innovative philosopher, specializing in logic rather than the philosophy of existentialism. Just as Sartre’s existentialism was interwoven with the collective self-identity of the French intelligentsia, British intellectuals portrayed analytical philosophy as typically British, with its focus on logic and precision as a necessary antidote against the purported intellectual and political dangers of German philosophy. Russell too spoke with great authority about a whole range of issues in which he had little professional expertise — from marriage and the family to religion and race. Like his French counterpart he gained worldwide recognition, which also included the Nobel Prize. And like Sartre he used his platform of public notoriety —amplified through the emerging communication channels of radio, television, and televised public demonstrations— to take a moral stance and intervene in the politics of his day, from Vietnam to nuclear disarmament. Just like Sartre, Russell, the ultimate insider, managed to position himself as the antiestablishment figure, starting with his backing of conscientious objection during World War I and culminating in his anti–Vietnam War activities. In sum, Russell was as emblematic an authoritative public intellectual as Sartre was, equally successful in using his accomplishments within philosophy to legitimate his views on public and political issues that went well beyond it.9 If I mention these two pivotal figures, it is partly because commentators often invoke them when arguing that there are no longer public intellectuals today. The likes of Sartre and Russell are often used as yardsticks to judge the contemporary situation, in which, so it is argued, there is no longer space for public intellectual giants, as there undoubtedly was in earlier times. I agree, but only partly. I will show that a changing sociopolitical landscape has indeed made it more difficult for authoritative public intellectuals to emerge and gain respect and attention, but crucially that this does not imply the fall of the public intellectual altogether. Rather, new modes of public engagement have come to the surface. Before exploring what these forms of engagement entail, it is important to identify the possible sociological factors that have contributed to the decline of the phenomenon of the authoritative public intellectual.

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The Context of Authoritative Public Intellectualism

Authoritative public intellectuals thrive in a very particular setting. They thrive in societies in which a significant section of the population values intellectual life and in which nevertheless the cultural and intellectual capital is concentrated within a small elite. They thrive in a hierarchical educational context, with “hierarchical” referring to a clear distinction not only between elite institutions and other higher education establishments but also between high- and low-status disciplines. They can exist independently of academic appointments because of independent resources, gained from family wealth or successful exploitation of the media of the time (book-writing and print journalism in the first half of the twentieth century, broadcasting in the second half and beyond). They tend to surface when the academic setting is more amorphous, with limited specialization, and especially when the social sciences are poorly professionalized. It is in this very specific context that authoritative public intellectuals like Sartre and Russell have a field day. Steeped in highprofile disciples like philosophy and mathematics and with the confidence of the right habitus and an elite education, they can speak to a wide range of social and political issues without being criticized for dilettantism. The early part of the twentieth century, especially in parts of Europe, fits this ideal type remarkably well. It was the era of the philosopher as public intellectual. What has changed since? First, philosophy has lost to a certain extent its previous intellectual dominance. This is partly due to the rise, during the latter part of the twentieth century, of various philosophical currents, such as postmodernism and neopragmatism, which questioned, if not undermined, the erstwhile superiority of philosophy over other vocabularies. Within the Anglo-Saxon context, Rorty and Richard Bernstein epitomize this strand, advocating Gadamerian hermeneutics and Dewey’s pragmatism over epistemology.10 But besides the developments within philosophy itself, other factors also came into play. The social sciences have emerged as a significant force and have professionalized, making it more difficult for philosophers or others without appropriate training and expertise in the social sciences to make authoritative claims

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about the nature of the social and political world without being challenged. Massive expansion of the ranks of professional social scientists means there are now lifelong specialists in the areas that public intellectuals used to comment on who are better placed to contest such “generalist” interventions as uninformed and superficial. For all its genius and perceptiveness, it would be difficult to imagine Sartre’s Réflections sur la question juive to have been met with such little critique when it came out if it had been published, say, twenty years later. Whereas this book was seen as a highly insightful piece of work in the 1940s, we now value it more as a quaint piece of French intellectual history rather than a valuable explanation of the phenomenon of anti-Semitism. Compare this with, say, Theodor Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality, published only three years later and addressing related issues, it still demands considerable respect, something not unrelated to its sociological outlook and methodology.11 Second, with high educational levels for larger sections of society, the erstwhile distinction between an intellectual elite and the rest no longer holds to quite the same extent. With higher education also comes a growing skepticism towards epistemic and moral authority, an increasing recognition of the fallibility of knowledge and of the existence of alternative perspectives. Speaking from above and at their audience, as authoritative public intellectuals do, is no longer as acceptable as it used to be. Print and broadcasting media have become less deferential and more willing to challenge the statements of politicians and other public figures— a process assisted by the arrival of journalists with higher education and subject specialism. The rise of new social media in the twenty-first century has intensified this “democratization” of public intellectual interventions even further, partly because of the interactive nature of the technology involved, which means that no single party has intellectual monopoly, and partly because technically more people can enter the public sphere than previously. Of course, we should not overestimate the dialogical and democratic potential of the new social media. The interactive potential of the technology does not always pan out in practice. The new social media have gatekeepers, too, just like newspapers and magazines, and we should keep in mind that very few bloggers have a large following. But the technology has made a difference,

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one that surely has further lessened the likelihood of authoritative public intellectuals. Third, there has since been a growing disquiet about “philosophical systems” such as Marxism in whose name numerous authoritarian regimes have been established and legitimized. Although not all authoritative public intellectuals promoted a “system” as such, let alone a Marxist one, the failure of the latter certainly put a serious dent in the status of philosophy within the wider public. Since the 1980s, those grand schemes, often the brainchild of philosophers, were gradually replaced by a rebranded free market ideology. Mark Lilla’s chapter in this volume explores at length the current state of liberalism, but it is worth pointing out here that free markets are as much a “grand narrative” as Marxism was, equally fanatical about the desirability of its utopian vision and equally adamant that an inevitable march of history would sweep across the globe. No other publication epitomizes this doctrine of liberal supremacy more than Francis Fukuyama’s End of History and the Last Man.12 But unlike Marxism, which conceived a different society for the future, the new free market ideology ultimately reinvoked the distant past, celebrating the era of unregulated capitalism and arguing why, with some modifications, it was the only viable strategy for the present. Whereas speculating about desirable futures had always been the hallmark of philosophical and political thought, the free market ideology with its attendant focus on the present put economics, rather than philosophy, center stage and presented a view in which freely choosing individuals would generate a relatively openended future that intellectuals could not usefully shape or predict. Indeed, of all the social sciences, economics became particularly dominant from the 1980s onward, acquiring a credibility that has very little connection to its limited predictive power. If various societal forces have worked against the authoritative public intellectual, then what has emerged in its place? In the first instance, “expert public intellectuals” have come to the forefront. These are public intellectuals who draw on their professional knowledge, derived from their research in the social or natural sciences, to engage with wider societal or political issues that go beyond their narrow expertise. When, in the 1970s, Michel Foucault introduced himself as a “specific intellectual,” he had precisely this form of focused and expert-driven engage-

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ment in mind, and indeed his own research on the history of punishment, including Surveiller et punir, tied in with his campaigning for prison reforms.13 Likewise, in the 1990s, Pierre Bourdieu drew on his research on poverty in France, including La Misère du monde, to enter the public arena and embark upon a political crusade against neoliberalism, in particular against the policies of the French government at the time.14 In some respects Noam Chomsky also falls in this category: although initially obtaining recognition for his theoretical contributions to the study of linguistics, he subsequently became a public figure as an expert on and critic of U.S. foreign policy. Though Foucault and, to a lesser extent, Bourdieu have sometimes been depicted as philosophers, they did, just like Chomsky, a considerable amount of empirical research, and in particular the work that formed the basis for their public engagement was respectively historical and sociological in nature. Indeed, philosophers rarely make expert public intellectuals. More precisely, if they have any tangible expertise, it is difficult to translate this into public engagement. Social scientists, on the other hand, are much better placed to act as expert public intellectuals, equipped as they are with well-rehearsed methods and specialized as they are in analyzing contemporary social and political phenomena. Whereas authoritative intellectuals could exert influence outside their specialist subject entirely through demonstrated intellect and educational prowess, expert intellectuals’ comparable influence relies on intellect and acquired knowledge, and mastery of the inductive technology (observational skill, statistical methods, lab machinery, etc.) to acquire or verify that knowledge. There is, second, the rise of what I would call the dialogical public intellectual. Contrary to both authoritative and expert public intellectuals, dialogical public intellectuals do not assume a superior stance towards their publics. Rather, they present themselves as equals to their publics, learning as much from them as vice versa. In contrast with Marxists, Foucault already took a more modest stance, employing the past as he did to shed light on the present, but without dictating an ideological agenda or imposing a political direction. Still, he positioned himself as an expert on the genealogy of how things came to be the way they are. Today, increasingly, intellectuals engage with their publics in a more interactive fashion, partly because of the technologies that make this dialogical format

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now possible and to a certain extent blur the distinction between public intellectuals and their publics; and partly because, with higher educational levels, the publics are no longer willing to accept entrenched hierarchies as they once did. In this context, what is striking about Michael Burawoy’s recent plea for a public sociology15 is not so much that it promotes critical engagement with the nonacademic world— something that, after all, has been argued before —but that it advocates a dialogical model, whereby sociologists and their publics are, theoretically at least, equal partners and equally responsible for producing knowledge. Burawoy’s utopian vision for sociology conceives an intellectual and social partnership between the sociological researchers and the communities they serve, whereby both parties are willing to learn from each other and collaborate while striving for a common political goal. Anthropologists, having been forced to confront their colonial heritage, have adopted this dialogical stance much earlier, with the early traces going back to the 1970s.16 The critical turn in cultural and social anthropology not only introduced reflexivity at the heart of this academic discipline but also tied it to a different notion of knowledge acquisition in which anthropologists no longer positioned themselves as superior to the people who are being researched. More recently, intellectuals who use the new social media to get their message across often position themselves in contrast to those who rely on “traditional” media by emphasizing how the new technologies permit frequent and intense interaction with the audiences. Of course, as Paul Horwitz explains in his contribution to this volume, the situation is often more complex than the bloggers themselves tend to acknowledge. They are likely to continue to write for newspapers, magazines, and other outlets, and their blogs might even simultaneously appear in print version. But the point is that they position themselves as “democratic,” that is, in dialogue with their audience and ultimately blurring the distinction between themselves and that audience. Dialogue, to be sure, is not antithetical to philosophy. In his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty’s revival of Hans Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics, pitched against epistemology, famously elevated the notion of dialogue to the heart of philosophy.17 It is, however, more difficult to see how, within the new cultural landscape of expertise, dialogue, and declining aura, philosophers can still make the kind of public inroad they

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used to make. If they manage to do so, it is more likely that their interventions will be of a hybrid kind, part philosophy and part empirical research. Philosophy, as practiced in the realm of the academy, has become quite removed from the rough and tumble of contemporary society. It is telling that in the current economic crisis very few philosophers have intervened in ways that have resonated with the wider public. This is, as I pointed out earlier, partly because, in the wake of the collapse of communism as a project with global aspirations, the general public has become more wary of theoretical schemes about what a future society should look like. But it is also partly because the way in which philosophers are being trained, especially within an Anglo-Saxon setting, is not really conducive to a critical and constructive engagement with issues that currently concern the wider public. In this context, philosophers are most likely to be successful in retaining a public profile when dealing with questions for which there is no obvious empirical resolution, including issues of faith or ethical choices. Some of Michael Sandel’s interventions have been of this kind; they have struck a chord with their audience, as can be gleaned from the success of Sandel’s recent Reith Lectures. Peter Singer’s reflections on animal rights and world poverty provide another example.

Concluding Comments

I would like to conclude by clarifying the arguments spelled out in this chapter. First, the arguments developed herein are partly directed against what I call the “declinist” perspective on intellectuals.18 Contrasting the current situation with a presumed golden age of the public intellectual situated in the first half of the twentieth century, declinists hold that there is no longer much space for public intellectuals today. The declinist argument is as simple as it is ubiquitous: whether as recent Jewish immigrants in Greenwich Village or as chain-smoking existentialists on the Left Bank, intellectuals once felt a duty to speak to a broader public, and they acted on this. They were engaged intellectuals. Once they were domesticated within the sheltered offices and employment contracts of the academy, intellectuals lost that edge, retreating into their specialized

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circles and writing opaquely. My argument presented in this chapter only partly concurs with this perspective. I agree that the public intellectual of the type that was dominant in the first half of the twentieth century is now rarer than it was sixty years ago. Yet, I have also demonstrated that this does not imply the fall of the public intellectual altogether. On the contrary, other types of public engagement have emerged and are now more plausible than the earlier type: the expert public intellectual and the dialogical public intellectual. Crucially, philosophy is less compatible with those new types than it was with the authoritative public intellectual. This brings me to the next point. Second, there is an elective affinity between the authoritative public intellectual and philosophy as a discipline. Indeed, at the beginning of the chapter, I emphasized how in the early and mid-twentieth century, public intellectuals often had a philosophical background. It is easy to see why this might have been the case. Philosophy had considerable status and it was not uncommon for people to see it as the overarching discipline to which other academic fields were subjected. Also, philosophy provided the rhetorical tools and levels of abstraction that enabled one to speak out about a wide range of topics. Now, I did not want to suggest that philosophers in those days had the strict monopoly of public engagement. Indeed, some people trained in other fields became authoritative public intellectuals. In England, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell came close to the ideal type of the authoritative public intellectual, but neither had training in philosophy: the latter studied English at Cambridge, and the former did not attend university. The argument that I have developed above refers to patterns or trends and could be put in probabilistic terms. Authoritative public intellectuals tended to be philosophers, but they were by no means the only ones. Third, moving onto the present day, I did not argue that there is no longer scope for authoritative public intellectuals, nor did I want to imply that contemporary philosophers cannot have a public profile. Indeed, some writers and critics exhibit characteristics of the authoritative public intellectual: Badiou, Žižek, and Cornell West show aspects of this ideal type, although none exhibits all its features quite as Sartre and Russell did. Likewise, some contemporary philosophers, analytically trained and housed in comfortable academic institutions, have a public presence

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and have managed to acquire a broader appeal beyond the safe contours of the academy. Acknowledgment of the validity and significance of these observations does not mean that they should not be seen as counterexamples somehow undermining the general picture outlined earlier. Rather, my sociological argument is centered around ideal types and trends: the societal changes have made it less likely for privileged generalists to be taken seriously and to have an impact, just as it has become increasingly difficult for rigorously trained philosophers to enter the public sphere. The argument has, ultimately, an evolutionary bent: given the changing societal conditions, I am arguing that certain forms of positioning are more likely to be successful than others and more likely to lead to the further diffusion of the ideas propagated. And some academic disciplines, as they are practiced today, are more compatible than others with these new forms of positioning. Fourth, each type of public intellectual— the authoritative, the expert, and the dialogical one —incorporates its own contradictions. I mentioned earlier how authoritative public intellectuals struggled to retain credibility in an era of increased specialization and expertise, while expert public intellectuals sometimes found their legitimacy challenged once facing more educated and skeptical audiences.19 Dialogical public intellectuals have their own unique contradictions. Positioning themselves as equals to and in conversation with their publics, they inevitably lose some of the charisma and aura that surround the authoritative and expert public intellectuals and that, as Max Weber famously pointed out, were essential to the existence of the ancient prophets. Whether relying on elite education or expertise, both authoritative and expert public intellectuals were able to keep a symbolic distance vis-à-vis their audiences even when mingling and engaging with them, but for dialogical public intellectuals this would be more difficult to achieve because equality and responsiveness are interwoven with their positioning. The arrival of the dialogical public intellectuals can be seen as yet another step in the process of Entzauberung (“breaking the spell”). This loss of charisma and aura might eventually erode their existence altogether, for it is difficult to see how it is possible to maintain a recognizably central and influential position within the intellectual or political sphere without being acknowledged as exhibiting certain qualities that set them apart from the rest of society.

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Fifth, the notion of positioning is crucial in my analysis. In this sense my approach has affinities with Jeffrey Alexander’s performative take on public intellectuals, which draws attention to the rhetorical and dramaturgical devices upon which intellectuals draw to stake their claim.20 It would be a mistake to see the developments depicted in the above as first and foremost “technological” or “structural” transformations rather than changes in positioning. For instance, it might be perfectly plausible to argue that, with the new technologies, communication is becoming more dialogical. Blogging, for instance, might be intrinsically more interactive than text in print, regardless of whether bloggers wish to position themselves as interactive. Nevertheless, what really matters for my analysis is how these changes affect positioning. As one of the researchers on the new social media points out, the opposition of bloggers to journalism “is raised largely by channelling the voice of the people” and offering “a more intimate, personal kind of authority in place of the impersonal authority of journalists. . . . What the bloggers asserted through use of readers’ messages was that there was no difference between themselves and their audience.”21 In this new context, a “democratic” form of positioning is more likely to provide intellectuals with the necessary credibility and to help the dissemination of their ideas. This strategic advantage of the dialogical public intellectual in the current constellation explains his or her recent rise in various domains. So the notion of positioning is a significant component of the story. Finally, it is useful to point out the limitations of my discussion here. I focused on how social scientists have increasingly taken over the public role of philosophers. This is, however, only part of the story. It would be a mistake to see social scientists as the only ones who have taken over the mantle of philosophy. More recently, natural scientists have taken on a public role, and in doing so are clearly encroaching upon the domain of philosophers. As can be gleaned from Kenneth Miller’s contribution to this volume, they often use their scientific authority and specialized expertise to speak out about a wide range of issues traditionally considered to be part of a philosophical repertoire. Stephen Hawking was an early example, speculating as he did on black holes and the beginning of the universe as a prelude to his philosophical reflections on the nature of time.22 Richard Dawkins, similarly, used his specialist expertise in biological

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natural selection to speculate on Darwinian processes in other realms, notably the possible selection and replication of social phenomena as “memes.” Dawkins’s recent barrage against religion is a particularly striking example of this phenomenon because the realm of faith was commonly considered to be subject of philosophical reflection and beyond scientific reason, whereas he explicitly used the latter to criticize and delegitimize the former.23 The scientists’ foray into the public realm and the media attention they receive ultimately will affect the public visibility and public perception of the social sciences. Indeed, there are signs that the natural sciences, in particular biology, are encroaching upon the domain of the social sciences, especially with the rise and popularity of genetic explanations for social phenomena. It is perfectly possible that this new development will have repercussions in the public realm. After the demise of the public philosopher, it is not inconceivable, therefore, that we will be witnessing in the not so distant future the decline of the public social scientist.

Notes This text is based on my presentation at the annual conference titled “Public Intellectualism in Comparative Context: Different Countries, Different Disciplines” at the Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Notre Dame, April 22– 24, 2013. I also presented a shorter version of this paper at the conference “Economic Reason: Intellectuals and Think Tanks in the Late Twentieth Century,” June 28, 2013. I would like to thank the participants of both conferences for their comments, in particular Michael Desch, Katherine Brading, and Kenneth Miller. I would also like to thank Josh Booth, Marcus Morgan, Emma Murray, and Alan Shipman for their feedback on an earlier version of this chapter. 1. This extract is from Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours [Froth on the Daydream], translated from the French by Stanley Chapman, with an introduction by Adrian Searle (London: Quartet, 1967), 93– 96. 2. See also Patrick Baert, “Positioning Theory and Intellectual Interventions,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 42, no. 3 (2012): 304 – 24. 3. Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

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4. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Présentation, ” Les Temps modernes 1, no. 1 (1945): 1– 21. 5. Patrick Baert, “The Sudden Rise of French Existentialism: A Casestudy in the Sociology of Intellectual Life,” Theory and Society 40, no. 4 (2011): 619– 44, and Baert, “The Power Struggles of French Intellectuals at the End of the Second World War: A Study in the Sociology of Ideas,” European Journal of Social Theory 14, no. 4 (2011): 415– 35. 6. See also Patrick Baert and Alan Shipman, “Transformation of the Intellectual,” in The Politics of Knowledge, ed. Fernando Rubio Dominguez and Patrick Baert (London: Routledge, 2012), 179– 204. 7. For an extensive study of Sartre’s background and formative years, see Annie Cohen-Sohal, Sartre (Paris: Gallimard, 1985). 8. Patrick Baert, “Jean-Paul Sartre’s Positioning in Anti-Semite and Jew,” Journal of Classical Sociology 11, no 4 (2011): 378– 97. 9. Regarding Russell’s family background, early upbringing, and academic career, see, for instance, Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996), and Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Ghost of Madness (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000). 10. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), and Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992). Also see Richard Bernstein, The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge: Polity, 1991). 11. Theodor Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper, 1950). 12. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992). 13. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). See also Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (Paris: Flammarion, 1989). 14. Pierre Bourdieu, La Misère du monde (Paris: Seuil, 1993). See also David Swartz, “From Critical Sociology to Public Intellectual: Pierre Bourdieu and Politics,” Theory and Society 32, nos. 5/6 (2003): 791– 823. 15. There is a whole cottage industry surrounding public sociology, but the canonical text remains Michael Burawoy’s 2004 presidential address for the American Sociological Association, subsequently published as “For Public Sociology,” American Sociological Review 70, no. 1 (2005): 4 – 28. 16. See, for instance, James Clifford and George Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

The Philosopher as Public Intellectual 181 17. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. 18. See, for instance, Russell Jacoby, American Culture in the Age of the Academy (New York: Basic Books, 2000). Jacoby’s declinist tale, first published in 1987, was highly influential when it first came out. In the second edition, Jacoby qualified his perspective. See also Richard Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study in Decline (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), and Frank Furedi, Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? Confronting 21st Century Philistines (London: Continuum, 2004). 19. See also Patrick Baert and Josh Booth, “Tensions within the Public Intellectual: Political Interventions from Dreyfus to the New Social Media,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 25 no. 4 (2012): 111– 26. 20. Jeffrey Alexander, “Public Intellectuals and Civil Society,” in Intellectuals and Their Publics, ed. Christian Fleck, Andreas Hess, and E. Stina Lyon (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 19– 27. See also Jeffrey Alexander, Performance and Power (Cambridge: Polity, 2011). 21. David Park, “Blogging with Authority: Strategic Positioning in Political Blogs,” International Journal of Communication 3 (2009): 265. 22. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to the Black Holes (London: Bantam, 1988). 23. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam, 2006).

chapter seven

The Economist as . . . ? The Public Square and Economists .  

The Salience Today of the Economic

Sit down some evening and watch the news on the TV, or scan the magazine covers in the supermarket, or simply immerse yourself in modern America. Elements of Public-Square Gossip If you are like me, you will be struck by the extent to which our collective public conversation focuses on seven topic areas: 1) The personal doings of the beautiful, the powerful, and the rich— and how to become more like them. 2) The weather. 3) Local threats and dangers, especially to children.

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4) Amusements— usually gossip about the past or about our imaginary friends, frenemies, etc.— it is amazing how many people I know who have strong opinions about Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen1— many more than have any opinions at all about her creator George R. R. Martin, author of the Song of Ice and Fire novels,2 on which Game of Thrones is based. 5) How to best procure necessities and conveniences. 6) Large scale dangers (and, rarely, opportunities): plagues, wars and rumors of wars, the fall and rise of dynasties, etc. 7) “The economy”: unemployment, spending, inflation, construction, stock market values, and bond market interest rates. Now, out of these seven topic areas, the first six are found not just in our own but in other societies as far back as we have records. They are common in human history as far back as we have been writing things down, or singing long story-songs to one another around the campfire. What, after all, is the story of Akhilleus, Hektor, and Agamemnon in Homer’s Iliad if not a combination of (1), (4), and (6)?3 In April 2014, by a strange chance, the Internet led me to a passage from the lost Biographies of third-century BCE philosopher Hermippos of Smyrna. The passage was about a fourth-century BCE Athenian, Phryne, who may or may not have been a model for the sculptor Praxiteles of Athens’s lost Aphrodite Knidia and the painter Apelles of Kos’s lost Aphrodite Anadyomene. Hermippos of Smyrna wrote of “the dazzling Phryne, who, “at the great festival of the Eleusina and that of the Posidonia in full sight of a crowd that had gathered from all over Greece, she removed her cloak and let loose her hair before stepping into the sea”— thus providing a rare opportunity to see her nude. Otherwise you had to be satisfied with art: “it was from her that Apelles painted his likeness of Aphrodite coming out of the sea.”4 That made me think: Was the occupation “philosopher” in the third century BCE some weird mixture of what we would call a “philosopher” and what we would call a “writer for People magazine”? It appears so. Surely Hermippos of Smyrna’s agent would have welcomed a booking on the Oprah of that day.5

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Six of these seven topics of public-square conversation are recognizably common across societies and across history. But we have a seventh. It is somewhat different. And it is what I want to focus on— our collective public-sphere concern about the economy is unusual in historical perspective. Past societies’ public squares have dealt with issues we would call economic: the local price of food is always of general interest, and the supply and demand of traded goods is of interest to merchants. The wealth or lack thereof of individuals and cities is always of interest to moneylenders. The Rise of the Economy But the economy? There really wasn’t such a thing before 1700. We only begin to even see the word in the eighteenth century, when the phrase “home economics”— teaching how to cook, how to sew, how to clean, and how to budget — found its first word replaced by “political.”6 Then “political economy” becomes a study of how the government managers should do for the state the things that a household manager does for a household. And then, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the “political” gets dropped, and the “-y” gets replaced by an “-ics.” Why? As part of a movement to make the subject less, well, political—less partisan. It was a semideliberate move by political economists seeking to become economists to claim a mantle for their discipline as more than an objective branch of knowledge that could at least aspire to the prestige of a true natural science and the respect given to its advice possessed by a technocratic whatworks discipline, like engineering. So why does “the economy” and its study —“economics”—become a concept that needs a label in the eighteenth century? Why do we today watch it on the TV and read about it in the newspaper instead of learning more normal things— like Phryne’s dress secrets, or Odysseus’s least-known battle stratagems, or Akhilleus’s favorite recipes? I believe that there is a simple answer. When we look into the deep past, the evidence — especially the skeletal evidence that finds adult humans in the millennium around that start of the Common Era little

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more than five feet tall7— strongly suggests that, save for a small upper class, and save for lucky generations born into times of temporary land abundance (from technological changes like the invention of the wet-rice paddy or the horse collar, or from previous plague), the bulk of human populations saw very little economic change. Most people lived for the most part close to subsistence in the years between the invention of agriculture and 1500 or so. We can guess at what their material standard of living was like, and we can guess that their income level would strike us in today’s dollars as something less than $1,000 per person per year.8 We do see substantial population growth: we guess that there were about 5 million humans in 8000 BCE, and 500 million in 1500 CE, for we had much better agricultural and herding “technology” in 1500 CE than we did in 8000 BCE. But all or nearly all of the better technologies between 8000 BCE and 1500 CE showed up in Malthusian fashion as increasing population rather than increasing living standards.9 Crunch these guesstimates, and we find a worldwide economic growth rate of 0.05 percent/year. That is not 5 percent per year — that is 5 percent every hundred years. Thus what might have been called “the economy” was pretty much an unchanging backdrop before 1500 from the standpoint of any individual year, or, indeed, from the standpoint of any individual’s lifetime — plagues, war and rumors of war, and their economic consequences aside. Substantial transformations of what might have been called the economic would have been visible only if one stepped back and looked across multiple centuries at what Fernand Braudel called the longue durée10— the analytical perspective from which the long and gradual four-century-long spread of the Merino-breed sheep across Mediterranean and then northwest Europe truly was a really big deal. Thus in any previous era the idea that one should pay attention to somebody called “an economist”— that there would even be a subject called economics that could be thought of as significant— would have been a strange one indeed. The Centrality Today of the Economic Compare that to the years since 1900, in which worldwide average real GDP growth was 3.5 percent per year. Compare that to the years from

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1990 to 2007: worldwide average real GDP growth of 4.5 percent/year.11 And compare that to what happened in 2008– 2009: an 8 percent fall in total economic production in the United States and a 6 percent fall in employment driven purely by the monetary-financial derangement of our economy as a system, and not by any change in our knowledge or our technological capabilities or in the rest of the natural world.12 The fact is that we today see roughly 100 times as much economic growth and change in any given period— for good and for ill— than our pre-1500 ancestors did. Today economic change is a very big deal that determines what kind of job you will have, and if you will have a job, and how you will live ten or twenty years from now — if not tomorrow. Is it any wonder, given this ramping up of the pace of change, that the economy is salient today? Ours is an era in which, in our consciousness, issues like the filioque clause and the vicissitudes of the Bush or Habsburg dynasties appear to us to be in relative terms less salient, and the economy much more so. In such an age it is natural that the public square has a desire to listen to economists— for they claim to have knowledge about what is an important, newsworthy, and changing aspect of our civilization. And it is natural that economists will seek to speak today in the public square as public intellectuals.

Analyzing Emergent Properties of Systems of Decentralized Exchange

So what do economists have to say when they speak as public intellectuals in the public square? As I see it, economists have five things to teach: (1) the deep roots of markets in human psychology and society, (2) the extraordinary power of markets as decentralized mechanisms for getting large groups of humans to work broadly together rather than at crosspurposes, (3) the ways in which markets can powerfully reinforce and amplify the harm done by domination and oppression, (4) the manifold other ways in which the market can go wrong because it is somewhat paradoxically so effective, and (5) how the market needs the state to underpin and manage it on the “micro” level.

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The Five “Micro” Things Economists Have to Say At the level of the “micro”— of how individuals act, and of their wellbeing as they try to make their way in the world—economists really have five things to say when they enter the public square as public intellectuals. First, the Deep Roots of Markets. Probably most importantly, at some deep level human sociability is built on gift-exchange —I give you this, you give me that, and a rough balance is achieved, but we both still owe each other and still are under some kind of mutual obligation to do things to further repay each other. Wherever we look in human societies across space or across time we find such overlapping networks of giftexchange and resulting reciprocal obligations to be an important share of the social glue that holds us humans together.13 On top of this deep giftexchange sociability, we economists say, we humans have built an economic system of decentralized market exchange. Today, a great many of our gift-exchange relationships are not long-term relationships over time with people we come to know well, but rather one-shot exchanges with people we do not necessarily expect to ever see again. These exchanges are mediated by tokens called “money” that are acceptable to each of us as payment or repayment because they are acceptable to all of us. And this great enhancement of our potential network of those with whom we can exchange is what allows us to have a wide and productive rather than a cramped and penurious social distribution of labor. This part of what economists have to say has been very clear since Adam Smith in 1776 published the first edition of his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.14 Because humans have a “natural propensity to truck, barter, and exchange,” we can build markets of wide extent. Because “the division of labor depends on the extent of the market,” our extensive markets allow a detailed and sophisticated division of labor. And Smith saw the detailed and sophisticated division of labor of eighteenth-century Britain as the principal cause of its relative productivity and prosperity. It is, perhaps, the most important thing that economists have to say as public intellectuals in the public square. Second, the Extraordinary Power of Markets. Perhaps next in importance, organizing a great deal of our societal distribution of labor around

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market exchange mediated by tokens called “money” is more than something that works with the grain of the crooked timber of humanity. It is also something that turns out to be extraordinarily powerful and effective. The market system works amazingly, remarkably well as a decentralized societal calculating mechanism for determining what is to be collectively produced, how it is to be produced, and for whom it is to be produced. Take market exchange, add private property in things, and the proviso that people can get together and form smaller hierarchical or cooperative forms of economic organization within the matrix of the market economy when they think best, add the proviso that there is a government to enforce its conventions about property rights and contract obligations, and you find that you have a system that as a whole has marvelous advantages. First of all, it happens that the great bulk of commodities in this world are what economists call “rival in use”— if I am making use of it, you cannot be. Thus one person’s enjoyment and use of a particular item reduces the available options of others. It thus makes sense for a rational and efficient social system to force a person who makes decisions to feel the effect of his actions on the opportunities and choices of others. It turns out that if you (1) assign exclusive property rights to use to someone, and (2) require a person to pay a market price for the privilege of transferring those rights, then you have (3) a marvelously effective way of making each feel the effect of his decisions on the well-being of all. This is quite a coincidence. Nineteenth-century economist Richard Whately — the only person ever to have been in rapid succession Professor of Political Economy at Oxford and Archbishop of Dublin— detected the hand of Providence in this truly divine coincidence.15 Second of all, it just turns out to be that the great bulk of decisions about what is the best economic use of resources in the world are best made at the local level, by individuals who actually know what is going on. It is not good to make them in some centralized Kremlin or GOSPLAN office.16 And, again by coincidence, it turns out that exclusive and transferable private property is a good way of making decisions take place where the information is at the periphery, rather than at the center where the information is not. And, as Ronald Coase pointed out, one of the geniuses of our market system is that it allows for islands of centralized hi-

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erarchy wherever and whenever people decide that there is stuff to be gained by centralized hierarchical planning and coordination, or by some other mode of coordination and collective decision-making other than decentralized market exchange. That extraordinary power of markets that just happens to fit our world of largely rival commodities in which decision-making is largely better decentralized is, perhaps, the second most important thing that economists have to say as public intellectuals in the public square — along with noting that what had been true in the agrarian age in which Adam Smith lived that ended with the eighteenth century and in the industrial age of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries may not be true in whatever kind of age the twenty-first century turns out to be. Third, Market Systems Reinforce and Amplify the Harms of Domination. Next, however, comes the serpent in the garden: that market systems can and do amplify the harm done by power imbalances— slavery (humans as chattel) in the context of the American South’s cotton plantations was a much worse thing than slavery in the context of West African households precisely because the first was embedded in a market economy and so there was a great deal of money to be made by whipping slaves to work until they dropped. Market systems are at the bottom very good ways of getting people to respond to incentives. Power imbalances create situations in which we would rather that people not have more reason to use their power. Such power imbalances can cause enormous misery in the context of a market economy even in the absence of incentives to behave with affirmative cruelty, for power imbalances turn into wealth imbalances, and a market economy’s underlying calculus is a calculus of doing what wealth wants rather than what people need. Wealth imbalances alone produce a situation in which we do not like the pattern of incentives that the market system provides to individuals, and in which market systems go horribly, dreadfully, diabolically wrong. Consider the Bengal famine of the middle of the last century.17 In Bengal, in 1942, because of the interruption of world trade, those whose sole wealth was their labor in the jute plantations found their wealth valued at zero — nobody wanted to hire rural workers then because nobody thought it worthwhile to grow jute that would then have to be shipped out

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through the Indian Ocean as long as there was a chance that the aircraft carriers of Japanese admiral Nagumo’s Kido Butai might be prowling the ocean. Moreover, the large logistical demands of supporting the armies of the United Nations in Burma pushed up urban food prices, and rural food prices. Without wages to earn, the ex-jute workers of Bengal had no wealth and no money to pay. With no money to pay, the market provided those in other parts of India who had food with no incentive to move the food to Bengal and sell it to the ex-jute workers. Two million people died, even though there was ample food in India for the population as a whole. And likewise for the British state that ruled India and was responsible for checking to see whether the incentives the market system was providing really were the incentives that people were responding to. Prime Minister Churchill sent a telegram: If it were really true that there was famine in India, why was Mohandas Gandhi still alive?18 Such behavior by the British Empire was not exceptional. My Gallagher ancestors knew well the earlier failure of the British state to take appropriate action to rebalance the distribution of wealth and prevent mass starvation in 1846– 48, similarly in the midst of ample food nearby and plenty of resources to transport it. Fourth, Other Ways in Which the Market Can Go Wrong. Moreover, even when the distribution of wealth is right, modes of “market failure” are many. The market system can and does go wrong and provide the wrong incentives for behavior in myriad ways. The brilliant Ronald Coase of the University of Chicago — who remained productively at work as an economist a decade into the twenty-first century, even though his age had reached three figures — was interpreted to have argued that pretty much any arrangement of property rights will do about as well as any other and the government should simply step back.19 The canonical case adduced was the locomotive that occasionally throws off sparks that burn the nearby farmer’s crops. If the railroad has a duty of care not to burn the crops, Coase said, the railroad will attach spark-catchers if it is cheap and makes sense to do so — and the railroad will pay damages and settle in order to avoid being hauled into court on a tort claim if it is expensive and doesn’t make sense to do so. If the railroad has no duty of care, Coase said, then the farmer will offer to pay the railroad to install spark-catchers — and spark-catchers will be installed if the potential

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damage to the crops is greater than the cost of the spark-catcher and it makes sense to do so, and spark-catchers will not be installed if the damage to the crops is less than the cost. Thus the same decisions will be made whatever the property rights— as long as there are settled property rights. If there are not settled property rights, then the crops burn and lawyers grow fat. But as long as there are property rights, the market will work fine. Maybe the widows and orphans who own railroad shares will be wealthier under one setup and maybe the farmers will be wealthier under the other, but that is rarely a matter of great public concern. Now, this argument has always seemed to me to be wrong. If there is no duty of care on the part of the railroad, it has an incentive not just to threaten not to install a spark-catcher, but to design and build the most spark-throwing engine imaginable — to make sure that the firebox is also a veritable flamethrower — and then to demand that the farmer bribe it not to set the fields on fire. What economists call “externalities” are rife and call for the government to levy taxes and pay bounties over wide shares of the economy in order to make the incentives offered by the taxand-bounty-augmented market the incentives that it is good for society that decision-making individuals have. Cutting property rights “at the joints” to reduce externalities is important. But it will never be efficient: what economists call Pigovian taxes and bounties make up a major and essential part of the business of government. Fifth, the Market Needs the State. Last, the market needs the state. For the market system to work well and produce a good outcome, outcomes need to be dictated not by inequalities of wealth or power but by genuine win-win exchanges. This means that the government has to set out and maintain its laws of property and contract, so that what is yours stays yours and what is promised is delivered at good weight. In the absence of a properly regulating government, what is yours is not yours, what is promised will not be delivered, and weight will not be good: instead, either roving bandits, local notables with bully boys functioning as barely better stationary bandits, or the government’s own functionaries abusing its powers will decide that what was yours is now theirs. And having a government powerful enough to set out and enforce laws of property and contract that does not then turn around and become the

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largest and most destructive stationary bandit of all is perhaps the most difficult of all problems of political economy, for a government is, as the philosopher Ibn Khaldun wrote,20 at its foundation an organization that prevents all injustices save for those it commits itself. Those five points and their application to the issues of today are what economists have to say about “micro” topics when they don the mantles of public intellectuals and speak in the public square. Moreover, it is economists’ task to speak about how much the technical details matter, and the technical details do matter: Would you have thought ex ante that it would be important whether the property rights of the farmer were boosted by a requirement that anybody running machinery nearby have a duty of care? Economists are worth listening to — and, we hope, worth paying — to the extent that they can combine their knowledge of the basic principles with sufficient institutional knowledge to understand just what small differences in regulatory institutions and organizations will mean for the distribution of wealth, and for the on-the-ground incentives provided to humans. Economics in the public sphere is thus a difficult, important, and subtle discipline. It is concerned with what are the emergent properties of basing a great deal of the construction of our collective social division of labor on a decentralized system of money-mediated market exchange. Many of these emergent properties are not obvious and not well understood. And the devil is often in the details. That is why I looked forward in my twenties to making a comfortable living as an economist — as a speaker in the public square, as someone pushing forward our economists’ collective understanding of these emergent properties, and as someone teaching noneconomists how to listen when we do speak in the public square. So far I have not been disappointed. Macroeconomics in the Public Square But: I lied back when I said that economists really have five things to say when they enter the public square. They actually have six: (6) How the market needs the state to underpin and manage it on the “macro” level, for sometimes the entire market system appears to go awry in some puzzling way. Sometimes when you go to the market, you find the money

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prices that you have to pay higher than you expected— perhaps 10 percent higher than you expected last year when you made your plans. It seems that, somehow, there is too much spending money chasing too few goods. How is it that this happens? And what should the government do to make sure that it does not happen? Conversely, we can have the opposite problem— not a glut of money relative to goods, but what early nineteenth-century economists used to call a “general glut” of unsold commodities, idle factories and workshops, and idle workers all across the economy. Economists have important things to say about how to prevent these episodes and what to do when they happen to cure them. And this sixth role of economists as public intellectuals in the public square is worth going into in more depth. Back in the 1820s, the question of whether the circular flow of economic activity as mediated by the market system could break down and the economy become afflicted by a “general glut” of commodities was a live theoretical question. Everybody agreed that there could be particular gluts. Consider what happens should households decide that they want to spend less on electricity for powering large-screen video and audio entertainment systems, and more on yoga lessons to seek inner peace. The immediate consequence — within the “market day,” as late nineteenthcentury British economist Alfred Marshall would have put it21— of this shift in preferences is excess demand for yoga instructors and excess supply of electric power. Prices of electricity (and of large-screen TVs, and of audio systems) fall as unsold inventories pile up in stores and as generators spin down and stand idle. Yoga instructors, by contrast, find themselves overscheduled, working ten-hour days, and stressed out — and find the prices they can charge for their lessons going through the roof. Workers in electric power distribution and in video and audio production and sales find that they must either accept lower wages or find themselves out on the street without jobs. Over time the market system provides individuals with changing incentives that resolve the excess-supply/excess-demand disequilibrium. Seeing the fortunes to be earned by teaching yoga, more young people learn to properly regulate their svadisthana chakra and teach others to do so. Seeing unemployment and stagnant wages in electrical engineering,

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fewer people major in electrical engineering/computer sciences. The supply of yoga instructors grows. The supply of electrical engineers shrinks. Wages of yoga instructors fall back towards normal. Wages of electrical engineers rise. And balanced equilibrium is restored. Thus we understand how there can be a glut of a particular commodity — in this case, electric power. And we understand that it is matched by an excess demand for another commodity — in this case, yoga instructor services to properly align your svadisthana chakra. But can there be a general glut, a glut of everything? Some economists early in the nineteenth century said yes. Others said that the idea of a “general glut” was logically incoherent. JeanBaptiste Say, for example: Letters to Mr. Malthus: I shall not attempt, Sir, to add . . . in pointing out the just and ingenious observations in your book; the undertaking would be too laborious. . . . [And] I should be sorry to annoy either you or the public with dull and unprofitable disputes. But, I regret to say, that I find in your doctrines some fundamental principles which . . . would occasion a retrograde movement in a science of which your extensive information and great talents are so well calculated to assist the progress. . . . What is the cause of the general glut of all the markets in the world, to which merchandize is incessantly carried to be sold at a loss? . . . Since the time of Adam Smith, political economists have agreed that we do not in reality buy the objects we consume, with the money or circulating coin which we pay for them. We must in the first place have bought this money itself by the sale of productions of our own. To the proprietor of the mines whence this money is obtained, it is a production with which he purchases such commodities as he may have occasion for. . . . From these premises I had drawn a conclusion . . . “that if certain goods remain unsold, it is because other goods are not produced; and that it is production alone which opens markets to produce.” . . . . . . Whenever there is a glut, a superabundance, [an excess supply] of several sorts of merchandize, it is because other articles [in excess demand] are not produced in sufficient quantities . . . if those

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who produce the latter could provide more . . . the former would then find the vent which they required.22 Yet Say changed his mind. By 1829, in his analysis of the British financial panic and recession of 1825– 26, Say was writing that there could indeed be such a thing as a general glut of commodities after all: “Every type of merchandise had sunk below its costs of production, a multitude of workers were without work. Many bankruptcies were declared.” The general glut, Say wrote in 1829, had been triggered by a panicked financial flight to quality in financial markets. What was going on? The answer was nailed by John Stuart Mill: Those who have . . . affirmed that there was an excess of all commodities, never pretended that money was one of these commodities. . . . What it amounted to was, that persons in general, at that particular time, from a general expectation of being called upon to meet sudden demands, liked better to possess money than any other commodity. Money, consequently, was in request, and all other commodities were in comparative disrepute. . . . The result is, that all commodities fall in price, or become unsaleable. . . . As there may be a temporary excess of any one article considered separately, so may there of commodities generally, not in consequence of over-production, but of a want of commercial confidence.23 Note that these financial market excess demands can have any of a wide variety of causes: episodes of irrational panic, the restoration of realistic expectations after a period of irrational exuberance, bad news about future profits and technology, bad news about the solvency of government or of private corporations, bad government policy that inappropriately shrinks asset stocks, et cetera. When the government does not create “enough” money and safe savings vehicles, you have an excess demand for them, an excess supply of everything else, and high unemployment and idle factories. It seems as if there is always or almost always something that the government can do to affect asset supplies and demands that promises a

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welfare improvement over, say, waiting for prolonged nominal deflation to raise the real stock of liquid money, of bonds, or of high-quality AAA assets. Monetary-policy open-market operations swap AAA bonds for money. Quantitative easing that raises expected inflation diminishes demand for money and for AAA assets by taxing them. Nonstandard monetary-policy interventions swap risky bonds for AAA bonds or money. Fiscal policy affects both demand for goods and labor and the supply of AAA assets— as long as fiscal policy does not crack the status of government debt as AAA and diminish rather than increase the supply of AAA assets. Government guarantees transform risky bonds into AAA assets, and so on. And the government’s proper task is made much more difficult by the fact that what is “enough” jumps around as the set of savers and investors do their behavioral-economics thing: the Kindlebergian cycles of displacement, profit, transformation, boom, speculation, enthusiasm, mania, crisis, panic, revulsion, and discredit.24 When the government creates “too much” money and safe savings vehicles, you have an excess supply of them and an excess demand for everything else — which means inflation. And what if there is a glut not of commodities but inflation? Simply apply the same policy tools in reverse. Right now our economy is going badly wrong in this “macro” dimension, with a prime-age, twenty-five to fifty-four adult employmentto-population ratio of barely 78 percent, even as late as the spring of 2016, when in a healthy and well-functioning macroeconomy that number should be north of 80 percent.25 The only excuse my friends in the Obama administration offer is that Europe is doing much worse.26 That is the last of the six things economists have to say in the public square: that the economy does not consistently balance itself at high employment with stable prices. The principle that it does economists have called Say’s Law — even though Say himself had abandoned it by 1829.27 And it is important for economists to say, loudly, that Say’s Law is not true in theory, and it takes delicate and proper technocratic management to make it work in practice. So economists’ τεχνε (“art, skill”) does have many powerful lessons for the public square, which are (1) a bias toward freedom, choice, decentralization, and individual responsibility; (2) knowledge that systems of

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decentralized market exchange have important emergent properties that depend on close knowledge of and careful reasoning from institutional details; (3) a recognition that markets can amplify oppression and also opportunity; (4) a fear that getting those institutional details wrong produces horrible outcomes; (5) a recognition of the importance of government to get details right; and (6) government acts as a balance wheel when the set of savers and investors do their behavioral-economics thing.

Economics as a Vocation

That is how we economists try to sell ourselves, and also how we see ourselves. We as a species have made a choice to organize our very large — now 7-billion-human-wide — social division of labor largely through decentralized arm’s-length market exchange. Such a system has powerful advantages. Such a system also has lots of emergent properties, good and bad, that are nonobvious consequences of institutional and regulatory details. Economists are here to tell you what’s what, and how to do it. John Maynard Keynes The aim is, as John Maynard Keynes said at the start of the 1930s at the end of his talk “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” to be a profession that performs a very useful but not overwhelmingly important role in understanding the economy and how to treat it in a way analogous to the way that dentists perform a useful but not overwhelmingly important role in understanding teeth and how to treat them: “[People should not] overestimate the importance of the economic problem, or sacrifice to its supposed necessities other matters of greater and more permanent significance. It should be a matter for specialists— like dentistry. If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people, on a level with dentists, that would be splendid!”28 Yet, was there ever a dentist who attempted to reshape, in the interest of dental hygiene, the shape of human destiny in the way that Keynes in the interest of economic hygiene tried to do pretty much every day? Here is Keynes reviewing Leon Trotsky’s Where Is Britain Going:

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A CONTEMPORARY reviewing this book says: “He stammers out platitudes in the voice of a phonograph with a scratched record.” . . . In its English dress it emerges in a turbid stream with a hectoring gurgle which is characteristic of modern revolutionary literature translated from the Russian. Its dogmatic tone about our affairs, where even the author’s flashes of insight are clouded by his inevitable ignorance of what he is talking about, cannot commend it to an English reader. . . . The book is, first of all, an attack on the official leaders of the British Labour Party because of their “religiosity,” and because they believe that it is useful to prepare for Socialism without preparing for Revolution. . . . “Together with theological literature, Fabianism is perhaps the most useless, and in any case the most boring form of verbal creation. . . . “That is how the gentlemen who so much alarm Mr. Winston Churchill strike the real article. . . . If only it was so easy! If only one could accomplish by roaring, whether roaring like a lion or like any sucking dove! . . . [Trotsky] assumes that the moral and intellectual problems of the transformation of Society have been already solved— that a plan exists, and that nothing remains except to put it into operation. . . . [But] force would settle nothing. . . . We lack more than usual a coherent scheme of progress, a tangible ideal. All the political parties alike have their origins in past ideas and not in new ideas—and none more conspicuously so than the Marxists. It is not necessary to debate the subtleties of what justifies a man in promoting his gospel by force; for no one has a gospel. The next move is with the head, and fists must wait.29 Did ever, would ever any humble dentist ever write so? On the one hand, Keynes claims to be asserting only a very minor kind of authority — that based on his expert knowledge of the emergent properties of systems of decentralized market exchange — and to be giving merely technical advice about adjustments needed to achieve selfevident and obvious goals, such as full employment, price stability, and healthy increases in productivity. He claims to be performing the economic equivalent of the dentist saying, “You should brush your molars much longer in the morning” and “that tooth has to come out now or you will be in real trouble.”

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On the other hand, Keynes then leverages his professedly limited technical and technocratic expertise to attempt to banish from participation in high politics entire schools of political and moral thought, entire mass movements with their utopian aspirations, and to silence via their exclusion from valid technocratic debate the prophets of those schools of thought and mass movements. Trotsky is indeed a prophet — as Edmund Wilson wrote in his To the Finland Station: Here are some references [from Trotsky]. . . . “If the prince was not succeeding in peacefully regenerating the country, he was accomplishing with remarkable effectiveness the task of a more general order for which history had placed him at the head of the government: the destruction of the political illusions and the prejudices of the middle class.” “History used the fantastic plan of Gapon for the purpose of arriving at its ends.”. . . History, then, with its dialectical Trinity, had chosen Prince Svyatopolk-Mirsky to disillusion the middle class, had propounded revolutionary conclusions which it had compelled Father Gapon to bless. . . . These statements make no sense whatever, unless one substitutes for the words “history” and “dialectic of history” the words “Providence” and “God.”30 And it is not just Trotsky and his followers whom Keynes wishes to banish. He would apply the same to the stewards of Europe today, and to that part of President Obama who speaks of how because the current Lesser Depression has compelled households to tighten their belts that the government needs to tighten its. As Keynes said back in 1931: It seems an extraordinary imbecility that this wonderful outburst of productive energy [in the boom] should be the prelude to impoverishment and depression. Some austere and puritanical souls regard it both as an inevitable and a desirable nemesis on so much overexpansion, as they call it; a nemesis on man’s speculative spirit. It would, they feel, be a victory for the mammon of unrighteousness if so much prosperity was not subsequently balanced by universal bankruptcy. We need, they say, what they politely call a “prolonged liquidation” to put us right. The liquidation, they tell us, is not yet complete. But

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in time it will be. And when sufficient time has elapsed for the completion of the liquidation, all will be well with us again. I do not take this view. I find the explanation of the current business losses, of the reduction in output, and of the unemployment which necessarily ensues on this not in the high level of investment which was proceeding [during the boom] . . . but in the subsequent cessation of this investment. I see no hope of a recovery except in a revival of the high level of investment. And I do not understand how universal bankruptcy can do any good or bring us nearer to prosperity.31 There is more than a little inconsistency and tension here. Alasdair MacIntyre You can resolve this inconsistency and tension in one of several ways. It is impossible to think about issues of history and moral philosophy, especially here at Notre Dame, without thinking of Alasdair MacIntyre and his brilliant After Virtue,32 surely one of the best and most important books in history and moral philosophy of the second half of the twentieth century. We economists seek to leverage a narrow claim to limited technical and technocratic expertise to banish and dispel the Trotskys and all his peers and all their works— for, in our view, they contain many empty promises. MacIntyre, by contrast, seeks to banish and dispel all of us economists— for we are the archetypes of what he regards as one of the most unhealthy and poisonous diseases of modernity, the disease of “managerialism.” What MacIntyre sees as the vice of the manager — that he or she doesn’t tell you that you ought to do X or not to do X, only how to do X if you decide you should— we see as respect for autonomy, as granting people equal significance to us, and as the virtue of the economist: we are just supposed to tell you what is likely to happen if you do X. Of course, to provide someone with knowledge of the consequences may be simply to give them the kind of freedom that is necessity: the freedom to do what is the right thing. The old Cold War joke was of the strategist who would offer the president three possible options: immedi-

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ate surrender to the Russians, total thermonuclear war, and his preferred policy.33 To the extent that there is no grave disagreement about what the good is and what the ends are, control is exercised not by the one who chooses the ends but rather the one who chooses how the means are evaluated. It is still not completely clear to me what MacIntyre’s root objection to economics in particular and “managerialism” more generally is. The possibilities: • We economists say, “Our technical expertise tells you that if you do X, the effects will be Y,” when we should say, “You need to do X.” • We economists say, “Our technical expertise tells you that if you do X, the effects will be Y,” but we do so because we hold to moral values, Z, that we do not express, and are in fact harmful. • When we say, “Our technical expertise tells you that if you do X, the effects will be Y,” we refuse to stake an explicit claim as to what the moral order inscribed in the firmament is, and so we encourage nihilism by teaching not how to reach the good but how to reach whatever you take to be your good. It is clear to me that Keynes believed in the second of these objections: that economics was good for the body but taught moral values that were bad for the soul, yet in a world as poor as the world Keynes saw, the needs of the body took precedence. When the world becomes rich, Keynes wrote: We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession— as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder

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to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.34 And Keynes briefly detouring into anti-Semitism: “Perhaps it is not an accident that the race which did most to bring the promise of immortality into the heart and essence of our religions has also done most for the principle of compound interest and particularly loves this most purposive of human institutions.” And then calling for, someday, Kingdom Come: a rejection of “managerialism” and of economics as thorough as MacIntyre could wish for: I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue — that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin. But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.35 From this viewpoint, the fundamental difference between Keynes, at least in his “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” and MacIntyre is that Keynes believes that the Kingdom is still a century off, while MacIntyre believes that the Kingdom is at hand.

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Leon Trotsky and St. Benedict But I believe that we can go further. MacIntyre, at least in his After Virtue mode, believes that good civilizations are ones with moral consensus led by prophets, rather than ones with moral confusion managed by managers. It is MacIntyre’s belief that we should hope for a civilization led by Trotskys (less preferred) or St. Benedicts (more preferred), but in either event it is to be preferred to managerial Keyneses. If you step back, however, and inquire into the content of the thisworld secular ideologies of the Trotskys, it then becomes very difficult to prefer the prophetic Trotskys to the managerial Keyneses. Trotsky’s gospel, it turns out, is in reality little more than a managerialist gospel. Trotsky says that History speaking through Marx and him knows how to build a communist utopia. What is a communist utopia? It is a society in which humans pull together and coordinate their activities. It is a society in which people are free to do what they want, within reason of what is not destructive for the community. It is a society in which people are prosperous: well-fed, well-clothed, well-housed, and well-entertained. Trotsky’s gospel is that Keynes’s market economy is incapable of even approaching such a utopia, while Marx and History have together told him how to accomplish it. And here we have to bring in history: the regimes that accepted versions of Trotsky’s gospel in the twentieth century and tried to implement it range from Pol Pot’s to Fidel Castro’s, with Stalin’s and Mao’s regimes at the worst, and something like Erich Honeker’s Stasi-spies-on-everyone East Germany close to the best. The whole point of saying that you would prefer Trotsky to Keynes is that Trotsky has a gospel that, if not true, is true enough to hold society together in moral consensus and produce a modicum of prosperity. But what if Keynes’s managerialism does better at fulfilling what Trotsky claims will be the accomplishments of Trotsky’s gospel more effectively than Trotsky’s does? And it does. We can see that Keynes was totally correct in wanting to reduce the influence of a Trotsky in the public square, because Trotsky’s ideas about good organization of the economy were seen immediately by Keynes as, and turned out to be, a horrible disaster,

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even from the perspective of Trotsky’s values— especially from the perspective of Trotsky’s values. In a similar fashion, many of the same conclusions follow if you step back and inquire into the content of the other-worldly gospels of the St. Benedicts. Their lodestones swing from following the ethical teachings of Rabbi Yeshua of Nazareth to worshipping the Anointed Λόγος that is of a higher order of reality than we, with a certain tension between them. But when Rabbi Yeshua spoke of what the Anointed Λόγος commanded his followers to do in this world, his followers were commanded to successfully attain managerial ends: Then shall the king say to them that shall be on his right hand: Come, ye blessed of my Father, possess you the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry, and you gave me to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me to drink; I was a stranger, and you took me in: Naked, and you covered me: sick, and you visited me: I was in prison, and you came to me. Then shall the just answer him, saying: Lord, when did we see thee hungry, and fed thee; thirsty, and gave thee drink? And when did we see thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and covered thee? Or when did we see thee sick or in prison, and came to thee? And the king answering, shall say to them: Amen I say to you, as long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me.36 That is a very powerful statement that what is sought after is successful managerialism— a successful managerialism with a preferential option for the poor: one that feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, heals the sick, welcomes the immigrant, and visits the imprisoned. Right ritual, right moral orientation, right faith seem to be nowhere — at least in this part of Matthew.37 We Dwell Not in the Republic of Plato but in the Sewer of Romulus

In the last days before the coming of the Roman Empire, Marcus Tullius Cicero in Rome wrote to his best correspondent, Titus Pomponius Atti-

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cus, in Athens: “You cannot love our dear [Marcus Porcius] Cato any more than I do; but the man— although employing the finest mind and possessing the greatest trustworthiness— sometimes harms the Republic. He speaks as if we were in the Republic of Plato, and not in the sewer of Romulus.”38 Whatever you may think about economists’ desires to use their technical and technocratic expertise to reduce the influence of both the Trotskys and the St. Benedicts in the public square, there is the prior question of whether here and now — in this fallen sublunary sphere, among the filth of Romulus— they have and deploy any proper technical and technocratic expertise at all. And we seem to gain a new example of this every week. The most salient relatively recent example was provided by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff 39 —brilliant, hard-working economists both, from whom I have learned immense amounts. Rogoff’s depth of thought and breadth of knowledge about how countries act and how economies respond in the arena of the international monetary system is a global treasure. Reinhart’s breadth and depth of knowledge about how governments have issued, financed, amortized, paid off, or not paid off their debts over the past two centuries is the greatest in the world. However, they believed that the best path forward for the developed economies— the United States, Germany, the UK, and Japan— was for them to shrink their government deficits quickly and quickly halt the accumulation of, and begin to pay down, government debt. My faction, by contrast, believed that the best path forward for these economies was for them to expand their government deficits now and let the debt grow until either economies recover to normal levels of employment or until interest rates begin to rise significantly. Why does my faction disagree with them? Let me, first, rely as an example on the graph in Figure 7.1, which is the product of work by Berkeley graduate student Owen Zidar,40 plotting how economic growth in different industrialized countries in different eras has varied along with the amount of government debt that they had previously accumulated. And let me give the explanation of why I disagree with Reinhart and Rogoff that I was giving at seminars around the country in the early 2010s:

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The argument [for fiscal contraction and against fiscal expansion in the short run] is now: never mind why, the costs of debt accumulation are very high. This is the argument made by Reinhart and Rogoff: when your debt to annual GDP ratio rises above 90%, your growth tends to be slow. This is the most live argument today. So let me nibble away at it. And let me start by presenting [the adversaries’] case in the form of Owen Zidar’s graph. First: note well: no cliff at 90 percent. Second, [the adversaries] present a correlation— not a causal mechanism, and not a properly-instrumented regression. Their argument is a claim that high debt-to-GDP and slow subsequent growth go together, without answering the question of which way causation runs. Let us answer that question. The third thing to note is how small the correlation is. Suppose that we consider two cases: a multiplier of 1.5 and a multiplier of 2.5, both with a marginal tax share of 1/3. Suppose the growth-depressing effect lasts for 10 years. Suppose that all of the correlation is causa-

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tion running from high debt to slower future growth. And suppose that we boost government spending by 2% of GDP this year in the first case. Output this year then goes up by 3% of GDP. Debt goes up by 1% of GDP taking account of higher tax collections. This higher debt then reduces growth by . . . wait for it . . . 0.006% points per year. After 10 years GDP is lower than it would otherwise have been by 0.06%. 3% higher GDP this year and slower growth that leads to GDP lower by 0.06% in a decade. And this is supposed to be an argument against expansionary fiscal policy right now? The 2.5 multiplier case is more so. Spend 2% of GDP over each of the next three years. Collect 15% of a year’s extra output in the short run. Taking account of higher tax revenues, debt goes up by 1% of GDP and we have the same ten-year depressing effect of 0.06% of GDP. 15% now. -0.06% in a decade. The first would be temporary, the second is permanent, but even so the costs are much less than the benefits as long as the economy is still at the zero lower bound. And this isn’t the graph that you were looking for. You want the causal graph. That, worldwide, growth is slow for other reasons when debt is high for other reasons or where debt is high for other reasons is in this graph, and should not be. Control for country and era effects and Owen reports that the -0.06% becomes -0.03%. As Larry Summers never tires of pointing out, (a) debt-to-annual-GDP ratio has a numerator and a denominator, and (b) sometimes high-debt comes with high interest rates and we expect that to slow growth but that is not relevant to the North Atlantic right now. If the ratio is high because of the denominator, causation is already running the other way. We want to focus on cases of high debt and low interest rates. Do those two things and we are down to a -0.01% coefficient. We are supposed to be scared of a government-spending program of between 2% and 6% of a year’s GDP because we see a causal mechanism at work that would also lower GDP in a decade by 0.01% of GDP? That does not seem to me to compute. Now I have been nibbling the RRR result down. Presumably they are trying to see if it can legitimately be pushed up. This will be interesting to watch over the next several years, because RRR is the heart of the pro-austerity case right now.41

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Now, that is as concise and simple an explanation of why I disagree with Reinhart and Rogoff as I can give. If you are not a professional economist and have managed to understand that, I salute you. They disagree with me because, first, they started with different prior beliefs— different assumptions about the relative weight to be given to different scenarios and the relative risks of different courses of action that lead them to read the evidence differently. Second, they made some data processing errors— although those are a relatively minor component of our differences— and are now dug in, anchored to the positions they originally took, and rationalizing that the data processing errors do not change the qualitative shape of the picture. Third, they have made different weighting decisions as to how to handle the data. Is Owen Zidar putting his thumb on the scales, and weighting the data because he knows that the effects of high debt in reducing growth are small? I don’t think so: his weighting scheme is simple, and he is too young to be dug in and have a dog in this fight. But I am, perhaps, not the best judge. But when we venture out of data collection and statistics and the academy into policy advocacy in the public square the differences become very large indeed. Matthew O’Brien quotes Sen. Tom Coburn’s report on Reinhart and Rogoff’s briefing of the Republican Congressional Caucus in April 2011: Johnny Isakson, a Republican from Georgia and always a gentleman, stood up to ask his question: “Do we need to act this year? Is it better to act quickly?” “Absolutely,” Rogoff said. “Not acting moves the risk closer,” he explained, because every year of not acting adds another year of debt accumulation. “You have very few levers at this point,” he warned us. Reinhart echoed Conrad’s point and explained that countries rarely pass the 90% debt-to-GDP tipping point precisely because it is dangerous to let that much debt accumulate. She said, “If it is not risky to hit the 90% threshold, we would expect a higher incidence.”42 I think we have by far the better of the argument. Yet it is very clear that even today Reinhart and Rogoff— and allied points by economists

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like Alberto Alesina, Francesco Giavazzi, and others,43 where I also think we have the better of the argument by far — have had a much greater impact on the public debate than my side has. Thus the key problem of knowledge. Since technical details matter, conclusions must be taken by noneconomists on faith in economists’ expertise, by watching the development of a near consensus of economists, and by consonance with observers’ overall worldview. But because political and moral commitments shape how we economists view the evidence, we economists will never reach conclusions with a near consensus—even putting to one side those economists who trim their sails out of an unwarranted and excessive lust for high federal office. And note that neither Carmen Reinhart nor Kenneth Rogoff have such a lust. We do not live in the republic of Plato. We live in the sewer of Romulus. In this fallen sublunary sphere, the gap between what economists should do and be and what they actually are and do is distressingly large, and uncloseable. And this leaves you— those of you who must listen to us economists when we speak as public intellectuals in the public square — with a substantial problem. Should You Pay Attention to Economists as Public Intellectuals in the Public Square?

You have to. You have no choice. You all have to listen. But you have nearly no ability to evaluate what you hear. When we don’t reach a near consensus, then heaven help you. Unless you are willing make me intellectual dictator and philosopher-king, I cannot.44 Notes 1. See Game of Thrones (HBO), http://www.hbo.com/game-of-thrones. 2. George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones (New York: HarperCollins, 1996 –). Subsequent books in the series were published 1999, 2000, 2005, and 2011.

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3. Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Viking, 1990). 4. James N. Davidson, Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998), 42. 5. See The Oprah Winfrey Show, http://www.oprah.com/index.html. 6. Google Books Ngram Viewer, https://books.google.com/ngrams/, reports an exponential explosion of “political economy” starting in the 1790s; see my own search at http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/04/the-phrase-political -economy.html. 7. See Greg Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 2007), table 10.3, reprinted at http://amzn.to/1Tc5pCq; also Rick Steckel, “Stature and the Standard of Living,” Journal of Economic Literature 33, no. 4 (1995): 1903– 40, https://campus.fsu .edu/bbcswebdav/users/jcalhoun/Courses/Growth_of_American_Economy /Chapter_Supplemental_Readings/Chapter_29/Steckel-Stature_and_the _Standard_of_Living.pdf. 8. Jutta Bolt and Jan Luiten van Zanden, “The First Update of the Maddison Project: Re-Estimating Growth Before 1820,” University of Groningen, 2013, http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/maddison-project/publications/wp4.pdf. 9. See Michael Kremer, “Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 108, no. 3 (1993): 681– 716, http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark /210a/readings/kremer 1993.pdf. 10. Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, vol. 1: The Structure of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California, 1992). 11. Latest estimates from J. Bradford DeLong, “Econ 1: Economic Growth Lecture II,” April 4, 2016, http://delong.typepad.com/files/2016-04-04-econ -1-spring-2016-uc-berkeley-lecture-finance-1.pdf. 12. The two best books to read on the macroeconomics of the past decade are Barry Eichengreen, Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, the Great Recession, and the Uses-and Misuses-of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); and Martin Wolf, The Shifts and the Shocks: What We’ve Learned—and Have Still to Learn—from the Financial Crisis (London: Penguin, 2014). Also very useful is Gary Gorton, Slapped by the Invisible Hand: The Panic of 2007 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 13. State-of-the-art in thinking about these issues is, to my knowledge, Paul Seabright, The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); the brilliant Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon, 1946); and the stimulating but not very reliable Karl Polanyi

The Economist as . . . ? 211 et al., eds., Trade and Market in the Early Empires (New York: Henry Regnery, 1971). 14. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: Strahan and Cadeli, 1776), http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks /3300. 15. See Richard Whately, Introductory Lectures on Political Economy (London: B. Fellows, 1831), https://books.google.com/books/about/Introductory _Lectures_on_Political_Econo.html?id=R549AAAAcAAJ; Salim Rashid, “Richard Whately and Christian Political Economy at Oxford and Dublin,” Journal of the History of Ideas 38, no. 1 (1977): 147– 55. http://www.jstor.org/stable /2708847. 16. Richard E. Ericson, “The Classical Soviet-Type Economy: Nature of the System and Implications for Reform,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 5, no. 4 (1991): 11– 27, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1942862. 17. See Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). 18. Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 306, quoting Viceroy Archibald Wavell’s diary for July 5, 1944: “Winston sent me a peevish telegram to ask why Gandhi hasn’t died yet. He has never answered my telegram about food.” 19. Ronald Coase, “The Problem of Social Cost,” Journal of Law and Economics 3 (Fall 1960): 1– 44, http://www.jstor.org/stable/724810. 20. Ibn Khaldun (1377), The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981). 21. Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics (London: Macmillan, 1890), https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/marshall/bk5ch03.htm. 22. Jean-Baptiste Say, Letters to Mr. Malthus on Several Subjects in Political Economy, and on the Stagnation of Commerce (London: Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1821), https://books.google.com/books?id=7iArAQAAMAAJ&pg =PA2&lpg=PA2. 23. John Stuart Mill, “The Influence of Consumption upon Production” (1829), published in John Stuart Mill, Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy (London: John Parker, 1844), https://books.google.com/books ?id=c-0DAAAAQAAJ. 24. Charles P. Kindleberger, Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises (New York: John Wiley, 1978). 25. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, FRED: Federal Reserve Economic Data, 2016, https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?graph_id=303990.

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26. Barry Eichengreen and Charles Wyplosz, “How the Euro Crisis Was Successfully Resolved,” VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal, February 12, 2016, http:// voxeu.org/article/how-euro-crisis-was-successfully-resolved. 27. See J. Bradford DeLong, “What More Is There to Be Said?” 2011, http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2011/01/what-more-is-there-to-be-said.html, quoting Jean-Baptiste Say, Cours Complet d’Economie Politique Pratique (Paris: Rapilly, 1829), https://books.google.com/books?id=dk5AAAAAcAAJ. 28. John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (1930), in Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (London: Macmillan, 1931), 358– 73. 29. John Maynard Keynes, “Trotsky on England” (1926), in Keynes, Essays in Biography (London: Macmillan, 1933). 30. Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940). 31. John Maynard Keynes, Unemployment as a World-Problem (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931). 32. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). 33. Told to me by my grandfather Earl H. DeLong, a one-time protégé of Richard Helms at the CIA. 34. Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” 369. 35. Ibid., 372. 36. Matthew 25:34 – 40. 37. Or, rather, faith is to be met on the road one then walks. Cf. Daniel Burke, “The Pope Said What?!” CNN, January 19, 2015, http://www.cnn.com /2015/01/19/living/pope-said-what/. 38. Marcus Tullius Cicero (60 BCE), “To Atticus, [in Greece] on His Way to Rome,” Epistulae ad Atticum 2.1.3, https://books.google.com/books?id=an MtAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA119&lpg=PA119. 39. Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, “Growth in a Time of Debt,” American Economic Review, 100, no. 2 (2010): 573– 78, http://www.nber.org/papers /w15639. 40. For the graph in context and Owen Zidar’s work, see J. Bradford DeLong, Laura Tyson, and Owen Zidar, “Debt to GDP Ratios & Future Economic Growth,” University of California, Berkeley, March 8, 2013, http://delong.type pad.com/debt-to-gdp-ratio-and-future-economic-growth.pdf. 41. J. Bradford DeLong, “Understanding the Adversaries,” 2013, http:// delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/04/understanding-the-adversaries-umkc -seminar-talk-slides-330-500-pm-april-5-2013.html.

The Economist as . . . ? 213 42. Tim Fernholz, “How Influential Was the Rogoff–Reinhart Study Warning That High Debt Kills Growth?” Quartz, April 16, 2013, http://qz.com /75117/how-influential-was-the-study-warning-high-debt-kills-growth/. 43. See Francesco Giavazzi and Marco Pagano, “Can Severe Fiscal Contractions Be Expansionary? Tales of Two Small European Countries,” in NBER Macroeconomics Annual 1990, ed. Olivier Jean Blanchard and Stanley Fischer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 75– 122, http://www.nber.org /chapters/c10973; Alberto F. Alesina and Silvia Ardagna, “Large Changes in Fiscal Policy: Taxes Versus Spending,” NBER Working Paper, 2009, http:// www.nber.org/papers/w15438>; Carmen M. Reinhart, Vincent R. Reinhart, and Kenneth S. Rogoff , “Debt Overhangs: Past and Present,” NBER Working Paper, 2012, http://www.nber.org/papers/w18015; Alberto Alesina, Carlo Favero, and Francesco Giavazzi, “The Output Effect of Fiscal Consolidations,” NBER Working Paper, 2012, http://www.nber.org/papers/w18336. 44. Plato, Republic (bk. 5) 473d: “Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils— nor the human race, as I believe — and then only will this our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day. Such was the thought, my dear Glaukon, which I would fain have uttered if it had not seemed too extravagant; for to be convinced that in no other State can there be happiness private or public is indeed a hard thing” ( Jowett translation).

chapter eight

Of Mirrors and Media The Blogger as Public Intellectual       

Introduction

What a difference a decade or so makes. A dozen years ago, a talk about blogs and public intellectuals would have been, if not in the vanguard, then at least still sufficiently fresh to have a glimmer of the unknown and exciting about it. The blogging medium was in its first flush of youth, if not infancy. And there was some excitement abroad in the land then, too, about public intellectuals. That topic was hardly new, of course. But recent works had cast the subject in a new light,1 and relatively recent events— especially the Clinton impeachment, and the contested election between George W. Bush and Al Gore — had raised anew some of the standard but evergreen questions about the role and limitations of the public intellectual in a democracy.2 Today the bloom is off the rose — again. In keeping with Moore’s Law, computing and communications technology continue to increase in speed and capacity. In keeping with the equally inexorable laws of the 214

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academy, other events have evoked other interests. Talk about public intellectuals continues, but not perhaps at the level of activity and enthusiasm that was present a decade ago.3 And bloggers themselves are far from the new kids in town. Many early and prominent blogs, if they still survive, are celebrating their thirteenth anniversaries this year. The medium is in adolescence, at least. Or even at best. Given the rise of Twitter — a communications medium that tops out at 140 characters per post and is itself now arguably past its prime —blogging, although it continues marching right along, might already be approaching senescence. That makes it a less exciting time to talk about either bloggers or public intellectuals, perhaps. But it also allows some space for reflection and assessment of both phenomena and their relationship. I have been blogging since 2005, on the popular legal blog Prawfsblawg.4 Prawfsblawg is a group blog, meaning that the burden of keeping it going is shared among a number of permanent writers and a changing cast of guest bloggers. Our blog is populated by law professors, so naturally we write a great deal about technical legal issues and intramural matters concerning the American legal academy. But, both as a matter of personal inclination and because law reaches so widely and deeply into so many aspects of human affairs, we are free to comment on a vast number of issues, giving us a good vantage point from which to do what public intellectuals so often do: to take the whole world as their subject. In its first decade, Prawfsblawg had 6 or 7 million unique visits to our blog, a number that has increased steadily since then.5 Even assuming that most of those visits come from repeat customers, it is certainly a much larger readership than we could have hoped to achieve as academics alone, writing in academic venues. Eleven years is a long time to be blogging. Many bloggers quit after a while or allow their blogs to lie dormant,6 or find that their blogs are simply never visited. It is certainly long enough to suffer from the blogger’s disease, which may simply be a species of the writer’s disease generally: a sense of exhaustion and repetition, a loss of one’s sense of purpose. On a more global level, it’s long enough to begin entertaining some serious doubts about the whole enterprise. As my online career (along with the rest of me) approaches middle age, I have indeed experienced some strong misgivings about blogging. My own sense of doubt and exhaustion

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as a blogger will certainly color what I have to say here about the blogger as public intellectual. But there is a larger question here. For blogging, I will argue, is just a medium, just a particular medium or technology of communication. It has some unique features, but ultimately it is not that different from any other medium through which public intellectuals speak. It may be, I will suggest, that the doubts and enervation of which I speak may not be unique to blogging either. Rather, they may just be a local example of a broader set of doubts about the very enterprises of public intellectualism and public commentary altogether. In the end, then, examining the topic of “the blogger as public intellectual” allows us to raise doubts about not only about the particular activity of blogging but also about the public intellectual enterprise in general. Before setting out, I must offer an important caveat. As Michael Desch notes in the introduction to this volume, American efforts to address almost any issue tend to suffer from a combination of exceptionalism and parochialism. That will certainly be true of this chapter. My observations about the blogger as public intellectual will mostly have to do with American blogs and bloggers and the American audience for them. I will have little to say about the role of blogs, or of public intellectuals, beyond our borders. That’s an important omission. Blogs may fill a different and much more essential role elsewhere in the world—especially in places where access to communications media of any sort is limited and public engagement, from intellectuals and others, is both more urgently needed and more frequently suppressed, as in the Arab Spring. In such environments, blogs can serve an important role in routing around government censorship or private media monopolies. Other authors in this volume know much more about these matters; indeed, some of them have personal experience of blogging under those kinds of regimes. I gratefully leave those questions to them.

Blogs as/and Mirrors

Let us begin with an analogy. Consider a common, utterly unexceptional object: the mirror. A mirror is a reflection, just a reflection. It does noth-

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ing more than throw back the image in front of it. No one gives mirrors any thought. But the mirror is also, of course, a technology, an invention.7 The earliest known mirror dates back to around 6200 BCE.8 The mirror began as a sacred object and eventually became a more secular object, but still a rare luxury item.9 Like many technologies, the mirror underwent changes in quality and production cost over time, becoming easier to produce and less expensive to obtain. It went from luxury to staple. And, like any technology, it both reflected and changed its user. It both enables and alters our self-perception.10 It facilitates both vice and virtue.11 Vanity was a cardinal sin before mirrors became easily available, of course, but the mirror is a technology well suited to its spread. At the same time, it can ward off vanity. No matter how tall and handsome I look in my mind’s eye, the mirror brings me back rudely to something like reality. Finally, despite its apparent accuracy, the mirror is still a distortion. Consider the definition of a mirror offered by Wikipedia: “A mirror is an object that reflects light in a way that preserves much of its original quality subsequent to its contact with the mirror.”12 Some of the distortion is in the eye of the perceiver. Everyone is familiar with the phenomenon of raising one’s left hand and seeing the “wrong” hand move in the mirror. And some of it, although it may be imperceptible, is a function of the imperfections of the mirror or the minor changes in light. It’s understandably easy to forget that word, “much.” But it serves to remind us of the basic truth: the mirror is a tool, a technology, one that is easily taken for granted but still imperfect. Like all technologies, it simultaneously serves and changes its user. I shall return to the analogy shortly. But let’s detour for a moment so we can fix in place some definitions. Defining the “public intellectual” can be a difficult and imprecise affair. For present purposes, I use Russell Jacoby’s simple definition of public intellectuals as “writers and thinkers who address a general and educated audience.”13 I would add to that definition that the public intellectual addresses his or her audience on matters of public concern, whether cultural or political. That is a broad but not unlimited definition. Not every intellectual speaks to the generally educated audience. Indeed, given the increasing academization and specialization of the intellectual class,14 few of them necessarily want to do so — or can.

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Nor does every intellectual who does address the general educated public necessarily speak as an intellectual, or on a matter of public concern. It remains to define blogs and blogging. Here, again, I turn for better or worse to a standard definition from Wikipedia. A blog is a “discussion or informational site published on the World Wide Web and consisting of discrete entries (‘posts’) typically displayed in reverse chronological order,” so that the most recently written post appears at the top of the blog, followed by less recent posts.15 The blogging medium arose in the late 1990s, and took off with the development and popularization of Web publishing tools that made it easy for those without coding skills and technical expertise to start and maintain their own blogs.16 Blogging is just the activity of writing and publishing in blog form. And that’s it. That’s all it is. Not every website is a blog. Not every blog is on a matter of public concern. Many are nothing more than reverse-chronological personal diaries or modern versions of commonplace books. Some offer commentary. Others are just aggregators, collectors of links to discussions elsewhere, on- or offline. Few are especially public, whether by design or because they find few interested readers. Fewer still are written by public intellectuals or in the spirit of public intellectualism. Their essence lies not in their content but in their format. Rebecca Blood observes that blogs are “not just a digital variation on an established formula. Everything about them— their format, their reliance on links, their immediacy, their connections to each other — is derived from the medium in which they were born. They are of the Web itself.”17 Her claims to uniqueness might be contested; many blogs closely resemble diaries. But her claim that the blog’s essential nature is formatbased and Web-dependent seems quite correct. If this definition seems unglamorous and detached from concerns with content, it is meant to. A blog is just a particular medium of technology. That is the first of four central points I will make. A blog is a technology — like the mirror. Like the mirror, its development has made what was once a limited good, one available only to the few — in this case, the ability to publish or broadcast one’s views to a wide audience — relatively cheap and accessible to many. Like the mirror, it is now taken for granted by most people. Like the mirror, the blog is useful. And like the mirror, it comes with no guarantee of the nature and character of its

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user, or of the attractiveness or utility of the image it displays. Blogging is a communications medium— just a medium.

Blogging and Public Intellectuals

With respect to the question of bloggers as public intellectuals, the introduction to this volume posed two questions: Have the Internet and the blogosphere opened up new vistas for public intellectuals? And, if they have, do public intellectuals acting as bloggers operate any differently than do traditional public intellectuals taking advantage of other conventional communications media? With our definitions in place, we can now answer both questions. On the first question, continuing in my theme of deliberate mundaneness, the answer is certainly yes. Blogs are not unique in this. Public intellectuals have benefited as much or more from the rise of other communications media, such as radio and television, as other speakers. But the blog, as a medium, offers some more or less unique benefits that those other media do not. Public intellectuals have certainly taken advantage of those benefits to open up “new vistas.” Again, keep our deliberately dull definitions in mind. Being a public intellectual simply means communicating to the educated public in an educated way on matters of present and public import. And being a public intellectual blogger simply means logging on to Blogger, or some other weblog hosting site, following the instructions, and starting to write. If that’s nothing fancy, it’s still far from unimportant. The rise of the blog, and of the public intellectual as blogger, reenacts, in somewhat hypercaffeinated form, a phenomenon we have seen many times before, in which navies of writers take advantage of new technologies to set sail on seas of words. In the age before bound print, public intellectuals laboriously filled their scrolls by the dozens. When the age of the folio and the printing press came along, they turned to books, and realized new efficiencies. Rabelais wrote that “all the world is full of knowing men, of most learned Schoolmasters, and vast Libraries.” He added, “It appears to me as a truth, that neither in Plato’s time, nor Cicero’s, nor Papinian’s, there was ever such conveniency for studying, as

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we see at this day there is.”18 The technology of the printing press had given rise to an “ocean of print,” Lope de Vega wrote.19 Much of it, he added, was little more than “froth.” But some of this ocean would represent the rising tide of the Republic of Letters, that celebrated international community of writers and thinkers that helped create and sustain the Enlightenment.20 The same phenomenon was anticipated with the rise of twentiethcentury communications media, such as radio and television broadcasting. Broadcasting pioneer David Sarnoff once hailed radio as “the bar at which great causes will be pleaded for the verdict of public opinion.”21 Similarly, although television was famously derided in the early 1960s as a “vast wasteland,”22 it was once thought to hold the promise of much more. A local broadcaster singled out television’s “unique usefulness as a means of public information” that would contribute to democracy.23 Robert Sarnoff, David Sarnoff’s son, echoed his father in praising “television’s ability to enlighten through its capacity to channel and process the diverse fields of information, knowledge, and experience that characterized the modern age.”24 And despite the continuing prevalence of the wasteland metaphor, television and related broadcasting media have been a boon of sorts for public intellectuals. The rise of the twenty-four-hour cable news network has vastly increased the available space for experts, academics, and other public intellectuals to offer public commentary on current political and cultural events, but few commentators who appear on television, in America at least, stand in the front ranks of public intellectuals.25 The blog, then, is just the latest in a long line of new media that have offered more and cheaper venues for public intellectual work.26 Some of the blogosphere’s most popular writers are public intellectuals, whether academic or otherwise.27 There is no doubt, then, that the blog can open up “new vistas” for public intellectual writers. It is, after all, just a communications medium, as I have insisted. Taking it as a given for a moment, and setting to one side for a moment its own virtues, vices, and emerging norms of discourse, it is certainly capable of serving as a medium of expression for public intellectuals. The examples are legion. More than one author in this volume is a blogger, and some are fairly prominent in the blogging world, Brad DeLong among them.28 Mark Lilla is an occasional writer for the New York

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Review of Books blog.29 Rick Garnett, a commentator on a draft of this chapter, is not only a colleague of mine on Prawfsblawg; he is also the prime mover behind Mirror of Justice, a wonderful blog that features writing from an engaged and politically diverse group of (mostly academic) writers, tied together by their mutual commitment to thinking about various issues through the lens of Catholic social thought.30 Even I might qualify. Much of what I have written on Prawfsblawg, on subjects like church–state relations, affirmative action, and modern culture may well count as public intellectual writing, no matter its dubious quality. In short, a public intellectual can choose to communicate to general educated readers through a blog, just as she can choose to write a trade book or magazine article or go on television. The medium clearly does not somehow preclude its use as a forum for public intellectual discussion. To the contrary, academic and blogger Daniel Drezner has called the Internet in general, and the blogosphere in particular, a potential “aid to the renaissance of public intellectuals.”31

The Ethic of the Blog: Immediacy, Connectivity, Feedback

I have said that blogging is just a communications technology or medium, one that hardly precludes use by public intellectuals for purposes of public intellectual discussion— that has, if anything, been a boon for public intellectual discussion. But of course that is too simple. Whether, in McLuhan’s words, “the medium is the message”32 or not, the medium undoubtedly influences the message. More particularly, it influences both the messenger — her identity, the style of her message, even the message’s content — and her intended audience.33 This is not unique to blogging. Even writing technologies, let alone different technologies of information dissemination, can alter their user and the nature of her work. Having made the switch from composing by longhand to using a typewriter, T. S. Eliot observed, “I find that I am sloughing off all my long sentences which I used to dote upon. Short, staccato, like modern French prose. The typewriter makes for lucidity, but I am not sure that it encourages subtlety.”34 Everyone old enough to

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have ever written on something other than a computer, myself included, knows that word processing programs, too, fundamentally changed the way we think and write. What is true for the mere method of composition is also true for the medium of communication. That is true for the content of the communication, whether it involves text or visuals, photographs or film. It is true, too, for the means of dissemination, whether it is cheap or expensive, broadcast or accessible only to a few, live or time-delayed, and so on. The blog is no different on that score. For the topic at hand, it is no worse. There is no reason to think that the blogosphere is more ill-suited as a medium for public intellectual communication than other communications media, and it might be better than some. But it is surely true that the blogging medium affects both the content of the public intellectual communication and the experiences of both the public intellectual and her audience. Each medium or technology of expression has its own virtues and vices, its own modality. In his book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr puts it in similar terms, writing that each “intellectual technology . . . embodies an intellectual ethic.”35 Writing initially “reflected, and reinforced, the intellectual ethic of the oral culture [from] which it arose.”36 In time, “writing began to take on, and to disseminate, a new intellectual ethic: the ethic of the book.”37 That ethic favored silent, lengthy, private research and writing. It favored extended, “deep” reading. And it came to take “originality of thought and creativity of expression,” as opposed to the transmission of tradition, as “the hallmarks of the model mind.”38 It encouraged, even created, habits of work, of expression, and of mind that influenced both the speaker — no longer a “speaker,” but a writer, although we still often use those terms interchangeably — and the audience, or reader. We must now ask: Is there an ethic of the blog? If so, how might it influence the use of that medium by public intellectuals, for good or ill? In the broadest sense of the word “blog,” taken to mean nothing more than a set of posts published online in reverse-chronological order through blogging software, the answer is that there is no distinct, universal “ethic of the blog.” A blog is just a device for making web pages less static. Its contents may include diary entries, restaurant reviews, trenchant commentary on the Arab Spring, serialized pornography, on-the-

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ground reporting, or commentary on daily Bible verses. A blogger can post once an hour or once a year. Or a blogger could simply reprint, in whole or in part, material that was first published elsewhere, such as a magazine or a book. But that’s not really the whole answer either. More narrowly, there is an ethic of the blog, or at least an emerging, albeit contested, ethic of the blog.39 It characterizes many of the sites that we tend to think of as exemplary blogs, including those written by public intellectuals. It is influenced by, and in turn has exerted an influence on, the general culture and unique technological capacities of the World Wide Web — its “ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity.”40 As we will see, the ethic of the blog speaks, in both positive and negative ways, to the questions we are asking here about the phenomenon of public intellectual as blogger. Moreover, I will ultimately suggest, it may speak to the broader questions posed by this volume concerning the value of public intellectuals altogether, no matter the medium through which they speak. As I have already said, the ethic of the blog is an emerging ethic. It is still in flux. My sense is that, at least in my own corner of the blogosphere, the world of American legal academics’ blogs, it is currently experiencing some serious growing pains. Nevertheless, as a first approximation, I would suggest that the ethic of the blog is made up of three core qualities: immediacy, connectivity, and feedback. Just about anyone who has spent any time reading blogs will find these familiar concepts. But let me take a few moments to discuss each of them in turn. Immediacy The problem to which blogs were a response was that web pages are static by nature. As Scott Rosenberg writes in his history of blogging, “Newspapers and magazines are date-stamped bundles of information; each new edition supersedes the previous one. TV and radio offer their reports in real-time streams, a continuum of ‘now.’ But Web pages are just files of data sitting on servers.”41 They either stay inert and become outdated, or are revised, but with little or no indication of when they were updated and what preceded them. The reverse-chronological, sequential format of blogs was the solution to the “unexpectedly confounding” problem of

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“telling people what’s new” online.42 Blogging thus facilitates, and ultimately encourages, immediacy. Blogospheric norms encourage fairly quick reactions to current events—“hot takes,” as current lingo has it — whether those events are occurring in one’s own life or across the world. A blogger who sits on an event or an idea risks having that idea or news item become stale. Staleness is especially problematic in a quickly moving environment with countless competitors, all of whom operate at relatively low cost and are equally capable of being accessed instantly by readers. The blogosphere is no place for an idle or contemplative writer. If you have more to say about something, you can always write a new post later. In the meantime, the race goes to the swiftest. That norm, in turn, interacts with developments elsewhere on the Internet. Those developments were themselves spurred on by the rise of the blogosphere itself. More conventional institutions, such as newspapers and magazines, quickly came to realize that they were competing with bloggers for readers’ attention. They responded by uploading content to the Internet more and more rapidly. Contrary to the hopes of those who saw the medium as a breeding ground for a new form of amateur journalism,43 blogs generally rely on established news media for original reporting.44 Thus, as the conventional news media took their reporting online and sped up the transmission process, bloggers were given more new content to cite, link to, and comment on more often. Because blogs that don’t regularly update their content are seen as moribund and stop drawing new or return visitors, the bloggers have every incentive to keep up with the increased production of online news items. (And vice versa, alas. A new and dreadful specialty in journalism is the lazy, hysteriafeeding story based on and transcribing fights on Twitter.) In short, an ever-increasing pace of immediacy tends to become a self-sustaining norm in the blogosphere.45 On the positive side of the ledger, the blogosphere’s tendency toward immediacy means that important events—and, to be sure, many unimportant or evanescent events—are quickly linked to, disseminated, and analyzed for a potentially vast audience. In some cases, the commentary on those events will come from individuals—including academic or nonacademic intellectuals— who have true expertise and insight into those issues.

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Of course, there is also a negative side. Immediacy is no guarantee of depth. To the contrary, the faster one’s reactions, the less likely they are to contain any depth at all. Many blog posts, especially in light of the desire to be first to link to a new story, become simple “aggregation” posts: posts that do no more than link to a story or to commentary on other blogs, without adding any content other than the obligatory “Interesting” or “Read the whole thing.” The initial post may promise later posts offering more and deeper analysis, but such promises are often forgotten in the press of events or superseded by other developments. Expert bloggers, whether academic or otherwise, might be expected to enjoy an edge here, since they can bring their knowledge to bear more quickly on an event within the sphere of their expertise. Readers may thus realize a net benefit from the presence of public intellectuals on the Web who stand ready to fire up a blog post about an important new event. Against this, however, three factors must be considered. First, many public intellectuals blog about events that are not within their expertise, and will enjoy no particular advantage here. Second, although there will be times when genuine experts are quick to respond to an event with valuable analysis, there is no guarantee they will be any faster than an even larger number of nonexperts, who will be happy to bloviate with stunning rapidity on issues about which they know little or nothing. Third, intellectuals, no less than others, are often captive to their own priors and passions, especially when they are responding in real time. Finally, although some expert intellectuals are skilled at communicating to a general educated audience, others are not — and the nonexperts may be more eloquent or provocative, even (especially?) if they lack more than surface knowledge of the subject. The race for the attention of the blog-reading public goes not only to the swiftest but to the most readable. There is no guarantee that the winners will be the most thoughtful or expert writers. If anything, the ongoing academization of expertise makes this less likely to happen, since most academics are still unused to writing for the general public and are less likely to make the kinds of startling, if benighted, claims that draw public attention. To be sure, one set of public intellectuals may still enjoy an advantage, or at least competitive parity, here: those who are happy to comment on issues on which they enjoy no particular expertise. Some of the

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most popular and active public intellectuals in the blogosphere are those who consider their own relative ignorance no barrier to commenting on current issues— or those who deny that they are inexpert in any subject. Whatever contributions these individuals make to public discussion, however, it is hard to conclude that it will be a genuinely “intellectual” contribution. To the extent that it is, its value-added aspect will have little to do with deep knowledge or insight into a subject, and more to do with the suite of skills that most intellectuals, including academics, bring to any subject — forensic skills, a talent for making fine distinctions, and so on.46 Whether those kinds of skills make a genuine intellectual contribution to public discussion, or are really something closer to parlor tricks or “entertainment,”47 is open to debate, I suppose. Immediacy, in short, benefits readers by giving them quicker access to more information and commentary about more events. But it does so in a way that may disadvantage genuinely expert public intellectuals more than it helps them. To the extent that they are able to compete by putting up shorter posts or keeping their analysis simple, their contributions are less likely to add much of genuine intellectual value to the “public intellectual” discussion of current issues. Connectivity Another fundamental aspect of the ethic of the blog is connectivity. Connectivity is the phenomenon, or more accurately the impression of a phenomenon, in which “everyone is . . . connected to everyone else, and all available information, through instantaneous, multi-way communication.”48 It is a central element of the standard architecture of the blogosphere. Blogs maintain connectivity in a variety of ways. For instance, many blogs maintain a “blogroll,” a list of featured links to other blogs and other sites that the blogger recommends, often because they find those bloggers to be kindred spirits.49 Maintaining a blogroll, and observing a reciprocity norm when it comes to the blogroll, sends signals to readers about whether they are likely to be interested in this blog or not, helps blogs to promote themselves and each other, and enables blogs to get attention and survive by glomming on to more established blogs’ readerships.50

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The most important connectivity norm on blogs, though, is the hyperlink. Linking — providing hyperlinks to content found elsewhere on the Internet — is, writes Yochai Benkler, “the very core idea of the World Wide Web.”51 It is also the signal contribution of the blog to public discourse. As Jack Balkin explains: “Blogs grab quotes and information from other sources, including the websites run by mass media like the New York Times and the Washington Post, and use them as launching pads for commentary. Although a few blogs do original reporting, most of the blogosphere is devoted to commentary.”52 And it is a fundamental norm of the blog to link to your sources. If you are commenting on what Senator Grassley said yesterday in the Senate, you link to online footage of his speech, or to the news story you read that told you what he said. If you are reacting to someone else’s commentary on what Senator Grassley said yesterday, you link to that commentary. If you are a scholar and happen to have a book or article that comes anywhere close to the subject that Senator Grassley addressed, you definitely link to that writing, in the faint hope that some anonymous reader somewhere will surf over to Amazon and purchase your book. Linking has become a “basic characteristic . . . of Internet speech.”53 In one sense, hyperlinks are not new. As Nicholas Carr has written, they may be seen as “a variation on the textual allusions, citations, and footnotes that have long been common elements of documents.”54 And perhaps sufficiently educated readers of a much earlier generation, steeped strongly in a narrower common culture, would have appreciated, as strongly as we appreciate hyperlinks, the rich allusions that now require us to consult annotations when we read the Divine Comedy, The Waste Land, or Pope’s Essay on Criticism. But few people are now so wellread as to have all that information at hand, and in any event our reservoir of cultural resources is now so deep55 and far-flung, and involves so many different media, that the idea of a common cultural vocabulary is itself increasingly dubious. Hyperlinks bring all those resources to us instantly, allowing readers to draw from the same well, to check our facts and question our premises, and to link to the same sources if they choose to comment on their own blog. Thus, as I have written elsewhere, through the linking norm, “blogs form a collective and networked institution . . . it makes sense to say that

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there are no blogs— only the blogosphere. Blogging is a collective enterprise in which much of the value of the medium comes from the connections between blogs rather than the independent content of each individual blog.”56 The relevant functional and cultural unit of the blogosphere is the whole blogosphere, or even the whole Web. Like the brain, it exists largely through its synapses. Feedback A third and final key feature of the blog, one that is both similar and closely related to connectivity, is feedback. Just as it is a blog norm to link to your sources, so it is a standard practice on many or most blogs to provide linkages to your readers— to provide a space where readers may comment on your post. Those commenters will, in turn, respond to and argue with each other. And the blogger herself is frequently expected to enter the fray too, arguing back or, sometimes, confessing error. Feedback is not, to be sure, a universal norm, and it is undergoing major reconsideration in the blogosphere. Responding to comments can be time-consuming and—because many commenters are anonymous, profoundly uncivil, or both—emotionally wearing. The more controversial the post and the more widely read it is, the more time you will have to spend policing your site, weeding and pruning the comments, to maintain its usefulness as a discussion space. If you let the comments space grow untended, as some prefer to do, you risk letting your own space become clogged and polluted by invective or irrelevancies. Some bloggers, and many news sites, have stopped allowing comments or have blocked anonymous comments,57 a trend that shows no sign of slowing. It is still the case, however, that feedback is a standard feature of the blog. The comment feature has “been a unique and tightly integrated feature of blogging since the beginning of blogs,”58 and it remains both popular and characteristic of what the blogosphere offers to public discourse. As tiring and sometimes futile as the feedback norm can be, it can also be productive, corrective, and insightful. At its best, the feedback norm lends the blogosphere a quality that the conventional news and cultural media, which necessarily broadcast from the few to the many and in

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one direction only,59 so often fail to give us— namely, a sense of community, including intellectual community. These three features, then — immediacy, connectivity, and feedback — constitute the core of the ethic of the blog. The ethic of the blog both reflects and facilitates the larger ethic of the Web: the larger technological framework and habits of mind that characterize both the medium and our age itself. They are characterized by what Mark Federman called ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity; what Twitter, in an ad slogan, calls a focus on “what’s happening right now”;60 what Nicholas Carr calls a mental state of “perpetual locomotion.”61 In keeping with its reverse-chronological architecture, the blogosphere is always moving, always linking, always updating, always commenting. It encourages us to constantly refresh— not mentally, but literally and physically —as we look for the next story, the next post, the next thing to link or react to. It is a constant source of potential provocation, information, and inspiration. Yet after a while, we may come to feel that too much information and provocation are not inspiring but enervating. It inspires a kind of “thinking by linking,” in which we can see connections between seemingly distant events and draw insights from those connections. Its capacity to make connections visible and important is surely one of the virtues that we also see in some public intellectual writing.62 But against this, it must be said that thinking by linking rarely embodies another virtue of public intellectual writing, namely, the ability to think and learn by quiet reflection. It economizes on time — or appears to.63 Perhaps most centrally, the blogosphere makes possible a great breadth and wealth of information and opinion. The larger Web “grants us instant access to a library of information unprecedented in its size and scope, and makes it easy for us to sort through that library.”64 The blogosphere does the same for the online equivalent of the periodical section of that universal library, bringing every newspaper, magazine, and opinion journal instantly within our reach. It gives us immediate access to a wide range of events and experts— and to valuable amateur views. It is overwhelming and exhilarating. The ethic of the book gave rise to the Republic of Letters. The ethic of the blog brings us something closer to a Democracy of Letters: a genuine and universal gathering of the demos,

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in which everyone has a voice and a role to play, whether as blogger or commenter. What does all this suggest for the public intellectual as blogger (or vice versa)? To me, it suggests two primary conclusions, each somewhat in tension with the other, and perhaps one larger conclusion. First, the choice of the blogging medium is not all that consequential, in and of itself, for the public intellectual question. Blogging is still just a medium, and a print medium at that. In many respects, as I will suggest in the next section, it is well suited for public intellectuals, and may alleviate some of the concerns that have led in the past couple of decades to talk about the decline of public intellectuals. On the other hand, the medium always affects the message. Our current culture, and the technologies that pervade it, encourage certain habits of mind, certain modes of thinking, reading, and writing. To the extent that it takes place online, and perhaps no matter where it takes place, public discussion— including public intellectual discussion— is bound to take on some of the characteristics of that medium, some of the ethic of the blog. I discuss that prospect in the next section. My larger question, about what blogging says about the public intellectual enterprise altogether, will follow upon that.

What Blogs Do for Public Intellectuals

Blogs and the blogosphere hold out many potential benefits to the public intellectual, and to public intellectual discussion more generally. The primary benefit they offer is to help ward off some of the sources of contemporary worries about the state of the public intellectual world. These are the kinds of worries that have been voiced by Richard Posner and Russell Jacoby, among others.65 According to this view, the world and voice of the public intellectual are fading. The public intellectual himself or herself is disappearing. A good deal of the reason for this is the increasing substitution of academic work for pure public intellectual work. Although many —too many — academics consider themselves public intellectuals, the two activities are decidedly different. Academic intellectual work is, or at least is supposed to be, narrow, specialized, and

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careful. Each of us works in our own little silo, confined to our own field or subfield and isolated from the other silos. Academic work encourages habits of mind, and especially habits of writing, that limit one’s audience to other academics, and generally other specialists within one’s own field. To become an academic is a timeconsuming enterprise. It takes years to be credentialed as an academic, and still more to gain an academic reputation. Gaining that reputation generally requires the academic to write specifically for his or her peers, in a format that is not highly accessible, either in terms of style or content or, in straight physical and financial terms, in terms of the forum of publication; even in the Internet age, academic journals are expensive and hard to find for those who are not affiliated with a university. We write on narrow topics and write to be read and understood by the few, not the many. At the same time, it is — or was, as recently as a decade ago — increasingly hard to be a nonacademic intellectual. Among other things, there are serious financial constraints. Whether you’re referring to the activity or the magazine with that name, it is fair to say that Commentary does not pay the rent. Moreover, the opportunity costs of the nonacademic intellectual life have risen, because the barriers to entry for academic life have fallen, or at least been more equitably applied. In a perverse way, the golden age of the New York intellectuals benefited a great deal from the first- or second-generation immigrant status of many of its charter members, and from anti-Semitism itself.66 The circumstances they confronted gave birth to a generation of intellectual strivers, at odds with the larger culture and driven to engage and criticize it. Their relative lack of access to close alternatives, including safe berths in academe, made the financial and other risks they bore less serious and more worth taking. Grub Street looks pretty good, if you have no other viable options. That’s no longer the case. No insuperable barriers now prevent a Jewish or immigrant intellectual in the West from taking advantage of the many luxuries that the academy has to offer. Why stay on Grub Street if you can get rooms in college on the High Street? And as the academic intellectual option became more available, the nonacademic intellectual option became more difficult to pursue. All the journals that sustained the New York intellectuals and similar groups barely exist anymore; meanwhile, the cost of living in such places has increased dramatically. Poverty

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is bad enough on its own; it looks positively perverse when compared to tenure. All these things, it is said, have contributed to the sickness, if not the demise, of the public intellectual. The rise of the blogosphere has altered this calculus considerably, in three important respects. First, it has made it more possible to be an unaffiliated public intellectual, an intellectual outside the college gates. This is not because it has raised the income of the unaffiliated public intellectual. A few bloggers find ways of monetizing their online work, either directly (through advertisements) or by using their blog readership to leverage book sales and paid lectures. But they are the exception, and for the most part blogging makes Grub Street wages look like a windfall. What has changed is that the blogosphere has made it cheaper to be an unaffiliated public intellectual. For one thing, one’s ability to be an unaffiliated intellectual writer no longer depends on one’s proximity to the publishing centers of New York or London, as it once did. One can live and write anywhere in the world and still have access, both to publishers and editors and to the books and other fodder one needs for one’s writing. Moreover, the role and power of cultural gatekeepers has been greatly diminished. The age of the blogosphere is the age of “routing around.” The gatekeepers have not been toppled, but their importance has been reduced. The blogosphere allows writers to “reach . . . audiences directly, without going through a gatekeeper or an intermediary.”67 Like linking, routing around is a “basic characteristic . . . of Internet speech.”68 Bloggers “bypass the media, which is to say the middle-men, in the public intellectual media market.”69 It is possible to become a public intellectual without first having to satisfy media or academic gatekeepers that you are one.70 Second, the blogosphere has made it cheaper, easier, and more attractive for public intellectuals—especially academic public intellectuals— to actually write for the public, or at least the generally educated public. Again, it is more attractive not so much because the gains have increased, but because the opportunity costs of engaging in public intellectual work have gone down for academics. You simply write and hit send, without incurring the time and money lost in contacting publishers, negotiating with editors, seeking permissions, and so on, all of which takes

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time away from one’s primary academic duties. Academics who harbor an interest in public intellectual work (and many do), but who are on the fence about doing so, are now freer to take up this option. Finally, to the extent that public intellectual work is defined as writing or speaking on matters of present concern, the blogosphere has made it far easier and more attractive to speak to the present moment. Since we have immediate access to the events and documents that we wish to comment about, and instantaneous access to the public discussion itself, we need not worry about lag times in publication, or labor to develop contacts with a daily newspaper or weekly magazine that stands ready to publish our work without much delay. This is a central advantage of the blogosphere for public intellectuals. To be a public intellectual, after all, is not the same thing as being an intellectual. To be a public intellectual, one must be an engaged intellectual, actively involved in commentary and dialogue on matters of current political or cultural concern. The blogosphere makes this much easier. In sum, the blogosphere is unquestionably a boon for the would-be public intellectual. It serves as a counterweight to the “academization of intellectual output [that] created barriers to the flourishing of public intellectuals.”71 It both offers room to the nonacademic public intellectual and lowers the opportunity costs of engaging in general public intellectual work by academics. It “democratizes the function of public intellectual,”72 routing around the traditional gatekeepers and allowing a much wider range of people to make genuine contributions to a true dialogue. The narrative of public intellectuals in decline that was so much in vogue a mere decade or so ago is now in need of considerable revision.73

Problems with Public Intellectual Blogging

That’s the good news. What are the negatives? In what ways does the blogging medium negatively affect the possibility or quality of public intellectual work? There are a number of problems and pitfalls. The question, as we shall see, is whether these problems are unique to the blogger as public intellectual, or whether they are simply a specific case of a general problem with public intellectual work tout court.

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First, public intellectual blogging routinely involves a good deal of illegitimate trading on authority. Many academics are wrongly convinced that they are smart about everything, not just their own corner of their own subject. Although some carefully limit their public writing to their own area of academic specialization, many are eager to write about the same broad political and cultural subjects that all public intellectuals turn to. And in doing so, they are more than happy to flaunt their academic credentials, no matter how irrelevant they are to the subject at hand. Nonacademic public intellectuals can also be dilettantes, of course; probably they generally are. For the most part, however, they have no specific credentials or expertise to trade on. Moreover, we might ask not only whether academics who trade on their credentials have bought themselves some unearned credibility with the public, but also whether their errors and failings away from their own subject will tend to reduce public trust in academics when they are writing within their expertise. Second, public intellectuals, academic or otherwise, are as capable of being ruled by the passions of the moment as anyone else. The immediacy that is one of the core aspects of the ethic of blogging exacerbates those tendencies by removing even the slightest time for reflection and incentivizing them to write quickly. In the grip of their convictions, they are less likely to write with humility or to second-guess themselves, and more likely to make unnecessary predictions, adopt an unwarranted air of certainty, assume the worst of their opponents, and write with a hottempered voice. Third, although blogging public intellectuals are more likely to find a wider audience for their work,74 that audience is not necessarily going to be much more politically diverse. There is debate on this point, but it appears that many blogs, despite the linking norm, mostly link to their ideological compatriots, not to those holding genuinely opposing viewpoints.75 So public intellectual blogging will often consist of rallying the troops rather than questioning one’s own political priors. All these factors will contribute to the error rate of public intellectual bloggers— to the number of misstatements they make and arguments they fail to consider. The linking and feedback functions of blogs may remedy some of those errors, but the tendency of blog readers (and writers) to pay more attention to their ideological confederates than to

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their adversaries suggests that some of those errors will go unspotted or unchallenged. To this, though, must be added the evanescence of the blogosphere. That is my fourth point. If you are the kind of serious public intellectual blogger who is driven to revisit past discussions and admit prior mistakes, the reverse-chronological nature of the blog means that your superseding statement will appear at the top of the blog. But it is also possible you will do nothing of the kind. The moving finger, having pressed “Send,” moves on. Bloggers are free to make inaccurate statements and predictions and then ignore them as they go on to the next day’s controversy —are free, in fact, to build a readership on the basis of provocative posts and predictions in the hope that readers (and perhaps the writer himself ) will forget them by the time they are falsified by events. So are newspaper columnists and public intellectuals writing for print publication or speaking on a broadcast program, of course. Blogs are not unique in their transience or in the short memories of their public. And, as I observed earlier, the proper unit of analysis may be the whole blogosphere, where one person’s error is fodder for another person’s lacerating corrective commentary. But they certainly are transient, and some public intellectual blogging will inadvertently — or deliberately — exploit that fact. Here, the lack of official and permanent gatekeepers, who at their best provide an institutional memory and maintain quality controls, may be a problem for blogs in a way that it is not for established media that have layers of editors and fact-checkers. Finally, even a short stint in the blogosphere teaches that an environment of immediate commentary on events, and one in which bloggers compete for the affections of a large and potentially fickle group of readers, favors a particular kind of skilled communicator and rhetorician rather than the actual expert. Many academics, who often are more skilled at communication with other experts than with the public, start this competition at a deficit. Some public intellectuals, academic or nonacademic, who are somewhat skilled at reaching the public may not possess the particular communications skills that play best in the blogosphere. A short, pithy argument is likely to play better in a world of “hot takes” than the typical New York Review of Books essay. True, the connectivity norm means that readers will at least generally be able to judge for themselves whether

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the blogger is fairly describing some particular text or news event. Nevertheless, blog readers are more likely to favor the fast and clever than the slow and deep. If I may be permitted a lengthy aside, I suspect that this is why lawyers and law professors are among some of the most popular public intellectual bloggers.76 Lawyers possess most of the skills that are key to success in the blogosphere. (And legal academics possess not only lawyers’ skills but also some extra public intellectual chops— and, most importantly, a good deal of free time in which to blog.) Much of human activity and current events intersects with the law, so they never lack for a subject. Legal academics, even more so than social scientists, tend to be intellectual bricoleurs and parasites, borrowing tools and perspectives from whatever field of knowledge seems handy or trendy. The fast turnaround that the blogosphere prefers is made easier for the lawyer by their main skill, which is to engage in skillful, if often half-informed, logicchopping.77 Perhaps most important is that lawyers and legal academics generally possess a decent-sized “bag of rhetorical tricks.”78 Lawyers become skilled at “the rhetorical moves”— analogy, misdirection, appealing variously to facts or law or emotion or authority as the occasion demands, and so on—“that are used to adjust legal doctrines to fit novel cases.”79 The same skills can, of course, be used to fit new (or superficially new) analyses quickly to new events. The fact that they are trained in these rhetorical skills means both that they can use them well and that they can apply them quickly. No wonder that we — and I include myself here — take so readily to blogging. But, whatever lawyers may like to believe about their own genius, these skills conduce to readable arguments, not necessarily to accurate ones. I do not mean this as a fatal criticism of lawyers and legal academics, but it is no high compliment either. But it is the case that our talents make us well suited to public intellectual blogging — and that our success at public intellectual blogging raises questions about the value of that enterprise. So we can conclude that although blogging is “just” a medium, it also affects the nature of public intellectual work within that medium, and the kinds of public intellectual blogging that are more likely to gain

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readers and attention— for better and for worse. Public intellectual work gains a number of advantages from the blogging medium. It can make use of immediacy, connectivity, and feedback to provide a quick, wellsourced, genuinely dialogic conversation about important events. On the other hand, it may suffer in a variety of ways from the same norms, which often reward facile analytical work and rhetorical skills over genuine insight and accuracy. Well into the second decade of the blogging scene, we are happily past the feverish reactions to the blogosphere that characterized its youth: overwhelming enthusiasm or absolute rejection. In its middle age, the public intellectual blogosphere can be appreciated for what it has to contribute to public discourse — so long as the warning “Approach with Caution” is kept firmly in mind.

Conclusion: What Blogs Say about Public Intellectualism

That leads me to a final, somewhat depressing observation. Return to the mirror analogy with which I began. A blog, I said, is just a technology, as a mirror is just a technology. Mirrors merely reflect reality. But they also distort it. And they make our own selves— our few virtues and our many flaws— highly, often painfully, visible. One sort of mirror does an especially good, albeit depressing, job of revealing us to ourselves. Some brave souls equip their bathrooms with high-magnification mirrors. They’re useful, I suppose, for shaving, applying makeup, and the like. But they make it impossible to hide from oneself. A gray hair is a California redwood, a blackhead is Vesuvius. A high-magnification mirror is like Socrates’s classic injunction to “know thyself ”— uttered by a torturer. After more than a decade of writing and reading blogs, many or most of them of a public intellectual nature, I begin to wonder whether the blogosphere is not simply a high-magnification mirror for public intellectualism more generally. To talk about the “public intellectual as blogger” suggests a focus on how public intellectuals fare in this particular medium, what virtues or flaws of the medium are particularly pertinent

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in considering public intellectual work in this location. But although I do believe that there are particular features of this medium, features that are either unique to it or highly developed and salient there, I wonder whether the experience of public intellectuals in the blogosphere does not ultimately say more about the virtues—but more especially, about the flaws — of public intellectualism itself. Considered in this light, it seems to me that examining the question of the blogger as public intellectual may give us less reason to worry about public intellectual blogging as such— and more reason to doubt the public intellectual enterprise as a whole. Consider the flaws, the potential pitfalls, of public intellectual blogging that we examined in the last section. The rapid pace of the blogosphere, driven by the norm of immediacy, may make public intellectual blogging more susceptible to those flaws. The connectivity of the medium, and the availability of feedback from the blog-reading community, may further reveal those flaws—both because our links to sources and our readers’ comments lie near at hand to contradict us and, conversely, because our readers’ enthusiasm for what we write reminds us that we write mostly for an audience of fellow travelers rather than engaging in true dialogue with others. But I am not sure any of these flaws are unique to the medium. To the contrary, most of the flaws that I have discussed in public intellectual blogging are present in public intellectual work of any kind — whether it appears on a blog or NPR, on a computer screen or in the pages of Daedalus. Public intellectuals, whatever their medium of choice, regularly trade on their authority in dubious ways. Like television cops flashing a badge to bully a witness, public intellectuals brandish academic or other credentials to lend an air of credibility to writing on subjects about which they are substantially ignorant.80 Public intellectual writing on current events is often guided far more by passion than reason.81 In the midst of the Clinton impeachment controversy, when the historian Sean Wilentz told the House Judiciary Committee that it “is no exaggeration to say that upon this impeachment inquiry . . . hinges the fate of our American political institutions,”82 and former law professor and judge Robert Bork declared that the failure to remove Clinton from the presidency would be “a clear sign . . . that American morality, including but not limited to our political morality, is

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in free fall,”83 they had two things in common: they were wrong, and they were driven by highly emotional, partisan events. Public intellectuals are human, and humans are susceptible to momentary passions. Since public intellectual work, as I have defined it, is almost always about matters of current moment, this problem is likely to plague public intellectual work as a general rule. Public intellectuals speak to their own kind, just as the rest of us usually do. Like most of us, they would rather preach to the choir than seek out new converts among the heathen. The New York Review of Books letters section may feature some of the most vicious debates in all of modern letters, demonstrating the truism that the debates are so fierce in academia because the stakes are so small. But these are just internecine squabbles. For the most part, the views and politics of its writers, and of its readers, march in lockstep. That’s equally true of the content of Academic Questions, the journal of the conservative National Association of Scholars. Public intellectual work, whether on the Internet or elsewhere, is evanescent. It comes and goes, perhaps making a small splash and perhaps not, and is quickly forgotten. Facts are sometimes challenged and counterarguments made, but soon enough both sides of the argument will recede from memory: “To a considerable extent, the public-intellectual market is a branch of entertainment.”84 As such, whether on blogs or elsewhere, public intellectual work will often rely heavily on the intellectual version of a magicians’ bag of tricks: the kinds of rhetorical flourishes and persuasive tropes that make an argument a pleasure to read but hardly guarantee its accuracy or depth. The most successful public intellectuals are often the cleverest or most enjoyable writers and speakers. Whether they are accurate and whether their insights are meaningful and not just glib are incidental questions. In short, the potential flaws that characterize public intellectual blogging aren’t unique to the blogging medium. Like all media, blogs have distinctive features— among them immediacy, connectivity, and feedback — that influence the nature and quality of the communications found there, sometimes restraining and sometimes exacerbating those flaws. Like all media, blogs affect the message. In the end, however, what they mostly do is enhance our ability to see these flaws afresh. The rapidity, visibility, and sheer novelty of the blogosphere exaggerate the problems

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with public intellectual work (and some its virtues, too). They rehearse the entire history of debates over the value of public intellectualism, like watching a movie at fast-forward speed. But it’s still the same old movie. Thus, we may have begun this journey by asking about the particular relationship between and among blogs, the blogosphere, and public intellectuals. But we end it with a general skepticism about public intellectuals and the public intellectual enterprise altogether. Nothing is new under the sun.

Notes 1. See, e.g., Richard A. Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study in Decline, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Basic Books, 1987). 2. Both are discussed in Posner, Public Intellectuals. 3. Or perhaps, as the title of this volume indicates, it continues unabated, but the focus of that talk has moved away from the United States and toward other places, such as the Middle East, where circumstances make the question of public intellectuals more stimulating and relevant right now. 4. See http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/. 5. See http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=sm7prawfsblawg for the most recent figures. 6. See, e.g., Nate Whitehill, “Top 5 Reasons Most Blogs Don’t Last,” Nate Whitehill, May 15, 2007, http://natewhitehill.com/top-5-reasons-most -blogs-dont-last/. 7. For discussion, see Mark Pendergrast, Mirror, Mirror: A History of the Human Love Affair with Reflection (New York: Basic Books, 2003); Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror: A History, trans. Katharine H. Jewett (New York: Routledge, 2001). 8. See Mark Pendergrast, “Mirror, Mirror: A Historical and Psychological Overview,” in The Book of the Mirror: An Interdisciplinary Collection Exploring the Cultural Story of the Mirror, ed. Miranda Anderson, 1, 2 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007). 9. Ibid., 3. 10. See ibid., 11, recounting the story of the Biami tribe of New Guinea, who had no mirrors and lived near no standing bodies of water. When they first

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encountered mirrors, the anthropologist who supplied them and witnessed the Biami’s encounter with them described their response as “something like Adam and Eve eating the apple in the Garden of Eden, then suddenly becoming selfconscious and covering themselves.” 11. See generally Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror. 12. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror (emphasis added). If ever there were an appropriate occasion to cite Wikipedia in an academic article, I assume an article on blogging would be it. 13. Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals, 5. 14. See generally Posner, Public Intellectuals; Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals. 15. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog. For a dated but useful collection of discussions, see John Rodzvilla, ed., We’ve Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 16. See, e.g., Rebecca Blood, Weblogs: A History and Perspective, in Rodzvilla, We’ve Got Blog, 7, 8. 17. See Rebecca Blood, “Introduction,” in Rodzvilla, We’ve Got Blog, ix, xi. 18. Rabelais, Gargantua (1534), quoted in Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2011), 70. 19. Lope de Vega, All Citizens Are Soldiers (1612), quoted in Carr, The Shallows, 71. 20. See, e.g., Anthony Grafton, Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Laurence Brockliss, Calvet’s Web: Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 21. David Sarnoff, “Uncensored and Uncontrolled,” The Nation, July 23, 1924, 90. 22. See, e.g., Newton N. Minow and Craig L. LaMay, Abandoned in the Wasteland: Children, Television, and the First Amendment (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 3, 185. 23. David Kisseloff, The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1929–1961 (New York: Viking, 1995), 171. 24. See Memories of VideoDisc: Who’s Who in VideoDisc, Robert W. Sarnoff, http://www.cedmagic.com/mem/whos-who/sarnoff-robert.html. 25. See Posner, Public Intellectuals, 26, wherein he notes the “vast expansion of the electronic media, and in particular in the number of radio and television talk shows, with their insatiable demand for expert commentary on matters of public concern.” 26. Ibid., 61: “With hundreds of television channels to fill, with the Internet a growing medium for the communication of news and opinion, and with

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newspapers becoming ever more like magazines in an effort to maintain readership in the face of the lure of continuously updated news on television and over the Internet, the opportunity cost to the media of providing a platform for public intellectuals has shrunk.” 27. Ibid., 402– 3. 28. DeLong’s blog can be found at http://delong.typepad.com/. 29. For a list of his posts there, see http://www.nybooks.com/contributors /mark-lilla/#tab-blog. 30. See http://www.mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/. 31. Daniel W. Drezner, “Public Intellectuals 2.0,” May 2008, 2, http:// www.danieldrezner.com/research/publicintellectuals.doc. Drezner quotes Siva Vaidhyanathan, a well-known media studies professor, who concluded, “There has never been a better time to be a public intellectual, and the Web is the big reason why” (ibid.). See also Posner, Public Intellectuals, 402– 3, wherein he notes, in an afterward to the paperback edition of his book on the decline of public intellectuals, that in the first edition he had overlooked the rise of blogging and its contributions to the resurgence of public intellectuals. 32. See Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Message (New York: Bantam Books, 1967). See also Gregory Wolfe, Intruding upon the Timeless: Meditations on Art, Faith, and Mystery (Baltimore: Square Halo Books, 2003), who states that “[McLuhan] was essentially right. The medium does have a substantial impact on the message” (68). 33. See, e.g., Mark Fenster, “The Opacity of Transparency,” Iowa Law Review 91 (2006): 926: “One need not go to McLuhanesque lengths to recognize that individual media technologies shape the form that messages take and establish distinct dynamics in the relationships between sender and receiver.” 34. Carr, The Shallows, 209. 35. Ibid., 45. 36. Ibid., 67. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. For an early take, see Paul Horwitz, “Or of the [Blog],” NEXUS 11 (2006): 45. 40. Mark Federman, Why Johnny and Janey Can’t Read, and Why Mr. and Mrs. Smith Can’t Teach: The Challenge of Multiple Media Literacies in a Tumultuous Time, undated, http://individual.utoronto.ca/markfederman/WhyJohnny andJaneyCantRead.pdf (quoted in Carr, The Shallows, 111). 41. Scott Rosenberg, Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters (New York: Broadway, 2010), 8.

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42. Ibid., 9. 43. See, e.g., Scott Gant, We’re All Journalists Now: The Transformation of the Press and Reshaping of the Law in the Internet Age (New York: Free Press, 2007); Larry E. Ribstein, “From Bricks to Pajamas: The Law and Economics of Amateur Journalism,” William & Mary Law Review 48 (2006): 185; J. D. Lasica, “Blogging as a Form of Journalism,” Online Journalism Review, May 24, 2001, http://www.ojr.org/ojr/workplace/10179958873.php. 44. See, e.g., Neil Weinstock Netanel, “New Media in Old Bottles? Barron’s Contextual First Amendment and Copyright in the Digital Age,” George Washington Law Review 76 (2008): 952, 964n54 (collecting sources); Robert Niles, “Are Blogs a ‘Parasitic’ Medium?” Online Journalism Review, March 2, 2007, http://www.ojr.org/are-blogs-a-parasitic-medium/; Richard A. Posner, “Bad News,” New York Times Book Review, July 31, 2005, 1. 45. Because the burden of keeping up with the constant outpouring of news items and other occasions for commentary is too great for all but the most enthusiastic individuals, we have seen the rise of group blogs, in which the work is shared among several permanent or guest writers. 46. See, e.g., Steven Brint, In an Age of Experts: The Changing Role of the Professions in Politics and Public Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 163. In this, I doubt that they are very different from past generations of noted public intellectuals. In looking back at, say, the body of work of the New York intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century, I am struck by how ephemeral much of that work was, and how much of it was simply a well-written statement of the conventional wisdom of a particular class of individuals about public issues about which they had little real knowledge to contribute. Similarly, Richard Posner has noted, in his evaluation of public intellectual writing, the frequency with which many noted figures, despite the superficial attractiveness of their analysis, opine on issues about which they know little. See Posner, Public Intellectuals, 76– 77. 47. Brint, In an Age of Experts, 168. 48. Federman, Why Johnny and Janey Can’t Read, 11. http://individual .utoronto.ca/markfederman/WhyJohnnyandJaneyCantRead.pdf. 49. See, e.g., Dan Hunter, “Open Access to Infinite Content (Or ‘In Praise of Law Reviews’),” Lewis & Clark Law Review 10 (2006): 761, 770. 50. See, e.g., Ribstein, “From Bricks to Pajamas,” 191; Bradley M. Bakker, Note, “Blogs as Constitutional Dialogue: Rekindling the Dialogic Promise?” N.Y.U. Annual Survey of American Law 63 (2007): 215, 230. 51. Yochai Benkler, “Through the Looking Glass: Alice and the Constitutional Foundations of the Public Domain,” Legal & Contemporary Problems 66 (2003): 173, 220.

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52. Jack M. Balkin, “Digital Speech and Democratic Culture: A Theory of Freedom of Expression for the Information Society,” N.Y.U. Law Review 79 (2004): 1, 11. 53. Ibid., 13. 54. Carr, The Shallows, 90. 55. Or, anyway, so wide. 56. Paul Horwitz, First Amendment Institutions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 57. I have taken a middle ground. I generally prefer to allow comments, including anonymous comments. But I am more inclined these days to block comments altogether when I write on a topic that experience has shown me is likely to draw a more uncivil crowd. 58. Corbett Barr, “Debate! Should You Allow Comments on Your Blog? Find Out What Two Remarkably Popular Bloggers Think,” ThinkTraffic, January 12, 2011, http://thinktraffic.net/debate-should-you-allow-comments-on -your-blog-find-out-what-two-remarkably-popular-bloggers-think. 59. See Horwitz, First Amendment Institutions, 166; Balkin, “Digital Speech and Democratic Culture,” 10: “Mass media are asymmetrical and unidirectional.” 60. Carr, The Shallows, 158. 61. Ibid., 164. 62. Although he is on the popular side of public intellectualism, his ability to draw connections, and particularly to draw connections between the social sciences and our daily lives, is what has made Malcolm Gladwell not only popular but also in many senses the public intellectual most representative of our age. See also Drezner, “Public Intellectuals 2.0,” 10, wherein he notes that contemporary public intellectuals are more likely to draw on the social sciences than the humanities. 63. See, e.g., Carr, The Shallows, 132– 33, where he discusses studies showing the distracting effects of multitasking, on or off the Internet. At our original symposium, many audience members were students, watching from their dormitories. I was delighted to have a larger audience, but wondered how many of them were busying themselves with other tasks and distractions while listening to my talk. 64. Ibid., 143. 65. See, generally, Posner, Public Intellectuals; Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals. 66. See, e.g., Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 20, 68, 132. 67. Balkin, “Digital Speech and Democratic Culture,” 10.

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68. Ibid., 13. 69. Posner, Public Intellectuals, 403. 70. It also makes it possible for a more diverse range of intellectuals, ideologically and otherwise, to bypass the gatekeepers and find a public voice. See, e.g., Posner, Public Intellectuals, 403, where he observes that the blogosphere has allowed a significant number of libertarians, whose voices were heard less often under the gatekeeping regime, to become successful public intellectuals. 71. Drezner, “Public Intellectuals 2.0,” 14. 72. Henry Farrell, “The Blogosphere as a Carnival of Ideas,” Chronicle of Higher Education, October 7, 2005, B14. 73. See, e.g., Posner, Public Intellectuals, 403– 4. 74. Cf. Drezner, “Public Intellectuals 2.0,” 12, where he notes that academic and other public intellectuals are among some of the most widely read bloggers. 75. See Yochai Benkler and Aaron Shaw, “A Tale of Two Blogospheres: Discursive Practices on the Left and Right,” American Behavioral Scientist 56, no. 4 (2012): 459– 87 (collecting sources and summarizing the debate). 76. Also blessed with an advantage are journalists with a background in magazines that specialize in deliberately, sometimes glibly and puckishly, contrarian takes on the news, such as The New Republic. The success of bloggers like Andrew Sullivan and Mickey Kaus are good examples of this phenomenon. 77. In a different way, this is a skill possessed by economists, who have a ready-made set of tools close at hand that can be applied to nearly any situation. Economists have also been very successful bloggers. 78. Richard A. Posner, “In Memoriam: Bernard D. Meltzer,” University of Chicago Law Review 74 (2007): 435, 437. 79. Richard A. Posner, “Law Reviews,” Washburn Law Journal 46 (2006): 155, 156. In the legal public intellectual world, but not the public intellectual blogosphere, an exemplary user and abuser of these kinds of rhetorical skills was the late Ronald Dworkin, who enjoyed great if dubious success as a public intellectual. 80. See, e.g., Posner, Public Intellectuals, chaps. 3, and 10; cf. Ward Farnsworth, “Talking Out of School: Notes on the Transmission of Intellectual Capital From the Legal Academy to Public Tribunals,” Boston University Law Review 81 (2001): 13; Neal Devins, “Bearing False Witness: The Clinton Impeachment and the Future of Academic Freedom,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 148 (1999): 165. An excellent example is Elaine Scarry, a well-known English professor whose recent subjects include torture and air crashes. The New York Review of Books, apparently unwilling to let a perfect name slip through its clutches, published two articles by Scarry on the latter topic.

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81. See Posner, Public Intellectuals, 107: “The academic is accustomed to conducting research in depth, at his leisure, before formulating a conclusion. He is a fish out of water when asked to opine on events that are unfolding before his eyes as he speaks.” 82. Ibid., 122. 83. Ibid., 123. 84. Ibid., 72. More specifically, Posner argues that public intellectual goods “are entertainment goods and solidarity goods as well as information goods” (ibid., 3). Solidarity goods are “symbolic goods that provide a rallying point for like-minded people” (ibid., 42). This is consistent with my point about public intellectuals, like others, preferring to preach to the choir.

chapter nine

Science in the Crosshairs The Public Role of Science and Scientists  . 

According to a popular online encyclopedia,1 science can be defined as “a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.” Science is the source of fundamental concepts like the Copernican model of the solar system, the atomic theory of matter, and the cell theory of biology. Science enables us not only to reach into the most profoundly small features of matter, but also to extend our imagination and understanding to grapple with the immensity of the cosmos. It enables us to ask fundamental questions about where we came from, and how we came to be. Scientists, naturally enough, are those who participate in that “systematic enterprise,” building and organizing ever more knowledge of the natural world. Their expectation, and ours, is that they will continue to push the enterprise forward, that they will discover new knowledge, and this in turn will lead to an ever greater understanding of the universe. Despite that expectation, “intellectual” is not a term most scientists would use to describe themselves. Scientific work, to be sure, requires intellectual 247

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rigor of its participants. But the active and empirical nature of most scientific inquiry does not quite fit with the passive and reflective image conjured up when one applies the term “intellectual” to describe a professional career. Many scientists have carried out groundbreaking work that has brought them immense fame within the scientific community, but they nonetheless cannot fairly be considered public figures or “public intellectuals” in any sense. An example can be found in the remarkable work of geneticist Barbara McClintock. Her career was devoted to the study of inheritance in maize, and well before the era of molecular genetics, McClintock revolutionized biology by discovering an unexpected degree of plasticity in the genome. Her discoveries of how certain genes can change physical positions on a chromosome, almost literally “jumping” from one point to another, thereby affecting their own expression and that of neighboring genes, were decades ahead of the field. When her insightful work was fully appreciated, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology in 1982, the first woman to win an unshared Nobel in that field.2 McClintock’s work was truly revolutionary, but she was never a public scientist in any sense of the term, despite her groundbreaking contributions to genetics. Her story is not at all unlike that of others whose work has been recognized and honored by the scientific community but who remain unknown to the general public. Indeed, even those who, like McClintock, win the Nobel Prize discover that the recognition brings them, at most, a fortnight of fame in which their every utterance is considered quotable. After a few weeks, the “Nobel moment” fades, their access to the media becomes limited once again, and any chance to play the role of public intellectual is gone. However, one can indeed cite a number of scientists whose careers would still fit any definition of public intellectual. These include some whose work has garnered the acclaim of the Nobel committee, including Albert Einstein, Linus Pauling, and Steven Weinberg. It would, of course, also include some whose scientific work has not won such honors. Recent names that come to mind are Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, and Richard Dawkins. Each of these has done important scientific work, to

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be sure, but each is thought of far more for their public persona than their theoretic work or fundamental discoveries.

Possible Roles for a Public Intellectual of Science

What are the proper, and the possible, roles for a public scientist? One obvious calling for such individuals would be to advise the public and government officials on matters of scientific importance. Asked to pick an example from history, one might think of the 1939 letter from Albert Einstein to President Roosevelt describing the possibility of developing, as he put it, “extremely powerful bombs of a new type.”3 Speaking for many in the physical science community, Einstein’s prestige virtually guaranteed that his letter would gain attention at the highest levels of government, and so it did. What followed was the Manhattan Project, the atomic bomb, victory at the end of a horribly destructive war, and the recognition that warfare had been changed forever. Another role might be to direct and advocate for the research enterprise itself. Thinking again of the Manhattan Project, we might call to mind Robert Oppenheimer, an extraordinary scientific manager who marshaled the conflicting talents and personalities of hundreds of researchers to bring the project to fruition. Oppenheimer also proved to be a master at navigating the intricacies of political and military bureaucracies, a talent that is still essential for scientific leadership in the present day. Francis Collins, currently director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is an example of such a public advocate today. Despite initial misgivings voiced by some about Collins’s religious beliefs,4 he has been a tireless and effective public voice for biomedical research and for the scientific integrity of the NIH. Within the scientific enterprise itself, one might see another role, specifically, to provide new directions and insights that will change the direction of fundamental research. A contemporary example for this might be Peter Higgs, who predicted the existence of the particle that now bears his name, for which substantial evidence has been discovered at CERN

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within just the last year.5 Higgs himself is often described as being publicity shy, but the prominence of his work, now recognized by a Nobel Prize, has clearly lifted his name and work into the public sphere. Last, I can think of one more role for the public intellectual of science, which is to educate the public and popularize science. Two examples should suffice: Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould. Both were prolific writers of popular books, both were highly credible public figures, well regarded by the media, and both became household names associated with their disciplines, astronomy and evolutionary biology, respectively. Given the extent to which funding of science depends upon public support in a modern democracy, one can argue that this role of the public scientist has become even more important in recent years. So, which of these four roles is most important and which should assume primacy in our expectations for the public intellectual of science? The answer is simple: all of them. Each of these reflects an important role that scientists play in the public square, each has a value of its own, and each is vitally important to the health of the scientific enterprise. As I will argue, however, taken together they point to an even more fundamental and inclusive task that falls to public intellectuals of science. That task, perhaps unfortunately, is necessitated by an emerging force in American public life — the rise of science denial.

Science Denial in the Public Square

One does not have to look very deeply into reporting by the press and electronic media today to find myriad examples of the denial of mainstream science by public figures and even by the media itself. The popular satirical program The Daily Show made light of this in a segment featured on October 26, 2011, and broadcast by Comedy Central.6 In the span of just a few seconds the program strung together video quotations from a series of presidential candidates denying the reality of global climate change (businessman Herman Cain), evolution (former Sen. Rick Santorum), and the safety of vaccines (Rep. Michelle Bachmann). To top things off, the program showed a video of Texas governor Rick Perry claiming that scientists routinely manipulated data to ensure that “they

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will have dollars rolling into their projects.” These claims were followed by an assertion from a political strategist,7 who is a frequent guest on the Fox television network, that “scientists are scamming the American people right and left for their own financial gain.” The examples ridiculed on the The Daily Show were hardly isolated. In addition to the cases cited on that program, the public square now includes resistance to the idea of cosmic expansion (often called “the big bang”), rejection of renewable sources of energy, and the claim that foods produced from genetically modified organisms are dangerous and unhealthy. I do, however, want to focus on one example in particular that concerns me because of its overall importance to our society, to our understanding of ourselves, and to the life sciences in general. That is the denial of evolution. The United States is the Western industrialized country with the lowest acceptance, by a large margin, of the theory of evolution.8 In most polls, fewer than half of Americans accept the theory of evolution as an explanation for the origin of species, and in some surveys, more than 40 percent of the American people believe that human beings were created in their present form less than 10,000 years ago.9 Such views are reinforced by well-funded efforts by antievolution organizations, such as the Kentucky-based Answers in Genesis, which in 2007 opened a $27 million creation museum in northern Kentucky to argue the point. My own interest in evolution denial has two sources. The first, naturally enough, is that I am a biologist. As the biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky once wrote, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”10 Today, evolution is the central organizing principle of the biological sciences, so an outright rejection of evolution amounts to a rejection of the life sciences themselves. The second source is a bit more personal. In the early 1980s I was contacted by a former student, Joseph S. Levine, and asked to work with him to coauthor a textbook on biology for high school students. The result of our collaboration, after many years of writing and rewriting, has been a series of very widely used high school biology textbooks, which have found their way into each of the fifty states and many foreign countries.11 These books, as one might expect, feature evolution as the unifying principle of biology, which it most certainly is.

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One of the results of publishing such a book was that it immediately became a target for critics of evolution. In Cobb County, Georgia, for example, school authorities attached disclaimer stickers to the textbook,12 informing students that evolution was “a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things.” This action eventually led to a lawsuit and a federal trial,13 but it was just one of many examples of antievolution activity throughout the United States. Some of these were summarized in a cover story in Time magazine aptly titled “The Evolution Wars.”14 As noted earlier, evolution was actually an issue, and quite a prominent one, in the presidential campaign of 2012, when a number of presidential candidates came out and clearly stated they did not accept the scientific evidence for evolution.15 Sadly, all of this has been noticed in other countries, and has given rise to serious international concern about the state of science in the United States. In 2011, Great Britain’s popular science magazine The New Scientist published a special report on the situation entitled “Unscientific America—A Dangerous Retreat from Reason.”16 Their concerns built upon an earlier editorial article in the journal Nature with the ominous title “Science Scorned.”17 As the authors of that editorial observed, “The anti-science strain pervading the right wing in the United States is the last thing the country needs in a time of economic challenge.”

Kitzmiller v. Dover

Although international concerns about the state of American science apply across the board, evolution merits special attention by virtue of its prominence among antiscience activists. Such activism reached the boiling point in 2004, when the school board of Dover, Pennsylvania, instructed biology teachers in the local high school to prepare a curriculum featuring “intelligent design” to present to students as an alternative to evolutionary theory. Despite the very real risk of losing their jobs, the teachers refused. The school board was then reduced to writing a fourparagraph lesson on intelligent design that their professional staff then read aloud to students while their actual teachers stood outside in the hallways of the school. Within a few days, eleven parents of students in

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the school filed a lawsuit arguing that intelligent design was religion, not science. The lawsuit claimed that by inserting intelligent design into the science classroom, the Dover board had violated the parents’ First Amendment rights not to have an agency of the government support or endorse a particular religious point of view. This case, Kitzmiller v. Dover,18 moved to trial with surprising speed. Nine months later, in September 2005, the trial opened in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania. Following a nine-hour deposition in May 2005, attorneys for the plaintiffs asked me to serve as lead witness on the opening days of the trial. Nothing in a scientific career could have prepared one for the ordeal of cross-examination by a skilled opposition attorney, but I did manage to summarize my experiences for my inquisitive colleagues. As I was to tell them when I returned to campus, my two days on the stand “were like having the oral exam for my Ph.D.—over and over and over again.” In advance of the trial, many advocates of intelligent design saw this case as a chance to vindicate their ideas as legitimate science. Not only did they have the support of the local school board, but the case was also to be heard in front of Judge John E. Jones III, a conservative Republican recently appointed to the bench by George W. Bush. Some even fantasized about a strategy in which the “Darwinists,” in court and under oath, might be broken down and forced to admit that evolution was, in fact, a lie. In reality, the events of the seven-week trial took matters in exactly the opposite direction. By the time the trial drew to a conclusion, intelligent design had collapsed as anything even remotely resembling a scientific theory. The only remaining suspense was how sweeping the judge’s decision against the school board might be. It would be sweeping indeed. On December 20, 2005, it became clear that Judge Jones had rejected each of the arguments made in defense of the Dover board’s actions. His decision was front-page news in both USA Today19 and The New York Times20 and was featured across the nation in news broadcasts that evening. How great was the cultural and political significance of the trial? To date, four books21 now document the twists and turns of legal, scientific, and philosophical argument that occupied Jones’s courtroom for forty days, and two television documentaries, one by the BBC and

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another by PBS, analyzed the trial. Accepting the military metaphor wholeheartedly, the BBC program was aptly named “A War on Science.” In many respects this trial was a case study in the very subject of this volume, namely, the role of the public intellectual. Attorneys for the successful plaintiffs assembled a team of six expert witnesses to make the case for evolution. Significantly, only two of these were scientists (paleontologist Kevin Padian from the University of California at Berkeley and I). Joining us were a theologian ( John Haught, Georgetown University), an expert on science education (Brian Alters, then of McGill University), and two philosophers (Barbara Forrest of Southeastern Louisiana University and Robert Pennock of Michigan State University). As the case developed over several weeks, we first established the scientific status of evolutionary theory, and the lack of similar standing for “intelligent design.” Shifting from science to the humanities, our team then explored the philosophical, theological, and historical underpinnings of antievolution movements, with special reference to the origins of “intelligent design” as a carefully designed strategy against evolution. Alters used this background to explain the educational damage that might be done by the insertion of antiscientific arguments into the science classroom. Finally, we returned to scientific issues when our final expert witness, Padian, testified on the nature of the fossil record and the extensive support it provides for the evolutionary process. In the aftermath of the trial, it was clear to all of us that the common efforts of attorneys, witnesses, and most especially the courage of both plaintiffs and the Dover science teachers had carried the day. In one of several gatherings after the case, some suggested we should regard this as a signal triumph for public science and the work of the public intellectual. At one of these discussions, Plato’s concept of the philosopher-king was brought up. No one was impertinent enough to suggest we had all become philosopher-kings, but at least for a moment, in that courtroom, I might have suggested that was exactly the role we had played. Scientists as Philosopher-Kings

Over the years I have toyed with that idea a little bit, and wondered what might happen if we regarded scientists, and public scientists in particu-

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lar, as modern-day equivalents of Plato’s philosopher-kings. In such a world, we might gather and house these brilliant people at a central location, perhaps at National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC. And we would expect them to issue wise dictates on major issues of public importance. In a sense, that’s exactly what the National Academy has done, many times, with respect to evolution. In 2006, for example, they issued a booklet intended to settle the issue, entitled Science, Evolution, and Creationism.22 Turning the pages of that document, one might well say, “You know, if only the people in Dover had listened to the philosopherkings of the National Academy, they could have been spared the trial, the trauma, the expense, and the publicity.” Clearly, however, the opinions of experts at the National Academy carried little weight with the Dover Area Board of Education, and similarly with the American public with respect to evolution. So, why not change things? Should scientists play a determinant role in decisionmaking in our society? In other words, should we simply put scientific intellectuals in charge of any public issue with scientific content? Or, should we be content with a situation in which, as physicist Lawrence Krauss lamented, “distinguished scientific minds at our research universities and other national labs— provide advice that is routinely ignored.”23 Even though the philosopher-king role might have appeal to scientists who find themselves frustrated by an apparent lack of input into public policy, there are serious problems with any proposal that would place scientists alone in charge. Problem number one, you might say, comes to us courtesy of Adam Smith and John Locke, great minds in economics and in political theory. What might their approach be to a very clear and present danger to our planet? That danger, of course, is the way in which human activity is changing the climate of our planet. Scientifically, the evidence is unmistakable. The extent of the Arctic ice cap has been shrinking year after year, and is now approaching the point at which the Arctic Ocean may actually become navigable in summer, causing ocean levels to rise worldwide.24 What’s causing this and many other indications of warming in the global climate? The scientific data are clear. Human activity has dramatically increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The concentration of carbon dioxide, which acts as a greenhouse gas, does

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fluctuate on a yearly cycle, but the overall trend is obvious. Yearly average levels have increased from roughly 315 parts per million in 1960 to more than 400 parts per million today.25 As a result of yearly atmospheric increases in this heat-trapping gas, the planet is getting warmer. There are, to be sure, many other factors that influence the global climate, but the scientific consensus is overwhelming that human use of fossil fuels is a major factor in these trends. What science has done is to identify both cause and effect of a potentially destructive process now taking place on the planet. We know cause; we can see the effect. Now, what is to be done? Can and should the philosopher-kings of science dictate a solution? The answer to that is, perhaps unfortunately, not exactly. Even though science can tell us in principle what might work in order to slow the rate of global warming, any conceivable remedy to the problem involves both economics and politics, even if both should be informed by science in an enlightened society. In economic terms, all potential solutions have costs, and therefore a pricing mechanism must come into play to determine which are best, and which might actually cost more than they might save. Likewise, in political terms, all potential solutions adversely affect some people while benefiting others. Scientific intellectuals, however empowered or well intentioned, cannot tell us if we should adjust the oil depletion analysis, place a tax on carbon, subsidize solar and wind energy, or merely prepare to face the costs of warming temperatures and rising seas. Each of these questions has a scientific component, but none has a purely scientific answer. Therefore, political and economic processes must be part of any solution, leaving scientists in the roles of advisors, rather than philosopher-kings. Another example, perhaps somewhat more trivial, might serve to make the point, especially to anyone familiar with local politics in New York City. In early 2013 the city government, led by Mayor Bloomberg, enacted a ban on the sale of high-volume sugary drinks. Bloomberg’s goal was to combat obesity by outlawing “big gulp” drinks sold by convenience stores and fast-food restaurants. The ban ran into legal trouble almost immediately, as noted by a news website with the headline “Bloomberg’s Supersize Soda Ban Rejected by Judge, but Backed by Science.”26 Quite frankly, that headline was simply wrong. Science has indeed made a connection between the consumption of large amounts of sugary drinks and

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obesity. But science cannot, at this point, show a connection between a public policy banning such drinks and any improvement in human health. Going further along these lines, one confronts serious issues of personal autonomy and the reach of state power that cannot be trumped by scientific studies or pronouncements. If, in fact, the state were to invoke “science” to ban all foods that might be unhealthful if consumed in large amounts, it would surely mean the end of fried chicken restaurants, barbecue joints, taverns, and maybe even of the custom of enjoying a rich dessert after a fine meal. As a scientist who enjoys these things from time to time, I would strongly protest. A second concern, beyond political and economic theory, casts the philosopher-king model in an even more doubtful light. That is the question of how to achieve scientific consensus. Some issues (climate change and vaccination come to mind) have indeed achieved consensus within the scientific community, but in other cases this is far from true. One current example involves a potentially deadly variant of the influenza virus known as H5N1. In 2011 two groups of researchers announced that they had isolated mutants of the virus that could be transmitted from one animal to another by respiratory droplets. Science and Nature received manuscripts from the laboratories describing their results, which included the genetic alterations allowing airborne transmission of the virus. Almost immediately, the National Science Foundation’s advisory Board for Biosecurity recommended that the papers not be published unless those critical details were removed.27 A moratorium on publication and certain types of research resulted. Many in the research community felt that experiments on transmission of the flu virus might enable potential bioterrorists to weaponize the virus, and therefore should be halted or suppressed. Others spoke up for the open reporting of results, arguing that sharing research data was the surest way to speed scientific progress, and to develop new therapies against the virus. In the end, the year-long moratorium was lifted and research resumed.28 In retrospect, I regard the decision to lift the moratorium as absolutely correct. When the details of this work were finally published, our understanding of the molecular biology of infectious diseases was enhanced, and new research possibilities became apparent. One of these may have already borne fruit, with the discovery, late in 2013, that standard flu

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vaccines can provide protection against a potential H5N1 pandemic.29 In the end, however, a critical issue remains. There is still no clear international consensus on which kind of studies are worth the risk, which are not, and how to evaluate the danger they might pose to the public. This is exactly the problem we would face in giving scientists absolute control over such decisions. Almost inevitably, we in the scientific community will favor data publication over data suppression, and complete transparency despite concerns for public safety. The brief, but telling, storm over H5N1 research was just a hint of controversies we will face in the years ahead as research on infectious disease becomes more precise —and generates even greater cause for concern. The H5N1 story leads us directly to a third problem with the philosopher-king model, namely, science in the service of power. Science is neither intrinsically good nor evil. But the history of the twentieth century shows us that science has been used to aid some of the most despicable crimes that humanity has ever inflicted upon itself. Nazi Germany is an obvious and well-documented example.30 But Nazism was not an isolated case. It is worth remembering that the excesses and oppression of communist states were once justified as “scientific socialism.” In the Soviet Union, science was invoked routinely to justify totalitarian measures intended to produce an “ideal” society, even to the detriment of science itself.31 In Western countries today, where one might not feel the need to worry about communism or fascism— there remains an issue of what one might call “corporatism,” the corporate control and domination of science. A majority of the funds supporting research and development in the United States today now comes from private industry, far outpacing the public support provided by institutions such as the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation.32 This means that a majority of scientific research carried out today in the United States has been funded on the basis of potential profit for its corporate sponsors rather than knowledge for its own sake. Although the motives of corporations may not be truly sinister, corporate science is nonetheless very much science done in the service of power, and self-interest is then clearly a matter of concern. This is the final, and perhaps the ultimate, reason why the philosopherking model of the public intellectual of science should be rejected.

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Science as a Culture

In spite of the complexities presented by the many topics in this volume, with respect to science I find myself presenting a single thesis with respect to the role of the public intellectual. The task of the scientific intellectual is not merely to tell us what it is true, as valuable as that might be. Rather, it is to spread the culture and the values of science. I will offer two examples of individuals who have done exactly that. The first is Sean B. Carroll from the University of Wisconsin.33 Carroll is not only an outstanding scientist who has done fundamental work establishing the field of evolutionary development biology, often known as evo-devo, but he is also a first-rate popularizer of science. Carroll is the author of several books for general audiences, the first of which, published in 2005, was Endless Forms Most Beautiful.34 The book’s title is a phrase taken from the last sentence of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, and Carroll’s use of the phrase is appropriate in every sense. In this book Carroll explained, in clear and gripping prose, one of the great discoveries of modern developmental biology. That discovery is that the animal body is modular, made up of a series of repeating parts. This modularity is a kind of construction kit with which evolution can tinker. As he explains, very small changes in regulatory genes and proteins affect the position, timing, and shape of these modules. As a result, the size, shape, and form of the body, and its coloration, can be dramatically altered by remarkably small changes in DNA. I highlight Carroll’s achievements in this and several other books not only because he so clearly explains the emergence of a new understanding of the evolutionary process, but also because he has done something else, almost without trying. In his open and conversational style of writing, he has given his readers a chance to understand the logic of science itself, the procession from idea to experiment, to observation, and finally to the synthesis of concepts and theories. This is no mean feat, but happily there are others who have done as well. One such person is Neil Shubin, paleontologist at the University of Chicago. In 2004 Shubin led a team that was to make one of the most important fossil discoveries of this century, a specimen known as Tiktaalik, which shows how lobe-finned fish made the transition to tetrapods, four-legged land vertebrates. After completing scientific descriptions of

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this work with his colleagues, Shubin set about to place this work in context. The result was a remarkable book called Your Inner Fish.35 In it, Shubin used examples from the medical anatomy classes he has taught to explore the ways in which the human body is based on a modified fish skeleton and body plan. Almost immediately the peculiarities of human anatomy, from the complexities of cranial nerves to curiosities of embryonic cell movements made perfect sense, as Dobzhansky would have said, in the light of evolution. Like Carroll’s, Shubin’s achievement goes beyond the mere explication of scientific facts and discoveries, and it gets to the heart of the scientific process itself. In so doing, he draws the reader into the process of discovery and interpretation, opening up the scientific enterprise as a way of thinking and a way of understanding. This, I would argue, is the critical mission of the public intellectual of science. Quite frankly, many of us in the scientific community have failed in this task, and that is one of the principal reasons why many core scientific concepts have gained so little traction in the public square. The doubt and dispute that always seems to surround evolution is an indicator of exactly this problem. To be sure, there are many reasons for the continuing public rejection of evolution, with religious resistance foremost among them. But surely another reason is that we, meaning scientific intellectuals, have often failed to tell the story of our origins in a clear and compelling way. And that’s true even though the evidence of evolutionary change is very clearly written even into the human genome itself. In the Kitzmiller trial, we decided to base part of our case on the hope that we could indeed open up the workings of science in a way that would allow the judge to become part of the very process of scientific reasoning. To set the stage, we pointed out that there is abundant evidence of our common ancestry with other primates, including the great apes. However, despite that evidence, there is a bit of a mystery residing in each and every human cell. We humans carry forty-six chromosomes, while all the other great apes have forty-eight. Since chromosomes come in pairs, with each of us inheriting twenty-three from our mother and twenty-three from our father, this means that humans are missing a pair of chromosomes that each of the other great apes still possess.

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What might have happened to that missing pair of chromosomes, I asked? The judge clearly was intrigued. In response to questions, I pointed out that our ancestors couldn’t have simply lost those chromosomes due to damage or genetic error. The loss of both members of what is known as a homologous pair of chromosomes would have been fatal. So the only possibility consistent with the notion of evolutionary common ancestry is that two chromosomes, still separate in our primate relatives, were accidentally fused to form a single chromosome in the lineage that led to us. Chromosome breakages and fusions happen all the time, they are generally heritable, and therefore this would explain why we carry forty-six chromosomes. However — and this is why evolution is science, not conjecture or speculation— this explanation makes a testable prediction. That prediction is that each of us should carry remnants of a chromosome fusion in our genomes today. If evidence for such a fusion were lacking, then the notion of evolutionary common ancestry would be in serious trouble. Next, we wondered out loud how one could possibly find such a chromosome. The answer turns out to be remarkably simple. The tips of every chromosome are marked by a highly repetitive DNA sequence found in the region known as the telomere. In addition, near the center of every chromosome is an equally special region called the centromere. If one of our chromosomes had been formed by the recent fusion of two chromosomes still separate in the other primates, we would expect to find telomere DNA where it doesn’t belong, right at the middle of the fusion site. Likewise, we would expect to find two centromere regions. So the prediction, by which evolutionary ancestry may be tested, is highly specific. At this point I could see that the whole courtroom was waiting for the solution to this small mystery. We didn’t keep them in suspense. Human chromosome number 2 has each of these markers. It’s got telomere DNA at the fusion point, and it has the remnants of two centromere sequences. What’s more is that these match the centromere sequences of chimpanzee chromosomes 12 and 13, and the genes found on these chromosomes correspond quite closely to those found on either side of the fusion point in human chromosome 2. Our own genome confirms the evolutionary prediction. Common ancestry is thereby tested, and confirmed.36

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The effects of this brief dialogue between witness and attorney were very clear. It would have been one thing to tell the court what science had concluded, leaving that assertion to stand or fall on the credibility of a specific witness or the general reputation of scientists as truth-tellers. But it was quite something else to take a court, step-by-step, through the process of inquiry, hypothesis, testing, and interpretation that is at the heart of the scientific method. This, I would argue is what scientists must do routinely in the public square.

Scientists as Public Intellectuals

Clearly, public scientists have filled a variety of social and political roles. They have served as advisors on public issues, as authorities on questions of fact, as leaders on issues of education and research, and as popularizers of the scientific enterprise. All of these roles are important, but I believe that one is primary, and that is to open the process of science in a way to make it understandable and thereby more accepted and more valued. Inspired by a scientist who was a master of exactly this role, I’ve sometimes told popular audiences of yet another example of the evidence for human evolution. Look at any textbook on human embryology, and you will notice that early in human development a large, empty sac forms right next to the cluster of cells that will form the embryo. That structure is known as the yolk sac— and yet, it contains no yolk. It’s called a yolk sac by analogy with birds and reptiles, in which a similar structure forms to enclose the yolk that will nourish the embryo as it develops. Placental mammals, of course, derive their nourishment from their mothers via the placenta, and therefore have no need to form such a sac, but it appears nonetheless. Why should mammals like us form a yolk sac if our eggs have no yolk for it to enclose and feed to the embryo? The answer, from evolutionary history, is that the empty sac is a reflection of the fact we evolved from animals (reptiles, specifically) in which the yolk sac did indeed perform the function that it does in other animals today. Their yolk is especially rich in fats and a protein known as vitellogenin, which the yolk sac

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mobilizes to nourish the developing embryo. Its persistence in placental mammals is an interesting hint at our evolutionary past. But this is the age of the genome, and from that arises a precise way to test what some might regard as a just-so story. If the ancestors of mammals once had yolky eggs, the mammalian genome must have once had genes for the yolk protein vitellogenin. Could the genes for vitellogenin still be in our genome even though we never make this protein? The surprising answer is yes. The human genome actually contains three vitellogenin genes, each the nonfunctional remnant of corresponding functional genes for vitellogenin found today in birds.37 But there is more to the story. We can actually trace the loss of the vitellogenin genes by the number of mutations they have endured. When this is done, we can follow the evolutionary pathway from reptiles to egglaying mammals, like the platypus, and eventually to placental mammals like us. Quite clearly, in our own genome the loss of these genes parallels the evolutionary development of mammals. If our species had been uniquely and intelligently designed, there would be no reason to give us nonfunctional genes, coding for a nonexistent yolk protein. But if we are organisms with an evolutionary past, these yolk protein genes, just like the fused chromosome, become perfectly explicable. My telling of this story is frankly inspired by the late Stephen Jay Gould, who called this sort of thing “a senseless sign of history.” As Gould wrote in one of his many popular books, “Darwin reasoned, if organisms have a history, then ancestral stages should leave remnants behind. Remnants of the past that don’t make sense in present terms— the useless, the odd, the peculiar, the incongruous— are the signs of history. They supply proof that the world was not made in its present form.”38 As Gould would have agreed, those yolk genes are indeed “the signs of history.” The world was not made in its present form, and neither were we. In terms of an absolute model of the public intellectual, it would be difficult to make a better choice than Gould, who was not only an incredibly prolific writer but also an inspirational one. Despite his dazzling productivity as the author of books, articles, and opinion pieces, Gould found time to enter the public imagination in other ways. A number of years ago, I served on the board of science advisors to an eight-hour

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series on PBS called Evolution.39 When we sought a scientific authority to come on camera and explain the intricacies of evolutionary theory, Gould was the obvious choice. His performances for that series were brilliant, as he presented evolutionary theory in language that is so clear and so compelling it couldn’t help but resonate with the lay audience. We shouldn’t have been surprised at his effectiveness. Gould was such a frequent guest on television and radio programs that he even appeared as a character on The Simpsons, a popular cartoon series. In American culture today, few accomplishments attest more to the extent of one’s public persona than appearing on The Simpsons, and Gould did exactly that. His career remains as a model for the public intellectual of science. At its best, the intellectual role of the public scientist may be thought of as something akin to art or literacy criticism. Reviews of art or literature often tell us explicitly what is bad or what is good about a piece of work, but such criticism implicitly has a much higher goal. That is, to connect the world of the artist with the experiences, values, and sensibilities of the artist’s audience. Artistic criticism, at its highest level, opens the world of art in a way that allows the work of the artist to be appreciated, evaluated, and understood in the most profound sense. So it is with the work of the public scientist. I would argue that the role of such a scientist is to open up the enterprise by making its techniques, its findings, and its goals clear and accessible to the general public. At its most basic level, this may manifest itself as a willingness to interact with the media, and to be available to groups, organizations, and schools to explain and to present the findings of science. If done well, however, a great deal more can be achieved. The role of the public scientist is not, as I have emphasized, just to tell us what is “true,” but to open the doors to the process by which science advances to a greater understanding of the natural world. In essence, the goal should be to spread the culture, the values, and even the romance of science itself. Our ultimate goal, which I am optimistic enough to believe is within reach, should not be to place science in a position to dictate or decide the future directions of society. Rather, it must be to enable society to see, to understand, and even to experience science in a way that makes the enterprise a valued and essential part of the political, artistic, literary, and popular cultures.

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Notes 1. Wikipedia, of course. The article on “Science” from which this definition is taken was accessed on October 21, 2013. 2. McClintock’s life and work were wonderfully described in Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1983). 3. The letter is dated August 2, 1939, and was sent to the president from Einstein’s residence on Long Island, New York. 4. Sam Harris, “Science Is in the Details,” New York Times, July 26, 2009, A21. 5. Evidence for the Higgs was reported in a number of scientific publications. A summary of the data is available here: A. Cho, “Higgs Boson Makes Its Debut after Decades-Long Search,” Science 337 (2012): 141– 43. 6. The title of the segment was “Weathering Fights—Science: What’s It up To?” It was broadcast on October 26, 2011, and was narrated by Daily Show correspondent Aasif Mandvi. 7. Noelle Nickpour. 8. See, for example, J. D. Miller, E. C. Scott, and S. Okamato, “Public Acceptance of Evolution,” Science 313 (2006): 765– 66. 9. A Gallup poll dated June 1, 2012, reported that 46 percent of Americans held this view. 10. Theodosius Dobzhansky, “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution,” The American Biology Teacher 35 (1973): 125– 29. 11. The most recent edition of this textbook is K. R. Miller and J. S. Levine, BIOLOGY (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2014). 12. C. Holden, “Georgia County Opens Door to Creationism,” Science 298 (2002): 35– 36. 13. Selman v. Cobb County School District. The case was heard in district court in Atlanta, Georgia, in November 2004, and was later taken up by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. The case citation is 449 F.3d 1320 (11th Cir. 2006). 14. Claudia Wallis, “The Evolution Wars,” Time, August 7, 2005, 26– 35. 15. These included Rick Santorum, Michelle Bachmann, and Rick Perry. 16. The New Scientist, October 29, 2011. 17. Nature 467 (2010): 133. 18. Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. The case citation is 400 F. Supp. 2d 707, Docket no. 4cv2688. 19. J. Lawrence, “‘Intelligent Design’ Is Religious, Judge Says,” USA Today, December 21, 2005, 1.

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20. L. Goodstein, “Issuing Rebuke, Judge Rejects Teaching of Intelligent Design,” The New York Times, December 21, 2005, 1. 21. The books are Lauri Lebo, The Devil in Dover (New York: The New Press, 2008); Matthew Chapman, Forty Days and Forty Nights (New York: HarperCollins, 2007); Edward Hume, Monkey Girl (New York: HarperCollins, 2007); and Gordie Slack, The Battle over the Meaning of Everything: Evolution, Intelligent Design, and a School Board in Dover, PA (San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons, 2007). 22. Science, Evolution, and Creationism (Washington, D C: National Academy Press, 2008). 23. Lawrence M. Krauss, “Deafness at Doomsday,” The New York Times, January 15, 2013. 24. T. Jacob et al., “Recent Contributions of Glaciers and Ice Caps to Sea Level Rise,” Nature 482 (2012): 514 – 18. 25. Source: The Global Monitoring Division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ (accessed on October 21, 2013). 26. Source: http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/03/11/1700421/bloomberg -soda-ban-right-direction/ (accessed on October 21, 2013). 27. M. T. Osterholm and D. A. Henderson, “Life Sciences at a Crossroads: Respiratory Transmissible H5N1,” Science 335 (2012): 801– 2. 28. D. Malakoff, “H5N1 Researchers Ready as Moratorium Nears End,” Science 339 (2013): 16– 17. 29. N. J. Thornburg et al., “Human Antibodies That Neutralize Respiratory Droplet Transmissible H5N1 Influenza Viruses,” Journal of Clinical Investigation 123 (2013): 4405– 9. 30. See, for example, E. Katz, Death by Design (New York: Pearson, 2006), or J. Cornwell, Hitler’s Scientists (New York: Viking, 2003). 31. For a summary of such measures, see G. Fisher et al., Science and Ideology in Soviet Society (Aldine, TX: Aldine Translations, 2012). 32. Changes in the funding of research were described by Joseph V. Kennedy, “The Sources and Uses of U.S. Science Funding,” The New Atlantis (Summer 2012): 3– 22. 33. Carroll is currently serving as vice president for science education at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. 34. S. B. Carroll, Endless Forms Most Beautiful (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005). 35. N. Shubin, Your Inner Fish—The Amazing Discovery of Our 375-MillionYear-Old Ancestor (New York: Vintage, 2008).

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36. The scientific data supporting this analysis can be found in L.W. Hillier et al., “Generation and Annotation of the DNA Sequences of Human Chromosomes 2 and 4,” Nature 434 (2005): 724 – 31. 37. D. Brawand et al., “Loss of Yolk Genes in Mammals and the Origin of Lactation and Placentation,” PLoS Biology 6 (2008): 0507– 0517. 38. S.J. Gould, The Panda’s Thumb—More Reflections on Natural History (New York: Norton, 1980), 28– 29. 39. The PBS Evolution series was originally broadcast in September 2001; see http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/.

chapter ten

Diplomats as Intellectuals An Unlikely Combination  

Introduction: Silent Intellectual?

The Diplomat as an Intellectual Among civil servants, it seems that diplomats should uniquely qualify as intellectuals. Diplomacy may be a profession eventually geared towards action (interacting, representing, negotiating) and one that pursues a practical purpose, namely, to manage relations with other countries, but a disproportionate part of the work of a diplomat has an analytical and speculative dimension: acquiring an in-depth knowledge of other countries, their language, society, and political systems; understanding their objectives and motives, figuring out how they can diverge from, or coincide with, your own country’s interests, devising possible compromises or other ways to achieve your objectives. That work may include field work, contacts, and is often identified with the reputedly futile side of diplomacy — socializing. It nonetheless 268

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in large part results in formal writings, dispatches or telegrams, which include to varying degrees the analytical, conceptual, and speculative dimensions normally associated with intellectual work. Very few civil servants devote as much time to writing as diplomats. That side of their activities is not significantly different from journalism, especially its concern with factual accuracy and timely reporting. Diplomacy is also very close to academic research, even if it is of a highly empirical kind and devoid of the formal canons of university work. Beyond reporting facts and making sense of them like a journalist, the diplomat has a practical question to answer and must hypothesize about it in order to arrive at the most satisfactory answer, not unlike a social scientist. As a result, there has been a degree of porosity between these three professions: a number of journalists and academics have become diplomats, while many diplomats have at one point taught in universities or written in newspapers. In addition, diplomatic writings have always included a significant concern for literary quality. That of course depends on each country’s tradition and has varied over time. However, diplomats, either because they faced the problem of having to capture their limited audience’s attention or as a result of their own idea of their profession, tended to display a disproportionate attention to the style and form of their written work. Diplomats have often been genuine authors, providing accurate, witty, and at times inspired records of the events they witnessed. A case in point is provided by the dispatches of the Venetian ambassadors in Paris at the time of the French Revolution, which remains an outstanding piece of literature.1 That leads us to another porosity, that which exists between diplomacy and the literary profession. Extremely marked in France, it has given rise to what some have called “the myth” of the diplomat-writer.2 Major French writers of the nineteenth century, such as Stendhal or Chateaubriand, had occupied diplomatic positions, even if briefly, which encouraged the diplomats to construct an ideal view of their profession— a view shared to some degree by the public — which combined both activities. In the French diplomatic service, it came close to being a reality in the intrawar period, where half the active members of the service in 1937 had published a book, and 10 percent a work of fiction.3

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That is, of course, an extreme case, and today diplomatic realities are more mundane. Even so, the attention to style, combined with a certain freedom of expression, and, occasionally, to humor, remains common in diplomatic correspondence. It was evidenced by WikiLeaks, which has shown how U.S. diplomats are able to provide independent and colorful information to their government. Beyond the embarrassment, it has served the image of the U.S. diplomatic service well, in particular in the Middle East, where people who used to see American diplomats as blind supporters of the regimes in place now discover that they in fact took a much more nuanced, honest, and critical view of these. Some have suggested that it may have contributed to the downfall of these regimes in the Arab Spring of 2012. Diplomacy is an intellectual activity, meant to support and inform political choices and action. Diplomats are, inasmuch as the term allows, intellectuals— they aim at ultimately having influence on the policy debate and on the conduct of public affairs, a concern they share with public intellectuals. That situation has been reinforced in France by the closeness, social and otherwise, between and among civil servants at a higher level, diplomats, the intellectual class, and the political leadership. That closeness reached a peak under the Third Republic and was evidenced, among others, by Albert Thibaudet in his République des professeurs;4 it has still persisted under the Fourth and Fifth, even though the creation of L’ENA (École nationale d’administration), the national school of government, in 1945, has tended to divorce the recruitment of intellectuals and civil servants. Some of their former proximity remains, however. Can There Be a Silent Intellectual? In the French tradition, an intellectual is a public character expected to play a vocal role in the public debate. Although the word “intellectual” is old in the French language (it appears in the French academy’s dictionary in 1694 as an adjective: “related to the things of the mind, as opposed to bodily ones”), it acquired its contemporary sense at the beginning of the twentieth century, in the context of the Dreyfus affair.5 By that time, the

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word “intellectual” was widely associated not only with being preoccupied with the things of the mind but also with an active presence in the public debate. It can be further argued that this particular reality —a class of knowledgeable people claiming influence on the public debate by virtue of their ability to apply the tools of reason to political and social objects—is much older: it goes back at least to the eighteenth-century philosophes and the French Revolution, where intellectuals exerted a direct influence on events through the sociétés de pensée. Intellectuals were later disparaged under the term idéologues (as of 1800), opening a tradition of anti-intellectualism present ever since on the French Right, but never dominant: even on the Right, intellectuals were seen as a legitimate, and indeed an indispensable, component of the public debate. To this day, intellectuals have remained central in French political life, and they have exerted a considerable influence on foreign policy and on other aspects of French politics. The absence of the expression “public intellectuals” in French is probably a reflection of a powerful tradition of intellectuals assuming a public role and of the fact that everyone in France expects intellectuals to be public. A “silent intellectual,” or a situation when the intellectual class has failed to properly lead the public debate would be an exception, occasionally to be blamed on those too silent or not prescient enough. It is only very rarely that some in France have blamed the intellectual class for intruding in politics and other public issues on which they reasonably could claim no competence and that they have invited them to confine themselves to the advancement of knowledge and the pursuit of higher values.6 Finally, a feature of French intellectuals, and of the French public debate in the twentieth century, and especially after 1945, is its polarity between opposing, and at times extreme, views. Communism was extremely influential and perhaps dominant after World War II among the intellectual class in France. That can be explained in part by the attraction exerted on intellectuals by trenchant, and at times extreme, beliefs. Intellectuals, especially left-wing intellectuals, have been compared to believers, and intellectualism to a religion, as a result (e.g., by Raymond Aron in L’Opium des intellectuels).7

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The Public Debate, Intellectuals, and Diplomats These features of the public debate and of the role of intellectuals in France put diplomats at a marked disadvantage: they are intellectuals of a sort, but bound to remain silent by statute; they are realists interested by facts, in an intellectual world of beliefs; they are moderates, inclined to compromise, among intellectuals attracted by extreme ideas; by profession, they do not put forward their political opinions, in a politicized and polarized public debate. Has public opinion (say, the informed public) expectations of any kind towards diplomats? It has always been ambiguous. On the one hand there is a tendency not to expect ingenuity from diplomats and to doubt their ability to either speak the truth or properly perceive reality: their trade, La Bruyère says, “is to deceive and to be deceived.” That prejudice has always remained strong and persists to this day. (Sarkozy once stated that diplomats were all cowards.) On the other hand, there is an expectation that they possess knowledge that others do not have about distant and complex realities, and that one can learn a good deal more from them. Under that angle, their views have always attracted a measure of interest and respect and have occasionally opposed the statements of people who falsely claimed knowledge of foreign realities they were ignorant of: a point illustrated by the same La Bruyère through the fictional character of Sethon, an ambassador, whose in-depth knowledge of a foreign country is opposed to the boastful ignorance of the courtier Arrias in Les Caractères (1688). Whatever the public may expect from them, diplomats are bound by their profession to remain mostly silent while in office and to keep a measure of discretion afterwards. Not only have they to stay mostly outside the public debate, but they are also subject to a fierce and growing competition. Foreign affairs have never quite been, and are perhaps less and less, regarded as requiring any particular expertise in order to express a valid opinion on them. Intellectuals, politicians, and a variety of people confidently express themselves on foreign affairs without any particular inhibition, and without feeling themselves at a disadvantage vis-à-vis the professionals in that field (as opposed, say, to other professional fields, such as law or medicine).

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All in all, these constraints should disqualify diplomats as public intellectuals. Things are not that simple, though: a number of diplomats have managed to make their voices heard, most often after leaving the diplomatic corps, sometimes in between two assignments, occasionally while in office, a phenomenon increased by the contemporary role of public diplomacy. The principal obstacle to diplomats assuming successfully the role of public intellectuals does not reside, however, in the statutory limits to their ability to express themselves; it is more to be found in the intrinsic requirements of pragmatism and compromise of their profession, which, though compatible with a high level of intellectual ambition, tends to compromise their effectiveness as public intellectuals. The following sections will examine, based on four generations of French leading diplomats, how diplomats have managed to play a role in the public debate, and in what measure they can be regarded as public intellectuals as a result. The result of that inquiry is that only a few stand out as genuine public intellectuals, and even fewer have assumed that position with success. Always, that position has been difficult to assume for them. Beyond the continuity between diplomacy as an intellectual and public profession, and the engagement of diplomats as public intellectuals, there has always been a tension between these two roles. In the end, this chapter seeks to explore that tension, which is telling of what both a diplomat and a public intellectual are.

The Last Moments of the European Concert: The Professionals

The context: the formation of two competing alliances in Europe, the Triple Alliance and the Entente, within the framework of the concert of Europe. Jules Cambon, ambassador to Washington and Berlin, and his brother Paul Cambon, ambassador to Constantinople and London, Camille Barrère, ambassador to Rome, and Maurice Paléologue to Saint Petersburg were key players in cementing France’s alliances with Great Britain and Russia and in detaching Italy from its alliance with Germany and Austria, and later in securing its entry into the war on the French

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side in 1916. The two Cambons and Barrère were intimates. All had taken inspiration from Théophile Delcassé, the French foreign minister who organized these alliances between 1898 and 1905, when he had to resign under Germany’s pressure. Some of their ambassadorships were exceedingly long: Barrère stayed in Rome as ambassador from 1897 to 1924, Paul Cambon in London from 1898 to 1920. They can be labeled as patriots, extremely sensitive to the interests and dignity of their country. But they remained— at least the two Cambons and Barrère, with Paléologue being a more controversial figure in that respect — men of peace, weary of the nationalistic impulse of the press and of public opinion, and eager to shed diplomacy from these and other outside pressures. These included in their eyes those of politicians: the correspondence between Jules and Paul Cambon show them mostly unimpressed by their political masters, whose incompetent interference with the conduct of affairs they frequently deplored. Paléologue was a man of the world and a man of letters, a traditional profile for a diplomat (and a schoolmate of the French president Raymond Poincaré); the Cambons, republicans engaged in politics and heirs of a wealthy family; Barrère the odd man out, the son of a republican schoolmaster who fled to Britain in 1852, himself exiled again after the Commune in 1871 on suspicion of sympathy for the uprising. Two started their career as journalists, Jules Cambon and Paléologue. Do they qualify as intellectuals? Paléologue was a prolific writer, producing more than twenty books on issues ranging from Chinese art to Russia, which was his main topic, and on literature (he wrote on Vigny, Vauvenargues, and Dante) while in office, and on foreign policy after he retired. Jules and Paul Cambon and Barrère were gifted writers and left impressive volumes of letters and speeches, and a few books (including Le diplomate by Jules Cambon,8 a masterful short essay on diplomacy). Paléologue and Jules Cambon became members of the Académie Française. They had independence of judgment and an ability to form their own views, which they expressed outside only with great care: for example, Paul Cambon’s horrific accounts of the massacres of Armenians by the Turks in 1895 appear both in his official and private correspondence; his critical view of the occupation of Rhineland in 1922, in letters

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to his son and friends; or Barrère’s fierce criticism of the British policy of appeasement in letters to influential British friends in the 1930s.9 The ability of Paul Cambon to distance himself intellectually from the policy he served, and to express himself in private letters in the most undiplomatic language, should be noted: for him, for instance, France had no other choice than the Russian alliance, but he identified well its risks for the functioning of the European system. He and Jules sought to alleviate these by working to reconcile Britain and Russia, a goal they eventually helped achieve in 1907. In addition, they acted as a kind of pressure group within the French system and appealed to a larger public to defend their views. They did not hesitate occasionally to circumvent their political masters and appeal to the public, but always with great care. Their reputation had made them a force to reckon with, difficult to ignore for any minister. Their means of communication were letters (among themselves and beyond), the salons (Mme Paléologue had one of her own), conferences, and speeches. (See Jules Cambon’s speeches while ambassador to the United States, published in English in 1905.) They adopted different attitudes when it came to defending their accomplishments beyond their years in service. Paléologue had a lot to do in this respect in view of his controversial role in the crisis of August 1914 and of his affiliation with Poincaré,10 who was disparaged after the war for his bellicose stance and given the nickname of Poincaré-la-guerre. He was the only one to write books about his years in service. Paul Cambon, invited to publish his memoirs as he retired, replied that it would be unbecoming to do so as long as the political issues he had dealt with were active, which he presumed would be the case for thirty years. He added that people involved in politics should refrain from publishing their views except if they had solutions to put forward. These four men were intellectuals and public figures of considerable stature who skillfully used their ability to appeal to a larger audience, both at home and beyond. They were not, however, public intellectuals in the contemporary sense. They saw their trade as an essentially practical one, and despite their many intellectual talents, they would have probably refused to consider themselves as “intellectuals.” The public

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they connected with was a limited one, which they sought to influence on pragmatic grounds, not to convince from a higher standpoint. These limits are no better evidenced than by a comparison with the unique figure of Paul d’Estournelles de Constant.

A Rare Public Intellectual/Diplomat: D’Estournelles de Constant

Born in 1852, d’Estournelles de Constant11 joined the diplomatic service in 1876 and served in Tunisia (under Paul Cambon), Montenegro, Turkey, Holland, became head of the Near East bureau, and chargé d’affaires in London. He resigned in 1895 to become a deputy, and later senator of the Sarthe, a position he kept until 1924. An energetic and eclectic figure, he showed interest in education, automobile, aviation (he financed Wilbur Wright’s first flights in France) while retaining an active role in foreign affairs, on which he wrote extensively in La Revue des Deux Mondes,12 among other journals. His many themes included warnings about the rise of rivals to Europe, such as the United States, Japan, and, in the years ahead, China, and the necessity for Europe, already integrated by markets, science, and technology, to become united. His obsessive concern, however, was the need for Europeans to preserve peace. He argued against the increase in defense spending and for a concerted limitation of armaments. A French delegate to The Hague conferences of 1899 and 1907, he pleaded for the peaceful resolution of disputes through an organization and journal he created in 1905, both called La Conciliation internationale, supported by a wide-ranging network of French and international affiliates. He hoped to enlist America in support of his ideas, arguing that if the United States embraced the cause of conciliation, they could make a difference, as Europe was enmeshed in its illiberal and nationalist tendencies. He met with President Roosevelt in 1902 while on a conference tour in the United States, an encounter said to have contributed to Roosevelt’s decision to submit the border dispute with Mexico to arbitration. He worked to foster the entente between France and Britain and, a much rarer stance for a Frenchman at the time, pleaded for a rapproche-

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ment with Germany, and was in 1903 a founding member of the FrancoGerman Association. The Association, among other things, promoted youth exchanges between the two countries. In 1909 he delivered a speech before the higher house of the German Diet to promote the cause of arbitration and to plea for an improvement of Franco-German relations.13 He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize the same year. D’Estournelles sought support for his ideas from Andrew Carnegie, and he became the chairman of the European bureau of his Endowment for International Peace. He presided over the international commission assembled under the aegis of the Endowment “to inquire into the causes and conduct of the Balkan wars” in 1913.14 After the Great War, d’Estournelles looked back with sorrow on his international accomplishments, and he died having concluded they had failed. He nonetheless deserves to be remembered as a courageous and visionary man, whose thinking closely parallels that of his AngloAmerican contemporary, Norman Angell. His emphasis on the need for a German–French rapprochement to cement peace in Europe, his vision of the geopolitics of the first globalization and of the rise of Asia, his quest for a more united Europe, his humanitarian concerns— all echo contemporary issues. In addition, he was a private diplomatic entrepreneur whose purpose and methods make him a forerunner of contemporary NGOs, only more passionate, and perhaps more disinterested. He had deliberately left the Foreign Service to regain his freedom of speech and action. His positions on Germany were not isolated in France (politicians like Gabriel Hanotaux and Joseph Caillaux shared them), but he was in a minority. Like them, he was not a pacifist: on Alsace-Lorraine, his principle was ni revanche, ni oubli, “neither revenge, nor oblivion,” meaning that the issue should not be closed. In 1914, he supported the war and used his extensive networks in the United States to plead for its entry into war. His daring openings to the German public and political class were nonetheless criticized, not only by nationalists, like Georges Clemenceau, who displayed an intense hatred for d’Estournelles, but also by his fellow diplomat Paul Cambon. In a less-than-friendly letter, Cambon, who had little patience for amateurs’ views on diplomatic affairs, castigated d’Estournelles’s conference in

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Berlin of 1909, reminding him that Germany had put two conditions on any rapprochement with France — the abandonment of any claim on Alsace-Lorraine and the dissolution of the Franco-British alliance — which meant that, as he saw things, the only basis for rapprochement would be humiliation for France. Observing how “difficult it is to discuss suggestions as unspecific and conclusions of such vagueness as yours,” he notes, “you live in so close a tête-à-tête with your own ideas that you admit only facts which seem to accord with your theories; often that accord is but an appearance.” He concedes that “you are full of patriotism and courage,” and concludes, “I desire peace as much as you do but I think that the best way to preserve it is to be strong.”15 Such a debate between the intellectual visionary and the realist diplomat sounds perennial. In this circumstance, the facts were on Cambon’s side since the cause of a Franco-German rapprochement had no conceivable base at the time, especially in Germany, but d’Estournelles was right in assessing that armed peace, against which he wrote at length, could not be a true peace and would end in war.

The German Question and Europe: André François-Poncet

The context: a generation of French diplomats who had known two wars, and for which the issues of a lifetime, between 1914 and 1955, were Germany and the organization of Europe. Foreign policy issues had long been the object of an active public interest. They were now life or death issues passionately debated among the public. The concert was gone, and any pretense of a discrete or professional diplomacy to be confined to chanceries was also gone. In addition, even if they wanted to keep a low profile, high-ranking French diplomats of that generation would ultimately have to choose between the Vichy regime and the Free French, a dramatic, and necessarily public, choice. The intrawar period is one in which the abundance of diplomatwriters in the French diplomatic corps has already been noted. That came probably because many diplomats were now recruited from the École Normale Supérieure, along with a good part of the French literary

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and university elite. Young diplomats with a literary ambition were protected by Philippe Berthelot, the all-powerful secretary-general of the Quai d’Orsay, both because it was flattering for the self-image of the department and because it served his policy of developing cultural diplomatic institutions abroad, like Paul Claudel for instance did in Japan during his ambassadorship. Diplomat-writers fell into two categories: those who set for themselves minimal professional objectives as diplomats, like Jean Giraudoux, Paul Morand, or later Romain Gary, and those who sought to achieve both great diplomatic and literary careers, like Claudel, or most notably Alexis Léger,16 who became secretary-general of the foreign ministry from 1932 to 1940. Léger had contributed first under Aristide Briand to the tentative settlement with Germany achieved at Locarno in 1925. He remained faithful to the spirit of Geneva and to collective security, before assuming a line of firmness towards Hitler. The turning point of that trajectory came with the 1938 Munich agreements, of which he was the main French negotiator, and which he neither fully endorsed nor repudiated. Léger was demoted in 1940 by Paul Reynaud for not having been firm enough with Germany, took refuge in the United States upon the armistice, and was deprived of his nationality by Vichy, but kept a defiant distance from de Gaulle. Along with Jean Monnet, he contributed to feeding the Roosevelt administration’s distrust of de Gaulle. A poet, as “Saint-John Perse” he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1960. His obsession with keeping his diplomatic and literary activities separate and his extreme caution in expressing his views, publicly or otherwise, on contentious policy issues, disqualify him as a public intellectual. That cautious aspect of his character is probably worth dwelling on here, though. Léger’s propensity to take refuge in brilliant generalities, or sibylline pronouncements, in order to be able to show retrospective wisdom whichever way the issue at hand eventually went was noted and resented by his collaborators. By the same token, Léger’s ambivalence about the Munich agreements was not merely the reflection of honest intellectual hesitations about which of two options, accommodation or war, was the least bad under the circumstances, which hesitations infuse, for instance, Raymond Aron’s writings about Munich. His ambivalence was mostly prompted by

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his desire not to alienate himself from either of the two camps fighting at the time in the French government over Munich. As a result, Léger ended up discredited as a warmonger by the Munichois and as an appeaser by the anti-Munichois, but his actual role remained ambiguous enough to protect his image as a civil servant of high stature. Dithering and equivocating are of course universal bureaucratic tactics, by no means specific to foreign ministries. Diplomats may be more exposed to these temptations, however, because seeking to achieve compromise and keeping one’s opinion for oneself are intrinsic to their profession. These, it should be noted in passing, are yet another obstacle to their assuming a role as public intellectual, which implies delivering principled and clear messages. All in all, diplomats of that generation had every ability and incentive to join the public debate, but few did. André François-Poncet aside, of whom more will be said later, some sought to contribute independent views to the most pressing question for France, namely, how to reinsert Germany in a new Europe after its defeat in 1918. Three men should be mentioned in this context. First Jacques Seydoux. After a career that led him to assist Briand in devising his proposals for a European federation, and later to negotiate the settlement of German war debts, he left the Foreign Service in 1928 to assume important positions in industry and finance. He then pleaded in journals and newspapers the cause of an economically integrated Europe while being close to a pro-European circle, L’Europe nouvelle. Two others should be mentioned in that context, who both hesitated between joining the diplomatic corps— which they ultimately did—and assuming a public role, and whose reflection also centered on Germany: Wladimir d’Ormesson, who became a journalist and prolific writer, and Pierre Viénot, who chose to live in Germany, where he directed the Berlin bureau of the Comité d’études franco-allemand, a center devoted to the development of Franco-German exchanges and with which both d’Ormesson and Seydoux were affiliated. D’Ormesson published a number of books on Germany, the most noteworthy being Confiance en l’Allemagne?17 (Trusting Germany?), and Viénot wrote Incertitudes allemandes18 (a title oddly enough translated into English by Is Germany Finished?),19

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where both showed an uncharacteristic understanding for Germany’s situation. Both books received a prize from L’Europe nouvelle.20 François-Poncet’s concerns were also centered on Germany: first a journalist, then a deputy for Paris to the National Assembly, ambassador to Germany in 1931, and to Italy in 1938, where he was reassigned after the Munich agreements. A nationalist republican, proponent of a stronger and more efficient government, he remained in nonoccupied France and wrote columns in Le Figaro that were initially favorable to Vichy’s policy nominally aimed at redressing national discipline and reforming the public system. He was nonetheless arrested and sent to captivity to Germany in 1943. He was appointed high commissioner to Germany from 1947 until 1955, and then returned to Le Figaro again as an influential columnist. François-Poncet was a considerable public figure. Trenchant, outspoken, self-confident, he himself gave to his mission in Germany a high profile, increased by the circumstances: the rise of Hitler, followed by major international crises up to 1938. He had an incomparable network in Berlin and access to the top ranks of the German leadership, including Hitler himself. He was a genuine intellectual: a normalien, who wrote a dissertation on Goethe’s elective affinities; his subsequent writings included thoughts about Germany (Que pense la jeunesse allemande? 1913), and the modernization of the French political system and economy. As ambassador to Berlin, he personally produced an abundant correspondence, the sheer weight of which overwhelmed its readers in Paris, whose lack of attention for his views François-Poncet deplored bitterly in his memoirs — “I gave my opinion myself, I was never asked it.”21 His analysis of Nazi Germany is impeccable when it comes to Hitler’s personality and ultimate goals (he shares that with most other French diplomats of the time). In his account of his farewell meeting with Hitler, subsequently published in the French 1939 “yellow book” about the causes of the war, he describes him as “capable of the worst frenzies, of the most savage impulsions, of the most delirious ambitions.” He did not seem, however, to be able to go to the roots of the Nazi regime, in which he saw a more plebeian and violent variant of German nationalism rather than something totally new. In addition, the sheer

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volume of his correspondence makes it hard to discern a clear and consistent line of thought, which tends to be lost in details.22 François-Poncet, in this respect, can be contrasted with his American colleague William Dodd, a university professor appointed by Roosevelt in Berlin, where he served from 1933 to 1937: Dodd did not hide his dislike of the Nazis, with whom he had but minimal contacts, and showed a much more acute prescience of the nature and nefarious aims of the regime. With no diplomatic experience, and openly defiant of the Nazis, however, he was an embarrassment for the State Department, and an outrage for the German government. With no ability to be heard, either in Washington or in Berlin, how could Dodd be an effective diplomat? That brings into light another tension between the role of a diplomat and that of an intellectual: At which point does the need to maintain contact with the other side and to explore even the slightest chance of mutual understanding, intrinsic as they are to diplomacy, compromise intellectual clarity and judgment? François-Poncet, after the devastating portrait of Hitler in his farewell telegram, nonetheless concluded that Hitler’s openings to France following Munich should be explored, which was clearly a misjudgment. François-Poncet’s articles following his retirement, from 1955 to 1962 and published as a volume,23 tend to show a similar contrast between a taste for detailed analysis served by an assertive style and hesitating conclusions. It is on European integration, which he constantly supported, that he shows the most consistency and purpose. While an ambassador in Germany, he took the most unusual step of coming out publicly in favor of the European Defense Community treaty in 1954 while the ratification debate was pending before the French National Assembly. Europe’s unity seemed to him the only way out of France’s German dilemmas, and that was to his credit because many French diplomats who went public in the 1950s and early 1960s missed the significance of European integration, when they did not outright oppose it. That is, however, the only firm thought that emerges from an otherwise rather disappointing collection of articles. One has to wait for the next generation to see French diplomats, who had been involved in the negotiation of the Rome Treaty and the first years of the European Community, take a public stance in favor of

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European integration. Among these, the most committed were those, like Jean François-Poncet, the son of André, or Jean-François Deniau, who left the public service to embrace a political career. Deniau did that after publishing a remarkable book on the virtues but also the limits of the European project (L’Europe interdite).24

The Cold War: Jean Laloy and the Turn of the Intellectual Tide of the Mid-1970s

The context: an era when, as of 1958, de Gaulle’s foreign policy progressively establishes itself in a dominant position in the foreign policy debate, not only on the Right but also on the Left. A kind of foreign policy consensus was created, initially served by the hegemony of the Communist Party on the Left, which suited the Gaullist party. As of the late 1970s, François Mitterrand’s embrace of the central tenets of that policy further reinforced that consensus, which included (1) France’s reliance on nuclear deterrence, special position in NATO, and overt distance from the United States; (2) a tendency to symmetrically blame the Cold War on both superpowers combined with the quest for a leading role in the détente with the Soviet Union; and (3) the call for a politically more assertive Europe, but one which respected the sovereignty of its member states, and did not involve a federal dimension. It also included the aspiration for a special French–German relationship, which de Gaulle initiated in 1962– 63, but it failed to develop. Only under Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and Mitterrand, did it become a productive relationship, amounting, in the late 1980s, to a joint leadership of both countries on the European integration process. That meant a less vivid foreign policy debate and a diplomatic ser vice with less salient personalities, managing an essentially unchallenged foreign policy. Intellectuals such as Raymond Aron defended views more favorable to the Atlantic alliance, diffident of the Soviet Union, or skeptical of the wisdom of a French independent foreign and defense policy. The Christian Democrat tradition favorable to a federal Europe persisted. But both sets of views mostly manifested themselves outside French diplomacy.

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This section deals with notable exceptions to that general context of consensus, diplomats who sought to bring distinct views on three sets of issues: the nature of the Soviet regime and of its foreign policy; Europe and Germany; and nuclear deterrence and France’s role in NATO. Of the three, Jean Laloy, an expert on Russia, was the most “intellectual.” With a deep knowledge of the country and of the language (he had been de Gaulle’s interpreter in his 1944 visit to Moscow), he had a very articulate view of the Soviet regime and its responsibilities in the Cold War. In charge of the course on Soviet foreign policy at Sciences-Po as of 1968, he emphasized its ideological nature and its continuity with Lenin’s objectives. He later published a book on the Yalta agreements,25 which dispelled the view, common in France, of their having sealed the division of Europe, and emphasized how the commitments of Stalin at Yalta remained unfulfilled. More generally, Laloy sought to dispel the view that the Cold War was a symmetric affair and insisted on the asymmetries between the West’s and the Soviet Union’s foreign policy. The latter, for Laloy, was a function of the revolutionary nature of Soviet ideology and was bound to remain intrinsically hostile to liberal democracies. The Soviet Union did not conceive of détente as a mutual relaxation of tensions, but simply as a tactical pause in an otherwise inescapable struggle. The insistence on the ideological nature of Soviet foreign policy, on the asymmetries and the illusions of détente, put Laloy in direct contradiction with the Eastern policy of de Gaulle, and his active diplomatic career for all practical purposes came to a halt as of 1964. Laloy’s thinking on the nature of the Soviet regime, and the central role of ideology in its foreign policy, were combined with moral and civilizational concerns about the impact of the Cold War and with a deep knowledge of, and affection for, Russia. He belonged to the antitotalitarian school of thought identified in France with Raymond Aron (to whom Laloy was very close) without the combined ignorance and prejudice about Russia that often went with it. He shared nonetheless some of the rigidities of thinking of that school: in his systemic analysis of the Soviet Union, he minimized the possibilities of change of the system and exaggerated the risks of détente.

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Jean-Marie Soutou,26 a Christian Democrat by tradition and cofounder of a Christian resistance network, joined the diplomatic service after the war. He was in charge of European affairs, negotiator for France in 1961– 62 of the Plan Fouchet (de Gaulle’s proposal for a European political union), and later secretary-general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. A genuine intellectual, he sought to discretely convince influential circles, and circumvent what he saw as French foreign policy mantras, in the vein of the Cambons, rather than oppose them publicly, as Laloy did. Upon retirement, he founded with Joseph Rovan a small think tank on European and Franco-German affairs, Cassiodore, meant to support the cause of a more integrated Europe. François de Rose was an expert on strategic affairs, and an ambassador to NATO from 1970 to 1975, where he engineered a compromise that put an end in 1974 to the long-standing disagreement with the United States about the role of the independent French nuclear force. He had extensive connections in America and was one of the rare Frenchmen present at a higher level on the transatlantic conference circuit. Upon retiring, he started publishing extensively27 on nuclear strategy and NATO affairs, taking argument with what he saw as too self-centered a French nuclear strategy, which could present the Soviet Union with opportunities, while needlessly estranging France from her allies.28 Until his death in 2014, he did not cease to bring his contribution to the French defense debate, to which his ideas have provided a much respected reference point. Of themselves, Laloy, Soutou, and de Rose were not going to change the French consensus, but their reflections, which largely converged, coincided with a turn of the tide that saw the Communist Party’s influence, and the appeal of Marxism in the intellectual class, dramatically recede in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They accompanied that movement and helped pave the way for the subtle but nevertheless substantial reordering by Mitterrand of the French consensus in a more anti-Soviet, proWestern, and pro-European direction in the years 1981– 91. If one recalls how that turn in French opinion occurred, it is clear, however, that the impact of these intellectual-diplomats was extremely limited. Only Laloy was involved in the chain of events that saw in turn the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago in Paris in 1974,

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Sakharov’s Nobel Prize in 1975, soon followed by the revelation of the Khmer Rouge’s mass murders and the boat people’s tragedy, and eventually, Solidarnosc and the proclamation of the martial law in Poland in 1981. Laloy met Solzhenitsyn a number of times, and interpreted his works for the French public. In reaction to Sakharov’s house arrest he took the lead in making him an honorary member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of the Institut de France, of which he was himself a member, and pronounced his eulogy.29 Beyond both men’s denunciation of communism, he saw in them the opportunity for two streams of Western civilization, the romantic-religious and the scientific-rational, which each of them embodied, to be called upon to energize not only the cause of freedom in Russia but also the wider one of rejuvenation of the Western mind. It is in that framework that he received Solzhenitsyn’s criticism of the West’s loss of moral compass in his Harvard speech, and that, contrary to many in the West, he could understand and accept it. For a good part, however, the impact on the French intelligentsia of Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, and of events like Cambodia or Poland, was channeled by a group of young intellectuals, the nouveaux philosophes, who used them to reinterpret not only Marxism but the West’s broader philosophy of progress, in which they saw the distant source of the tragedies brought about by communism. The so-called nouveaux philosophes, among whom Bernard-Henri Lévy and André Glucksmann preeminently stood out, had a considerable media impact. Special issues of weeklies, journals, and prime-time programs on major TV channels were devoted to them; leading politicians like Giscard d’Estaing and Mitterrand gave their view on the phenomenon. It is only a slight exaggeration to identify the end of Marxism as the dominant ideological force in France to either of two dates: May 27, 1977, that of the popular literary TV show Apostrophes devoted to the nouveaux philosophes, or June 26, 1979, that of the joint visit paid by JeanPaul Sartre and Raymond Aron to Giscard d’Estaing to plead that humanitarian assistance and French visas be given to the Vietnamese boat people fleeing their country. Indeed, humanitarianism and the cause of

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humanitarian intervention were to be the main ideological offspring of that last phase of the Cold War battles that had pitted Aron and Sartre against each other for decades. The nouveaux philosophes came unexpectedly after decades of scholarly work of intellectuals like Aron and Laloy committed to denouncing the true nature of communism and of the Soviet Union. Their media success highlighted the very issue of what public intellectuals were, and whether their cardinal quality was the intellectual quality of their work or their ability to reach the wider public. Their disproportionate success in that respect was a challenge for a man like Aron, himself the quintessential public intellectual. He delivered a scathing attack against Lévy in an article,30 in which he was careful never to mention his name except in a footnote, and in which he insisted that the ideological fight against communism had been a long affair and was not over despite the favorable turn now engaged, and that progress should not be discarded along with Marxism. Aron may have won the argument, but the nouveaux philosophes seemed at the time to have won the opinion battle.

After the Cold War: Stéphane Hessel and Diplomacy as Advocacy

The context: a French diplomacy confronted with the less dramatic, but conceptually more uncertain, challenges of the post–Cold War era; a foreign policy debate more and more concerned by global affairs, and politically centered on the relevance of the European integration project in the changed circumstances of globalization; a new stream of humanitarian policies and intervention, ideologically linked to the antitotalitarian ideological struggles of the end of the Cold War;31 altogether, a diplomacy trying to be more responsive to the demands for a more open and moral foreign policy. In the process, the Gaullist aspiration of French foreign policy to stand out as uniquely independent tended to wither away. These changes were by no means limited to France and, at least in the Western world, included the following:

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• A diplomacy more public —but not necessarily more open— and disproportionately concerned with its media impact, both at home and abroad; • An informed constituency of think tanks and NGOs that observe diplomacy, and tend to practice it at the same time; • A claim to the moral high ground, and a diplomacy infused with morality, including when it resorts to force; • A diminished confidence in the virtue of negotiation and compromise, a growing belief in that of influence; • A more global and interdependent world, but not necessarily less parochial and introvert: peoples interact more, but do not necessarily understand each other better. These changes tend to further diminish the role of diplomats, at least as necessary intermediaries between countries and legitimate observers of foreign realities. There is a growing confusion between diplomacy and advocacy, with diplomacy equated to the pursuit of just causes, whereas its purpose had traditionally been to identify the interests, right or wrong, of the other side, to understand them, and to reconcile with them if possible. In that context, diplomats and former diplomats have been less restrained in publicly expressing themselves. “Public diplomacy” has become a trade of its own, and a significant part of diplomatic activities. At the same time, the French foreign ministry significantly relaxed the rules pertaining to publication for diplomats on active duty, and the policy planning staff members became relatively free, and in some circumstances were encouraged, to publish their views on ongoing foreign policy issues, a freedom which Jean-Marie Guéhenno, among others, used for the best. In that context, one has seen former diplomats intervene in the public debate, either to denounce the new course of international policy or to accommodate it. On the first side, a most talented but little-heard critic of that new course has been Gabriel Robin, former diplomatic advisor to Giscard d’Estaing, who has relentlessly pleaded for the pursuit of a traditional diplomacy of sovereign nation-states serving their interests, and staying clear from integration within Europe, and generally all the mutual encroachments on sovereignty brought about by globalization.32

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Most diplomats have recognized the evolution of foreign affairs and of their profession. Many have used their experience following their ambassadorships abroad to offer the French public a renewed and unprejudiced knowledge of their former country of residence, like Jacques Andréani on the United States33 or Bernard de Montferrand on Germany.34 By far the most successful of former diplomats in achieving the stature of a public intellectual, however, has been Stéphane Hessel, whose thirty-page pamphlet35 Indignate, published in 2010, sold 5 million copies in thirty languages worldwide. Hessel was (he passed away in February 2013) a great figure. An intelligence agent infiltrated in France in 1944, he was arrested and deported to Buchenwald. He was the son of a mythic French-German couple, born a German, and when he opted to become a French citizen, an obtuse French bureaucracy had him pass twice the entry examination to the École Normale Supérieure, first à titre étranger, and a year after as a French student, which he did brilliantly. A diplomat who served twice at the UN, and a true European, he had a genuine faith in multilateralism and in global justice. He was a passionate believer in the Palestinian cause and was indignant that it was not only ignored, but that its legitimacy and even its existence could be denied. He was a key leader in the setting up of the Russell Palestine Tribunal, an opinion tribunal modeled on the Russell–Sartre tribunal for Vietnam to publicly denounce the ones guilty for the Palestinians’ plight. Indignation, which was one of his personal abilities— he was above all an eminently charming and likeable person— and the title of his 2010 book, is of course a typically undiplomatic virtue: a passionate state of mind, it compromises judgment, complicates dialogue, and prevents compromise. In the intellectual realm, it is at best a starting point, but hardly a virtue per se. It is an irony that the former French diplomat who achieved the most unquestionable status as public intellectual in recent years did so with a book that had so little to do with diplomacy. Indeed, Hessel’s late and unique popularity, which came as a surprise to him, was a function of his heroic past, of his passionate character, and unique enthusiasm. It was also a function of his ability to connect with the public at a time when the seeming impotence of politics in addressing the economic crisis and its social woes shocked many. Hessel’s refusal to accept that

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state of affairs and his refreshing optimism were well in line with the expectations of the European public. His reference to the French immediate postwar period and the moment of national unity that marked it was also timely: after a post–Cold War period where liberty seemed the utmost political value, concerns for social justice and solidarity were returning, which he echoed well. All that, however, had little to do with his experience and talents as a diplomat.

Conclusion: You Cannot Beat the (Real) Public Intellectual

An Honest Intellectual Contribution It is, of course, extremely difficult to draw general conclusions from the survey of so many different characters over such a long period of time. All in all, however, the intellectual achievements of the French diplomats evoked here seem by and large commendable. What one sees in retrospect are people mostly pursuing an honest quest for the truth, just as anyone engaged in an intellectual activity should. On average, they were not further from the truth, and one might argue that on some occasions they were closer to it, than the intellectual class at large. If one compares, for instance, the judgment about Nazi Germany, its nature, and intentions, of French diplomats and of the French intelligentsia, the comparison turns out to be mostly favorable to the diplomats. Not only was the French intelligentsia divided, but within those committed to opposing fascism, such as the Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes, many were prejudiced in their judgment by pacifism, or by their subservience to the Soviet Union. These forces, which plagued the Comité and provoked its ultimate demise, played little role in the foreign ministry, leaving diplomats, who were anyway better informed, the luxury of a relatively independent and sound judgment. By the same token, the diplomats’ vision of the Soviet Union, both before and after World War II, has certainly been more accurate than that of the intellectuals at large, of whom many invited to visit the Soviet

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Union succumbed to the Potemkin village image that Soviet propaganda had organized for them.36 As a result, those diplomats who bothered, or were given the opportunity, to make their views known do not pale, at least on these two subjects, in comparison with other categories of witnesses or analysts. A Limited Influence Was the role of diplomat as public intellectual influential? Did it meet the expectations of the public? How did it evolve over time? One has to conclude, judging from the examples gathered in my study here, that diplomats, despite the general quality of their intellectual inquiry, had little influence on actual events. Most of them lacked what it would take to become real public intellectuals. Only two fully qualified, at both extremities of this essay, d’Estournelles de Constant and Hessel, by their ability to convey clear messages and to resonate with the public’s concerns. They were both advocates of causes that, unfortunately, as far as one can judge, look like lost causes: a self-evident proposition if one considers the cause of peace on the eve of World War I; a likely one if one looks at the chances of the Palestinian cause, or at the possibility of resuscitating the sense of unity, social justice, and purpose that animated France in the aftermath of World War II, which Hessel proposed as a model for today. At least, as opposed to the causes they fought for, d’Estournelles de Constant and Hessel enjoyed a measure of personal success: they were able to make their ideas known, and these resonated to some degree with the public. Others I have mentioned cannot be said to have met with even that modicum of success. Many reasons can be offered to explain their relative impotence, the main one being that diplomats are intellectually at their best when they pursue the detailed and nuanced analytical work that is their normal trade. Their main concern is not to be wrong: not to convey false information, not to involuntarily deceive their government into a bad course of action, not to miss an opportunity. A diplomat must nonetheless draw conclusions and make recommendations as to a proper

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course of action. That requires intellectual courage, even if he will not be the one to endorse the ultimate responsibility of action, which properly rests with his government. It is not an insult to the diplomatic profession, however, to observe that quite a few will privilege prudence over courage. Alexis Léger’s care in keeping his options open was shared by other famous diplomats; diplomatic historian Albert Sorel thus wrote of Metternich: “The only thing he lacked was courage.” A public intellectual’s fortune, by contrast, does not depend so much on prudence as on boldness: that of confronting publicly a hostile regime, or an established truth; that of using intellectual credentials acquired in a certain field to take a principled stance on issues where one’s legitimacy is not established, or, of which one is altogether ignorant. In that measure, a public intellectual’s fortune is not likely to be much affected by being wrong. Coming from the extreme Left, the nouveaux philosophes dared to challenge the Communist Party. Their philosophical approximations, or outright intellectual mistakes, may have exasperated Raymond Aron, but they did not compromise their success in the end. All in all, the influence of diplomats as public intellectuals remained fairly limited, and those who successfully intervened in the public debate mostly did so by virtue of credentials other than their diplomatic ones: because they had gone into politics, benefited from a particularly eminent position in society or business, or expanded their message well beyond the realm of foreign affairs. Two Sorts of Intellectuals? In 2011, a real public intellectual, Bernard-Henri Lévy, was instrumental, some would say decisive, in convincing Sarkozy to go to war with Libya to defend the Benghazi rebels against Muammar Gadhafi’s reprisals. It took the concurrence and active participation of the British and the Americans to effectively launch that war, but without Sarkozy’s initial leadership it is unclear whether they would have intervened. It is only slightly stretching that argument to suggest that as a result Libya was in some measure Lévy’s war. None of the diplomats mentioned in this chapter could have achieved a comparable result.

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The relative ineffectiveness of diplomats as public intellectuals raises in the end a broader question: Is that ineffectiveness a function of the constraints of their profession? or is it a function of their not belonging to the most effective class of public intellectuals? The consideration of diplomats as public intellectuals gives support to the latter thesis. Their position, in effect, is not substantially different from that of those scholars or scientists who seek to contribute their knowledge to a wider audience in order to influence the corresponding public debate and public policy choices. Their realm is that of the feasible, their moral that of the preference for the least bad option. Others speak from an institutional stance, that of the “intellectual,” which gives them an ability to speak out, irrespective of the field in which they have developed their intellectual credentials. They speak in the name of a broader understanding of the world, of a principled ethical stance, all the more authoritatively seeming that they address issues they have no academic or pragmatic knowledge of. Aron would belong to the first type, Sartre to the second. Diplomats, like anyone having spent a lifetime developing a concrete and rather specialized knowledge, would probably feel more comfortable identifying themselves with Aron. They experience, however, the same limit in their influence as he did vis-à-vis intellectuals able to free themselves from the constraints of analysis based on facts and from the relative ethic of constrained political choices. Perhaps, at the end of the day, the main dividing line of that argument is more properly drawn not between diplomats and public intellectuals but between these two distinct kinds of public intellectuals. Notes 1. Venise et la Révolution Française: Les 470 dépêches des ambassadeurs de Venise au doge (1786–1795), ed. Alessandro Fontana, Francesco Furlan, and Georges Saro (Paris: Robert Laffont, Bouquins, 1997). 2. Laurence Badel, Gilles Ferragu, Stanislas Jeannesson, and Renaud Meltz, Ecrivains et diplomates: L’invention d’une tradition XIXème–XXIème Siècle (Paris: Armand Colin, 2012). 3. According to Renaud Meltz’s computation, Ecrivains et Diplomates, 241. 4. Albert Thibaudet, République des professeurs (Paris: Grasset, 1927).

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5. That is the argument of Michel Winock, Le Siècle des intellectuels (Paris: Le Seuil, 1997). 6. A notable exception is Julien Benda, who, in La Trahison des clercs, blamed intellectuals for their engagement in politics, at the expense, he argued, of their proper role, which was the quest for truth and higher spiritual values. 7. Raymond Aron, L’Opium des intellectuels (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1955). 8. Jules Cambon, Le diplomate (Paris: Crété, 1926). 9. Among others in his correspondence with Lady Milner, daughter-inlaw of Lord Salisbury, http://specialcollections.wichita.edu/Collections/pdf/93 -2-a.pdf (accessed August 1, 2013). 10. As ambassador to Saint Petersburg, he had failed to report in time on key developments of the crisis in late July– early August 1914, and was accused of having deliberately favored the course to war as a result. Why he kept no minutes of the official meetings of Poincaré during his state visit to Saint Petersburg in July remains a puzzle to this day, and it has fueled much speculation as to the encouragements the nationalist-minded French president might have given the Russians. 11. See Laurent Barcelo, Paul d’Estournelles de Constant: L’expression d’une idée européenne (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995). 12. He eventually broke with the Revue, which did not approve of his call for a Franco-German rapprochement. 13. “Le rapprochement franco-allemand, condition de la paix mondiale,” Bulletin de la conciliation internationale (1909): 441. 14. The report was reprinted in 1993, with a preface by George Kennan, in the middle of the Yugoslav wars: The Other Balkan Wars (Washington, DC: Carnegie, 1993). 15. Paul Cambon, Correspondance 1970 –1924, Vol. 2 (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1940), 284 – 85. 16. See Renaud Meltz, Alexis Léger dit Saint-John Perse (Paris: Flammarion, 2008). 17. Wladimir d’Ormesson, Confiance en l’Allemagne? (Paris: Gallimard, 1928). 18. Pierre Viénot, Incertitudes allemandes: La crise de la civilisation bourgeoise en Allemagne (Paris: Valois, 1931). 19. Pierre Viénot, Is Germany Finished? (London: Faber and Faber, 1931). 20. On Viénot and these first attempts at a French–German rapprochement, see Hans-Manfred Bock and Gilbert Krebs, eds., Echanges culturels et relations diplomatiques: Présence française à Berlin Sous la République de Weimar (Paris: Editions de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2004).

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21. André François-Poncet, Souvenirs d’une ambassade à Berlin, ed. JeanPaul Bled (Paris: Perrin, 2016), 12. 22. His policy prescriptions in conclusion to his most important telegrams include strengthening France’s national unity and alliances in front of the rising German threat, but they otherwise lack specificity. 23. André François-Poncet, Au fil des jours: Propos d’un libéral, 1942–1962 (Paris: Flammarion, 1962). 24. Jean-François Deniau, L’Europe interdite (Paris: Le Seuil, 1977). 25. Jean Laloy, Yalta: hier, aujourd’hui, demain (Paris: Le Seuil, 1988). 26. Jean-Marie Soutou, Un diplomate engagé, ed. Georges-Henri Soutou (Paris: de Fallois, 2011). 27. Inter alia, François de Rose, La France et la défense de l’Europe (Paris: Le Seuil, 1976), and de Rose, Contre la stratégie des Curiaces (Paris: Julliard, 1983), which was translated as European Security and France (London: IISS, 1984). 28. Lacking in the range of interests of French intellectuals/officials during that period is the consideration of nuclear deterrence from an ethical viewpoint: there is no equivalent in France of Sir Michael Quinlan, who had eminent responsibilities in devising Britain’s nuclear strategy, and he sought at the same time to devise ways to accommodate deterrence within the conceptual framework of discrimination and proportionality in war. He shared his findings initially with religious leaders and other intellectuals, and eventually with the public at large. 29. Jean Laloy, Hommage à Andrei Sakharov (Paris: Institut de France Paris, 1984). 30. Raymond Aron, “Pour le Progrès: Après la Chute des Idoles,” Commentaire, no. 3 (1978): 233– 45. 31. That continuity is evidenced by the role of Bernard Kouchner, a medical doctor and cofounder of Médecins Sans Frontières and fellow traveler of the nouveaux philosophes in the 1970s, secretary of state for Humanitarian Action and then minister of health in Socialist governments in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and eventually Sarkozy’s foreign minister from 2007 to 2012. 32. Gabriel Robin, Entre empires et nations: Penser la politique étrangère (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2004). 33. Jacques Andréani, L’Amérique et nous (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2000). 34. Bernard de Montferrand and Jean-Louis Thiériot, France-Allemagne: L’heure de vérité (Paris: Tallandier, 2011). 35. Stéphane Hessel, Indignez-vous! (Montpellier: Indigènes, 2010). 36. A notable exception being André Gide, who produced a remarkably lucid analysis of the Soviet Union after such a trip in 1936.

Reflections

chapter eleven

Reckless Minds Caveat Lector  

In 2001, I published a book titled The Reckless Mind, which is a collection of portraits of modern German and French political thinkers who defended and even promoted some of the worst tyrants of the twentieth century: Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, the Khmer Rouge, Ayatollah Khomeini. I tried to understand what in their personal backgrounds and historical circumstances might have turned otherwise serious thinkers into figures out of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed. But in the end I concluded that it was not just a matter of biography or history. I saw instead a deeper affinity between modern thinkers and tyranny, having to do with the way intellectuals negotiate — or fail to negotiate —between lofty political principles and the dull, obscure, intransigent facts of political life. The book ended with a plea for greater intellectual skepticism and moderation, and offered a warning to readers about the unpredictable and sometimes destructive power of political ideas and passions. The book might indeed have been titled Caveat Lector.

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But as I reread the book while preparing this chapter I began to have doubts about its thesis. They were not doubts about the narrow arguments and evidence I marshaled in writing about this past figure or that one. Nor did they have to do with the framework in which I put them all. What struck me as questionable only a decade after The Reckless Mind was published was the degree to which that framework still applies to the intellectuals and political issues of the present. At least in the West. The problem of tyranny, and the intellectuals’ relation to it, remains urgent in many of the regions discussed at the conference. But in the developed West a great deal has changed in the still young twenty-first century. As everyone knows, our intellectual lives are being radically transformed by the digital revolution, a subject I won’t address here. Less widely recognized, I feel, are the new realities that pose a challenge to the way we thought about politics, economics, and history throughout the twentieth century. I put down my book feeling that it’s time to take a fresh look at the political role of intellectuals.

The modern intellectual, you might say, is an afterbirth, having come into the world just after the arrival of the modern state. From the start, their destinies were intertwined. Already in the eighteenth century there were debates about the legitimacy of new forms of political rule, the place of religion in public life, the authority of the sciences, and the autonomy of individuals in relation to power. Reciprocally, there were also questions regarding the authority of independent writers in relation to social institutions — feudal, clerical, confessional, economic, and scientific institutions— and whether they had any legitimate standing or adequate knowledge to pronounce on them. All these issues came to a head in the polemics surrounding the French Encyclopédie, and at the root of them were disagreements about the nature and status of human freedom. The eighteenth century was not an enlightened age, as Kant once remarked, but it was an age of enlightenment in the sense that philosophical questions, particularly moral and political ones, were at the center of elevated public discussion. It is true that some of the Enlightenment’s leading promoters, like Voltaire and Diderot in France or members of the Mittwochsgesellschaft in Berlin, were engaged in day-to-day polemical combat with

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authorities (though elliptically so as to avoid censorship, or worse). But the figures who really mattered were thinkers like Montesquieu, Hume, and Kant, whose dispassionate, comprehensive works set a much higher tone. They were philosophers, not polemicists or ideologists. The French Revolution changed all that. So, at any rate, argued the late French historian François Furet in his influential essays on the French Revolutionary “catechism” and in his last book, The Passing of an Illusion. In those works, Furet showed how the “miracle” of the Revolution— or “apocalypse,” depending on how you looked at it — quickly reduced previously complex European debates over the modern state and the role of intellectuals down to one momentous question: Were you for or against the Revolution? When the Revolution descended into the Terror, which paved the way for Napoléon’s soft modern tyranny, the question became even more urgent and aggressive: Were you willing to affirm the whole historical break with the past that began with the Enlightenment, led to the Revolution, and then (allegedly) brought everything modern into the world? In other words, were you willing to make a profession of faith in, or a declaration of war against, modernity? This way of looking at modern history and politics was expressed perfectly by the French statesman Georges Clemenceau, who famously declared in a parliamentary speech in 1891: La Révolution française est un bloc —“The French Revolution is a bloc,” he said, “that must be accepted or rejected as a whole, because the revolutionary combat continues.” Furet argued, convincingly in my view, that this stark alternative demanding blind commitment created two ideological camps that dominated and politicized continental European cultural life for the next two centuries. On one side were those who accepted the legitimacy of the Revolution and wished to see its legacy deepened and extended around the globe; on the other were those who believed that this historical break had destroyed all that was beautiful in the ancien régime (or in human life tout court), creating a world ruled by force, the mob, the machine, and mad scientists. In this gigantomachia there was little room to consider the virtues of two less dramatic revolutions, the English and the American, and the liberal democratic paths they had opened up. Throughout the nineteenth century, utopians of all sorts could be found in continental Europe — radicals like Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier and Charles

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Proudhon, or more conservative ones like Auguste Comte. And there were more than enough royalist and Catholic reactionaries to do battle with them. Together, these two parties dominated the intellectual and political landscape, squeezing out the more moderate voices of Benjamin Constant, Tocqueville, Friedrich Gentz, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and others like them. The two dominant ideological parties saw themselves engaged in a world-historical, winner-take-all game. Both knew who their friends were, and who their enemies were; and that’s pretty much all they felt they had to know.

Of course, this is an extremely rough sketch of continental intellectual and political life in the nineteenth century, and we can all think of exceptions and qualifications. But it is not a cartoon. Only in this larger picture, Furet argued, is it possible to explain why so many Western intellectuals in the twentieth century developed such a stake in the Russian Revolution and the movements and revolutions it inspired throughout the world. On the surface this made little sense. In the late nineteenth century, there were countless socialist sects, and Marx was considered just one more sectarian leader, and not the most important—he did not have many communist disciples. It was only when a putsch in St. Petersburg happened to succeed and the Reds happened to win the short civil war that followed that Marx came to be seen, retrospectively, as a prophet. Moreover, the major revolutions that took place in the twentieth century were not at all of the sort Marx had predicted. Russia and China were despotically ruled agrarian countries, not bourgeois industrialized ones, and the revolutionary movements of Asia and Latin America had more to do with political and economic colonialism than with the textbook Marxian class struggle. Yet Western intellectuals maintained their investment in these regimes and movements even after their tyrannical nature became obvious to anyone willing to see. Why did that happen, and why did it persist? Those of us who grew up in the Cold War found it quite natural. But I already sense in my students’ puzzlement and even skepticism that such a thing was possible. Communist intellectuals? What was that all about?

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Furet offered one explanation. And that was that intellectuals on the Far Left were not committed to real, existing communism, about which they remained willfully ignorant. Instead, they were committed to a compelling grand narrative of modern history that began with the French Revolution. That narrative focused on a progressive “revolutionary tradition” seen to be running continuously from 1789 to 1848, then to the Paris Commune, then to St. Petersburg and Moscow, then China . . . and then, and then, and then. This narrative proved highly elastic and portable. Communist sympathizers in the United States after World War I tried to inscribe this country’s history into it, without great success; more successful were future revolutionary leaders throughout Europe, then Asia, Latin America, even Africa. The narrative they adopted also offered a role for themselves. In this myth the historical task of avant-garde intellectuals was to prepare the way for revolutions before they happened, and to defend the revolutionary heritage against allegedly reactionary intellectuals, many on the noncommunist Left, who raised questions about its victims. This European narrative and European myth then became intellectual commodities that were exported to parts of the world whose history and present experience had nothing to do with the European story. In retrospect, this may have the most consequential and destructive form of colonialism the West ever visited upon foreign peoples. In Furet’s narrative, the Cold War marked the culmination of this intellectual epoch that began with the French Revolution. Never before, perhaps, had the issues appeared so clear and, given the existence of nuclear weapons, the stakes so high. On the one side were those who, at the extreme, thought that the intellectual’s responsibility was to defend Stalinism, the Soviet Union’s domination of Eastern Europe, the Cultural Revolution in China, Castro’s repressive rule, even the genocide perpetrated by the Cambodian Khmer Rouge. On the other side were those equally convinced that intellectual responsibility meant resisting communist regimes, ideas, and intellectuals. Their reasons, though, were more varied. Some were leftists who saw in communism a great threat, and perhaps a greater threat to socialism than democratic capitalism, which proved amenable to reform; others were ex-communists who had deconverted and then became fanatics sniffing out leftist heresy under every

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rock. And then there were sober liberals such as Raymond Aron, who preached the ethic of responsibility against the ethic of blind commitment, and like-minded thinkers such as Jacob Talmon and Daniel Bell who saw the intellectuals’ attraction to violent revolution as the expression of a centuries-long tradition of political messianism. It was exciting being a Cold War intellectual, and I have to confess I miss it. Those of us engaged in it felt important, as if our taking one position rather than another in some little review with a few thousand subscribers could tip the balance of world history. We were committed either to a revolutionary or antirevolutionary narrative that explained how the world got to be the way it was, and where we were situated in relation to the past. We also had confidence that these narratives would be extended into the future, because taking sides on the revolutionary heritage was what it meant to be modern. That’s just the way the world was. Until, of course, that world disappeared.

For many people, perhaps most people, the end of the Cold War is a tired subject. I happen to think we haven’t thought nearly enough about it, or at least not in the right way. Every day, it seems, I’m realizing something that the Cold War intellectual mentality caused me, my comrades, and my enemies to ignore or discount in the past, and how unprepared it left us for understanding the present. Nothing, it seems, has gone as a Cold Warrior might have expected with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yes, the Soviet Union was freed from the communist yoke, but it is not a viable democracy — it has reverted to an oligarchic-pharaonic-criminal despotism, and a totally incompetent one at that. China remains communist in name, but has morphed into an autocratic business enterprise that exploits workers, enriches those with connections, provides just enough consumer goods to keep people from rebelling, ravages the environment, and supports any petty African tyrant who will do business with it. Once the haze of the Cold War evaporated, festering problems around the globe having nothing to do with the grand 1789-to-1989 narrative also suddenly became apparent. This is most obvious in the Arab world, whose internal condition and problems very few of us knew anything about; our ignorance of Islamic theology and sectarian cleavages was total. Yet

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today one can still see old Cold War intellectuals wade into these waters and deliver speeches on “Islamofascism” or the glorious democratic revolutions of the Arab Spring, as if these concepts and categories applied to that part of the world today. Everything solid in the Cold War political outlook has now melted into air — though not everyone has been willing to accept the news. So does that mean that the much awaited and long delayed “end of ideology” has finally arrived? That would depend on what one means by the term “ideology.” If we use it to mean a comprehensive picture of political reality, its genesis, and the set of collective actions that might improve it, then the answer may indeed be yes. The socialist tradition offered one such picture, of a heroic struggle for human liberation between the haves and have-nots that began in the French Revolution and would culminate in the foreseeable future. The reactionary tradition offered a quasi-biblical picture of an expulsion from Eden in 1789, followed by a Benedictine withdrawal into an alternative reality until a redemptive political or cultural counter-Revolution could be mounted. The socialist picture no longer convinces anyone. The reactionary one, repugnant to Europeans since World War II, still periodically inspires Americans, though were they made to live in it, they would undoubtedly rebel. Which brings us to the Fukuyama question once again: Is liberalism the last ideology standing? Many liberals and most antiliberals, Europeans in particular, seem to think so. After all, liberal democracy is increasingly seen around the world as the only really legitimate form of government; many millions still live in nonliberal, nondemocratic, even theocratic states, but none of those offer models of legitimacy that other nations want to imitate. And liberal free-market economic ideas— which are called “Conservative” in the United States, and (more accurately) “neoliberal” everywhere else — have also spread with astonishing speed over the past twenty-five years. The avant-garde intellectuals who promote it are not bearded romantics printing pamphlets in tenements; they are tenured professors who teach Economics 101, which has become the world’s de facto core curriculum. Policies based on their ideas have provoked great resistance and anger around the world, much of it justified, in my view. But no one has articulated an alternative set of ideas that could serve as the basis of national policy in the contemporary global economy.

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But is democratic liberalism, as an ideology, really comparable to those of the radical European Left and Right after the French Revolution? I grant that peoples around the world want the benefits of freedom under legitimate governments, and they also want the bounty that capitalism at least promises. And I recognize that the neoliberal economics driving public policy worldwide has no serious intellectual rival today. What I deny is that liberalism today provides what past ideologies did, which was a plausible picture of the past, present, and near future. The ideologies spawned by the French Revolution were grounded in competing historical narratives; they made the chaos of history legible, not only to intellectuals but to leaders and followers of the grand social movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Anglo-American liberalism— which is the dominant form today — has always been weak on history, often consciously and proudly so. And for understandable reasons: historical myth and fantasizing played enormous roles in the political crimes and disasters of the twentieth century. Anglo-American liberalism sees itself as the most natural regime, founded on ahistorical rights that are just there waiting to be recognized and actualized; it does not see itself as the product of a particular historical development, which is why such liberals tend to be weak even on their own intellectual history. (One can only speculate how different the world might look if the liberalism of Tocqueville, Constant, or even the Adam Smith of The Theory of Moral Sentiments had proved more enduring than that of Locke and John Stuart Mill.) The reason Francis Fukuyama’s writings in the 1990s caused such a stir is that he tried to graft a philosophy of history onto a political philosophy of liberalism that, in the end, rejected it. One does not need a view of history, let alone a philosophy of it, to believe in the promise of liberal democracy — one can simply judge its actual workings in the here and now. That was not true of the revolutionary and reactionary ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. No one ever said, “I reject Marx’s picture of history; all I know is that communism really works.” So if liberal or neoliberal democracy is the ideology of our time, it is a weak and ahistorical one. During the Cold War, I and probably most anticommunists would have considered that progress. We were all convinced that historical mythologies shaped by ideologies were the main source of modern political problems because they distorted reality, raised

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messianic hopes and passions, prepared disappointment, and justified cruelty and tyranny. And we believed that the intellectuals who promoted such ideologies bore great moral and historical responsibility for their fantasies. I still believe all this with regard to the revolutionary and reactionary ideologies of the twentieth century. Today, though, I’m no longer sure that the end of those ideologies has been an unmixed good. I’m coming to think that the lack of coherent, historically grounded ideologies is distorting our perception of reality, inspiring foolish decisions, and sowing uncertainty and fears that pose their own political dangers. Ideology serves an important function in democracies: it makes the present legible, much as eyeglasses allow a severely near-sighted person to make out the world around him, even though what he sees is never exactly what someone with perfect vision would see. What strikes me most today is our inability to read the post–Cold War present and the shortsightedness of our responses to it. Let me explore two examples.

Let’s begin with the European Union (EU). On paper, continental Europe is now a liberal-democratic success story: in every nation there are free elections, the peaceful alternation of power, recognized constitutions, and individual liberty guaranteed by law. (I leave aside the increasingly problematic case of Hungary.) But the rush to create a European Union after 1989 and the failures and problems that have ensued, coupled with lax immigration policies over many decades, have shaped a political landscape that no longer resembles the classic liberal model. Anyone who has studied the history rather than just the theory of liberal democracy knows that as an idea it has always been bound up with that of national sovereignty. The reasoning was simple: the only way to ensure individual selfdetermination is to secure collective self-determination; and given that, in the modern period, nations are the collectivities to which people feel most attached, the sovereignty of nations became the foundation of individual liberty. The architects of the EU understood that they were sacrificing national sovereignty, not to secure individual liberty, but to secure peace and, it was hoped, prosperity in a world dominated by much larger national economies. It is unclear whether those architects thought of the EU as a new locus of collective self-determination and collective identity;

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or whether, ignoring the history of liberal democracy, they thought they were creating a world in which those things would no longer matter. In either case, we are now in a position to judge how successful the experiment has been. The news is not good. No one in Europe, in weak countries or strong ones, today feels that the EU has advanced the cause of collective selfdetermination. Instead, everyone agrees that the EU has a serious “democratic deficit.” The nation-state, seen in the history of political forms, represents a compromise of sorts between the politics of empire and the politics of the village. It is large enough to encourage people to think beyond their local interests, but not so large that they feel they have no control over their lives. The creation of national, rather than local or clan or ethnic, parties was an important step in reconciling national attachment with democratic legitimacy. But there are no pan-European political parties to legitimize the exercise of EU power today. Instead, citizens in every member state vote for national slates of candidates for a supranational political body, with which they identify very little. Turnout is low, public recognition of candidates and party platforms even lower, public awareness of parliamentary politics and bureaucratic regulations lower still. The perception is that everything takes place behind closed doors, either in Brussels or in meetings involving ministers appointed by elected national governments. The EU is a strange hybrid institution, and its weaknesses have been all too apparent since the financial crisis of 2008. Essentially national governments have been negotiating with each other within the EU framework, defending their national interests; they have not engaged citizens as Europeans, across national boundaries, to offer them a picture of their common economic and political destiny. Which is why, as member states like Greece and Spain teeter on the edge of insolvency, their citizens— who see themselves primarily as Greeks and Spaniards, not Europeans— feel they no longer control their collective destinies. This is also true of the restless German public, which increasingly worries that it has signed an economic suicide pact. Nationally elected officials in the weaker states, hoping to stay in office while having to impose austerity, blame the Germans; the Germans blame the EU as an institution; and the EU blames the all-powerful, all-seeing, all-knowing “market.” Many will argue that

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after the great wars of the twentieth century, the EU was a necessary thing; and, who knows, it may eventually prove to be a good thing. But it is not a liberal-democratic thing. Defenders of the EU have argued that the root of its problems are not inherent in its conception, constitution, or institutions. Rather, in its current form it has proven too weak to withstand the power of global financial markets and therefore must be given even more authority over member nations’ policies. They have a point: capitalism seems to have entered a new phase in its history since the end of the Cold War, and this is posing political challenges around the globe. We have no idea how this system really works, or even what to call it. Standard economic models of markets as mechanisms that send reliable information to producers, consumers, and investors are looking pretty inadequate to capture what happens in the increasingly complicated world of international finance, where every day sees the introduction of new esoteric “financial products” and algorithms that seem mainly to benefit specialists who can manipulate them— and speculators who can afford to hire those specialists. Capital has become as mobile as bits and bytes, and thus gravitates to wherever taxes are lowest and regulatory oversight is the weakest, drawing nations into the cut-throat business of undertaxing and underregulating. This while, in the West at least, aging populations must depend on fewer workers for support, given the decline in birthrates. This dynamic produces larger deficits, which then make nations even more dependent on the vagaries of international financial markets, which in turn apply more pressure for austerity. This is Europe’s plight today. It will be said that nations like Greece and Spain have gotten themselves into this mess by overspending and undertaxing, which is true; but it is also true that were they to impose higher taxes, investment capital would flee to other countries with lower rates. So all the pressure is on reducing spending. Which is why nations under this pressure feel they can no longer defend their interests and have lost control of their destinies within the EU framework. And they, too, have a point. When capital can flee elsewhere instantaneously, at the click of a mouse, there is no time to consult voters, build consensus, and make long-range decisions democratically. Consequently, political authority over economic decision-making is increasingly being transferred

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to economic experts and so-called technical governments that are voted in to clean up the mess without public consultation— making them, and not the people, sovereign in the Schmittian sense. Now, some may say that this is an inevitable thing, given the development of postindustrial economies driven by international finance, whose powers expand with every advance in computing. And some might argue that economic plenty will inevitably reach more people and that governments will eventually be forced to shrink, opening up more space for capitalism to work its magic — which is a good thing. Which it may indeed be. I simply remind you that it is not a liberal-democratic thing.

Looking beyond Europe to other parts of the world, the inadequacy of the liberal-democratic picture becomes even more apparent. Take, for example, the way we think about politics in the so-called developing world, which includes places with weak or nonexistent states, and peoples with limited experiences with self-government. The bitter truth about many of these countries is that liberal democracy is not a realistic option, and won’t be in our lifetimes or those of our children or grandchildren. Too many factors militate against it: clan and tribal bonds, ethnic divisions, military factions, attachment to nondemocratic religious law, illiteracy, economic oligarchies . . . the list is long. Yet since the end of the Cold War we seem less and less capable of thinking the nondemocracy in which most people around the globe live and will live for the foreseeable future. Marxists used to know where in their picture to put postcolonial nations: they were to be swept up into the general course of history, which meant that a period of revolutionary struggle would be followed by self-determination, economic justice, and economic plenty. It didn’t work out that way. But neither have the most problematic of these nations been swept up into the liberal-democratic version of this same fantasy. The reasons are fairly obvious. Without the rule of law and a respected constitution, without professional bureaucracies that treat citizens equally, without the subordination of the military to civilian rule, without regulatory bodies to keep economic transactions transparent, without social norms that encourage civic engagement and law-abidingness— without all of this, modern liberal democracy is impossible. So what are we to

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call the great variety of political regimes that exist out there? How are we to think about how they operate, or how their citizens might hope to reform or replace them? Liberal-democratic ideology has no answers to these questions, because it considers itself to be the only legitimate regime and isn’t interested in thinking clearly about its own preconditions, or the second-best alternatives to itself. Other decent forms of government might be possible, but we refuse even to consider them. The attitude of liberal democrats is après nous, le déluge — which is dramatic but not terribly helpful. This helps to explain the folly of U.S. officials, who when they entered and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, respectively, immediately destroyed existing political parties, standing armies, and traditional institutions of political consultation and authority. They simply had no way of thinking about them. All they knew to do was draft new constitutions, establish parliaments and presidential offices, and then call elections. And after that it was the deluge, indeed. A few years ago I spent a month in China, which was a revelatory experience in many ways. One of the least expected, though, was the light it shed on intellectual debate in the West and in the United States, in particular. One learns rather quickly when traveling in non-Western countries— and I am not the first to point this out — that the era of liberal idealism that began in the 1980s and spread in the 1990s is over. This is certainly true in China. Intellectuals who came of age in the decade and a half after Mao’s death were involved in intense debates over competing paths of modernization and took human rights seriously, a period that culminated in the Tiananmen movements of 1989. But once the Chinese government’s official policy became “To get rich is glorious,” and the Chinese began to get rich, intellectuals largely turned against the liberal political tradition— not only because they were displeased by the collateral damage caused by China’s economic modernization, but also because they saw liberalism as intellectually superficial in the context of a vast, ancient civilization like China’s. Liberal thought, they now feel, just doesn’t help them understand the dynamics of Chinese life today or offer a model for the future. For example, everyone I spoke with, across the political spectrum, agrees that China needs a stronger state, not a weaker one — a state the follows the rule of law, is less capricious, can control local corruption,

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and can make and carry out long-term planning. Their disagreements all seem to be about how a strong state should exercise its power over the economy — crush capitalism before it’s too late, slow it down, or exploit it for the national good?— and how it’s newfound power should be exercised in international affairs. There was no mention of the liberal dissidents of the Tiananmen generation, whose sufferings understandably draw the attention of Western journalists, but who no longer play a significant role in public debate. Instead, the intellectual landscape is dominated by a somewhat nationalist Right drawing inspiration from thinkers like Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt, and a Left inspired by postmodernism, neo-Marxism, and (as it happens) Carl Schmitt. That may sound retrograde and deplorable, but in fact their debates are fresh and worth following because both sides see that China has entered a radically new phase in its history. Whatever their differences, they agree that the neoliberalization of the economy and the atomization of society that followed has not only brought to an end a half century of communist rule, but it has also overthrown a 5,000-year-old tradition of China’s selfunderstanding as a society and a nation. This sounds melodramatic, and it may very well be, but at least this view is rooted in the reality of the present, not some liberal-democratic fantasy of it.

Perhaps I should mention that I write as a partisan of liberal democracy who would like to see it flourish where it can. But I no longer think of myself primarily as an intellectual “defender” of it because I no longer think its main threats are ideological. This includes radical political Islamism. Islamism is an ideology and it is a clear threat within currently existing liberal democracies. But since liberal democracy is not among the plausible alternatives to Islamism in the regions and countries where it is most powerful (for reasons mentioned above), defending it there is somewhat beside the point. Our single-minded focus on it may actually contribute to the problem if it prevents us from thinking about decent regimes that might actually coexist with Islam in its present state, without being fully liberal or democratic in our sense. Any politically engaged intellectual who wants to address the real, existing present will want to think about this issue, without relying on the ideological categories of the

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past two centuries. One consequence of the French Revolution was that it abolished the long tradition of Western thinking that ran continuously from Aristotle to Montesquieu about the variety of political regimes. Recovering that tradition would be a small step toward clarifying our vision of the contemporary political landscape. Something similar might be said about the political economy of contemporary capitalism, where the challenge is no longer to defend it against Marxist alternatives no one believes in, but to think seriously about the challenges it poses to political self-determination. Today that kind of thinking is only taking place on the post-Marxist Left, which has long and rightly complained about the power of international finance and lending institutions to trump sovereignty in the developing world. Now that Western nations are finding themselves hoisted with their own petard, they have no way of thinking systematically about the situation they find themselves in, so powerful is the neoliberal mythology of the self-regulating market. Returning to the baroque edifice of Marx’s Capital would be a step backward, but acquiring some of Marx’s ambition simply to describe the reality of contemporary capitalism and its political repercussions would be a genuine advance. That, I think, is the intellectual challenge of our time: to think the present, the way it actually is, and to develop a coherent, historically grounded picture of it. The exhaustion of the grand modern ideologies that shaped and distorted Western thinking for two centuries is a welcome fact. Less welcome is the task it leaves us of starting over under our own power. Perhaps that’s why our intellectual lives seem so barren today, our condition so confusing. Intellectual freedom, like all freedom, is a burden, and once acquired the urge to shirk it is difficult to resist.

chapter twelve

Caveat Lilla On Public Intellectualism in the Twenty-First Century  

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Lillas

Not too bad a description of the twentieth century. It was a century that saw perhaps the worst tyrannies humanity had ever experienced; it was a century that certainly saw the most devastating wars. It was also a century for the spread of government responsible to the governed on a grander scale than ever before, a century of greater prosperity and extended human life, culminating in the sudden dissolution of the dominant po314

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litical conflict of the second half of the century — as if by magic. It did seem as if the “worst of times,” as one could easily call the first half of the century, and the most threatening of times, the nuclear stalemate that marked the Cold War of most of the second part of the century, gave way to the best of times, times so good that Hegel’s old formula of “the end of history” was trotted out anew to mark the triumph of the kind of order, liberal capitalist democracy, that, it was claimed, fulfilled all the aspirations and strivings that had driven human history theretofore. Mark Lilla, looking back in 2001 on this puzzling century just prior to the event that served to proclaim the end of the end of history thesis, was troubled by what he saw when he surveyed the role of intellectuals in the travails of the century. The intellectuals, those who engaged with the politics and public life of the century, the public intellectuals, had not played a positive role. Many of the most sparkling names among them had shown themselves to be “philotyrannical,” lending their honeyed (or jargony) words and their prestige to political causes that individuals of only average intellectual attainment could have seen and often did see to be unworthy of their passive support, much less their active allegiance. The problem seemed not to be caused by the inordinate gravitational attraction of one side of the political spectrum on these weighty thinkers. Some —Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, most notably — fell into the orbit of the Nazis. Others, Walter Benjamin, Alexander Kojève, and Jean-Paul Sartre, were defenders of the Stalinist Soviet tyranny. Later in the century, thinkers like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida romanticized the politics of violence, of “otherness,” of Third World tyrannies, and generally stood behind whatever reeked of immoderation and extremism, while standing against moderation and the norms and institution of law and (bourgeois) rationalism. Thus Lilla quotes Foucault as saying at the height of his political infatuation: “When the proletariat takes power, it may be quite possible that the proletariat will exert toward the classes over which it has triumphed a violent, dictatorial, and even bloody power. I can’t see,” Foucault says, “what objection could possibly be made to this.”1 Foucault showed a real relish for lawless popular violence, as when he questioned the role of courts in the doling out of revolutionary justice: “The masses themselves [will] come to say, ‘in fact, we cannot kill this man,’ or ‘in fact we must kill him.’”2

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Lilla aptly called this group “reckless minds,” and concluded that public intellectuals had not served humanity well during this difficult century. Did their disservice not stem precisely from their being intellectuals, he wondered. In any case, the tone of Lilla.2001 was decidedly negative about public intellectuals. He advised if not complete disengagement, at least a pulling back of their hopes and aspirations, a selfquestioning of their motives, and a large dose of modesty, a medication not much known to them heretofore. Mark Lilla.2013 has had a conversion experience, not quite as transforming as the more famous one Saul underwent on the road to Damascus or Rousseau’s on the road to visit his friend Diderot in prison. Lilla, once highly dubious about public intellectuals and public intellectualism, is now for them, or a certain breed of them at least, for unlike the earlier generation of “reckless minds” he had opposed, he thinks we have a real need for public intellectuals in our post– 9/11, post-2008 economic collapse world. The new Dr. Lilla modified his diagnosis of what ailed that earlier generation. Their problem was not so much the ever-present complications produced by the eros for knowledge that easily gets confused with an eros for fame or power and readily transforms into philotyranny. Now Dr. Lilla proposes a more historical, less nature-based diagnosis. That earlier batch of public intellectuals— post–French Revolution intellectuals— were ideologues and, as we have seen, extremists— dogmatically committed to progress or dogmatically committed to a kind of reaction or return. Both sorts proved to be dangerous and irresponsible. But with the collapse of the ambitious public agendas of the intellectuals, we are left with a more modest, somewhat clueless but still dangerous kind of public intellectual— even if dangerous for different reasons and in different ways. The liberal democrats are committed to democratic capitalism, but our capitalism is not, in Lilla’s memorable phrase, “your mother’s capitalism.” He has in mind the capitalist pathologies that brought us to the brink of worldwide financial collapse in 2008 and beyond the brink of the most significant worldwide recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Our intellectuals are committed politically to liberal democracy, but they are insufficiently knowledgeable about the conditions that make that kind of regime possible. Thus they — or some of them— would blithely en-

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dorse and even advocate a policy costing much blood and treasure to bring democracy to unlikely places, like Iraq. Without adequate guidance from intellectuals who understand the world as it is and its possibilities as they are, we stumble along, unable to control our economy and unable to figure out how to stand toward a politics different from what we find in the democratic West—and not so sure how to understand that either. We need a new public intellectualism to help clarify our world, for we no longer have intellectual tools adequate to the job. He concludes with a call for “another Karl Marx,” that is to say, not your grandmother’s Karl Marx. Or, in my case, not the Karl Marx of my uncle, who (my uncle, not Karl Marx) was a stanch supporter of Stalin and of Soviet policies, such as the crushing of the Hungarians in 1956. Lilla’s quest for another Marx surprised me more than anything else in his revised stance toward public intellectualism. Given his stated allegiance to liberal democracy, I would have thought he would call for “another John Locke” or “another John Stuart Mill.”

Another Case against Public Intellectuals

Even the early Lilla was only a half-hearted opponent of public intellectualism. There is a more robust case to be made. It is a case implicit in the life and works of many of the intellectual workers of our day and finds expression in a more explicit way in the thinking of some of the great philosophers. In at least one thrust of his thinking, this other case against public intellectuals is strongly present in the philosophy of the recently politically controversial Leo Strauss. Strauss, it may be recalled, was widely castigated as somehow, thirty years after his death, having caused the invasion of Iraq, and, more broadly, for being the intellectual guru of the George W. Bush administration. Such charges were puzzling in some ways, for Strauss was about as apolitical as one could be for a political philosopher. His scholarly work was devoted nearly entirely to the study of old texts and not at all to political comment or advocacy on contemporary politics. It was much easier to parse out where he stood on the Peloponnesian War than on the Vietnam War.

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The politicization of Strauss’s posthumous reputation was ironic, for he clearly stood for the supremacy of the philosophic life to the political life, and for the recognition of the difference between the two. He thus stood against public intellectualism and had little respect for the breed who practiced it. His case against public intellectuals can be briefly stated along these lines: the best or highest human life is the life of reason, the life devoted to understanding. The difference between the philosopher and the sophist largely lies in their different motives: the philosopher seeks wisdom, the sophist fame, honors, wealth, appearances on nighttime talk shows, MacArthur “genius grants,” and the like. The philosopher is perforce a political philosopher in that philosophy requires an awareness and an interrogation of the environment — social and political— within which philosophic activity is engaged. But the philosopher quickly comes to see a difference between philosophic activity — the search for knowledge that requires an unrelenting questioning, even challenging, of accepted opinion—and the usual frame of mind in which society carries on, accepting basic norms and conventional understandings. Strauss believed this was true even of societies that understood themselves to be “open societies.” There is then, a “tension between philosophy and the city,” a tension between the aims of the philosophic few and the rest of mankind, whose aims are much less single-mindedly toward knowledge, to say the least. The philosophers challenge the convictions on which society rests and as often as not they prove unable to come to knowledge that could in principle replace the social conventions philosophy challenges and even refutes. The paradigm case is Socrates: he was quite capable of refuting the views about justice, other virtues, and the divine held by his fellow Athenians, but, as he said of himself, the most reliable knowledge he came to was knowledge of his ignorance. A distinguishing mark of the Socratic philosopher is the ability to live with the uncertainty to which knowledge of ignorance consigns him. The Socratic philosopher is too aware of his ignorance to contemplate the project of Enlightenment that later thinkers undertook. Given his inherent disharmony with reigning opinion, the philosopher adapts his public presence so as to convince the community in which he lives that he is not dangerous to them, even though there is something inherently unsettling about philosophy Socratically pursued. The philoso-

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pher thus has a public presence, but it is limited in its aims and shrouded in its character. So far as philosophers are “public intellectuals” they automatically imbibe from the wells of moderation that Lilla.2001 called them to. Philosophy, thus, for Strauss, is an inherently inward, individual activity. It is in this sense theoretical and not intended to be socially transformative or even socially useful in some strong sense. Only the sophist takes the tools of philosophy — dialectic —and, appearing to be indistinguishable from the philosopher in the eyes of the nonphilosophic majority of citizens, turns those tools toward society, coming forward with plans for social reform and transformation. These are the public intellectuals, a false conception of the true intellectual calling, according to Strauss. The early Lilla, I believe, was influenced by some such view of the intellectual life, but he was much less intransigent than Strauss. Perhaps with good reason. In any case, Strauss presents the purer case against public intellectualism. That case can be expressed in the simple thought that the true calling of the intellectual is search for knowledge for its own sake. Any attempt to “go public” is a compromise and falling away from the real thing. Thus the term “public intellectual” is nearly oxymoronic.

Thinking about Public Intellectuals in the Twenty-First Century: Six Theses

Lilla, surprisingly, given the experience we have had with followers of the old Marx, calls for a “new Marx.” It is striking, however, that no matter which philosophe (or public intellectual) of the future he calls for, how little he shows of what the new public intellectual is to do for us. Compared, say, to Saul who became Paul and developed the theology for a new religion, or Rousseau, who developed a new philosophy, Lilla’s conversion experience leaves him with remarkably little to propose. His essay is more cri de coeur than guideline to public intellectuals in a post– Cold War environment. Lest I give the wrong impression, let me hasten to add that I agree for the most part with both the pre- and postconversion Lilla. The Heideggers and Schmitts, the Kojèves, Foucaults, and Derridas were “reckless” intellectuals. Some of them were brilliant and philosophically challenging,

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but it would be difficult to say that their public impact was on the whole positive, and in some cases it was quite clearly vicious and harmful. The clearest case, probably, is Heidegger, whose philosophy has great depth, but whose politics had great shallowness. Lilla.2001 is right: we will be fortunate to have fewer of these sorts of politically adventurous thinkers. And both we and they will be better off if they heed his earlier strictures about intellectual modesty and self-scrutiny. I also agree with the new Lilla and thus have reservations about the position of the purists who see public intellectualism as a degradation of the high human calling of thinking. But I do not agree with the substance, such as it is, of what Lilla believes we need from our public intellectuals. In order to endorse, extend, and take issue with Lilla’s analysis I submit the following six theses. On the History of Public Intellectualism Like many others, Lilla traces the emergence of public intellectualism to the era of the French Revolution. “The modern intellectual,” I remember him saying at the conference, “was born during the Enlightenment, when independent shapers of public opinion and critics of political and clerical authority emerged.” No doubt the Enlightenment made a difference in the phenomenon of public intellectualism, but the Enlightenment and the French Revolution are not quite coincidental in time, and that fact might make some significant difference in the way we think about public intellectuals. To step a revolution or two back from the French Revolution: the intellectual name most associated with the English Revolution of 1688 is John Locke — certainly an intellectual, and certainly a public intellectual. He wrote a defense of the revolution; he wrote his Letter of Toleration, meant to develop a solution to the problem of religious conflict that had roiled all of Europe since the Reformation 150 years earlier; he wrote a treatise on education meant to influence educational practice in his society; he drafted a proposal for a new poor law, based largely on his discoveries in political economy. Moreover, his defense of the English Revolution proved greatly relevant nearly a century later when the Americans looked to his theories to guide them in their conflict with their colonial masters in what turned

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out to be another revolution. And Locke was also a force, by himself and through thinkers like Voltaire, whom he had greatly influenced, in the French Revolution itself. But well before Locke, there were public intellectuals, even in the Middle Ages. Thus Thomas Aquinas writes to establish the public presence of philosophy in a Christian context, and to support the papacy in its conflicts with the emperor. On the others side was Marsilius of Padua, another public intellectual, entering those same contests on the side of the emperor. The Post–French (or American or English) Revolution Setting Makes a Difference, but Not an Essential One To take my examples of pre –French Revolution public intellectuals: they were clearly intellectuals, taking that term in the most favorable possible meaning. They were men of science, in the broad sense. They were individuals devoted first and foremost to the search for truth and the quest for knowledge. In that quest they developed specialized knowledge shared with a community of other such intellectuals. They were also public intellectuals in a double sense in that they addressed a public broader than merely the others who shared in the pursuit of their kind of specialized knowledge, and they did so with regard to matters of public interest. Thus Aquinas addressed broad public issues about the relations of authority in Christendom to audiences other than his fellow theologians. Locke brought to bear the theories and findings of his fellow members of the Royal Society regarding the nature of causation and the relation of our ideas to the world to guide public political life and educational practice. These intellectuals went public, but they wrote in an era when the public was still rather restricted by the limits of literacy and the generally undemocratic character of society. After the era of democratic revolution that changed, and the public addressed by public intellectuals expanded considerably. The public expression of the public intellectuals was perforce more different from their scientific work than previously. Or perhaps better put, there appeared more of a gap between the way they would or could speak to their colleagues in science and the way they could

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speak to the broader public. In the predemocratic age, when education was much less widespread and the disciplines less specialized, there was less difference between the specialized community of intellectuals and the literate public. So, for example, Locke was part of a community of scholars and scientists devoted to philosophy and the new natural science, and he wrote books informed by the discourse within that community. Yet even his most theoretical book was accessible to informed and educated men, such as the American Revolutionary leaders, all or most of whom appear to have read his Essay concerning Human Understanding, along with his more clearly “public” Two Treatises of Government. On the Consequences of the Democratization of Public Intellectualism The most significant consequence, as I have already suggested, is that the intellectual in public speaks with a voice usually ever more distant from the voice his or her colleagues use in speaking among themselves. This transformation in public intellectual discourse has led to a certain ambivalence toward the phenomenon of public intellectualism, as is visible in Lilla’s wavering views. In modifying his or her speech further from the strictly scientific discourse in which the intellectual is rooted, the public intellectual may seem to be pandering by shamelessly simplifying. Moreover, the lure of public fame, power, and even wealth made available through the mass public audience leads to suspicions about the motives of public intellectuals. Are they first and foremost individuals devoted to truth, who turn their knowledge and talent to matters of public concern, or are they individuals out for celebrity, power, and wealth? These are exactly the questions Lilla poses about his collection of “reckless minds.” It is only in the democratic era that the public intellectual gets identified as a species, and a suspect one at that. To put things in the language of Strauss: Are the public intellectuals like the philosophers, or are they sophists? A Variety of Types of Public Intellectuals According to the conception of public intellectualism affirmed above — although not perhaps according to Lilla’s views— economists, national security experts, environmental scientists who enter public service or who speak out on policy issues related to their expertise are public intellectuals.3

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Thus Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize –winning economist and clearly a member of the clan of economists who pursue and develop a knowledge base about how economies operate, is also a newspaper columnist for the New York Times and in that capacity writes about public economic issues in a way that he would not write were his audience solely composed of fellow economists. But presumably what he does write to his broader audience of (mostly) noneconomists is based on the knowledge base he shares with his professional colleagues. Krugman is a classic public intellectual in the terms used above. He is an intellectual who speaks to a broader public than his fellow seekers of economic knowledge, and he addresses matters more clearly of broad public concern than the profession as such may do. Public intellectuals of Krugman’s sort are present in many spheres of contemporary public life. Thus an intellectual like Michael Desch, speaking from a knowledge base generated by a community of scholars devoted to acquiring knowledge of international relations and security-related statecraft, also addresses broader audiences about issues of public concern. Krugman and Desch and the like are instances of more or less specialized public intellectualism. They possess a knowledge base in a specialized scientific discipline, and their public intellectualism is more or less limited to matters that relate directly to their knowledge base. Sometimes, as in the case of Krugman, that knowledge base may lead to rather wide-ranging interventions in public discussions, but we still recognize some boundaries to Krugman’s warrant to speak with any sort of authority. Thus if he presumes to speak of cultural or artistic matters— say tendencies in modern sculpture —he would be thought to have gone outside his portfolio, unless he could show some real connection between this topic and the economic matters on which he has recognized expertise. There are other sorts of public intellectuals with larger portfolios. For the most part these are the sorts Lilla had in mind in his anti–public intellectual phase and largely has in mind now that he is pro–public intellectuals. In our contemporary context, someone like Christopher Hitchens or David Brooks qualifies in this category. These sorts speak out on almost all topics of public concern. In Brooks’s case, he often bases his views on social science research, but he is not himself a practicing social scientist, and he clearly also brings a great deal of his own judgment and social philosophy to his topics.

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To a degree, there is an inverse relation between the public side of the public intellectual and the intellectual side. Brooks and Hitchens (d. 2011), for example, are much more public in both senses I have mentioned above, but less intellectual in the sense of firmly rooted in a knowledge base. In contrast are those who speak of public things in public but are more tightly attached to their intellectual base. If we think of public intellectuals as existing on a kind of continuum with the intellectual, that is, knowledge base, at one end, and the publicness (in scope and audience) at the other, we can see that public intellectuals like Krugman lie somewhere midway between generalists like Brooks and specialist public intellectuals like, for example, the health economists, who consulted or spoke publicly on one or another aspect of the recent health-care reform that was very closely tied to their particular area of expertise. Krugman speaks out far more generally on economic matters on which he is presumed to be knowledgeable, but of which he is not likely to have the specialized knowledge of a health economist. Public Intellectuals at Both Ends of the Continuum Are Indispensable to the Functioning of Modern Society Once human societies stop being essentially grounded in tradition, something like public intellectualism becomes constitutive for them. Tradition is replaced by the conscious application of human intelligence to public life. Those who do this are public intellectuals. There has indeed been a debate, since at least the time of the French Revolution, about the degree to which rationalism can or should replace tradition. Burke and modern conservatism arose largely in negative reaction against the perceived attempt by the French intellectuals to remake society in the image of reason. An irony here is that Burke and conservative thinkers like him were also public intellectuals, coming before the public with a case based on a knowledge base concerning the nature of society in order to oppose a certain sort of abstract rationalism. Friedrich Hayek is a twentieth-century public intellectual who has picked up in part on the Burkean skepticism about rationalism in politics. Hayek, it could be said, refines Burke’s analysis in an important way, for he sharpens and in some ways redefines the contrast between rationalism

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and tradition of Burke into a contrast between centralized and decentralized application of intelligence. It is not the application of reason to social life that is the problem, but the attempt to apply reason from the center. No one possesses enough knowledge to be rational for an entire society. But Hayek shows that the opposite of centralized rationalism is not mindless tradition, at least not in modern societies. Rather, it is the decentralized application of intelligence by actors who do not aim to govern the entire society through their pursuits. The wisdom of the whole, so far as there is such, is the aggregate of “small rationalisms.” Hayek no doubt overstates the rationality of decentralized decision-making, as in markets, but he does reveal that even the antirationalist position actually depends on the conscious application of intelligence to social decision, just at a different level and with a different range of ends in view. In this, Hayek supplies a valuable reinterpretation of Burke’s position. We now live in a society thoroughly based on various sorts of knowledge; it is a society constantly changing due to changes in the knowledge base and in social reality due to human actions grounded in the knowledge base. We may well debate whether this is a desirable situation to be in. Great thinkers like Rousseau, Heidegger, and Strauss doubted that it is. But we have no choice at this late date but to be dependent on those, such as policy analysts, who can apply some part of the knowledge base to local and specific issues. We are also dependent, however, on those like the public intellectuals Lilla calls for, who attempt to come to grips with the larger questions of where we are now and whither we are tending. This last group is especially necessary, for, as rational beings, we cannot be content with merely drifting along with the incremental and perhaps inconsistent changes produced by the application of local knowledge to local (not necessarily in the geographic sense) matters. We must seek answers to the “big questions” of justice, human wellbeing, and meaning raised within our common social life. We might think of John Rawls as an example in our time. This function of public intellectuals calls for thinkers far toward the “public” end of the public intellectual continuum. Such thinkers are high on the dimension of public concern but low relative to the more specialized public intellectuals at the other end of the spectrum on knowledge base. It is at this end of the “big thinkers” that we run the greatest risk of “reckless minds,” but this

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does not vacate our need for what thinkers of this sort contribute. Our public and educational policy and priorities are now largely at odds with our real needs. So far as the “big thinkers” at the public end of the public intellectual scale have a knowledge base, that seems to be in political philosophy and related kinds of thinking. But these are increasingly marginalized in our menu of disciplines. So far as these concerns are pursued— more in Europe than the United States it seems— they are pursued in great isolation from actual knowledge of politics, economics, and other concrete bodies of knowledge required for responsible thinking about the “big questions.” As James Ceaser once aptly put it, increasingly we have a political science divorced from philosophy of politics, and a philosophy of politics divorced from actual knowledge of politics. He was referring to the kind of narrow-gauge positivist political science almost universally pursued in the American academy and to the apolitical political philosophy pursued by philosophers like John Rawls or Jacques Derrida. Lilla is thus correct when he calls for a responsible cadre of public intellectuals. But what are we doing to educate and hold responsible such individuals? Liberalism, Broadly Understood, Has More to Offer (as a Public Philosophy) Than Lilla Admits I find Lilla’s stance toward the public intellectuals of the future for whom he calls to be unclear and even puzzling. On (almost) his last page of his chapter in this volume he identifies himself as “a partisan of liberal democracy” but he spends most of his space delineating its inadequacies and its inability “to think the present.” Apparently he was for liberalism before he was against it — or is it the other way around? Thus he has also at other times called for a “new Marx” even though Marx does not “think the present either.” He raises many objections to liberalism. It is too ahistorical, in part because it does not understand its own history or the historical and contingent circumstances that made it successful where it succeeded. It is also ahistorical in not having a grand historical narrative, as Marxism, for example, did. It thus does not tell as large or cosmic a tale of the “meaning of it all.”

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He also finds liberalism to be both normatively and descriptively deficient. It falls short as a normative guide because it posits liberaldemocratic capitalist society as the sole legitimate order, not recognizing that much of the planet is unable or unwilling to embrace such an order. Liberalism as we have it implies no guidance on how to relate to or what to hope for or aim at in dealing with nonliberal societies. It is descriptively inadequate for the closely related reason that it does not note sufficiently that much of the world does not fit its model. Even more damning, even much of the Western liberal world does not descriptively fit liberal models. Thus the capitalism of our day — replete with sophisticated mathematical models, driven by computer programs that can make transactions in nanoseconds, selling not only the standard goods and services but more perilous financial products only their devisers can understand and none can control— this is not the capitalism we think we know from the neoclassical synthesis in our Economics 101 textbooks. The EU is another example. It is or will perhaps be a good thing, “but it is not a liberal-democratic thing.” An impressive list of deficiencies. But is Lilla not applying the wrong standards and seeking a level of applicability that a large political framework like liberalism cannot—and does not attempt to —achieve? Not to engage in a detailed response, but is it really a bad thing that liberalism does not have a grand historical narrative, a philosophy of history, to give the entire historical process meaning? Are not his various concerns about liberalism’s deficient historicity at odds with each other, for in addition to his desire for a grand narrative he seeks greater appreciation for the actual history that produced liberal orders, one presumes a “warts and all” history, complete with an appreciation for contingencies such as grand philosophies of history deny or minimize? Although the liberalism of, say, Locke and Mill attempted to lay out the standard for a legitimate society, they were fully, even painfully, aware that most of the world did not conform to the norms they discovered. It was not a central part of Locke’s agenda to specify why this was so, or to lay out detailed policy prescriptions for what to do in relation to societies of an illiberal sort. He had enough on his plate. But Montesquieu, who I consider a successor to Locke and a member in very good

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standing of the liberal tradition, turned his attention to just these questions Locke had ignored. Does not Lilla sell short the resources of the liberal tradition when he argues as if the version of liberalism prevailing between Reagan and the second Bush should count as liberalism tout court? Is he correct to see liberalism as hopelessly deficient when there are big issues about which it does not speak univocally? Liberalism is not like Marxism. It does not claim to have a “theory of everything” or the ability to predict in advance all new developments in society or economy. Contrary to Lilla — or is it? — I would affirm that the liberaldemocratic tradition remains our best source of guidance because it contains commitments that remain true and provide a baseline of principle that can guide us as we attempt to describe, and prescribe for, the post–Cold War, post– 9/11, post-2008 world in which we now live. This is not to say that a commitment to the liberal-democratic tradition resolves all our quandaries; it does not give us a ready answer to the question of how, if at all, one should regulate derivatives, or whether Dodd – Frank is better or worse than Glass–Steagall. Or whether the Obama health-care reform is a good thing. Even if we remain committed to liberal democracy as “the last ideology standing,” we do not stand at the end of history, left with nothing we can or must do. There remains a need for public intellectuals at all of the levels mentioned above. I can only begin to make a case for the large claim that liberalism broadly understood provides the good and true way forward. In making such a case I appeal to the following aspects of the liberal democratic tradition. Basis in and Concern for Human or Natural Rights. I have elsewhere attempted to present the case for rights and will not repeat that case here.4 But I would like to comment on a part of Lilla’s case: devotees of rights and equality, which is the correlate to rights, understand that these are not universally recognized or vindicated. Responding to some observations similar to Lilla’s by Chief Justice Taney in the infamous Dred Scott case, Abraham Lincoln made the sensible response. According to Taney, that the authors of the liberal Declaration of Independence did not immediately act to free all the slaves in America proves that they could not have really meant “all men” when they spoke in that universal language.

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This is closely related to Lilla’s concern that the universalism of liberalism misses the intractable variability of human social orders. Mutatis mutandis, Lincoln’s response to Taney can be applied to Lilla’s point: I think the authors [of the Declaration] intended to include all men, but they did not declare all men equal in all respects. . . . They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all were then actually enjoying that equality [in “certain inalienable rights”], nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit. (Speech on the Dred Scott decision, 1857; Lincoln’s emphasis.) Equality in human rights, Lincoln says, is a moral vision. It describes something real and extremely important about all human beings, but the affirmation of these rights is not threatened by the (mere) fact that some — indeed many or most — human beings do not enjoy these rights. The rights represent legitimate claims and state a moral, but not necessarily an empirical, reality. That which gives human beings claims to rights also bears with it the claims to human dignity and equality. This triad—human rights, human dignity, and equality — remains the indispensable ground for our common moral and political life. It is unfortunate that not all peoples recognize this triad, but that is not a reason to dispose of it. It is also not clear what kind of warrant this supplies for forcible intervention to impose this recognition. For much of the history of the liberal tradition a norm of nonintervention prevailed. After the nightmare of the twentieth century’s crimes against humanity, the notion became more widespread that intervention was permissible or even morally required. Lilla has doubts about the emerging view, as do many others, in part because humanitarian intervention can so often serve as a mask for self-interest and be perceived as such by those on the receiving end of such “aid.” There is, however, no consensus on either the right or the duty to intervene to vindicate human rights, as recent debates over Libya and Syria clearly demonstrate. This remains one of the unsettled issues within the liberal tradition, which will

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require the contributions of public intellectuals from various points on the continuum to settle. Affirmation of Human Equality Only with Regard to Certain Matters. Liberalism began with the claim that all human beings are equal, but as more radical philosophic positions emerged it became clear that the commitment to equality is firm and foundational but limited in scope. Liberal equality consists in the claim to be considered as an individual rather than a member of a group or clan when it comes to matters of basic rights, status before the law, and, so far as compatible with other liberal goods, opportunity. Thus we speak of equal rights, equality before the law, and equal opportunity. These modes of equality embody the human dignity of each individual as an individual. Openness to the Competing Claims of Human Excellence in Other Matters and Its General Commitment to Liberty. The other side of the limited character of liberal equality is scope for the striving of individuals for excellence, and the exercise of liberty. Liberal equality is not a leveling equality — it does not require that all have the same life outcomes. It leaves room for differences that emerge from differential natural endowments and individual effort, discipline, and even luck. Liberalism is a mode of rationalism, but on the whole, unlike some of its more recent manifestations, does not commit to the rational rectification of all dispensations of the “natural lottery.” Liberal equality distinguishes among matters requiring equal treatment and outcomes and those where liberty and pursuit of excellence hold sway. Liberalism does not mandate the gray uniformity of the former Soviet bloc. The limits of liberal equality are mandated by the commitment to the right of liberty or, as Thomas Jefferson more expansively put it, the right to pursuit of happiness. He meant by that phrase a right of individuals to define and pursue happiness for themselves so far as that can be done harmoniously with a similar right of others and the needs of the public. Especially important in this context is the all-important freedom of religion, a freedom to pursue matters of ultimate concern according to the best lights one can garner and not to be subject to the dictates of rulers.

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The right to liberty arises from the same aspects of human personhood as do rights, human dignity, and the claims of equality. Liberty is not in any way a secondary claim. Commitment to Accountability of Government to Citizens through Some Sort of Consent-garnering Governance. The liberal ideal is full-scale liberal democracy, but there is no inherent claim that full democracy is necessary for a government to be legitimate, or at least acceptable. Montesquieu is a good guide here. This assertion runs counter to much that is often said of liberalism, by Lilla, for example. Liberalism is committed first and foremost to government that respects human rights and dignity. The belief embedded in the liberal tradition is that, all things equal, liberal democracy is the regime most likely to accomplish that end, but liberalism is not dogmatically wedded to the idea that only democracy is legitimate or capable of respecting rights. Liberalism also is capable of recognizing that many regimes fall short of securing basic rights. As we have explained, there is at present no firm consensus within liberalism as to what rights or duties that fact may imply. Nondogmatic Commitment to Liberty in Markets, Recognizing That Markets Do Certain Things Well but Are Not Infallible. Thus it is not at all clear to knowledgeable observers that Lilla is correct that liberal capitalism is incapable of managing the economy of derivatives and global finance. It is, by the way, an illusion to think that international flow of capital has only in this century become a factor in world politics. It has been so at least since the eighteenth century. Commitment to Some Form of the Welfare State. That is to say, the acceptance of some level of responsibility for the well-being of those for whom the institutions of civil society do not or cannot succeed. But the liberal tradition at its best recognizes welfare provision as supplementary to and potentially threatening to the liberty, self-development, and strength of character of their beneficiaries. Thus liberal democracy aspires to care for the needy, to provide the basics of opportunity, but not to be a cradle-to-grave nanny state. ———

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None of the above is meant to say we are at the end of history. In particular, both Lilla and I have left out of account the major challenge we face as a society or worldwide society of societies. It is not the EU’s democratic deficit nor the character of finance capitalism in the early twentyfirst century. It is rather the challenge of technology — one of the glories of liberal modernity, but also the greatest challenge to the survivability of civilization and perhaps of the human race itself. It is not clear that the liberal tradition has the resources to resolve all the dilemmas technology poses for us. Can any public intellectual— a new Locke, a new Marx, or even a new Heidegger “save us”? Leaving aside that awesome challenge for the moment, let me close by conceding that none of the so-called liberal democracies live up to the standards of the liberal tradition as outlined above. Even less do the nonliberal societies in the world. But as Lincoln once said of the equality principle, so may we say of the table of liberal goods: it can serve as “standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere” (speech on the Dred Scott decision, 1857). Implementing that— there is a task for public intellectuals.

Notes 1. Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001), 150. 2. Ibid., 151. 3. My discussion of types of public intellectuals is indebted to Alan Lightman, “The Role of the Public Intellectual,” http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum /papers/lightman.html. 4. Michael Zuckert, Natural Rights and the New Republicanism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Zuckert, The Natural Rights Republic (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999); Zuckert, Launching Liberalism: John Locke and the Liberal Tradition (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2002); and Zuckert, “Human Dignity and the Basis of Justice: Freedom, Rights, and the Self,” Hedgehog Review 9, no. 3 (2007): 32– 45.

chapter thirteen

The Public Intellectual as Teacher and Students as Public Declining and Falling Apart       .     

Why “Public” Intellectual?

A public intellectual— as opposed to merely an intellectual— is presumably a person of extensive education, intelligence, learning, and knowledge who has the added ability of conveying those qualities to a broader, nonspecialized audience. In order to translate the specialized knowledge and extensive training of an intellectual to a broader audience, the public intellectual must be able to speak and write in ways that are at once knowledgeable and accessible, learned but not pedantic, informed by specialized knowledge, but not presented merely for specialists. Even as the public intellectual is able to draw on a field of specialized knowledge — often ranging from a focus on security studies, or law, or medicine, or economics, or political philosophy — nevertheless, the public intellectual 333

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is also most often marked by the ability to draw on a wide range of disciplinary insights, frequently versed in fields and literature beyond his or her own academic home. Indeed, the public intellectual often has an “extradisciplinary” breadth that can be the source of disdain for specialists within that person’s own field, who conclude that their colleague has sacrificed disciplinary depth for superficial breadth. The public intellectual must therefore consciously and even willfully resist the deepest currents of academic intellectual formation that stress specialized knowledge, publication in narrowly focused academic journals and imprints, and the professional imprimatur of a small coterie of colleagues in specialized fields of study. All of these features of the public intellectual coincide precisely with the qualities that translate into a strong attraction to, and effective teaching of, undergraduates. Indeed, the kinds of presentations both in writing and speaking that most effectively appeal to talented and curious undergraduates unsurprisingly translate, with very little alteration, to a wider noncollegiate audience. The undergraduate is in most cases, by definition, a generalist and, in spite of attendance at an academic institution, a nonacademic. Although the undergraduate often desires to gain admission to top-ranked academic institutions, attends classes with world-class scholars (sometimes), reads work that has often been the fruit of long academic labor, and “mimics” the work of the professoriate in undertaking research, writing papers, engaging in laboratory work, even in writing of a more specialized “thesis,” in all but a few cases will an undergraduate become or even be attracted to an academic career. In addition to the work that mimics the endeavors of scholars, the undergraduate is often also extensively occupied in extracurricular activities, social events centered on the dormitory or campus group, both playing and rooting for collegiate (and professional) athletic teams, preparing for one’s eventual career (including the increasingly ubiquitous internship requirement), and in general preparing broadly for the transition into adulthood— which, for most undergraduates, peripherally involves academic work. For most undergraduates, the academic side of their collegiate experience is often secondary, and what will remain will often be a generalized interest in intellectual subjects that are not easily mistaken with an “academic” approach.

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This general portrait of the overextended undergraduate experience — what David Brooks dubbed “The Organization Kid”— is simply the incipient form of the public intellectual’s broader audience.1 The public intellectual— distinguished from the “academic”—competes with the overwhelming busy-ness of the modern era, from the demands of the competitive global marketplace, to time spent on family life, social obligations and relaxation, and the millions of distractions of our media age. Unlike the small academic audience for which most scholars are trained to address, the public intellectual’s audience is anything but a version of the leisured aristocracy. Rather, members of that lay audience are often harried by life’s countless demands, yet, to their occasional credit (like the talented undergraduates they might once have been), they remain inquisitive, eager to learn when the opportunity can be grasped, desirous for explanations of how things “fit together.” They simply don’t have time, training, or even inclination to drill down into the minutiae of scholarly debate. They instead look to smart, insightful, discerning, and accessible voices that provide graspable but often penetrating analyses across a spectrum of issues. When time permits, they turn to public intellectuals. From the outset when referring to “public intellectuals,” I have italicized the word public, in the first instance to distinguish this distinctive figure from the mainstream of academic “intellectuals.” But I have also sought to distinguish the adjective in order to point out that the term is of fairly recent vintage, reflecting relatively recent historical trends. As journalist (and scholar of journalism) Robert S. Boynton has written of the development of the concept of “public intellectual,” as opposed simply to an “intellectual,” “designating an intellectual as ‘public’ would have struck a late-nineteenth-century listener as tautological, if not absurd.” To be an “intellectual” was by definition to be a public intellectual, which included not only the ability to think in seclusion, but also implicitly described someone “informed by a strong moral impulse, who addressed a general, educated audience in accessible language about the most important issues of the day.”2 Writing as recently as 1987, Russell Jacoby entitled his jeremiad lamenting the decline of independent thinkers The Last Intellectuals. He did not entitle his work “The Last Public Intellectuals”; echoing Boynton, as recently as 1987 it was simply implicitly understood that to be an intellectual was tantamount to being a person who was necessarily

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engaged with a public. Jacoby described not the decline of “intellectuals” per se, but the replacement of an older norm of “public intellectual” with the rise of a new class of thinkers who are no longer engaged with a public, but instead resided in and spoke only to other denizens of the academy: Intellectuals who write with vigor and clarity may be as scarce as low rents in New York or San Francisco. Raised in city streets and cafes before the age of massive universities, “last” generation of intellectuals wrote for the educated reader. They have been supplanted by high-tech intellectuals [note that Jacoby needs to qualify the noun “intellectual” here with a limiting adjective, “high-tech”], consultants and professors, anonymous souls, who may be competent, and more than competent, but who do not enrich public life. Younger intellectuals, whose lives have unfolded almost entirely on campuses, direct themselves to professional colleagues but are inaccessible and unknown to others. This is the danger and the threat; the public culture relies on a dwindling band of older intellectuals who command the vernacular that is slipping out of the reach of their successors.3 Jacoby’s narrative both of declension and the university’s co-optation of all intellectual energies for the purpose of a closed, essentially “private” conversation was informed by romanticized nostalgia about the “bohemian” utopia of Greenwich Village in the days of Lionel Trilling, Max Eastman, Lewis Mumford, Dwight Macdonald, and the like, and it should be readily noted that many of the heroic “intellectuals” that he named in his lamentation attained Ph.D.’s and taught much of their lives within the confines of universities, even as they wrote for audiences and were read outside the ivy-covered walls. Still, his basic insight that something fundamental changed that led to the addition of the word “public” to the once-sufficient noun “intellectual” does indeed capture a fundamental change that took place not only outside the university but within the university and, specifically, moved the priorities of faculty away from teaching undergraduates and instead toward an emphasis on research productivity, disciplinary status, and graduate training. Without losing sight of the transformations taking place throughout American and industrialized society that led to the decline of the role of the “intellectual”

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understood implicitly as “public intellectual,” I will focus in the next section on the transformations within the elite institution of the university itself that contributed decisively to this decline.

The Origins of the Academic “Public Intellectual”

Describing the early days of Harvard University (then Harvard College), which is today regularly ranked as one of the top research universities in the world, the historian Samuel Eliot Morison wrote that, for the Puritan founders of Harvard, university learning apart from college life was not worth having; and the humblest resident tutor was accounted a more than suitable teacher than the most eminent community lecturer. Book learning alone might be got by lectures and reading; but it was only by studying and disputing, eating and drinking, playing and praying as members of the same collegiate community, in close and constant association with each other and with their tutors, that the priceless gift of character could be imparted to young men.4 Morison’s description of the involvement of faculty (tutors) in the daily lives of their students, and with each other, captures the essence of collegium from which the name of institutions such as Harvard College took their name. Meaning “community, society or guild,” a “college” was organized to embody an ongoing set of relationships both in and beyond the classroom with a main aim of the forming the character of the rising generation— character that included, but was not limited to, intellectual formation.5 The community was oriented around the cultivation of the undergraduates, most of whom were destined for lives in professions, especially (but not only) ministry. The collegium focused on developing “the whole man— his body as well as his soul and intellect,” in the hopes of encouraging “unity, gentility and public service.”6 Though much of the faculty’s focus and qualifications were directly related to academic attainments, awareness that such focus was ultimately

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directed at the cultivation of certain kinds of characters who would in turn have a considerable role in shaping the broader public meant necessarily that to be a college “intellectual” was inescapably to be a “public intellectual”— long before any usage of that phrase. As participants in a “collegium,” faculty were focused mainly on the formation of their students, requiring extensive rapport and cooperation with their faculty “colleagues.” Of necessity, given this focus, faculty could not merely focus on disciplinary specialization, and instead understood a main role to be the integration of various forms of knowledge along with fostering an explicit connection between the world of the intellect and the practice of living life. The emphasis on integration and formation of students was especially deepened by the religious nature of these institutions, which were grounded in the basic presupposition that the created order arose from a single divine source, and thus that it was intelligible because of the human capacity for reflection and understanding of divine intention and purpose. As a result, the collegium was oriented toward the universum— colleges were consonant with the “university,” or unified, single, and comprehensive order that could be known (at least in theory) through human inquiry. As Andrew Delbanco has written, “today the word ‘interdisciplinary’ is bandied about . . . , but in fact most of our academic institutions are much less interdisciplinary than were their counterparts in the past. In the early American college, since all studies were unified as one integrated study of the divine mind, boundaries between ‘fields’ or ‘disciplines’ did not exist. ‘There is not one truth in religion, another in mathematics, and a third in physics or in art,’ as one Harvard graduate (class of 1825) put the matter. ‘There is one truth, even as one God.’”7 The structure of the college in fact reflected the deeper commitment to a universum: by housing scholars of a wide variety of disciplines who were nevertheless in frequent conversation and communication with each other, the relationship between all approaches and avenues to universal knowledge could be readily discerned. There was necessarily specialization on college campuses, but specialists were not siloed or mainly in conversation with fellow specialists: rather, the organizational principle of the college, bringing together scholars of many fields who were responsible

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for most aspects of the university, from curriculum to student life, forced faculty into regular contact with scholars of many disciplines. Thus, rather than developing colleges focused exclusively on chemistry, or literature, or theology, or physics— which could well have been an alternative organizing principle, and would presumably have led to swifter advances in those sciences— from the very beginning the American college housed a wide variety of disciplines under a single roof. This diversity within a single collegium sought not to foster specialization for the sake of research productivity and the “advancement of learning,” but instead was the preferred organizational form by which institutionalized contact — especially through interaction with undergraduates— would encourage deeper apprehension of universal knowledge. This vision of the “collegium” as “universum” is captured eloquently in a justly famous passage of John Henry Newman’s The Idea of the University, in which he connects the interpenetration of disciplinary foci with its relationship with an institutional commitment to universal knowledge and the ultimate focus upon undergraduate students: It is a great point then to enlarge the range of studies which a University professes, even for the sake of the students; and though they cannot pursue every subject which is open to them, they will be the gainers by living among those and under those who represent the whole circle. This I conceive to be the advantage of a seat of universal learning, considered as a place of education. An assemblage of learned men, zealous for their own sciences, and rivals of each other, are brought, by familiar intercourse and for the sake of intellectual peace, to adjust together the claims and relations of their respective subjects of investigation. They learn to respect, to consult, to aid each other. Thus is created a pure and clear atmosphere of thought, which the student also breathes, though in his case he only pursues a few sciences out of the multitude. . . . A habit of mind is formed which lasts through life, of which the attributes are freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom. . . . This is the main purpose of a University in its treatment of its students.8

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This depiction of the environment in which a student is saturated by the “whole circle” that is created out of the “frequent intercourse” of faculty from a variety of disciplines is the very heart of an education that is “liberal,” or the education of a free human being. At the heart of this vision of education is the liberation of students both from narrow and parochial assumptions with which they may have entered college, but also the tutoring of base impulses that might govern in the absence of the kind of education in character commended by Newman. The “freedom” they were to attain was conceived in terms both intellectual and moral, and it was thought to be the direct result of the kind of the interconnected intellectual and moral formation arising from the collegium. The organization of the original colleges presumed a certain pedagogy and theory of human flourishing: intended in the very community of interaction between and among faculty of a variety of disciplines was a vision of a human person broadly, liberally, and educated in a way that sought to integrate knowledge that was assumed to be a comprehensive whole. There was no division between intellectual and moral formation in this organizational scheme: one’s job as professor could not simply be understood to be limited to one’s disciplinary work, but rather what one “professed.” Out of this environment, Newman suggests, a liberal person, and hence a free citizen, emerges.

The Rise of the “A-Public” Intellectual

Works such as Jacoby’s The Last Intellectual were bellwethers of a fundamental change that had been taking place within the university, namely, the transition from the norm of the collegium to the rise of the research university. This transition has been alternatively celebrated in landmark works by Clark Kerr — then chancellor of the University of California— even while decried in many more recent works. In Kerr’s “Godkin Lectures” delivered in 1963, and subsequently published as The Uses of the University, Kerr recognized that there were certain losses that followed from the transition from Newman’s university to the modern multi versity, but in the main — particularly in light of demands of modern indus-

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try and warfare — those gains were altogether needed and justified. Among the changes that Kerr readily recognized were those that were experienced by both students and faculty, and which were in fact deeply interconnected. The multiversity, Kerr wrote, “is a confusing place for the student. He has problems establishing his identity and sense of security within it. . . . The casualty rate is high. The walking wounded are many.” But the upside of life for students in the multiversity is freedom of choice: “The freedom of the student to pick and choose, to stay or move on— is triumphant.” Although left unexplained, the “confusion” for students often arises directly from their extraordinary freedom, a freedom that is in significant part granted because faculty are no longer oriented toward fostering and maintaining “collegium”: “Teaching is less central than it once was for faculty members; research has become more important.” As a consequence, increasingly specialized faculty lose the ability to connect their work with that of colleagues in other fields within the same institution, and even subfields within the same discipline: “The intellectual world has been fractionalized as interests have become more diverse; and there are fewer common topics of conversation at the faculty clubs.” One identifies far less with fellow professors at one’s institution as one does with faculty in the same subfield at other universities: “Faculty members are less members of the particular university and more colleagues within their national academic discipline groups.”9 Kerr sees these costs as inescapable given the nature of the gains, but more recent assessments conclude that the modern crisis of the university — particularly its increasing disconnection from the concerns of students and society as a whole — was born of the embrace of the “multiversity.” As Anthony T. Kronman explores in his 2007 book Education’s End, the rise of the research university has led especially to the displacement of the humanities by the natural sciences, the rise of “political correctness,” and a general decline in capacity for civil and meaningful exploration of “big ideas” that he argues was one of the hallmarks of the older university, all leading in his view to the question of whether universities should be thought to be any longer justified as institutions of education. This crisis was precipitated by the embrace of the research model

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lionized by Kerr, which in turn led to the national and even international standardization of Ph.D. requirements and a growing emphasis upon specialization and disciplinary focus. Thus, Kronman: Graduate students learn to restrict their attention to a single segment of human knowledge and to accept their incompetence to assess, or even understand, the work of specialists in other areas. But they also learn to accept the idea that this same narrowing of attention, which cuts them off from those in other disciplines, alone qualifies them to join the company of fellow specialists in their own field, spread over many generations and united in a common commitment to the subject they share. They are taught to understand that only by accepting the limits of specialization can they ever hope to make an “original contribution” to the ever-growing body of scholarship in which the fruits of research are contained.10 Ironically, although this shift was frequently accompanied by changes of institutional names from “College” to “University,” the consequence of the shift to specialized research roles for faculty, and an increasingly libertarian approach to curriculum and student life, was the fragmented “multiversity.”11 The dissolution of “collegium” resulted not—as frequent name changes would suggest—in the rise of the university, but in its opposite. Allan Bloom’s best-selling The Closing of the American Mind closed with reflections similar to those of Kerr and Kronman, emphasizing the “bewilderment and even demoralization” of students confronted with the exploding college catalogue and generally unguided and unconstrained by hard limits to choice of courses. This liberation has served the purpose of professors who themselves seek liberation from constraints of teaching generalist courses to generalist undergraduates: “Most professors are specialists, concerned only with their own fields, interested in the advancement of those fields in their own terms, or in their own personal advancement in a world where all the rewards are on the side of professional distinction. They have been emancipated from the old structure of the university, which at least helped to indicate that they are incomplete, only parts of an unexamined and undiscovered whole.”12

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Bloom emphasized that general education requirements, often taught either by specialists or specialists-in-training, no longer served the original function of providing a liberal education. Such courses tend instead to be generally consumed as fragmented offerings of a dis-integrated “multiversity,” courses that need to be fulfilled before moving on to “real” studies. In fact, Bloom stressed, the generalized fragmentation, lack of real disciplinary breadth, perceived lack of enthusiasm by faculty who end up teaching such courses, together amount to an alternative institutional pedagogy to that one animating the collegium: “There is no high-level generalism.”13 Professors no longer modeled such “high-level generalism” because it was no longer part of the organizational structure of universities, the result of daily interactions of faculty in “collegium” with fellow faculty across a diversity of disciplines. The result was a generalized disdain for “introductory courses,” felt by professors as obstacles to their proper work — specialized research— and by students as obstructions to their main interests of getting on to “real” studies or, even more commonly today, “the real world.” Universities, it is generally acknowledged, and even celebrated by some, are increasingly devoted to developing professional skills and marketability in an unremittingly competitive global marketplace. A feedback loop develops in which the professionalization of faculty leads to institutions that are increasingly focused on offering specialized training, contributing to an academic atmosphere in which students come to expect specialized training in order to make themselves competitive in the marketplace. Absent a model in which a central role of the professorial vocation is inviting students into the world of “high-level generalism,” students quickly gravitate to the path of least resistance — not the “big questions” centering on “the meaning of life,” which Bloom and Kronman alike argue should form the core of the undergraduate experience — and a focus on careerism and postgraduate status that tends to turn the collegiate experience into yet another “hoop” that must be jumped through before one can move on to the real business of getting ahead. The result of the transformation of the university is the loss of both “public intellectuals” and a “public” who cares about intellectual questions.

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These are general conclusions that derive from the systematic changes that have transformed much of higher education. There are always exceptions to this loose rule — there continue to be “public intellectuals” even among authors I’ve cited, such as Bloom, Jean Elshtain, and Richard Posner —but the systemic changes have had a profound effect on both the atmosphere in which a public intellectual might arise and the evaluation of such activity by disciplinary peers and administration. Interestingly, however, the very culmination of the research university’s trajectory — portending particularly the decline of the humanities and “humanistic” social sciences— and the rise of the Internet and accompanying ease of “publishing” work intended for a generalist audience suggests that we are at the advent of a new age of the “public intellectual.” However, what is far less clear is whether there is a public of sufficient coherence and breadth for such work. Ironically, we may be entering an age in which the “public intellectual” achieves a renaissance, but the fragmentation not only of the university, but society as a whole, precludes the existence of a “public.” And though there are many factors that contribute to this condition, a primary one is attributable to the failure of universities and their faculty to cultivate “high-level generalism” among our best and brightest, and in turn to their focus on jobs and private affairs and a general decline in civic life. If the decline of the “public intellectual” came about in significant part because the requirements of the research university precluded prior forms of disciplinary integration and an ability to speak across and beyond specializations, the decline of a “public” followed upon the withdrawal of faculty from their central role of cultivating comprehensively liberally educated students. For a time, a public existed without public intellectuals; increasingly, we might expect to see an increase in public intellectuals without a public.

Return of Public Intellectuals but Loss of a Public?

Two factors seem to be aligning that might give some hope to those who would hope for a renaissance of public intellectuals. First, the Internet has resulted in a revival of general interest venues that benefit both from

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lowered cost barriers to those of print publications and greater opportunity for those wishing to publish for a broader audience. If authors like Russell Jacoby, Christopher Lasch, and Kurt Vonnegut were wont to lament the decline of the general-interest publication for the educated public in the latter part of the twentieth century, the opportunities for publication via Internet venues has arguably more than compensated for the shuttering of numerous general-interest magazines and journals. Second, the very logic of the modern university, with its heavy stress upon research with practical (especially STEM) applications and career preparation is leading to the demotion and even disassembling of humanistic disciplines. This development was predicted already in 1987 by Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind and lamented with particular venom by Kronman, who puts much of the blame for the humanities’ eclipse on its own ill-fated decision to stress “political correctness” over pedagogy devoted to exploring “the meaning of life.”14 With declining enrollments in humanities a general and decided trend in higher education, there has arisen the prospect that faculty who offer special appeal to undergraduates otherwise attracted to the easier option of more narrowly tailored “career-preparedness” might gain a new standing within their departments and even institutions. One need only consider the nearly 1,000 students enrolling in Harvard University’s Michael Sandel’s “Justice” course — now an international “best-selling” video course — to recognize the potential space that has opened for “public intellectuals” on campuses where highly specialized approaches to humanities and social science disciplines especially hold relatively little appeal to undergraduates otherwise tempted by majors in business.15 Yet even with these two factors that make the prospect for a renaissance of “intellectuals” oriented to communication with a broader public, there is the question whether any such “public” exists as a potential audience for such work. In particular, the fragmentation that now exists as the norm in the intellectual life of the university is more widely the case in our national and international discourse. For all of the potential and promise of the Internet as a site for a renaissance of public intellectual life, part of its nature is to exacerbate a tendency already evident in the fracturing of a more national culture evinced by the rise of cable television and satellite radio, with its innumerable programming options.16 Gone

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are the days of a few national publications and broadcast stations that establish and foster a common national culture; abandoned is any ambition to foster “cultural literacy” as part of the tradition of “common schooling” and belief in the centrality of national and cultural integration of America’s multicultural variety; and as a host of “communitarian” thinkers have lamented, faded too is the rich and diverse tapestry of various civic locations, and what Ray Oldenburg called “the great good places” where a common civic culture could be practiced and sustained.17 Innumerable factors have contributed to this fragmentation and decline of a more common culture, but an often overlooked factor is the very transformation of the university that I have explored— the decline of collegium oriented to the relationship of teachers and students. The transformation of both purpose and organization of colleges and universities not only diminished the role and formation of “public intellectuals,” but, in turn, it also contributed to a decline of a “public,” inasmuch as the kind of integrated inquiry and discourse that was the aspirational norm for, and to be modeled by, college faculty, which in turn fostered an elite who in turn conveyed and modeled these practices to a broader public. One can understand how this was particularly the case when a large percentage of the college-educated would be expected to enter ministry or teaching professions, and how their formation in the elite colonial-era institutions would be magnified in their roles as community leaders and stewards. As concerns of college students and faculty alike have become more privatistic and careerist, and less shaped by what Harvard’s Morison described as “the priceless gift of character” or “unity, gentility and public service,” the decline of the atmosphere designed to encourage “high-level generalism” congenial to the formation of the “public intellectual” contributed to the general dissolution of a “public.” In turn, analyses of this consequence have pointed out how a more private, individualistic, and less “integrated” understanding of our common shared concerns and fate has led to what Lasch potently described as “the betrayal of the elites.” Universities are increasingly devoted to identifying the “best and brightest” and fostering a meritocratic class that can ably navigate the perils of globalized capitalism. But, as Lasch pointed out, a consequence of this formation has been the loss of any sense of common culture and destiny: “In effect, they have removed themselves

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from the common life.” Similarly, Robert Reich observed in a widely discussed 1991 article, “The Secession of the Successful,” that “we learn to feel responsible for others because we share with them a common history, . . . a common culture, . . . a common fate.”18 The simultaneity of the laments of the decline of “public intellectuals” and the decline of community, along with civic engagement and democratic participation, is more than merely coincidental. We are not seeking to overstate the role that transformations of universities, and particularly the role of professors in the formation, teaching, and cultivation of students has played, nor should we understate the significance of these changes to wider currents of American social and political life. Many contemporary social pathologies related to a fragmented and dis-integrated common culture and an increasingly dysfunctional and divided political environment have origins that lie at least to a significant extent in our most influential and formative institutions. If attention to the decline of and prospects for “public intellectuals” seems to some of less than foremost interest, to the extent that the fate of the American democratic project is of concern, then one barometer of our relative political and social health may well be a culture and its formative institutions that support “public intellectuals,” who, in turn, foster a public. The health of the republic may rest on our modest ability to learn again to speak with each other in ways both public and intellectual.

Notes 1. David Brooks, “The Organization Kid,” The Atlantic, April 2001, 40 – 54. 2. Robert S. Boyton, “The New Intellectuals,” The Atlantic, March 1995, http://www.robertboynton.com/articleDisplay.php?article_id=23. 3. Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals (New York: Basic Books, 1987), ix– x. 4. Samuel Eliot Morison, The Founding of Harvard College (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935), 252. 5. David Brooks, “The Organization Kid.” 6. Andrew Delbanco, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 74.

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7. Ibid., 41. The quote is from Horatio Greenough, Form and Function: Remarks on Art, Design and Architecture, ed. Harold A. Small (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1947), 74, which was originally published in 1853. 8. John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University, ed. Frank M. Turner (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 77. 9. Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University, 5th ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 31– 33. 10. Anthony T. Kronman, Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 93. 11. Hundreds of schools have had name changes during the course of their institutional lifetime. In the overwhelming number of cases, the name was changed from “college” to “university,” and almost none were changed from “university” to “college”; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_university_and _college_name_changes_in_the_United_States. 12. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 338, 339. 13. Ibid., 343. 14. Ibid., 343; Kronman, Education’s End, chap. 1. 15. For Sandel’s course, see http://www.justiceharvard.org/about/course/. 16. Cass Sunstein, Republic.com (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011). 17. Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (W.W. Norton, 1996), chaps. 6, 8, 9; E. D. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (New York: Vintage, 1988); Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts and How They Get You Through the Day (New York: Marlowe and Company, 1999); Alan Erenhalt, The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues of Community in America (New York: Basic Books, 1998); Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001); George Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief (New York: Basic Books, 2014). 18. Lasch, Revolt of the Elites, 47; Robert Reich, “The Secession of the Successful,” http://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/20/magazine/secession-of-the -successful.html. Reich is quoted by Lasch, Revolt of the Elites, 47.

chapter fourteen

The Ethical Imperative for Some Scholars to Be Public Intellectuals and for the Rest to Let Them Do So  . 

Introduction

What are the ethical obligations of scholars to the rest of society? To be sure, ethical discussion is by no means absent in the academy. We scholars spend a lot of time thinking about our obligations to the norms of our disciplines. We also agonize about the ethnical component of our relations with students and colleagues. But we do not talk much about our ethical obligations to society. The much decried decline in American academic public intellectualism is a consequence of changes in our thinking about the ethical of obligations of scholars, and it also raises profound questions about how we should think about them outside of the guild. The one exception to our general silence on this topic is the widespread hesitancy among scholars about policy engagement. The most common arguments against it are that it presents insuperable moral and 349

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ethical problems to the integrity of the scientific process and also makes the academy complicit in the immoral policies that governments often undertake.1 Political theorist Anne Norton cites the authority of one of the fathers of modern social science, Max Weber, as a rationale for maintaining distance between “science” and “politics.”2 Norton’s reading of Weber as separating the two realms is widely shared.3 “Most social scientists since Weber’s time have refrained from playing the dual role of scholar and political man,” Reinhard Bendix argues. But this abdication is, in my view, based upon two common misinterpretations of Weber’s thinking about the proper relationship between science/policy and facts/ values and ignores that he himself performed both roles while driven largely by his own value commitments.4 Weber was, to be sure, a proponent of ethical neutrality and valuefree social science and an opponent of preaching from “the academic chair,” famously maintaining that “the professor should not demand the right as a professor to carry the marshal’s baton of the statesman or the reformer in his knapsack.”5 But the conventional reading misinterprets Weber as completely eschewing values and policy engagement. In fact, Weber provides the theoretical and ethical basis for an argument on behalf of “Politics and Science as a Vocation.”6 To be clear, I am not arguing that Weber’s example shows that all scholars should also serve as public intellectuals. Rather, my point is that some should follow Weber’s lead and the rest ought to allow them to do so; indeed, the academy should reward those of its members who discharge their disciplines’ collective ethical obligation to the rest of society. I begin this chapter by showing that contrary to the conventional wisdom, Weber’s methodology of social science did not preclude ethical considerations or eschew policy engagement. Weber’s brief on behalf of value-free social science was not based upon the assumption of the superiority of science over all values, but rather the opposite. Value-neutrality was a means of protecting values from the limitations of science. Similarly, although Weber did not think that science could adjudicate among competing values, he did not regard values as disconnected from the scientific enterprise. Indeed, because he regarded scientists as ultimately animated by their values, and identified the political realm as the place

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where value judgments were made, he believed that at least some scholars had an obligation to participate in that realm. I then show that Weber’s actual practice consistently transgressed the boundaries between science and politics, and he did so consistent with his deeply held intellectual and ethical principles. Weber himself did not eschew political engagement — as we shall see, he was deeply engaged in the political realm throughout his career, regularly blurring the lines between scholar and public intellectual. Weber simply urged scholars not to confuse these two roles, particularly in the classroom. Just because science and the realm of scholarship could not settle ethical debates that did not mean that they were irrelevant to Weber. Indeed, in his view, such debates could only be adjudicated in the realm of politics. He maintained, in fact, that scholars had a moral obligation to engage ethical issues in the political realm. I conclude by drawing some general lessons from the Weberian approach to social science and by offering some concrete recommendations for putting “politics and science as a vocation” into practice in my discipline of political science, which I believe are also applicable to other social science and humanities disciplines.

Weber’s Social Science and the Intellectual and Ethical Imperatives of Policy Relevance

In order to make the case that Weber was in fact deeply committed to policy engagement, and that this commitment was rooted in a consistent value system, I need first to show that this obligation flowed directly from Weber’s scholarly work, particularly his discussion of the methodology of the social sciences. The conventional view that Weber was not deeply committed to values can only be sustained by a “superficial reading of some of his earlier ‘methodological’ essays.”7 I propose, instead, an unconventional but more accurate reading of Weber that challenges both the view that he eschewed values and that he believed scholars should avoid political engagement; in fact, I maintain that the two were inextricably linked in his thinking, at least for some scholars, including for himself.

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Value-Free Social Science Doesn’t Mean the Absence of Values in Research As we saw, the conventional view is that Weber advocated separating values and science, with scholars confining themselves to the latter.8 But far from eschewing values in their work, Weber cautioned that “we [scholars] in particular are liable to fall victim to a special kind of illusion: the illusion that we can entirely do without conscious value-judgments of our own.”9 A better way to understand Weber’s value neutrality is simply as an analytical approach for conducting research.10 In Weber’s view, the scholar’s values should not influence how he or she studies a question or the conclusions reached, but they play a decisive role in leading the scholar to ask a particular question or study a given topic in the first place.11 Weber’s approach to value-free social science was therefore simply a sensible caution that the methods of modern social science, whatever their other virtues, could not adjudicate among competing value judgments, which he defined as “practical evaluations of the unsatisfactory or satisfactory character of phenomena subject to our influence.”12 In his view, the tools of modern social science could only establish internal consistency among values and clarify the relationship between their means and ends.13 But they could not tell us which ends we should prefer.14 As Weber explained his thinking, “methodology can only bring us reflective understanding of the means which have demonstrated their value in practice by raising them to the level of explicit consciousness; it is no more the precondition of fruitful intellectual work than the knowledge of anatomy is the precondition for ‘correct’ walking.”15 “The teacher can demonstrate to you the necessity of this choice,” Weber argued elsewhere, but “as long as he wishes to remain a teacher, and not turn into a demagogue, he can do no more.”16 This attitude flowed logically from Weber’s methodology of value-free social science, which made it possible for the scholar to balance his or her obligations to both science and politics simultaneously. The core assumption undergirding Weber’s methodological position was his belief that “an empirical science cannot tell anyone what he should do —but rather what he can do — and under certain circumstances— what he wishes to do.”17 The reason that modern social science cannot adjudicate values, in Weber’s opinion, was that fact questions — the purview of science — and value debates— which by their very nature are

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more akin to those of theology or philosophy than social science — occupy distinct analytical realms.18 The validity of these values was in his words “a matter of faith.”19 Or as he wrote to a cousin, when we think about ethics, “we are simply at the limit of our intellectual capacity and step into an entirely different world in which an entirely different side of our mind undertakes to judge things and everyone knows that its judgments, though they are not based on intellectual concepts, are fully as sure and as clear as those of any logical reasoning.”20 Indeed, Weber’s rationale for advocating the methodology of valuefree social science was not part of an effort to exclude values from scholarship, but rather to defend them given the limits of modern science.21 As Weber himself explained in a speech to the Verein für Sozialpolitik in Vienna in the summer of 1909, “The reason why I take every opportunity . . . to attack in such extremely emphatic terms the jumbling of what ought to be with what exists is not that I underestimate the question of what ought to be. On the contrary, it is because . . . I can’t bear it if the weightiest problems that can move the human heart . . . are here changed into a technical-economic problem of production and made the subject of a scholarly discussion.”22 Paradoxically, Weber narrowed the scope of the social sciences to save values from them. Moreover, far from being an uncritical partisan of modern social science, Weber was actually quite critical of it. In his famous speech “Science as a Vocation,” he described “the ideas of science [as] another worldly realm of artificial abstractions that strive to capture the blood and sap of real life in their scrawny hands without ever managing to do so.”23 And he asked, rhetorically, “Who — aside from certain big children who are indeed found in the natural sciences— still believes that the findings of astronomy, biology, physics, or chemistry could teach us anything about the meaning of the world? If there is any such ‘meaning,’ along what road could one come upon its tracks? If these natural sciences lead to anything in this way, they are apt to make the belief that there is such a thing as ‘meaning’ of the universe die out at its very roots.”24 The root of his jaundiced attitude toward science was revealed in his approving quote from Tolstoy: “Science is meaningless because it has no answer to the only questions that matter to us: ‘What should we do? How shall we live?’”25

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Weber provided some concrete illustrations of science’s limits. For example, he thought social science could help us identify the most productive economic system, an admittedly important thing to know, but it could not tell us whether we should prefer the aggregate accumulation of wealth to some other societal goal, such as its more equitable distribution.26 Another illustration he offered concerned trade unionism: “The task of an ethically neutral science in the analysis of syndicalism is completed when it has reduced the syndicalist standpoint to its most rational and internally consistent form and has empirically investigated the preconditions for its existence and its practical consequences. Whether one should or should not be a syndicalist can never be proven without very definite metaphysical premises which are never demonstrable by science.”27 Both of these issues could only be decided ultimately in the realm of values, rather than science. The Link between Values and Political Engagement Social science’s inability to decide among competing values made engagement with the political world vitally important to Weber: it was only there that he thought the big value questions could be debated and decided. According to Marianne Weber, Max believed that “the social scientist in particular, whose findings are usable in particular measure for the shaping of life and who therefore shares the responsibility for the course of politics, has a dual task: the promotion of truth for its own sake and the ‘guiding of his actions by clear, consciously chosen convictions.’”28 Hence, policy and values were inextricably linked for him because “vocation” was “in some sense moral” and thus he “argues that science does have an important ethical role to play within the totality of human life.”29 Values and policy were connected for Weber because the former determined the latter, in much the same way that he saw values interacting with social science. Recall that he believed that the topics for research “are selected by the value-relevance of the phenomena treated.”30 Weber similarly argued that “the ultimate determinants of policy arise from highly personal values that are weighed against each other.”31 “The distinctive characteristic of a problem of social policy,” Weber therefore maintained, “is indeed the fact that it cannot be resolved merely on the

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basis of purely technical considerations which assume already settled ends. Normative standards of value can and must be objects of dispute in a discussion of a problem of social policy because the problem lies in the domain of general cultural values.”32 In his companion essay, “Politics as a Vocation,” Weber described the unique challenges of that realm: “Politics means a slow, powerful drilling through hard boards, with a mixture of passion and a sense of proportion. . . . The only man who has a ‘vocation’ for politics is one who is certain that his spirit will not be broken if the world, when looked at from his point of view, proves too stupid or base to accept what he wishes to offer it, and who when faced with all that obduracy, can still say ‘Nevertheless!’ despite everything.”33 Weber’s ideal politician, therefore, combined both responsibility and conviction:34 It is immensely moving when a mature man— no matter whether old or young in years— is aware of a responsibility for the consequences of his conduct and really feels such responsibility with heart and soul. He then acts by following an ethic of responsibility and somewhere he reaches the point where he says: “Here I stand; I can do no other.” That is something genuinely human and moving. And every one of us who is not spiritually dead must realize the possibility of finding himself at some time in that position. In so far as this is true, an ethic of ultimate ends and an ethic of responsibility are not absolute contrasts but rather supplements, which only in unison constitute a genuine man—a man who can have the “calling for politics.”35 The scholar played a critical role, in Weber’s framework, in making the ideal politician possible. Obviously, he or she provided the politician with the substantive “knowledge” necessary to carry out his or her duties.36 But beyond that, Weber thought that the realm of politics was plagued by two problems, which the involvement of scholars could mitigate. First, political engagement, because it involves deeply held value commitments, makes it hard for politicians to maintain the necessary critical distance to analyze issues effectively. “The ‘absence of distance,’ pure and simple,” Weber explained, “is one of the deadly sins of every

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politician and one of those qualities which, if instilled into our intellectuals, will condemn them to political impotence. For the heart of the problem is how to forge a unity between hot passion and a cool sense of proportion in one and the same person.”37 It was precisely value-free social science that Weber believed offered the means of balancing passion and proportion by harnessing and channeling values.38 It provided scholars with the critical distance from the intense value conflicts of politics that make it difficult for the politician to separate the “Is” from the “Ought.” Second, politics often inspires mixed motives among its participants. Weber highlighted two of them. He drew a distinction between living “from” politics (making it a job or a career) as opposed to living “for” politics (treating it as a “calling” or a “vocation”).39 But the most significant antinomy Weber posited was between the “ethics of conviction” (moral or intellectual consistency) and the “ethics of responsibility” (prudence). In Weber’s view, these are “not absolute antitheses but are mutually complementary, and only when taken together do they constitute the authentic human being who is capable of having a ‘vocation for politics.’”40 Weber acknowledged that there were tensions between the scholar as scholar and the scholar as political actor.41 But his methodology of value-free social science was the means to make that tension manageable. Indeed, it made it possible in some rare cases (such as his own) for the scholar to put down his or her pen, leave the study, and enter into the world of politics, as Weber himself did. To be sure, Weber did not think that most scholars have the ability, and therefore the obligation, to participate directly in the intensely value-infused political debates of the time.42 “Fellow students!” he exhorted his listeners during his famous “Science as a Vocation” lecture, “You come to our lectures and demand from us the qualities of leadership, and you fail to realize in advance that of a hundred professors at least ninety-nine do not and must not claim to be football masters in the vital problems of life, or even be ‘leaders’ in matters of conduct.”43 It was, in Weber’s estimation, only when, as a politician, [the scholar] is moved by the political fate of his people (towards which those universal trends are completely indifferent), he will think in terms of the next two to three genera-

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tions, even where the creation of new political formations is concerned, since these are the people who will decide what is to become of his nation. If he proceeds differently, he is no politician but one of the littérateurs. In this case, let him concern himself with the eternal truths and stick to his books, but he should not step into the arena where political problems of the present are contested.44 In sum, values were hardly irrelevant for scholars in Weber’s view. Although the tools of modern social science could not help them decide among competing values, they nonetheless remained an integral part of the scholarly process by determining which questions ought to be studied and why. Because the conflicts among competing values could not be resolved in the scholarly realm, scholars had no choice but to engage value debates in the political realm. That was the root of Weber’s vocation for not only science but also politics.45

Weber’s Liberal Values as Motive for His Engagement in German Politics

Weber the Liberal Weber had a vocation for both science and politics, and his value commitment to liberalism was the link between them.46 The roots of Weber’s liberalism grew from deep beneath his family tree.47 His father became a National Liberal Party deputy in 1869, fostering his son’s early interest in politics and inclining him in that general ideological direction for the rest of his life.48 Weber’s value commitment to liberalism, something he could not justify scientifically but rather embraced through something akin to religious “faith,” represented the consistent motive for his political engagement throughout his professional life.49 But Weber saw domestic and international obstacles to advancing liberalism in Germany.50 The domestic challenge was the increasing bureaucratization of the state, which he feared was coming about through the same mechanisms— hyperspecialization and the division of labor — that were transforming capitalism and much of the rest of the modern

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world into an “iron cage.”51 The international hindrance to liberalism was Germany’s weak and isolated position among the great powers, which retarded its development by forcing Germany to militarize in response to the threatening international environment.52 To advance German liberalism, Weber plunged into the political realm to help his country overcome both of these obstacles. Wolfgang Mommsen attributed Weber’s concerns to the fact that his “political theories were ultimately rooted in ethical and cultural value judgments,” and he therefore felt an “ethical duty” to engage issues that affected Germany’s power position.53 “It was the conscientiously ethical component of [Weber’s] theory of political power that led him to take such an extreme stand on power politics,” Mommsen concluded. “The seeking and holding of power were only justified in defense of ultimate values.”54 Domestically, Weber’s objection to historian Heinrich von Treitschke’s “preaching from the chair” and his own advocacy of “value-free” social science were rooted, according to his wife, in his concern that Germans lacked the political maturity that comes from independent thought: “Even as a young man Weber regarded the education of the nation to independence of political thought and intellectual freedom as being of paramount importance; that is why he repeatedly took issue with Treitschke’s teaching method.”55 Looming behind Treitschke, in Weber’s mind, was the figure of Germany’s first chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, whom he blamed for German liberalism’s arrested development. Similarly, Weber’s reservations about socialism, and qualified endorsement of capitalism, were rooted in his fear that the former would exacerbate the inexorable bureaucratization of modern society, further weakening the prospects for freedom at the core of his liberal value commitments.56 Weber’s Vocation for Science and Politics Some maintain that Weber pursued politics exclusively as a scholar.57 But Weber himself denied that: “I simply am not . . . a real scholar,” Marianne Weber reported him confessing. “For me scholarly activity is too much bound up with the idea of filling my leisure hours, even though I realize that due to the division of labor, scholarly activity can be carried on successfully only if one devotes one’s entire personality to it. I hope

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that the pedagogic side of my university post, the indispensable feeling of practical activity, will give me satisfaction.”58 Given Weber’s critique of modern academic social science, it is hardly surprising that he would not limit his participation in politics exclusively to his scholarship.59 Politics was, in fact, Weber’s “secret love.”60 His infatuation with it seduced him into blurring the boundaries between the scholar and the politician. As David Owen and Tracy Strong emphasized, Weber’s “aims were not just ‘academic,’ although they were always pursued with a high degree of intellectual rigor. An important part of his work, as he conceived of it, was to promote the political education of the German public,” and “he had established himself as Germany’s single most respected voice on public affairs.”61 Weber never used the tools of modern social science to defend his commitment to the values of liberalism, but he did use theory and methodology to clarify and implement these values in the practical world of politics.62 The dual mechanisms by which he sought to influence Germany’s politics were the construction of real democratic institutions in Germany and the inculcation of public attitudes conducive to liberalism.63 Weber’s unique vocation for both science and politics was evident throughout his career. He toyed with the idea of direct participation in politics early on. In 1897 he was in contention for a Reichstag seat, but he did not pursue it because he had just accepted an academic appointment at Heidelberg.64 And then later in his career, in 1918, he again flirted with direct political involvement as National Assembly candidate for the Democratic Party, despite declaring the previous year that he was “not an active politician and never will he ever be one.”65 Finally, during the Social Democratic government of Prime Minister Friedrich Ebert, Weber was bruited about as a candidate for the post of minister of the interior.66 There were, however, three reasons that Weber never took the plunge directly into political life. First, his health did not permit it. Having suffered throughout his career from anxiety and depression, which at one point incapacitated him for five years and forced him to give up his university post, he did not feel he could take on the even greater pressures of active political life. Second, despite his general commitment to liberal principles, Weber could never find a comfortable political fit among the extant political parties. Finally, his uncompromising and abrasive personality

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was ill-suited to the back-slapping, glad-handing, and intellectual compromise of political life.67 Instead, Weber’s calling for politics manifested itself more indirectly through public speeches and joint statements and letters on the pressing political issues of the day. But his primary mode of political engagement was through his voluminous political writing.68 As Keith Tribe explains, the “prime motivation” for it was “intervention” in politics, not just “commentary,” to which a traditional scholar would limit him- or herself.69 The rationale for this intervention, in his wife’s view, was that Weber “believed that the recognition of reality, and its domination by the intellect could only be the first step toward the direct shaping of reality by action; he seemed to be a born fighter and ruler even more than a born thinker.”70 One of the most important vehicles for Weber’s marriage of scholarship and politics was his association with the journal the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik. The Archiv was founded in 1873 by a group of socialist academics— the Kathedersozialisten— to foster “social reform” and encourage “economics [to] orient itself to ethical ideals again.”71 By the time Weber joined it, it was more focused on scholarship.72 Still, as Weber described it, “the express purpose of the Archiv ever since its establishment has been the education of judgment about practical social problems— and in a very modest way in which such goal can be furthered by private scholars— the criticism of practical social policy, extending even as far as legislation.”73 Explaining the connection of the Archiv to both his intellectual and value agendas, Weber gave a speech in 1909 to an associated group — Verein für Sozialpolitik— in which he sketched a role for professors as counterweights to bureaucrats: “And even though the idea that someday the world might be full of nothing but professors is frightening — one would have to escape to the desert if something like that happened— the idea that the world would be filled with nothing but those little cogs is even more frightening, that is, with people who cling to a small position and strive for a bigger one.”74 From the very beginning of his career, Weber engaged in research projects that had direct policy relevance. In 1892, for example, he investigated East Prussian agricultural conditions for the Verein für Sozialpolitik.75 The impetus for this was Weber’s concern that the economic

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self-interest of Prussia’s Junkers—Germany’s landed aristocracy — was undermining Germany’s power position in the east by encouraging them to bring more Polish farm workers into Prussia and displacing German peasants.76 Weber feared that their displacement was rending the social fabric of Germany and creating a radical rural “proletariat.”77 In addition, the growth of the Polish population in the east threatened the cohesion of the German state by introducing a large foreign population into the area.78 Marianne Weber recounted that her husband “felt that agrarian policy must be determined not by production interests but by the interests of the state, the interest in the preservation of a dense, vigorous, loyal rural population as a reservoir for national armed forces and the peaceful defense of the eastern borderlands.”79 Weber continued to study rural labor conditions under the auspices of the Protestant Social Congress.80 The wellspring of Weber’s concern about how these economic and social changes in East Elbia threatened Germany’s international standing remained his value commitment to fostering the development of liberalism in Germany.81 Throughout his career, Weber was preoccupied with this theme.82 It was, for example, the leitmotif of his Inaugural Lecture upon taking the position at the University of Freiburg in May of 1895. In it, Weber highlighted the central role of the value of freedom in connection with not only the East Elbian problem but also for him more generally in his intellectual and political life: “In this deep, half-conscious impulse towards the distant horizon there lies hidden an element of primitive idealism. He who cannot decipher this does not know the magic of freedom. Indeed, the spirit of freedom seldom touches us today in the stillness of the study. The naïve youthful ideals of freedom are faded, and some of us have grown prematurely old and all too wise, and believe that one of the most elemental impulses of the human breast has been borne to its grave along with the slogans of a dying conception of politics and economic policy.”83 Weber also emphasized his commitment to German national interest as a supreme value: “There is only one political standard of value which is supreme for us economic nationalists, and it is by this standard that we measure the classes which have the leadership of the nation in their hands or are striving for it. What we are concerned with is their political maturity, i.e., their understanding of the lasting economic and

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political interests of the nation’s power and their ability to place those interests above all other considerations if the occasion demands.”84 Liberalism and Germany’s great power status were thus inextricably linked in Weber’s mind. Weber’s major international policy concern in his early career was the Russian Revolution of 1905, which he followed closely — even learning Russian so he could keep abreast of it through the local press— not only out of intellectual curiosity but also because he believed that events in Russia were connected with the future of liberalism in Germany.85 Specifically, he wanted to gauge how the process of constitutional reform might play out in Russia to learn lessons from it for his own country and also to understand how the outcome of the revolution would affect Germany’s standing vis-à-vis the other great powers. Like many of his compatriots, Weber was thoroughly preoccupied with World War I after it erupted in the summer of 1914. He was initially caught up in the widespread enthusiasm for the war and optimistic about Germany’s prospects.86 Although his precarious health did not permit active service at the front, Weber did serve in uniform at home in a minor administrative role. This service, however, was by no means his most significant contribution to the war effort.87 In 1915, Weber moved to Berlin, because, according to his wife, “he primarily wanted to be in a political atmosphere, feel the pulse of world events, and see whether he could be of any help.”88 While residing in the Reich’s capital, he wrote polemical articles for newspapers like Frankfurter Zeitung, advised various political figures, and wrote longer popular essays on constitutional reform.89 As his initial optimism about Germany’s military prospects waned, Weber became increasingly critical of the government’s conduct of the war. In 1915, for example, he campaigned against Germany’s ambitious war aim of territorial annexations in Europe, fearing such a policy would make Germany’s position on the continent “precarious” and undermine its ability to become a world power by sparking opposition to it among other great powers.90 In a speech he gave in October 1916, his wife recounted, Weber maintained that “Germany’s special situation as a state based on power, which like no other was surrounded by large powerful states” mandated “a realistic policy, not one based on emotion, a policy of

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silent action rather than boastful vanity, a policy of alliances rather than one of conquest.”91 In line with this rationale, Weber embraced the cause of Polish independence in 1915 as an alternative to annexations. His reasoning was that German interests would be better served by reestablishing a friendly independent state in the east rather than continuing to occupy the region directly.92 Weber also adamantly opposed the German navy’s proposal to adopt unrestricted submarine warfare in 1916. At the urging of members of the civilian government, Weber drafted a memo to the Foreign Office in March that sought to bolster Chancellor Theobald von BethmannHollweg against the proponents, both inside and outside of the German government, of an unconstrained U-boat campaign against Allied and neutral shipping.93 Finally, Weber was directly involved in the postwar peace negotiations, having been nominated by the liberal Prince Max of Baden to join the German delegation to Versailles.94 Publicly, Weber resisted the Entente’s efforts to assign Germany exclusive responsibility for the war and impose what he regarded as an unfair settlement upon it.95 Privately, however, he was scathing in his assessment of the wartime leadership of the Kaiser and the German military high command. At one point he met with Field Marshal Ludendorff to urge him to surrender himself to the Entente to be tried for war crimes in place of German civilian leaders.96 But Weber’s most sustained and influential political activity, indeed his political life’s work, was his untiring advocacy of constitutional reform in Germany. Weber was attracted to liberal politics from his youth, but his interest in promoting constitutional government in Germany first crystallized in 1906 when he began to object publicly to Kaiser Wilhelm II’s meddling in politics, especially in the area of foreign policy.97 Writing in the third person, Weber explained that he became engaged in the public debate about constitutional reform because the experiences of the recent decades convinced him some time ago that the kind of political machinery and the method of determining the will of the state which we have employed hitherto are bound to condemn any German policy to failure, whatever its goals. He believes that exactly the same thing will go on being repeated in

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the future if our political arrangements remain the same, and he considers it unlikely that under those circumstances army leaders will arise time and time again who will be able to hack a way out of the political catastrophe by military means and at a cost of unimaginable sacrifices of the nation’s blood.98 The immediate target of Weber’s ire was the Kaiser’s ham-handed intervention in political affairs, but his larger preoccupation was with Germany’s political immaturity. Its source was the Reich’s founding father, Bismarck, whom he acknowledged as a great leader, but who Weber believed had failed to prepare the German people for effective participation in democratic politics.99 Germany’s political immaturity was problematic, in Weber’s view, because the process of universal bureaucratization made democratic politics even more imperative to simultaneously ensure domestic freedom and to enhance Germany’s international power position.100 Weber’s antidote to Germany’s political immaturity was twofold: (1) liberal politics in the form of the establishment of a functioning parliamentary regime in place of the monarchy or the unitary executive, and (2) a liberal economic system rather than socialism. Weber was particularly keen to construct a genuine parliamentary system for Germany because he saw it as a check upon the bureaucracy and as the “place where leaders are selected.”101 Selecting leaders via the democratic process was, in his view, the only way to ensure that the best ones would ultimately come to power.102 As with his ambivalent view of Bismarck’s legacy, Weber had a mixed view of executive authority. A system such as Germany’s since unification in 1871, that functioned strictly on the basis of the charismatic authority of one man, was bound to be unstable. Weber compared the Iron Chancellor to the great Athenian leader Pericles, with whose passing ended the golden age of Athens and set the stage for its defeat in the Peloponnesian War.103 Instead, Weber advocated a mixed political system that would enjoy the advantages of both strong legislative and executive branches of government. Weber’s rationale was that a revitalized German democracy and strengthened elected government would serve as checks upon the inexorable bureaucratization of the rest of the state and society, the primary threat he saw to the flourishing of German liberalism.104

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Weber was engaged with the process of German parliamentary reform for much of his career, but the apex of his participation in the effort came towards the end of World War I. In May 1917, he drafted two bills for Conrad Haussmann on the constitutional committee of the parliament.105 In December 1918, Weber was invited by the minister of the interior, Hugo Pruess, to serve on an expert commission to advise the new German government on constitutional reform.106 Weber had, in Mommsen’s assessment, a limited, but nevertheless real, impact in this debate about how Germany should be governed after World War I.107 His participation in this effort, as with his public engagement throughout his scholarly career, was tied to his view that politics was the realm in which ethical issues were resolved and to his own deeply felt obligation to advance liberal values through both his scholarly and public intellectual activities.

Conclusion

This examination of Max Weber’s scholarly and methodological writings, on the one hand, and his political engagement, on the other, teaches three lessons. First, given Weber’s stature as the greatest social scientist of the twentieth century, it is hard to maintain that his deep and consistent engagement with politics compromised his scholarship, as many contemporary scholars fear. Indeed, given Weber’s undisputed status as the twentieth century’s greatest social scientist there is ample reason for believing that his political engagement in fact enriched his scholarship. Thus one could argue that contemporary social science would be much better off, even on its own terms, if it were more Weberian in its effort to balance scholarship and practical engagement.108 Unfortunately, this view cuts against the grain of much of modern academic culture.109 Second, as we saw, Weber had a modest, but concrete, effect on actual policy in the Germany of his day. Critics might concede Weber’s impact but nonetheless object that this effect was “mixed” because it established both the structure (a strong presidency) and poisoned the general political climate (by fostering skepticism of unmediated democracy) that set the stage for the Weimar crisis and the rise of National Socialism.110

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There is, to be sure, an element of truth in this view, but in the final analysis it does not undercut the more general point that scholarly input can have a generally positive impact on policy. After all, there were other reasons why the Weimar Republic failed and was replaced by the Third Reich.111 Moreover, the German tradition of a strong executive was established well before Weber’s involvement in German constitutional reform, and his primary focus was on the development of the parliament rather than the executive. Finally, Weber was indisputably right on most of the other policy questions—especially German strategy during World War I and the weakness of the Kaiserreich system— that he weighed in on, and so the case is strong that Germany would have been better off had he had even more influence on policy. In the final analysis, Weber’s approach to balancing scholarship with values seems more satisfactory than the other approaches that have been offered. Critics across the political spectrum are right to caution that the ethical obligations of the scholar to science and political engagement are fraught with tension. And although there is no doubt that scholarly engagement with policy poses some moral quandaries, critics miss the fact that avoiding the latter leaves us with sterile moralism rather than serious engagement with practical ethics. Their effort to resolve this tension by simply throwing up a wall of China between them inevitably slights one obligation in favor of the other. Moreover, it ignores the possibility that, as the case of Max Weber demonstrates, this tension can be a creative one, producing better science and more effective policy at the same time. To be clear, my argument here is not that every scholar should also carry the marshal’s baton in his briefcase or dispense political wisdom ex cathedra. Rather, it is simply a plea that the guild not stand in the way of some of its members also acting as public intellectuals, thereby allowing them to discharge our collective ethical obligation to the rest of society. Indeed, we ought to reward those among us who can play both the role of scholar and public intellectual as successfully as Weber did. There is a middle ground between being a Fleet Professor (a pre –World War I German academic whose patriotism compromised his intellectual integrity) or a journalist on one side and beating a complete retreat to the ivory tower and pulling up the drawbridge on the other. Weber’s thought and life provides us with a road map for finding it.

The Ethical Imperative for Some Scholars to Be Public Intellectuals 367 Notes I am grateful to participants at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study seminar and the Department of Political Science Political Theory Colloquium for the comments I received on earlier drafts of this essay, especially Ruth Abbey, Vincent Bagnulo, Randall Collins, Patrick Deneen, Vincent Phillip Munoz, Michael Zuckert, James Nolan, Nathan Tarcov, and my fellow participants in the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study conference on “Public Intellectualism in Comparative Context: Different Countries, Different Disciplines.” 1. Edward Shils, “Social Science and Social Policy,” Philosophy of Science 16 (1949): 230. Developing these themes at length are Robert N. Proctor, ValueFree Science? Purity and Power in Modern Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Ido Oren, Our Enemies and US: America’s Rivalries and the Making of Political Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); and Oren, “The Enduring Relationship between the American (National Security) State and the State of the Discipline,” PS: Political Science and Politics 37, no. 1 (2004): 51– 55. 2. Anne Norton, “Political Science as a Vocation,” in Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics, ed. Ian Shapiro, Rogers M. Smith, and Tarek E. Masoud (New York: Cambridge University Press), 67– 68. 3. David Easton, “The New Revolution in Political Science,” American Political Science Review 63, no. 4 (1969): 1060, and Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs, “Introduction,” in Weber: Political Writings, ed. Lassman and Speirs (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xi. 4. Reinhard Bendix, “Political Critiques,” in Scholarship and Partisanship: Essays on Max Weber, ed. Reinhard Bendix and Guenther Roth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 68. Also see Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1988), 162– 63. 5. Max Weber, “The Meaning of ‘Ethical Neutrality’ in Sociology and Economics,” in The Methodology of the Social Sciences, ed. and trans. Edward Shils and Henry A. Finch (New York: The Free Press, 1949), 5. 6. This phrase is my effort to draw together arguments made in two famous separate essays: Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation” and “Politics as a Vocation,” in Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures: “Science as a Vocation” “Politics as a Vocation,” ed. David Owen and Tracy B. Strong (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), 1– 94. 7. Peter Lassman and Irving Velody, “Max Weber on Science, Disenchantment and the Search for Meaning,” in Max Weber’s “Science as a Vocation,” ed. Lassman and Velody (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1989), 184.

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8. David Owen and Tracy B. Strong, “Introduction,” in Weber, The Vocation Lectures, xl– xlv. 9. Max Weber, “The National State and Economic Policy,” Economy and Society 9, no. 4 (1980): 440 (emphasis in original). Also see H. H. Bruun, Science, Values and Politics in Max Weber’s Methodology (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1972), 35. 10. Wolfgang Schluchter, “Value-neutrality and the Ethic of Responsibility,” in Max Weber’s Vision of History, Ethics, and Methods, ed. Gunther Roth and Wolfgang Schluchter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 79. 11. Bruun, Science, Values and Politics, 15. 12. Weber, “The Meaning of ‘Ethical Neutrality,’” 1 and 6– 7. Also see Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 129– 58. Edward Shils, “Foreword” to Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, says Weber thought values were “in a sphere in which the powers of science were definitely limited” (v). Finally, Bruun, Science, Values and Politics, 37, characterizes Weber’s argument as that “science has limits which it cannot, and therefore should not pretend to be able to overstep.” 13. Max Weber, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” in The Methodology of the Social Sciences, 52, and Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in The Vocation Lectures, 25– 26. 14. Fritz Ringer, Max Weber: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 79. Also see Schluchter, “Value-neutrality and the Ethic of Responsibility,” 83. 15. Max Weber, “Critical Studies in the Logic of the Cultural Sciences: A Critique of Eduard Meyer’s Methodological Views,” in The Methodology of the Social Sciences, 115. 16. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in The Vocation Lectures, 26. 17. Weber, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” 54 (emphasis in original). 18. Bruun, Science, Values and Politics, 31. 19. Weber, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” 55 (emphasis in original). 20. Quoted in Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 157, 21. Bruun, Science, Values and Politics, 54; also see 61, 75– 76, and 192. This is also a consistent theme in Proctor, Value-Free Science? 89 and 149. 22. Quoted in Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 418. Also see Ringer, Max Weber, 109– 10.

The Ethical Imperative for Some Scholars to Be Public Intellectuals 369 23. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in The Vocation Lectures, 14. 24. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber, 142. 25. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in The Vocation Lectures, 17. 26. Weber, “The Meaning of ‘Ethical Neutrality,’” 37 and 44. 27. Ibid., 24 – 25. 28. Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 317. 29. Owen and Strong, “Introduction,” in The Vocation Lectures, xiii and xxxi. 30. Weber, “The Meaning of ‘Ethical Neutrality,’” 21. 31. Wolfgang Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 1890 –1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 44n36. 32. Weber, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” 56. 33. Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber, 93– 94. 34. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 171. 35. Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber, 127. 36. Bruun, Science, Values and Politics, 262 and 270. 37. Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber, 77. 38. Wolfgang Schluchter, “The Paradox of Rationalization: On the Relation of Ethics and the World,” in Roth and Schluchter, Max Weber’s Vision of History, Ethics, and Methods, 57. 39. Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in The Vocation Lectures, 4 – 43. 40. Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber, 83 and 92 (emphasis in original). 41. Bruun, Science, Values and Politics, 286. 42. Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 391, recounts that Weber involved himself in a case in 1908 in which a junior faculty member was pressured to do work for the government, which indicates that he did not think all scholars had such an obligation. 43. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber, 150. 44. Weber, “Parliament and Government in Germany,” 270 – 71 (emphasis in original). 45. Proctor, Value-Free Science? 136. 46. Lassman and Velody, “Max Weber on Science,” 186 and 188. 47. Lassman and Speirs, “Introduction,” xxiv. Also see Ringer, Max Weber, 49; Sung Ho Kim, “Max Weber’s Liberal Nationalism,” History of Political Thought 23, no. 3 (2002): 446– 47; and Kim, “‘In Affirming Them, He Affirms Himself ’: Max Weber’s Politics of Civil Society,” Political Theory 28, no. 2 (2000): 198. 48. Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 33, 39– 40, 115, 118, and 186. 49. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 49.

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50. Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 125. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 20 and 61. 51. Ringer, Max Weber, 64. 52. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 89 (emphasis in original). The counterintuitive notion that liberalism and imperialism could be connected has recently gained intellectual credibility. For examples, see Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). For useful discussions of this renewed interest in liberal imperialism, see Bhikhu Parekh, “Superior People: The Narrowness of Liberalism from Mills to Rawls,” Times Literary Supplement, February 25, 1994, 11– 13; and David Glenn, “Liberalism: The Fuel of Empires?” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 2, 2005, http://chronicle.com/article/Liberalism -the-Fuel-of/8134/. 53. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 42– 43. 54. Ibid., 46 (emphasis in original). 55. Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 119. 56. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 106. 57. Patrick Thaddeaus Jackson and Stuart J. Kaufman, “Security Scholars for a Sensible Foreign Policy: A Study in Weberian Activism,” Perspectives on Politics 5, no. 1 (2007): 95– 103. 58. Quoted in Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 165 (emphasis added); also see 612. 59. See Raymond Aron, “Max Weber and Modern Social Science,” in History Truth and Liberty, ed. and trans. Franciszek Draus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 335. 60. Lassman and Speirs, “Introduction,” x. See also Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 311; also see 1, where he argues that “Max Weber was passionately engaged by the political issues of the day.” 61. Owen and Strong, “Introduction,” ix. 62. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, xi. 63. Bruun, Science, Values and Politics, 281– 82. 64. Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 224. 65. Lassman and Speirs, “Introduction,” x. Max Weber, “Parliament and Government in Germany,” in Lassman and Speirs, Weber: Political Writings, 133. Also see the account of this in Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 641– 45. 66. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 301. 67. Ibid., 130 – 31, 147, 307– 8. Also see Ringer, Max Weber, 41.

The Ethical Imperative for Some Scholars to Be Public Intellectuals 371 68. Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 407, 412, and 618. 69. Keith Tribe, “Introduction to Weber,” Economy and Society 9, no. 4 (1980): 422. Also see the discussion of Weber’s effort to balance scholarship and practical engagement in Reinhard Bendix, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 31. 70. Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 166; also see 187. 71. Keith Tribe, “Introduction to Weber,” Economy and Society 8, no. 2 (1979): 173; and Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 127. 72. Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 128. 73. Weber, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” 50. 74. Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 416. 75. Tribe, “Introduction to Weber” (1979), 172. 76. Ibid., 174 – 75. An English translation of Weber’s report is available as Max Weber, “Development Tendencies in the Situation of East Elbian Rural Labourers,” Economy and Society 8, no. 2 (1979): 177– 205. 77. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 23 78. Ibid., 23, 24, and 29. 79. Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 129– 30. 80. Ringer, Max Weber, 45. 81. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 430. 82. Tribe, “Introduction to Weber” (1980), 423. An English translation of Weber’s address is available as Weber, “The National State and Economic Policy,” 428– 49; see 436 for Weber’s embrace of this value judgment. 83. Weber, “The National State and Economic Policy,” 433 (emphasis in original). 84. Ibid., 441– 42 (emphasis in original). 85. Richard Pipes, “Max Weber and Russia,” World Politics 7, no. 3 (1955): 371. 86. Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 521– 23 and 526– 27. 87. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 195. 88. Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 552. 89. Ibid., 583– 84. 90. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 211. 91. Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 580. 92. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 211– 27. 93. Ibid., 231. 94. Ringer, Max Weber, 53, 63, and 73– 74. Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 649. 95. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 320.

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96. Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 651– 54. 97. Ibid., 398ff. 98. Weber, “Parliament and Government in Germany,” 134. 99. Ibid., 144 – 45. 100. Ibid., 145– 77. 101. Ibid., 251 (emphasis in original). 102. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 172– 73. 103. Ibid., 185– 89. For Thucydides’s similar verdict on Pericles, see book 2, paragraph 65 in Robert B. Strasser, ed., The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 127– 28. 104. Pipes, “Max Weber and Russia,” 379. 105. Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 588– 89. 106. Ibid., 639– 40. 107. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 177. 108. Donald E. Stokes, Pasteur’s Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997), 24. 109. Ian Shapiro, The Flight from Reality in the Human Sciences (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 179. 110. Herbert Marcuse, “Industrialism and Capitalism,” The New Left Review 1, no. 30 (1965): 3– 17, and Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 381– 89 and 409. Also reporting that this is a widespread view is Kim, “Max Weber’s Liberal Nationalism,” 433. 111. The best discussion of the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of National Socialism is Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship: The Origins, Structure and Effects of National Socialism (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1972).

Concluding Thoughts Toward a Typology of Public Intellectuals  

As founding director of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, I was asked to offer some concluding remarks at the end of this volume, playing with some of the ideas that were discussed, asking some further questions, and pointing toward possible extensions of the complex topic that we are engaged with here. The conference on public intellectuals followed the first three inaugural conferences of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study — on beauty, goodness, and truth; and we can even connect this sequence with Plato’s Republic, which first articulates the transcendentals but then asks those who have grasped them to assume political responsibility; for public intellectuals are people who go down into the cave, to use the Platonic metaphor from the Republic. The following summary of the chapters does not have the least pretension to render justice to the wealth of arguments and information presented in them. I am deliberately telegraphic and idiosyncratic in my selection, focusing on some crucial issues and asking some questions

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that, partly at least, will prove useful for my final reflections on the concept of the public intellectual. In the first specific country study contribution to our volume, Jeremi Suri’s chapter on the importance of historiographical thinking among public intellectuals focuses on three American public intellectuals: George Kennan, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Henry Kissinger. Suri points to the use of American history in American political discourse, which is often blind to the histories of other countries, since a faith in America’s exceptional status leads to the belief that other nations’ histories have to be interpreted as having an institutional setting akin to that of the United States as their hidden telos. With his concept of irony in history, Niebuhr offered a healthy antidote to the American tendency toward self-righteousness, and his Christian realism influenced Kennan’s concept of diplomacy. There are two further avenues worthy of exploration. First, what was the use of other countries’ histories in earlier public intellectuals? I refer particularly to the role of Roman history in the formation of political convictions in intellectuals such as Niccolò Machiavelli, Edward Gibbon, and Theodor Mommsen. Although the politically interested historian can hardly avoid projecting his own political tenets into his interpretation of history, which is then read as justifying these tenets, my guess is that this is less likely to occur when the history studied is not their own, but a distant one — this may lead to greater objectivity. Second, what can we learn from history? On the one hand, historical events may instantiate laws of the social world (if such laws exist), and thus they can contribute to the specific knowledge produced by social scientists, such as economists or specialists on international relations. On the other hand, history shows us how certain changes in the value system of a culture occur. But I would hasten to add that it never can answer the question whether these changes are for the better or the worse. Here ethics comes in, and the realm it deals with is as ahistorical as that of sets or numbers. But communicating this realm to a larger audience is far more difficult than the diffusion of “lessons from history.” Andrew Bacevich’s case study of three American public intellectuals during the early years of the Cold War —Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Niebuhr, and Dwight Macdonald— shows mainly the limits of public intellectuals: they saw the new world through the lens of ideology, their

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analyses were not judicious, and they offered a simplistic response in the shape of a reductive concept of liberalism. What worries Bacevich most is the lack of alternatives, and he sees here one of the causes why ill-advised decisions, such as regarding Vietnam, were taken. For though public intellectuals rarely are decision-makers (Walter Lippmann’s direct influence on Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and Albert Wohlstetter’s and Paul Wolfowitz’s impact on George W. Bush are exceptions), public intellectuals create a background atmosphere that inevitably shapes the discernment and the values that lead to the actions of politicians. Does Bacevich’s case study allow for generalizations? War, especially the Cold War, which inaugurated the threat of a nuclear annihilation of humankind, probably is not conducive to intellectual openness, and one has to concede that the support of human rights and the containment policy were relatively successful in Europe (and I am not at all sure the world would have become a better place if Roosevelt had been succeeded by Henry Wallace instead of Harry Truman). But the more relevant issue is the following. If the public intellectual does not simply want to achieve insights for herself but desires to have an impact on the political arena, she will have to join forces, such as happened in Americans for Democratic Action. Whenever you join a platform, however, compromises have to be made in order to maintain the common platform, and minds that are not truly independent at the end come even to believe what at the beginning was only a concession to the would-be ally. The choice between magnificent loneliness with the dim chance of a long-term impact and immediate effect at the expense of depth is the true dilemma of the public intellectual. Willy Lam discusses the nature of public intellectualism in contemporary China. He insists that the subjection of intellectuals to state power is typical of a large part of Chinese history: the shidafu were an integral part of the social hierarchy of the Chinese empire, and only a few of them ever criticized abuses of power. Only at the beginning of the twentieth century, public intellectuals managed to gain an independent spirit, which, however, was soon crushed after the ascent of the Communist Party. The reforms that had begun after Mao’s death were frozen after the Tiananmen massacre in 1989. Lam sees, however, opportunities for the rise of a civil society in which public intellectuals regain independence,

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partly due to the Internet (which, however, can also be used for further control of the country by the Party). He mentions several examples of successful protests staged by public intellectuals, who dare to challenge the ideology of weiwen (“preserve sociopolitical stability”) supposed to foster a “harmonious society.” According to him, there are three groups of public intellectuals in the country: independent writers, often connected with the Internet; people affiliated with liberal think tanks; and human rights lawyers. The two main questions of which Lam’s chapter invites further study in my eyes are the following. Some public intellectuals in human history have been public servants, some were always positioned firmly outside of the sphere of the state, reflecting on public issues, but as independent members of civil society, some have moved back and forth between the two spheres. How did their social role impact the nature of their thought? Although it is very plausible to assume that public intellectuals depending on state power are less critical of current policies than independent ones, there are probably interesting exceptions, particularly if the public servant enjoys some form of tenure and the freedom of his expression is defended by independent courts; furthermore, his insider knowledge of the machinery of power may alert him to dangers that are overlooked by the outsider. And if we look at the continuity between the traditional Chinese shidafu and the Party apparatchiks, a second question imposes itself: Why are traditional role models of public intellectuals so resilient as to survive even enormous constitutional changes? Part of the answer (but probably not the whole) will certainly be that the constitutional changes in China did not address the lack of an independent civil society and that the power of an overwhelming state bureaucracy remains an enormous threat. Enrique Krauze begins his overview of the history of public intellectuals in Latin America with a definition by Gabriel Zaid: “An intellectual is a writer with moral authority among the elites who opines on matters of public interest.” He points to the fact that public intellectuals in Latin America originally were not Latin American intellectuals: they were mostly nationally based, and only the Spanish-American War of 1898 led to the budding sentiment of an Ibero-American solidarity. All antiliberal

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ideologies in Latin America, whether on the Right or on the Left, were fed by the opposition to the United States, the hegemonic neighbor to the north. As the French Revolution was the main watershed for hostile confrontations of public intellectuals in Europe in the nineteenth century, so the Cuban Revolution of 1953– 59 assumed a similar function in the identity struggles of the Latin American intellectuals. Magazines, from Sur to Vuelta, played a crucial role in the formation of critical intellectuals, who are distinguished by Krauze, again with Zaid’s help, as independent personalities who work freelance, for example as editors, in contradistinction to the intelligentsia as a social class in the service of the state. Krauze’s chapter invites a comparative analysis, for example, with the Chinese situation—but also with Russia, another culture that unfortunately could not be covered in this volume. Also in the Russia of the nineteenth century, from Pyotr Chaadayev’s Lettres philosophiques (Philosophical Letters) on, the main issue of public intellectuals was identitarian— the demarcation of one’s own essence in opposition to the West. The dangers inherent in such debates, which are prone to political instrumentalization, would certainly merit an extensive comparative study. The other issue that would deserve a thorough scrutiny has to do with the moral evaluation of the compromises that the public intellectuals at the service of tyrannical regimes have to underwrite in order to survive, make a career, and, perhaps, finally achieve some improvements. Among the various Latin American public intellectuals who achieved or strove for the presidency, the figure of Joaquín Balaguer, only quickly touched upon by Krauze, remains particularly challenging: three times president of the Dominican Republic, he ascended to power only by working for decades for the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. Ahmad Moussalli’s study of public intellectuals in the Arab world recognizes in their recent history one fundamental tension: between secular and religious intellectuals, between those inspired by the West, whose enormous economic and military superiority the Arab world began to feel with Napoléon’s invasion of Egypt, and those who seek orientation in their own national and religious heritage. Both camps, by the way, are far too willing to justify the authoritarian nationalist state, which replaced the original understanding of Islam as a community of believers. Also here the self-definition in opposition to the West is crucial, and

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one of its outcomes is a process of secularization without democratization, which partly engenders the return to religious thought. Moussalli hopes for something analogous to the Western Renaissance where the Greek heritage was adopted with enthusiasm and at the same time with the critical distance necessary to bring forth in the seventeenth century the Scientific Revolution. Two issues seem to deserve further probing. Since the religious scholar endowed with the power of interpreting the Qur’an is the prototype of the Islamic public intellectual, at least after the medieval controversies on philosophical theology ended with a victory of the antirationalist camp, and thus certain intellectual moves, such as questioning the revealed nature of the Qur’an, are still not tolerated outside of the secular circles, one would, first, like to know how the work of the public intellectual relates to the task of interpreting an authoritative text, particularly in cultures with a religion based on a revealed text. (It is tempting to assume that the replacement of ethical thought, as it characterized Greek and Roman philosophy, by more legally oriented thinking in Judaism and Islam has to do with their belief in a revelation, for the theology of revealed religions and jurisprudence are kindred disciplines.) And, second, how did the Western Enlightenment manage to transform public intellectualism by deconstructing the traditional understanding of revelation, thus opening up the possibility of discussions precluded to other cultures? Turning to the various disciplinary perspectives on public intellectualism, Patrick Baert discusses the changing role of the philosopher as public intellectual. He begins by proposing three types of public intellectuals, that is, people who address an audience outside of universities— the authoritative, the expert, and the dialogical. Two examples of the first type are Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertrand Russell, who, despite the differences in their philosophical outlook, had similar family backgrounds, positioned themselves in an effective way, and enjoyed authority while speaking on issues outside of their field of expertise. Particularly Sartre was both part of the establishment and able to depict himself as standing outside of it. This type of intellectual has faded, partly due to the decline of a hierarchical educational system and individual patrimonies, partly due to the increasing specialization especially in the social sciences, which undermined the authority of the generalist.

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But even the expert intellectual, who is trained, for example, in statistical methods, is now giving way to the dialogical intellectual, who no longer claims to teach from above but interacts with the public. The replacement of the philosopher by social scientists and, increasingly, by biologists has its deepest cause in the transformation of philosophy connected with the rise of analytical philosophy. Baert nicely captures the developments in France and the UK, but one should investigate whether his analysis holds also for Germany, which was largely ignored in our conference volume. Jürgen Habermas is a strong example of someone who managed to keep for a long time an intermediate position between the authoritative and the expert public intellectual— while at the same time offering a dialogical model of communication. Another issue of concern is to determine in which moment the dialogical intellectual stops being a true intellectual, who as such has to be committed to grasping the truth, and becomes a media minion with show business talent — that is, a postmodern equivalent of the sophist. I would not exclude at all that the dissatisfaction with this type of “intellectual” will quickly escalate, particularly when the serious ecological problems that threaten us will explode and will convince everybody that truth is not a matter of construction or consensus. Analogous and only slightly different issues emerge when investigating the social scientist as public intellectual. The social science with the greatest repute nowadays is economics, a fact that Bradford DeLong links to the enormous increase of growth rates in the last centuries. He points to basic economic truths— markets are based on a natural tendency toward reciprocity; markets with priced commodities are extremely efficient, but they may also reinforce inequalities (people without purchasing power are not helped by markets); markets do not address externalities, for this reason and for the enforcement of property rights and contractual obligations the state is indispensable; the state must also step in as a balance wheel when, because of, for example, speculative bubbles, markets are far from achieving the desired equilibrium of demand and supply. DeLong defends the technocratic self-understanding of economists: they only try to predict what will occur if one does certain things. The values that they presuppose are often widely shared, such as the conviction that the satisfying of the basic needs of people is better than

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poverty; and even if they have no special authority regarding values, their insights into causal mechanisms are important, because they could have helped to avoid the disastrous social experiment of socialism, which was counterproductive insofar as it did not achieve what it was intended to accomplish. Still, on many finer issues, economists disagree (partly because it is easy to discover correlations, but it is much more difficult to determine whether these correlations are causes or not), and this lack of consensus inevitably leaves the public puzzled. There are here two issues that seem worth pursuing. The most relevant difference between natural and social sciences is that though the former do not impact its object, the latter do. Economic agents react to economical doctrines, and this may change their behavior in a way that confutes the theories, which were right only as long as they were not known to a larger audience (think of the policy ineffectiveness proposition by Sargent and Wallace). How does this affect the predictive forces of economic theories, which seem to be far inferior to that of the natural sciences? And, second, although certainly some basic values of economics are shared by the majority of people, one cannot deny that some of its assumptions (such as the belief that the satisfaction of all needs, whatever their nature, is positive) are not only ethically dubious but tend to affect human behavior by being promulgated as anthropological truths. Here some Marxist critique of ideology might be useful— however disastrous Marxist economic doctrine has been. Paul Horwitz’s chapter does not deal with a geographical area but rather with the new global medium of the Internet, and more precisely with the nature of the blogosphere. Horwitz sees the Internet as only the most recent step in a long series of media revolutions and recognizes its capacity for offering more and cheaper venues for public intellectual work; its specific merit consists in making web pages less static. As with every media revolution, this one is not merely a question of form—it impacts the contents that it selects. The emerging new ethics of the blog, as opposed to the traditional ethics of the book that required concentration on one voice and periods of undisturbed solitude, is guided by the principles of immediacy, connectivity, and feedback. Gatekeepers are no longer required for the intellectual to access the public, and so the specialist may address it on the most disparate issues. But here lies the problem. The

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lack of quality control is hardly compensated for by the quick feedback of people who are parasitic on the knowledge gained by others and want to join in the chorus of bloggers, and so the whole medium is threatened by even more evanescence than the rest of the work by public intellectuals. In my eyes, these brilliant analyses would benefit if continued in two directions. First, how is the transition from the ethics of the book to the ethics of the blog connected to the replacement of an aristocratic value system by a democratic one? Is it really a blessing that we lost all the values that inspired the aristocratic public intellectual, of which Baldassare Castiglione was the consummate example not only because of the norms he developed for the courtier but even more because of the elegance of the indirect avenues by which he proposed them? And, second, one can only survive the exorbitant increase of information that we are exposed to thanks to the Internet by techniques of selection. On what moral and intellectual principles should such techniques be based? If the ship of the mind shall not run aground in the shallows, some aristocratic sense for what should be ignored from the beginning seems of vital importance. And if the tyranny of intimacy shall not destroy the sense of public responsibility, the evaporation of the divide between the public and the private so characteristic of the blog has to be halted. Ken Miller looks at the role of the public intellectual in the natural sciences. He indicates four public functions of the scientist. First, she may trigger political decisions— the classical example being Albert Einstein writing to President Roosevelt about the threat of a German nuclear bomb and thus ultimately initiating the Manhattan Project. Second, she may organize the scientific enterprise, which over time may have an enormous social and political impact. Third, she may lead the way to the change of a scientific paradigm, which often affects the self-understanding of the public. Fourth, she may simply popularize science by communicating recent discoveries to a larger public. Despite his scathing criticism of science denial, Miller cautions against scientific intellectuals being in charge of political decisions. First, political problems often have a scientific component (think of climate change), but the answer can never be only scientific, since normative issues come in. Second, scientific consensus on complex issues is often elusive, and the issue of data suppression in order to prevent greater harm is

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not always moot. Third, science is often in the service of power and depends on money coming in from government-funded organizations, which undermines its claim to be super partes. These reservations warrant further thought in three directions. Even if science cannot justify valuative assumptions, is there any objective knowledge of values, or do we have to rely on the factual valuations that the majority of the population of a country supports? As much as we must live with lack of consensus in the case of complex issues, are there moral principles that we should follow in such a situation, such as Rawls’s Maximin Principle in decisions facing uncertainty? And are there ways of organizing science in such a way that the dependence on the source that funds research— a dependence that is unavoidable — leaves science the most freedom in its research while at the same time committing it to the public good? Gilles Andréani’s study on the diplomat as the public intellectual offers a rich overview over four generations of French diplomacy, from the last decades of the European concert down to Bernard-Henri Lévy persuading Sarkozy to go to war against Libya. On the one hand, Andréani points to the fact that particularly in France, where there is no equivalent to the term “public intellectual,” since such a term would be regarded as redundant, the activities of diplomat, academician, and journalist (sometimes even poet) were often integrated (Alexis Léger received the Nobel Prize in Literature). On the other hand, he points to a basic tension between the diplomat, whose activity is silent and confidential and aims at finding points of convergence between the interests of different states, and the public intellectual, who roars in the public arena and has often to reduce the intellectual quality of his work in order to reach a broader audience — his virtue is boldness not prudence. Andréani is worried by the decrease in our time of the technical know-how that had to be acquired by traditional diplomats, who often knew the culture of their host country very well: the new world is more global but no less parochial, concern with media impact is exaggerated, and the new competition of NGOs and a moralism that replaces the virtue of negotiation are threats to diplomacy as it was practiced for many centuries.

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A question that merits a more detailed elucidation is the relation of the normative and descriptive elements that enter into the policy recommendation that diplomats offer to their countries. Diplomats often have a much better knowledge of the political reality of the country in which they work than generic intellectuals, yet diplomats do not necessarily enjoy a superior insight into the moral principles that guide foreign policy decisions, including the resort to force. Here the input of public intellectuals who are experts in moral philosophy may indeed be beneficial in the long term, even if it cannot have an immediate impact, since the necessary changes have to occur in various countries before the new vision can be implemented. Kant’s Zum ewigen Frieden (Perpetual Peace) represents a third type of approach, irreducible to either the patient analysis of the diplomat or the media obsession of recent public intellectuals. As we turn to our final section, after having reflected upon the varying and changing role of the public intellectual around the world and across the disciplines, it is inspiring to see how a scholar like Mark Lilla, well known for his criticism of the philotyrannical tendencies of public intellectuals, insists at the end on the inevitability of public intellectuals in the twenty-first century, whose absence he sorely misses. For Lilla, modern public intellectuals arose in the eighteenth century. The complex issues they originally dealt with were replaced after 1789 by one simple question: Are you for or against the French Revolution and its version of modernity? In the twentieth century, a similar divide builds around the issue of the Russian Revolution of 1917. With François Furet, Lilla explains the attractivity of leftist totalitarianism for public intellectuals with the role that it granted them as prophets of the change to come. Although deeply rooted in the liberal tradition, Lilla remains worried about the lack of a plausible narrative of liberalism, that is, a plausible way of what I would like to call a metaphysical history of liberalism (such as Hegel offered it). Lilla insists that the superiority of liberalism does not entail that it could or should be exported, since it can only work when complex cultural presuppositions can nourish it. Two questions deserve further investigation. First, Lilla’s theory is plausible that what we call today “public intellectuals” takes shape only in the eighteenth century, but I would like to connect this form of public

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intellectuals with earlier ones. After all, it is not implausible to consider Plato and Aristotle at least as rudimentary public intellectuals, even if our conference unfortunately did not include a paper on the ancient version of public intellectuals. Second, the interesting philosophical issue in Lilla’s concern is whether the narrative he asks for only has to satisfy popular needs, or whether it is truly part of a substantial account of what liberalism is. Michael Zuckert does not disagree regarding the necessity of public intellectuals (even those who warn against them, such as Burke, perform the function of public intellectual), but he insists on the opposition between philosophical and political life taught by Leo Strauss— the quest for truth is something else than the quest for honor, the philosopher differs from the sophist. His sketch of an alternative history of public intellectuals is important. For him the seventeenth century already produced public intellectuals, such as Locke (whose ahistorical stance was already corrected by that other great liberal, Montesquieu), and he does not hesitate to call even Aquinas a public intellectual. Crucial is his distinction between the public as topic and as addressee. One may deal with public issues without addressing the public, but ever since the literacy revolution, the true public intellectual is the one who writes about public issues for a large audience, both about the people and for the people. Zuckert sets furthermore the generalist public intellectual apart from the specialist, for example, in economic matters. Regarding the motives of public intellectuals, he invites us to look at them with sound skepticism— the desire for glory, money, and power plays no less a role than the sincere desire to contribute to the common good. I will come back both to the issue of the defining traits of the public intellectual and to the important issue of how motives and results of public intellectuals have to be considered in evaluating their impact on society. Patrick Deneen offers a history of the decline of public intellectuals that is deeply connected with the development of modern universities. The rise of the modern research university leads to ever increasing specialization; interdisciplinary work is tainted by the suspicion of superficiality, and even undergraduate education, traditionally delivered by highlevel generalists, yields more and more to early professionalization and marketability, which demands high-tech intellectuals. The common life

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of the college, which should bring forth moral and intellectual virtues, and the idea that inspired the old university (that all disciplines are rooted in the divine mind) are less and less relevant in the modern “multiversity” where people are more connected to faculty in the same subfield at other universities than to colleagues at their own institution. Although this led to a public without public intellectuals, we witness now as a further consequence the disappearance of the public itself, without which the emergence of new public intellectuals, perhaps facilitated by the media revolution, will not be able to achieve lasting results. This must usher in deleterious political consequences, for the “secession of the successful” (Robert Reich) can be prevented only by a general culture informed by common values; and for this public intellectuals remain indispensable. One issue worth pursuing further consists in the inner changes that occurred in the humanities in the twentieth century and particularly in the self-understanding of philosophy, which became the unifying discipline of the universe of knowledge once the primacy of theology was challenged by the scientific revolution and the rise of historicist thinking but which now has given up comprehensive ambitions: the system builder has been replaced by the puzzle solver. Michael Desch’s final chapter presents a spirited defense of Max Weber’s double activities as politician and as (social) scientist in order to bolster the claim that, though not every scholar is called to the life of a public intellectual, some are, and that both society and academia are better off for it; for only in this way does academia discharge some of its obligations toward society at large. Desch’s view of Weber is at odds with conventional wisdom that sees Weber as the one who introduced the strict separation between science and politics and argued for a value-free social science. For Desch, Weber does recognize that political activities, like his own fight for liberal imperialism, are inspired by values, even if these are not justified by science, and he recognizes that scientific activity itself is only possible because it is directed by values that determine the relevance of the material to be selected for the research at hand. But is this incompatible with the traditional interpretation that Weber did not consider any categorical moral norm based on reason? True enough, for Weber, whoever wants to achieve an end is advised to use the means necessary for it, and so whoever wants to study an area has

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to consider the information that sheds light on it. But the choice to engage in such a research activity depends on one’s own inclination. Something analogous holds for politics. As a politician, Weber accepts certain values and is grateful for the support the social sciences offer in detecting the means most appropriate to the realization of these values. But he regards the final choice of values as ultimately merely subjective — even if it fulfills the deepest need of the subject. What Weber rejects is the millennial tradition that there is such a thing as ethical rationality or natural law — that practical reason imposes certain norms independently of subjective preferences. It would be a worthy topic for a specialized conference to show how the collapse of this belief, in Germany caused mainly by Nietzsche, led to a transformation of the concept of public intellectual whose consequences we do not yet completely understand.

After this quick summary and the attempt to connect the studies of this volume with some more general issues, I want to address one issue only touched upon cursorily in a few chapters, probably because a previous understanding of it was more or less shared by all the participants. What is this question? It is certainly not one of those questions about causal connections that Michael Desch asks in his introduction; for such questions have to be addressed by empirical investigations, and I am only a philosopher. Philosophers, however, have some competence in conceptual demarcations, and so it won’t come as a surprise if I declare the issue in which I am particularly interested in these final reflections to be simply the clarification of the concept of public intellectual. Connected is the issue of taxonomy — how should we subdivide this concept? Needless to say, there are several criteria of subdivision, some of which are completely independent of each other. A public intellectual is clearly more than a public person who is an intellectual— like a good philosopher is more than a person who is good and a philosopher (frankly, he may be also less, because there exist good philosophers who are bad persons; but in any case the two concepts are not identical). This is clear for conceptual reasons,1 but a concrete example may help to clarify what I have in mind. In late antiquity there was no figure more public than the Roman emperor, and Marcus Aurelius

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was not only a Roman emperor but also a true intellectual. His Τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν, Meditations, are one of the major works of the late Stoa, and Marcus Aurelius has rightly been regarded as one of the very few examples of the philosopher-king. But that does not make him a public intellectual, and this for two reasons. Despite occasional allusions to his duties as statesman,2 the Meditations are not a treatise on public issues, and even less are they addressing a public audience. We cannot even be sure that the emperor wanted this monument of sober self-analysis ever to be published. What I just said is a fortiori true for intellectuals who held less important public offices but did not write on public matters. An apt example would be Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, who was senator, consul, and finally magister officiorum, something like the head of government offices, under Theoderic in 522– 23. But none of his numerous scientific, philosophical, and theological works deal with public matters, and thus he should not be called a public intellectual. (Analogously, despite having been both a philosopher and a martyr, he should not be called a philosophical martyr: his execution had nothing to do with his philosophical ideas but with the charge, whether justified of not, of high treason committed in letters to Justinian.) But what about Thomas More and Francis Bacon, chancellors under Henry VIII and James I, respectively? Here it is more reasonable to speak of public intellectuals, for the two jurists authored with Utopia and New Atlantis two classics of political philosophy, the latter even exerting a traceable influence on the foundation of the Royal Society. Still, the works are distinct from those that we usually connect with the public intellectuals who begin to appear with the Enlightenment, and this for two reasons. First, they do not deal, at least directly, so much with concrete issues of the day as with the utopian sketch of an ideal society; even if concrete suggestions for reform occur, as in the first part of More’s work, they are embedded in a complex literary text that not many can enjoy. Second, More wrote his book in Latin, which was translated into English only after his death. This shows that it was intended for a relatively small group of readers— even if dealing with public matters, it was not addressing the public at large. Bacon, on the other hand, wrote New Atlantis in English. But he never completed it,3 and it was published only

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after his death. Still, in his case it is more plausible to speak of a public intellectual, for his Essayes, which began to be published in 1587, three years after he had joined the House of Commons, clearly were directed to a larger audience. However, they manifest rather general shrewdness than tackle political issues— and just for this reason Bacon could hope that they would prop up his career plans. On a still lower level we have the advisor of the prince. Since the combination of royal dignity and philosophical talent is not exactly frequent, already Aristotle corrected Plato’s famous claim4 by teaching that philosophers should be satisfied with advising the kings (as he did with Alexander the Great).5 Several great minds, from Plato to Leibniz, have tried to discharge what they felt as their obligation toward the common good through gaining reputation with potentates and advising them, either informally or even with a specific title —Leibniz worked as a diplomat for various courts and was at the end of his life privy councillor at the court of Hannover, imperial court councillor, and in the service of the Russian tsar Peter the Great — he even tried to contact the Chinese emperor.6 Leibniz was indefatigable in writing political memoranda— the fourth section of the critical Akademie-Ausgabe dedicated to his political writings has already reached the eighth volume even if reaching only to the year 1700 (he lived till 1716)! Although it may well be that activities behind the scene are often more fruitful in achieving political changes than the publication of widely received books, and probably not only in predemocratic societies, the concept of public intellectual presupposed in this volume does not cover the intellectual who acts as an advisor, for such an activity, even if dealing with political issues, does not occur in the public light. A slightly different case is represented by Niccolò Machiavelli. Like More, Bacon, and Leibniz, he was for many years a public servant, but, unlike them, of a republic, not of a monarchy. His reports for the Florentine government, the secretary of whose Second Chancery he was from 1498 to 1512, contain very original political observations and advice — but, even if written in Italian, they were confidential, not public, in nature, even if debating matters of great public import. But what about his two greatest works, Il Principe (The Prince) and Discorsi sopra la prima

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deca di Tito Livio (Discourses on Livy), two of the most influential works in political philosophy ever written? Well, even if manuscripts particularly of the first work circulated already during Machiavelli’s lifetime, they were both published only posthumously, and since one cannot become a public intellectual after death, I would refrain from calling Machiavelli a public intellectual. (The fictional Machiavelli in Maurice Joly’s Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu [Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu] is of course a public intellectual— or rather his author is, for Joly’s Machiavelli himself has the annoying property of not being real.) It is certainly reasonable to coin a term for those authors who write on public affairs but not for the public — one might call them “public issues intellectuals” — but the term as used in this volume refers to authors who write both on public issues and for the public. In addition, a public intellectual must succeed during his lifetime in garnering public attention— otherwise one could speak of would-be public intellectuals, of whom there are always many, only very few of whom begin to exert influence after death. Public intellectuals are much more likely to thrive in a democracy or at least in cultures with a strongly developed civil society, such as pre-Revolutionary France. But they are by no means limited to the modern world. Cicero was not very successful as statesman, but he was a public intellectual—De re publica clearly is not only an important classic of political theory and a masterful dialogue, but it was also supposed to enhance Cicero’s authority in the power struggles of the late republic. Literary activity certainly helps the rise of public intellectuals, but it is not a necessary condition for their existence — there may be illiterate orators who influence the political debates of a culture considerably. In fact, in antiquity most public intellectuals, such as Demosthenes or Cicero, not only wrote books but also delivered their speeches themselves; they had therefore to be possessed of special talents of voice and demeanor. The one great exception is, of course, Isocrates, who did not trust his voice but whose written orations were indeed political pamphlets that had a considerable impact on the course that some Greek states, and perhaps even Macedonia, took.7

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Which types of public intellectuals can we distinguish? One important distinction came up in Baert’s study, namely, that between authoritative and expert public intellectual. It is more or less equivalent to the difference between generalist and specialist, even if Baert’s term “authoritative” connotes a lack of true competence, as evidenced by Sartre. I would suggest introducing the evaluative question later, as much as I agree with Baert not only in the concrete appreciation of Sartre but in the general suspicion toward people who speak on too many subjects. But competence in many areas is not logically impossible, and at least in the past there have been authoritative public intellectuals, such as Kant, who were truly at the height of their time in all of the many areas in which they pronounced themselves. Some generalists, furthermore, have not only been talented practitioners of various disciplines but have also had a vision for the architecture of knowledge that the specialists often lack. A similar, but not identical, subdivision concerns the nature of the knowledge paraded by the public intellectual. The basic duality here is between instrumental and value-oriented rationality. Although the representative of instrumental rationality is usually a specialist in one or a few areas of the natural or the social sciences, such as Frederic Vester from the Club of Rome or John Maynard Keynes, the speaker for value-oriented rationality has often a broad overview of many areas but no technical expertise. Note that my definition of public intellectual demands that the instrumental knowledge communicated have implications for public affairs, that is, policies. Thus, Stephen Hawking, doubtless a famed scientist who has struck the popular imagination, is not a public intellectual, while Linus Pauling was one since he used his scientific know-how to show the public health risks connected with radioactive fallout; this led first to a moratorium on aboveground nuclear weapons testing, then to the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 and secured him a Nobel Peace Prize after the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The expert in instrumental knowledge can mostly rely on given interests that have only to be enlightened concerning the proper means; after all, hardly anybody wants high unemployment or radioactive strontium-90 in children’s teeth (even if some people may accept these evils in order to achieve what they regard as higher goods, such as low inflation rates or national security).

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The public representative of value rationality, on the other hand, challenges our basic normative beliefs (and thus at least implicitly asks for changes in policies). He aims ultimately at a conversion of hearts. Zarathustra, several of the prophets of the Old Testament, Jesus, Muhammad, Luther, and Calvin brought about radical changes in the value system of humanity; but it is difficult to call them intellectuals in the modern sense since they relied on what they perceived as revelation and its interpretation and were unwilling to challenge certain traditions that defied reason. At least we have to distinguish from them terminologically those public representatives of value rationality that follow mainly rational arguments (I say mainly, because there is a large grey area— think of scholastic theology). Socrates was the first of the second group, and clearly also the revolt in moral and legal thinking inspired by the belief in universal equality that found its highest philosophical justification in Immanuel Kant and J. S. Mill, clearly this revolt that brought down the ancien régime was a revolution concerning basic normative principles, not so much connections between means and ends. Has there occurred something analogous recently? Reconceiving our relation to nature and elaborating moral and political norms that are more respectful of intergenerational justice are the best examples of a change in value rationality. The enormous success of Hans Jonas’s Das Prinzip Verantwortung (The Imperative of Responsibility) in Germany, which influenced the rise of the ecological movement, was based on the new norms that he proposed. But at least as important was that he offered a metaphysics of ethics. This seems another important facet of value rationality: we want to understand how values relate to reality, in which, after all, they have to be implemented. Both Kant and G. F.W. Hegel had powerful theories to offer about the relation between Is and Ought, which included (but were by no means reducible to) a philosophy of history, which in Marxism became the only way to express the problem. Since philosophy of history cannot stand on its own, this did not enhance the intellectual credibility of Marxism, even if for a few generations it supplied it with a motivational force that partially replaced the traditional religious motivation for moral behavior — not God but history would guarantee the triumph of the good. Lilla’s concern about the

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lack of a plausible narrative of liberalism is probably best connected with this aspect of the value rationality approach.8 Another structural difference among public intellectuals is whether they support or challenge the status quo, that is, whether they are conservative or progressive. Also here there is no sharp demarcation but a smooth transition; one can often locate moderate progressives in the center between staunch traditionalists and radicals.9 Usually it is both less intellectually demanding and less risky to defend the opinions shared by the powerholders, but, needless to say, this alone does not entail that those who attack them enjoy superior insights. There may even exist an intellectual climate in which the expectations of the public push the public intellectual to pronounce statements that are indeed original but obviously exaggerated and even self-contradictory; this rarely helps the truth, even if may increase royalties. Challenging the establishment while benefiting from it, and ultimately even supporting it, by fostering the impression that only in this social cosmos is unbounded liberty possible has been the peculiar role of several postmodern intellectuals, especially in France, who sometimes seem to play a functional equivalent of the role of the court jester. Regarding the impact of the public intellectual, one will have to distinguish among those who are discussed only for some part of their lifetime, those who manage to capture attention from their rise to their end, and those who endure even beyond their death. (I have already declared that I do not want to call “public intellectuals” those whose reception starts only after their death.) Thomas Paine stands for the first group, Voltaire for the second, Kant for the third. A person is most likely to remain confined to the realm of what one could call, in opposition to the universal public intellectual, the “circumstantial public intellectual,” when she helps in articulating the national identity of young nations. Such intellectuals are often able to engage large strata of the population, but they produce little that will ever interest other nations, and even their own nation, once it has found its place in the world. As far as I can see, there is no obvious correlation, either direct or inverse, between the magnitude of the short-term impact and the long-term impact of a public intellectual. An empirical study of this issue would be highly useful.

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Only after these descriptive classifications can we deal with the evaluative ones, that is, distinguish between “good” and bad” public intellectuals. I just used quotation marks because, no doubt, there is no simple evaluation since the criteria that suggest themselves are very different, and someone may be good according to one and bad according to another. Since a public intellectual is an intellectual with an impact on the broader public, we may evaluate the intellectual level of her contribution along with the social consequences of her activity in the social arena; and if we are intentionalists in ethics, we should also look at the motives of the person. Regarding the first, we see a gamut of intellectual quality evidenced by public intellectuals— the intellectual powers of, let us say, Kant and Paine differed considerably. (It is a trite point that intellectual quality is well compatible with falsehood— some wrong theories were extremely ingenious and sometimes even necessary for humankind later finding the truth.) Some influential public intellectuals were not at all original themselves but conveyed to a larger public discoveries by someone else — which in itself is something meritorious and socially useful, even if, from the purely intellectual point of view, its value is modest. Very high theoretical intelligence can even be cumbersome in the process of becoming a public intellectual, for the person who had to struggle hard to grasp certain insights often can reach a broader audience, which inevitably will have to struggle, too, to cope with original insights. The price of great intellectuals striving to appear in the public arena is not only that they lose time for this purpose that could be put to better use, but the necessity of lowering one’s level can, alas, also impact negatively one’s mind. One may survive appearing on a few talk shows, but if someone begins to care seriously about what he has to say in order to be reinvited, a degeneration of his intellectual habits is likely to occur. Still, there have been extraordinary intellects who were also able to write for a large public in an easily accessible way — in the natural sciences I name Galileo, Darwin, and Einstein, in philosophy Locke and Kant. One way of fulfilling this double feat is using different literary genres—Kant wrote his three Critiques for a technical audience but could express some important consequences of his philosophy in essays for the educated

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bourgeoisie, such as “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” (“Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?”) in the Berlinische Monatsschrift. In the case of Hegel, the situation is more complex, for the books he published during his lifetime were very difficult, and even his occasional writings on political issues are not easy to grasp. But his university lectures attracted enormous numbers of students, and their posthumous edition by his pupils granted Hegel a lasting influence on German intellectual history. The ancients rightly distinguished between esoteric and exoteric writing. Since only the highly technical esoteric works of Aristotle have been preserved, we often tend to overlook that he was also the author of many exoteric works (often in dialogue form). Plato, finally, managed to write dialogues that are both immediately attractive and at the same time have a philosophical and literary complexity that can be unveiled only after a long study; they are esoteric and exoteric at the same time. The decline of the philosopher as public intellectual has to do not only with momentous changes in the self-understanding of philosophy (such as skepticism with regard to value rationality) but also no less with the loss of the ability of writing in different genres and using rhetoric not as an instrument of manipulation but as a tool of communicating complex truths (such as it was understood by Plato in the Phaedrus, Aristotle in the Rhetoric, and Cicero in De oratore). Concerning the consequences of public intellectuals, one can only say that they may be uplifting, harmless, or deleterious. Without public intellectuals, there would have hardly been societal progress, for insights have to be communicated in order to be implemented. In predemocratic societies, the intellectual who advises the sovereign on his own may trigger important changes, but, at least in contemporary societies, it is unlikely that sweeping reforms will come about without the mediating work of public intellectuals. However sweeping these reforms, even the revolutions initiated or at least justified by the public intellectuals need not be good— public intellectuals may help to bring out the worst of human nature, or they can become useful idiots of the powers of the day. Suffice it to mention the gullibility of public intellectuals regarding totalitarianism, especially from the Left. German totalitarianism was probably worse, but since it was anti-intellectual in its root it seduced fewer people not imme-

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diately under its rule. The number of German professors supporting National Socialism, however, was high, and not only for opportunistic reasons. A few of them, such as Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and Arnold Gehlen, were truly innovative intellectuals. Even when the changes favored by public intellectuals are in principle reasonable, their vocal support of them may be far from beneficial— it may trigger a backlash that increases human suffering considerably. Or the changes it brings about can spiral out of control, as in the course of the French Revolution. In the first chapter of the third book of his L’ancien Régime et la Revolution, Tocqueville explains the unwholesome influence of French intellectuals on pre-Revolutionary society with the fact that, unlike their German counterparts, they were not primarily interested in abstract theoretical but practical matters (that is, they were public intellectuals), and, unlike their British colleagues, they rarely had exercised concrete political responsibility, an experience that usually tends to moderate one’s views.10 Not having to take responsibility for one’s assertions is probably a general danger of public intellectuals, especially when they are not subject to the control of institutions, as the clergy was, or at least when they are no longer animated by a sense of obligation toward a truth that transcends them.11 We have thus approached the field of human motives. They vary greatly, among public intellectuals no less than among other human beings, and they do not correlate with the outcome. The motives may be noble but lead to pernicious consequences, while a complete egomaniac may contribute to a society’s transition to sounder policies. The best motive is the sincere desire to further the commonweal, to have what is good and true rule not only in oneself but in society at large. Sometimes activism may be born from a special sense of responsibility for concrete issues—Joseph Rotblat, for example, had cooperated in the Manhattan Project and wanted to make up for it. Sometimes the great intellectual feels that his theoretical creativity has been exhausted and, legitimately, wants to dedicate his energies to a new area. Greed, of course, may be another motive, for public intellectuals are usually better paid than professors. More dubious still is the desire to exert power for the pleasure of it. But I am afraid that vanity is the most pervasive motive — whoever is not sure that his work has an intrinsic value can get a confirmation from

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being quoted in the newspaper that goes far beyond the pleasure one enjoys in grasping the truth or getting recognition by a few peers. But it is not my task to sort out the complex interplay of these motives in some famous public intellectuals because I am still busy searching my own soul. Notes 1. Already Aristotle understands that a person who is good and a shoemaker is not therefore a good shoemaker (On Interpretation 20b36, and On Sophistical Refutations 177b14 ff.). “Good” is here not a predicate of the subject but an attribute of “shoemaker”; in a formal reconstruction we would express it as an adverb. See Willard Van Orman Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), 103 ff. 2. See, for example, Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 6.20 and 10.10. 3. Whether the fragmentary character of New Atlantis is intentional remains controversial. See, e.g., Wolfgang Krohn, Francis Bacon (Munich: H. Beck, 1987), 158 ff. 4. Republic 473c and following. 5. See fragment 2 of On Kingdom in Aristotelis Fragmenta Selecta, rec. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 62. 6. See Eike Christian Hirsch, Der berühmte Herr Leibniz (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2000), 392 ff. and 531 ff. 7. On the possible connection between Isocrates’s exhortation to attack Persia (Panegyricus 173 ff.; Philippus 119 ff.) and Philip’s preparation of the war later waged by Alexander, see Michael Zahrnt, “The Macedonian Background,” in Alexander the Great: A New History, ed. W. Heckel and L. A. Tritle (Chichester: Blackwell, 2009), 7– 25. 8. On Marx’s place in the history of German philosophy, see Vittorio Hösle, A Short History of German Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 147 ff. 9. Think of the intellectual map that Jonathan Israel sketched of the Enlightenment in his masterful trilogy with Oxford University Press: Radical Enlightenment (2001), Enlightenment Contested (2006), and Democratic Enlightenment (2011). 10. Alexis de Tocqueville, L’ancien Régime et la Revolution (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), 229 ff. 11. The unflattering criticism by Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 145 ff., is quite to the point.

Contributors

Gilles Andréani is an adjunct professor at Paris II Panthéon-Assas University, where he teaches international relations. He has served as head of the policy planning staff in the French Foreign Ministry, deputy head of the French mission to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), head of the disarmament division in the Foreign Ministry, and deputy head for studies in the Ministry of Defense. Andrew J. Bacevich is Professor Emeritus of International Relations and History at Boston University and a leading public intellectual and analyst of U.S. foreign and military policies. He is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Before joining the faculty of Boston University, he taught at West Point and at Johns Hopkins University. Patrick Baert is Professor of Social Theory at the University of Cambridge. He is also Fellow and Director of Studies at Selwyn College, Cambridge. J. Bradford DeLong is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley; chair of the Political Economy of Industrial Societies major; and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He also served in the U.S. government as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. 397

398

Contributors

Patrick J. Deneen is the David A. Potenziani Memorial Associate Professor of Constitutional Studies in the Department of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. In addition to previous faculty positions at Princeton and Georgetown, he served as speechwriter and special advisor to the director of the United States Information Agency. Michael C. Desch is Professor of Political Science and founding director of the Notre Dame International Security Center. Before joining the faculty at Notre Dame, he was the founding director of the Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs at the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University and assistant director and senior research associate at Harvard’s John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies. Paul Horwitz is the Gordon Rosen Professor at the University of Alabama School of Law, where he teaches constitutional law, law and religion, and legal ethics. He clerked for the Honorable Ed Carnes of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Vittorio Hösle is the Paul Kimball Professor of Arts and Letters in the Department of German and Russian Languages and Literatures and Concurrent Professor of Philosophy and of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. He was the founding director of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study (NDIAS). Enrique Krauze is a historian, essayist, and publisher. He served as deputy editor of Vuelta magazine, edited by Octavio Paz, founded the publishing house Editorial Clío, and established Letras Libres magazine. Willy Lam is an adjunct professor in the Department of History and in the Center for China Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, a leading foreign policy think tank in Washington, DC. Mark Lilla, Professor of Humanities at Columbia University, specializes in intellectual history with a particular focus on Western political

Contributors

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and religious thought. Before moving to Columbia he taught in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and at New York University. Kenneth R. Miller is Professor of Biology at Brown University. In addition to his numerous scholarly publications, he served as lead witness in the trial on evolution and intelligent design in Dover, Pennsylvania. Ahmad S. Moussalli is Professor of Political Studies at the American University of Beirut. His research focuses on Islamic political history and studies, Islamic political theories, ideologies of contemporary Islamic movements, cultural theory and studies, political philosophy, and international relations. Jeremi Suri is Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs and Professor of History and of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of four books, including the acclaimed biography of one of America’s most distinguished diplomats, Henry Kissinger and the American Century. Michael Zuckert is the Nancy Reeves Dreux Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. Among many scholarly activities, he also coauthored and coproduced the public radio series Mr. Adams and Mr. Jefferson: A Nine Part Drama for the Radio.

index

‘Abd al-Malak, Anwar, 159 ‘Abd al-Raziq, Mustafa, 150 ‘Abdu, Muhammad, 153 academic “public intellectual,” origins of, 337– 40 Academic Questions, 239 academic work, 230 – 31, 246n81 Adorno, Theodor, 171 Afghani, Jamal al-Din al-, 150, 151, 153 After Virtue (MacIntyre), 200 Age of Jackson, The (Schlesinger), 69 Ai Weiwei, 107 Alesina, Alberto, 209 Alexander, Jeffrey, 178 ‘Ali Pasha, Muhammad (governor of Egypt), 149, 151 Alters, Brian, 254 American Diplomacy (Kennan), 50 – 53, 56 American exceptionalism, 40 – 41, 44 – 45, 374 American historical consciousness, 42– 43, 44 – 46, 56, 58, 59

American public intellectuals in early Cold War, role of, 63– 64, 83 engagement in politics, 7– 8 ideology and, 66, 67– 68 images of the past in works of, 39– 40 liberalism of, 67– 68 views of, 83– 84 Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), 72– 73 Amin, Ahmad, 150, 153 Amin, Qasim, 150, 154 Andréani, Gilles, 10, 46, 382 Andréani, Jacques, 289 Ansari, Muhammad Jabir al-, 158 Antun, Farah, 149, 152 Arab culture Arab renaissance, 152, 153– 54, 156 cause for backwardness, 155 concept of heritage, 155– 56, 157– 58 intellectual reforms, 149 literacy, 152– 53

400

Index relationship with Western culture, 154 – 55 scientific associations, 153 spread of nationalism, 151, 152 Arab intellectuals challenges of, 156– 57 failures of cultural renaissance, 148 interpretation of Qur’an, 378 justification of authoritarianism, 149 liberal and traditional trends, 148– 49, 150, 156, 158– 59 tension between secular and religious, 377– 78 theory of progress, 154 Western perception of, 148– 50 Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik ( journal), 360 Ariel (Rodó), 132 Aristotle, 384, 388, 394, 396n1 Arkoun, Muhammad, 150, 156, 157 Aron, Raymond, 4, 11, 283, 284, 286, 287, 304 Arsalan, Shakib, 154, 155 Ash‘ari, Abu al-Hasan al-, 158 Attar, Hasan al-, 155 Atticus, Titus Pomponius, 204 – 5 Authoritarian Personality, The (Adorno), 171 authoritative public intellectualism, 170 – 75, 176, 177 ‘Azoury, Najib, 151, 152 Bacevich, Andrew, 7, 10, 46, 374 – 75 Bachmann, Michelle, 250 Bacon, Francis, 13, 387– 88 Badiou, Alain, 166, 176 Baert, Patrick, 10, 378, 379, 390 Bai Tongdong, 96 Balaguer, Joaquín, 136, 377 Balkin, Jack, 227

401 Bao Tong, 95, 107, 111 Barrère, Camille, 273, 274, 275 Bell, Daniel, 24, 144, 304 Bello, Andrés, 131 Bender, Thomas, 17 Bendix, Reinhard, 350 Benjamin, Walter, 315 Benkler, Yochai, 227 Bentham, Jeremy, 22 Berlin, Isaiah, 11, 12– 13 Bernstein, Richard, 170 Berthelot, Philippe, 279 Betancourt, Rómulo, 135 Bethmann-Hollweg, Theobald von, 363 Bianco, José, 133 bin Laden, Osama, 85 Bismarck, Otto von, 364 blog connectivity of, 226– 28 definition of, 218 ethic of, 221– 23, 380 – 81 feedback as feature of, 228– 30 immediacy of, 223– 26 as mirror, 216– 19, 237 as technology, 218– 19, 237 blogger, as public intellectual, 214 blogging access to audience, 216, 232– 33, 234, 245n70 advantages of, 226, 233, 237 blogrolls, 226 comments, 244n57 comparison with Republic of Letters, 229– 30 constant changeability, 229 “democratic” form of positioning, 178 exhaustion and repetition, 215– 16 expertise and, 225– 26 hyperlinks, 227

402 blogging (cont.) illegitimate trading on authority, 234 lack of depth, 225, 234 lawyers and legal academics, 236 as medium of communication, 216, 230 Mirror of Justice blog, 221 Prawfsblawg blog, 215, 221 problems with public intellectual, 233– 37 prominent bloggers, 220 – 21 public intellectuals and, 219– 21, 230 – 33, 237– 40, 242n31 quick reactions to current events, 224 reverse-chronological nature of, 235 rise of group blogs, 243n45 vs. traditional media, 224 blogosphere, 228, 235, 237 Blood, Rebecca, 218 Bloom, Allan, 342, 343, 345 Bloomberg, Michael, 256 Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus, 13, 387 Bolívar, Simón, 131 Booth, Josh, 179 Borges, Jorge Luis, 133, 134, 135 Bork, Robert, 238 Bourdieu, Pierre, 173 Boynton, Robert S., 335 Braudel, Fernand, 185 Briand, Aristide, 279 Broderick, John, 79 Brooks, David, 323, 324, 335 Bulnes, Francisco, 131, 136 Burawoy, Michael, 174 Burke, Edmund, 324 Burnham, James, 68, 79 Bush, George W., 58, 65, 80, 85, 214, 317, 375 Bush Doctrine of preventive war, 65 Bustani, Butrous al-, 151

Index Cabrera Infante, Guillermo, 144 Caillaux, Joseph, 277 Cain, Herman, 250 Calderón, Francisco García, 132 Cambon, Jules, 273, 274 Cambon, Paul, 273, 274 – 75 Carnegie, Andrew, 277 Carr, Nicholas, 222, 227, 229 Carroll, Sean B., 259 Casares, Adolfo Bioy, 133 Castiglione, Baldassare, 381 Castro, Fidel, 139 Catholic intellectual tradition, 6, 16 Ceaser, James, 326 Chaadayev, Pyotr, 377 Chang Ping, 99 Cheek, Timothy, 92 Chen Guangcheng, 105 Chen Ziming, 114 Chiang Ching-Kuo, 116 Chiang Kai-shek, 116 China American view of history of, 42 as amoral society, 102– 3 Anti-Right Movement, 97 bloggers, 118 Central Compilation and Translation Bureau (CCTB), 113 civil opposition movement, 91 Confucianism, 92, 95 Cultural Revolution, 94, 97 decline of liberal dissidents, 312 development of pluralism in society, 98 Dragon Boat Festival, 111 economic growth, 90, 100 – 101 employment of college graduates, 100 foreign relations, 93, 101, 110 human rights issue, 110 intellectuals and state power, 375– 76

Index intelligentsia, 91, 92 Internet access, 99 leading universities, 100 legal and judicial reforms, 105 Maoist statecraft, 94 – 95 May Fourth Movement, 93, 96 nationalism, 101 Netizens social network, 106, 110 political parties, 126n66 political reform, 116 political thought in, 311– 12 prospects of democratization, 91 Red aristocracy, 100 ruling doctrine of Jiang Zemin, 96 Sichuan earthquake, 107 social hierarchy, 93 social protests, 107, 311 Southern Weekly incident, 109, 118 state-owned enterprises, 104 status of individual, 95 strategic intellectuals, 114 – 16 think tanks in, 103– 4 Tibetan policy, 101 traditional role of intellectuals in, 92– 93 traditional values and constitutional changes, 375– 76 2008 Summer Olympics, 99 weiwen apparatus, 98 Wukan village rebellion, 108– 9, 118 “China Dream,” conception of, 119 China Fantasy, The (Mann), 90 – 91 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 93, 95– 96, 97– 98, 99 Chinese public intellectuals achievements of, 117– 19 challenge of survival, 117– 18 Charter 08 movement, 107– 8 Chinese Tibetan policy and, 101 Communist Party’s co-optation of, 99– 100

403 definition of, 91– 92 emigration of, 99 “establishment intellectuals,” 111– 17 formation of national coalition of, 105– 6 groups of notable, 102– 5 human rights lawyers, 104 – 5 influence of, 103, 106– 7 knowledge and values of, 95 limitations of, 109– 11 members of liberal think tanks, 103– 4 members of official think tanks, 113 nationalism and, 101 vs. police-state apparatus, 98– 99 reform agenda, 110 – 11 scholars and writers, 102– 3 Sichuan earthquake and activism of, 107 support of Southern Weekly, 109 top fifty, 92, 103 traditional role of, 92– 93 Wukan incident and, 108– 9 Chomsky, Noam, 11, 173 Christianity and Crisis (magazine), 75– 76 Churchill, Winston, 81, 190 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 204, 389, 394 Claudel, Paul, 279 Clemenceau, Georges, 301 climate change, 255– 56 Closing of the American Mind, The (Bloom), 342 Coase, Ronald, 188, 190 Cold War intellectuals, 303– 5 Collins, Francis, 249 communication technology blogs, 220 expansion of electronic media, 241nn25– 26 printing press, 219– 20 radio and television, 220

404 Comte, Auguste, 131, 302 Confucianism, 95– 97 Constant, Benjamin, 302 Cosío Villegas, Daniel “The Crisis of Mexico,” 137, 138 educational projects, 136– 37 friends of, 134 – 35 liberalism of, 137 moral lesson of, 138 1968 student movement and, 137 as positivist thinker, 136 prediction of communist advancement, 137 publishing activity, 135, 142 reaction to Cuban Revolution, 139 works, 134 – 35, 137 as writer, 137– 38 Cuban Revolution, 139– 41 Cullen, Richard, 105 Cultivation of a Communist, The (Liu Shaoqi), 97 Cunha, Euclides da, 131 Daily Show, The, 250, 251 Dai Qing, 107 Darío, Rubén, 131 Darwin, Charles, 259 Dawkins, Richard, 178– 79, 248 de Gaulle, Charles, 283 Delbanco, Andrew, 338 Delcassé, Théophile, 274 DeLong, Bradford, 10, 220, 379– 80 “democracy without adjectives,” 143 Demosthenes, 389 Deneen, Patrick, 14, 384 Deniau, Jean-François, 283 De re publica (Cicero), 389 de Rose, François, 285 Derrida, Jacques, 315, 326 Desch, Michael C., 179, 216, 323, 385, 386 developing world, 310

Index dialogical public intellectuals, 173– 74, 379 Dickens, Charles, 314 Dingding Chen, 90 Ding Zhilin, 107 diplomatic work, 268– 69 diplomats courage of, 292 discretion of, 272 educational institutions for, 270, 278 influence of, 293 lives and careers of French, 273– 78 means of communications of, 275 professionalism of, 270 in public debates, role of, 273, 288– 89 as public intellectuals, 291, 292, 293, 382– 83 public opinion expectations toward, 272 qualities of, 268– 70, 282, 291– 92 WikiLeaks and correspondence of, 270 as writers, 269, 279, 280 – 81 See also French diplomacy Discourses on Livy (Machiavelli), 388– 89 Dodd, William, 282 Dos Passos, John, 67, 86n11 Doughface progressivism, 74 – 75 Dreyfus Affair, 7 Drezner, Daniel, 12, 221, 244n62 Du Daozheng, 111 Dworkin, Ronald, 245n79 Eastman, Max, 336 Ebert, Friedrich, 359 Echeverría, Luis, 141, 145 ecological movement, 391 economics as vocation, 197

Index economists as bloggers, 245n77 expertise of, 192 on national debt management, 205– 9 as public intellectuals, 186, 379– 80 in public square, role of, 192– 93, 196– 97, 209 economy Bengal famine from perspective of, 189– 90 debt to GDP ratio, 206– 7, 206fig division of labor, 187 emergent properties, 192 growth of worldwide GDP, 185– 86 historical perspective on, 184, 185 in industrialized countries, 205– 7 market systems, 187– 90 “micro” topics in, 187– 92 rise of study of, 184 – 85 Say’s Law, 196 as topic of public conversation, 183 wealth distribution, 190 Edwards, Jorge, 144 Egyptian National movement, 150– 51 Einstein, Albert, 21, 248, 249, 381 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 81 Eliot, T. S., 221 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 43 Endless Forms Most Beautiful (Carroll), 259 End of History and the Last Man (Fukuyama), 172 Essayes (Bacon), 388 Estournelles de Constant, PaulHenri-Benjamin d’, 276– 78, 291 European Union, 307, 308, 309– 10 Evolution (PBS series), 264 evolution, theory of, 251– 52, 254, 259, 260 – 61, 262– 63 expert public intellectuals, 172– 73, 177, 379

405 Fahmi, Mansur, 152 Fan Zhongyan, 102 Feast of the Goat, The (Vargas Llosa), 136 Forrest, Barbara, 254 Foucault, Michel, 172, 315 Fourier, Charles, 301 France intelligentsia, 286, 290 public intellectuals in, 382, 392, 395 François-Poncet, André, 280, 281– 82, 295n22 François-Poncet, Jean, 283 free market ideology, 172 French diplomacy Bernard-Henri Lévy, 292 after Cold War, 287– 88 during Cold War, 283– 87 evolution of, 287– 88 French-German relationship, 283 humanitarianism, 286– 87 intellectual contribution, 290 during interwar period, 278– 83 last years of European concert and, 273– 76 lives and careers of diplomats, 273– 76 Mitterrand and, 283 NATO affairs, 285 pro-European direction of, 275 Soviet Union and, 284, 290 – 91 French Revolution, 301– 2, 303, 313 Fuentes, Carlos, 139 Fu Hualing, 105 Fukuyama, Francis, 172, 305, 306 Fumaroli, Marc, 6 Furet, François, 144, 301, 302, 303 Gadamer, Hans Georg, 174 Gaddis, John Lewis, 48, 87n39 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 72, 117 Gallegos, Rómulo, 131, 135

406 Gans, Herbert J., 17 Gao Yaojie, 99 Gao Zhisheng, 104 Gaos, José, 138 García Calderón, Francisco, 136 Garnett, Rick, 221 Gary, Romain, 279 Gehlen, Arnold, 395 Gentz, Friedrich, 302 Germany constitutional reform, 363– 64, 365 military prospects of, 362– 63 obstacles to liberalism in, 357– 58 public intellectuals in, 394 – 95 Ghalyun, Burhan, 157 Ghazali, al-, 158 Giavazzi, Francesco, 209 Gibbon, Edward, 374 Giraudoux, Jean, 279 Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry, 283, 286 Gladwell, Malcolm, 244n62 Glucksmann, André, 286 Goldman, Merle, 92 Gómez Morín, Manuel, 136 good, concept of, 386, 396n1 Gould, Stephen Jay, 248, 250, 263, 264 Grafton, Anthony, 6, 8 Guangming Daily, 118 Guéhenno, Jean-Marie, 288 Guevara, Ché, 140, 142 Gulag Archipelago (Solzhenitsyn), 285 Habermas, Jürgen, 16, 379 Halberstam, David, 8 Hanafi, Hasan, 150, 156 Han Dongfang, 99 Han Han, 108, 118 Hanotaux, Gabriel, 277 Harding, York, 65 Harnecker, Marta, 142 Hartz, Louis, 43, 44 Haught, John, 254

Index Haussmann, Conrad, 365 Hawking, Stephen, 178, 390 Hay, John, 52 Haya de la Torre, Víctor Rául, 135 Hayek, Friedrich, 324, 325 Haykal, Muhammad Hasanayn, 153 Heartre, Jean Pulse (character), 163– 64 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 391, 394 Heidegger, Martin, 11, 19, 315, 320, 395 Henríquez Ureña, Pedro, 133, 134 Hermippos of Smyrna, 183 Hesse, Hermann, 25 Hessel, Stéphane, 289– 90, 291 He Weifang, 91, 102, 107, 109 Higgs, Peter, 249– 50 historical mythologies, 306 Hitchens, Christopher, 323, 324 Hofstadter, Richard, 5, 8, 22, 27, 43, 44 Horwitz, Paul, 14, 174, 380 Hösle, Vittorio, 3 Howe, Irving, 117, 144 Hu Dehua, 116 Hu Deping, 113 Hu Jintao, 96, 98, 112, 113 Hu Jiwei, 111 human rights, 328– 29 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 302 Husayn, Sharif, 152 Husayn, Taha, 152, 153 Hussari, Sati‘ al-, 151 Hu Xingdou, 102 Huxley, Aldous, 176 Hu Yaobang, 111, 113, 116, 117 hyperlinks, 227 Ibn Khaldun, 158, 192 Ibn Sina, 158 ‘Id, Abd al-Razzaq, 150, 157

Index ideology American public intellectuals and, 66, 67– 68 Communist, 71– 72, 84 democracy and, 307 of free market, 172 interpretations of, 305 Islamism as, 312 liberal democracy as, 305– 6 perception of reality and, 307 Imperative of Responsibility, The ( Jonas), 391 Indignate (Hessel), 289 intellect power of, 3 vs. wisdom, 12 intellectuals definition of, 131, 376 digital revolution and, 300 in French tradition, 270 – 71 in historical perspective, 300 – 301 historical task of avant-garde, 303 public intellectuals vs., 335– 37 intellectual style, 12– 13 Internet, 344 – 45, 380, 381 Irony of American History (Niebuhr), 56 Ishaq, Adib, 149 Islamism, 312 Jabiri, Muhammad ‘Abid al-, 150, 156 Jacoby, Russell on decline of public intellectuals, 230 definition of public intellectuals, 217 on intellectuals and universities, 15, 18 The Last Intellectuals, 117, 335, 340, 345 on new class of intellectuals, 335– 36 Jefferson, Thomas, 330

407 Jiang Zemin, 96, 99– 100 Johnson, Lyndon, 8 Johnson, Paul, 11, 12 Joly, Maurice, 389 Jonas, Hans, 391 Jones, John E., III, 253 Judt, Tony, 4 Kagan, Robert, 40 Kamil, Mustapha, 150 Kant, Immanuel, 383, 390, 391, 392, 393– 94 Katznelson, Ira, 4, 17, 18 Kaus, Mickey, 245n76 Kawakibi, ‘Abd al-Rahman al-, 149, 152, 154 Kennan, George American Diplomacy, 50 – 53 comparison with Kissinger, 54 – 55 contribution to political thought, 55 on democracy and democratization, 51, 57 diplomatic career, 47, 48, 49 as historian, 47– 48 historical works of, 49– 50, 52 influence of, 56– 57, 59, 374 “Long Telegram,” 48 on national consciousness, 51 as public intellectual, 48, 49 as realist thinker, 55 “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” 48– 49 on Treaty of Versailles, 52– 53 on U. S. foreign policy, 50, 51, 52, 53– 54 writing style, 52 Kennedy, John F., 7 Kennedy, Joseph P., 70 Kennedy, Paul, 40 Kerr, Clark, 340, 341– 42 Keynes, John Maynard, 197– 200, 201– 2, 390

408 Khalid, Khalid Muhammad, 150 Kingdon, John, 9, 10, 13 Kirk, Russell, 7, 23, 25 Kissinger, Henry, 42, 47– 48, 54 – 55, 56– 57, 59, 374 Kitzmiller v. Dover, 252– 54, 260 – 61 knowledge-based society, 325 Kojève, Alexander, 315 Kołakowski, Leszek, 144 Kouchner, Bernard, 295n31 Krauss, Lawrence, 8, 255 Krauze, Enrique, 10, 376, 377 Kronman, Anthony T., 341– 42, 343, 345 Krugman, Paul, 323 Kuklick, Bruce, 9 Kundera, Milan, 144 La Bruyère, Jean de, 272 Lafforgue, Laurent, 16 LaFollette, Robert, 7 Lai, Hairong, 113– 14 Laloy, Jean, 284, 285– 86, 287 Lam, Willy, 10, 375, 376 Lasch, Christopher, 345, 346 Last Intellectuals, The ( Jacoby), 117 Latin America academic intellectuals, 141– 42, 144, 145– 46 anti-liberal ideologies, 132, 133 Chilean coup, 141 cultural magazines, 138– 39 debates on collective destiny, 140 Generation of 1915, 136 Ibero-American nationalism, 132 idea of philosopher-king, 136 impact of Cuban Revolution on, 139– 41 intelligentsia, 130, 146– 47 justification of despotism, 136 majority-elected governments, 146 Marxism, 142

Index myth of Revolution, 146– 47 philosophy of positivism in, 131– 32 public intellectuals, 376– 77 wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador, 145– 46 Zapatista movement, 133 Latin American intellectuals, 130, 131, 134, 140, 141– 42, 146 L’Écume des jours (Vian), 164 Lee Kuan Yew, 95 Léger, Alexis, 279– 80, 292, 382 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 388 Lei Feng, 97, 98 Lenin, Vladimir, 44 Letter of Toleration (Locke), 320 Levine, Joseph S., 251 Lévy, Bernard-Henri, 286, 292, 382 Lezama Lima, José, 131, 138 Liao Yiwu, 99 liberal democracy challenge of technology, 332 conditions for, 310 – 11 developing world and, 310 in European Union, 307 as ideology, 305– 6, 311 as legitimate form of government, 305, 311 perceptions of, 311– 12 potentials for, 328 liberal equality, 329, 330 – 31 liberalism Anglo-American, 44, 68, 306 criticism of, 327 rationalism and, 330 welfare state and, 331 Li Changping, 109, 118 Li Fan, 104 Life magazine, 76 Li Keqiang, 110 Lilla, Mark on concept of the end of history, 315

Index criticism of public intellectuals, 316, 383 on liberalism, 326, 391– 92 as opponent of public intellectualism, 317 on problem of Heidegger, 19 quest for another Marx, 317, 319, 326 on reckless minds, 315– 16 Review of Books blog, 220 – 21 scholarship, 11 Lincoln, Abraham, 40 – 41, 43, 328, 329, 332 Lin Zuluan, 108 Lippmann, Walter, 54, 65, 375 Li Rui, 111 Literary Trends in Latin America (Cosío Villegas), 134 Liu, Yu, 90 Liu Junning, 107 Liu Shaoqi, 97 Liu Xia, 118 Liu Xiaobo, 91, 102, 107, 108, 114, 118 Liu Yingjie, 115 Li Zhongjie, 115 Locke, John, 255, 306, 320 – 21, 327– 28, 384 Lombardo Toledano, Vicente, 136 López Portillo, José, 145 Luce, Henry, 76 Ludendorff, Erich, 363 Lugones, Leopoldo, 131 Macdonald, Dwight, 69, 79– 80, 82, 336, 374 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 22, 374, 388– 89 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 200, 201, 202, 203 Malak, Anwar ‘Abd al-, 150 Manhattan Project, 249

409 Mann, Jim, 90 Maoism, 96 Mao Yushi, 104, 107 Mao Zedong, 94, 96, 121n16 Marcus Aurelius, 386– 87 Marcuse, Herbert, 165 Mariátegui, José Carlos, 133 market system balanced equilibrium in, 193– 94 characteristics of modern, 379 excess demand, 195 government’s impact on, 195– 96 harm created by power imbalances and, 189– 90 idea of a general glut, 193– 95 impact on everyday life, 193 market failure, 190 – 91 power of, 187– 89 property rights and, 190 – 91 role of state, 191– 92 Márquez, Gabriel García, 139, 140 Marshall, Alfred, 193 Marshall Plan, 77 Martí, José, 132 Martin, George R. R., 183 Marx, Karl, 44, 317 Marxism, 172, 286– 87, 302, 391 McClintock, Barbara, 248 McCormick, Robert, 64 McLaury, Bruce, 24 Mearsheimer, John, 40, 54 Meditations (Marcus Aurelius), 387 medium, influence of, 221– 22, 242n33 Melzer, Arthur, 5 Menand, Louis, 22 Merton, Robert K., 14 Mexican Revolution, 136– 37 Mill, John Stuart, 22, 195, 306, 327, 391 Miller, Kenneth, 10, 178, 179, 381 Mills, C. Wright, 4

410 Mitterrand, François, 283, 286 Mommsen, Theodor, 374 Mommsen, Wolfgang, 358, 365 Monnet, Jean, 279 Montesquieu, 384 Montferrand, Bernard de, 289 Morand, Paul, 279 More, Thomas, 13, 387 Morgan, Marcus, 179 Morgenthau, Hans, 54 Morison, Samuel Eliot, 337, 346 Moussalli, Ahmad, 14, 377 Mo Yan, 94 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 24 Mumford, Lewis, 336 Murray, Emma, 179 Muruwwa, Husayn, 150 Musa, Salama, 150, 151, 152 Nadim, ‘Abd Allah al-, 150 National Academy of Sciences (Washington, DC), 255 National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), 141– 42 Nervo, Amado, 131 New Atlantis (Bacon), 387– 88 Newman, John Henry, 3, 6, 16– 17, 339– 40 New York Review of Books, 239 Niebuhr, Reinhold as “Christian realist,” 47 on containment of communist power, 45– 46, 76– 77 encounters with Schlesinger, 75 founder of Americans for Democratic Action, 72, 75 founder of Christianity and Crisis, 75– 76 on historical narrative, 44 – 45 influence of, 46, 59 liberal views, 44

Index on Marshall Plan, 77– 78 on moral difficulties of immoral world, 46 opposition to Vietnam war, 87n33 scholarly literature on, 87n32 “Streaks of Dawn in the Night,” 77 on U. S. foreign policy, 77 Nitze, Paul, 20 Norton, Anne, 350 nouveaux philosophes, 286– 87, 295n31 Nussbaum, Martha, 19 Obama, Barack, 58, 110 O’Brien, Matthew, 208 Ocampo, Victoria, 133 Oldenburg, Ray, 346 On China (Kissinger), 42 Open Door Notes, 52 Oppenheimer, Robert, 249 Ormesson, Wladimir d’, 280 Ortega y Gasset, José, 133, 138 Orwell, George, 176 Ottoman Empire, 151– 52, 155 Owen, David, 359 Padian, Kevin, 254 Paine, Thomas, 392, 393 Paléologue, Maurice, 273, 274, 275, 294n10 Pangle, Thomas, 5 Pan-Islamism, 151 Partisan Review, 68, 70 Passing of an Illusion, The (Furet), 301 Pauling, Linus, 248, 390 Paz, Octavio, 141, 142, 143 Pennock, Robert, 254 People’s Tribune, 115 Perpetual Peace (Kant), 383 Perry, Rick, 250 Peter the Great, 388

Index philosopher in antiquity, role of, 183 concept of philosopher-king, 254, 255 as public intellectual, 163– 64, 318– 19, 378 vs. sophist, 318 Philosophical Letters (Chaadayev), 377 philosophy contemporary society and, 174 – 75 of history, 391 loss of intellectual dominance, 170 – 71 public engagement and, 176, 177 transformation of, 385 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Rorty), 174 Picón Salas, Mariano, 138 Plato, 213n44, 373, 384, 388, 394 political economy of capitalism, 313 political realism, 47, 48 politics moral limits of, 22 rationalism in, 324 – 25 scholars’ engagement in, 355– 56 science and, 350 – 51, 354 Politics among Nations (Morgenthau), 56 positioning theory, 165– 66, 177, 178 Posner, Richard, 1, 9, 16, 18, 23, 117, 230 Prince, The (Machiavelli), 388– 89 Proudhon, Charles, 301– 2 Pruess, Hugo, 365 public decline of, 344, 346 public intellectuals and, 344, 385, 393– 94, 395 public intellectualism academic disciplines and, 18– 20 American experience of, 27– 28 conservative vs. progressive, 392

411 consumers of, 20 – 21 decline of, 24 – 25, 344, 346 democracy and, 26, 322, 389 fragmentation of knowledge and, 345– 46 history of, 5– 6, 7, 320 – 21 impact of variation in intellectual tradition on, 25– 26 influence of, 20 moral issues of, 21– 22, 385 philosophy and, 18– 19, 394 sources of, 6– 7, 383– 84 subjection to state power, 375 technological developments and, 28 university and, 15– 18 public intellectuals academic intellectuals vs., 335– 38 American Founding Fathers as, 6 assumptions about, 2 audience of, 9– 10, 335, 345 authoritative, 167– 68, 177 blogging and, 219– 21, 230 – 33, 237– 40, 242n31 characteristics of, 3– 4, 217, 333– 34, 386– 87 charisma of, 177 comparative studies of, 14 – 15 decline of, 175– 76, 231– 32, 384 – 85 as defenders of tyranny, 315, 383 definition of, 3– 4 democracy and, 316– 17, 347, 389 dialogical, 173– 74, 177 in different political systems, 26– 27, 375– 77, 383– 84, 394 – 95 diplomats as, 291, 292, 293, 382– 83 effectiveness of, 12– 13, 393– 94 expert, 172– 73, 177, 390 in French tradition, 270 – 71

412 public intellectuals (cont.) historical evolution of, 5– 9, 321, 374 human nature of, 238– 39 influence of, 9– 12, 13– 14, 382– 83, 392– 93, 394 – 95 vs. intellectuals, 335– 37 limits of, 214, 374 – 75, 390 media revolution and, 380 – 81 in modern society, role of, 324 – 26 moral obligations of, 22, 383 motives of, 384, 395– 96 in natural science, role of, 381 nature of work of, 239– 40, 243n46 negative perception of, 315– 16 Niebuhr’s model for, 46 non-academic, 28– 29, 231, 232 philosophers as, 163– 64, 318– 19, 378 politics and, 23– 24, 395 promise and tragedy of life of, 58– 59 public and, 321– 22, 344 – 47, 382– 83, 385, 392– 95 public engagement of, 12– 13, 176, 321– 22, 386– 88 public opinion and, 9 as reckless minds, 319– 20 response to 9/11 attack, 86n13 responsibility of, 316, 326, 395 scholarly studies of, 1– 3, 65– 66, 373– 96 social role of, 376 teachers as, 334 technology and, 219– 20, 344 – 45 in the twenty-first century, 319– 32 types of, 164 – 65, 322– 24, 379, 390 – 93 universities and, 4, 340– 44, 384– 85 See also American public intellectuals; Chinese public intellectuals

Index Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (Posner), 117 Public Interest, The ( journal), 24 public representative of value rationality, 391 public sociology, 174, 180n15 public square, 182– 84, 192– 93 Quinlan, Michael, 295n28 Qu Yuan, 111 Rabelais, François, 219 Rahe, Paul, 5, 19 Rahv, Philip, 68, 79 Rawls, John, 325, 326, 382 Rayburn, Sam, 8 Raziq, ‘Ali ‘Abd al-, 152 realism. See political realism Reckless Mind, The (Lilla), 299– 300 Reich, Robert, 347, 385 Reinhart, Carmen, 205, 206, 208, 209 Republic (Plato), 5, 27, 373 Revel, Jean-François, 144 Reyes, Alfonso, 133, 134 Reynal, Arnaldo Orfila, 142 Reynaud, Paul, 279 right to liberty, 330 – 31 Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (Kennedy), 56 Robin, Gabriel, 288 Rodó, José Enrique, 132 Rogoff, Kenneth, 205, 206, 208, 209 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 72 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 83, 249, 381 Rorty, Richard, 23, 166, 170 Rosenberg, Scott, 223 Rotblat, Joseph, 395 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 11 Rovan, Joseph, 285 Russell, Bertrand, 165, 168– 69, 378 Russian Revolution of 1905, 362 Russian Revolution of 1917, 302, 383

Index Sagan, Carl, 248, 250 Said, Edward, 117 Sakharov, Andrei, 286 Sánchez, Luis Alberto, 138 Sandel, Michael, 175, 345 Santorum, Rick, 250 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 382 Sarmiento, Faustino Domingo, 131, 135 Sarnoff, David, 220 Sarnoff, Robert, 220 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 164, 165, 167– 68, 286, 315, 378 Say, Jean-Baptiste, 194, 195 Sayyid, Ahmad Lutfi al-, 150, 153 Scarry, Elaine, 245n80 Schaar, John, 22 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr. on America as New Deal country, 70, 74 on capitalist society, 70 career of, 69 on Cold War public intellectuals, 55 on Communist ideology, 71– 72 on democracy, 72 on Doughface progressivism, 74– 75 essay on communism, 69– 70 founder of Americans for Democratic Action, 72 memoirs, 88n39 publications of, 69, 74 on right of society to selfprotection, 75 on Soviet Russia, 71 The Vital Center, 74 Schmitt, Carl, 312, 315, 395 Schwartz, Delmore, 83 Schweitzer, Karl, 168 science corporate control of, 258, 259– 62 definition of, 247 ethics and, 354

413 limits of, 353– 54 moratorium on publication of research, 257– 58 natural vs. social, 341, 380 politics and, 366 popularization of, 259 in service of power, 258 theology and, 385 theory of evolution, 251– 52, 259, 260 – 61, 262– 63 Tiktaalik fossil discovery, 259– 60 Tolstoy on, 353 in United States, 252 values and, 350 – 53, 366 “Science as a Vocation” (Weber), 353, 356 science denial, 250 – 52 scientists philosopher-king model, 254 – 58 as political advisors, 256– 57 as public intellectuals, 247– 48, 249– 50, 262– 64, 379 in public square, 178– 79, 259– 60, 261 Semprún, Jorge, 144 Seydoux, Jacques, 280 Shipman, Alan, 179 Shubin, Neil, 259, 260 Shumayyil, Shibli al-, 149, 152 Sierra, Justo, 131, 136 Siglo XXI publishing house, 142 Silva Herzog, Jesús, 138 Singer, Peter, 175 Smith, Adam, 187, 255, 306 social scientist as public intellectual, 379 Socrates, 318, 391 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 286 Sombart, Werner, 44 Sorel, Albert, 292 Southern People Weekly, 92, 103 Soutou, Jean-Marie, 285

414 Soviet Union communist ideology, 71– 72, 84 comparison with U. S., 89n53 foreign policy, 84, 283 sustainability of regime in, 84 – 85 Sowell, Thomas, 9, 11, 12, 23, 117 Spencer, Herbert, 131 Stalin, Joseph, 83 Stalinism, 82– 83, 85 St. Benedicts’ gospels, 204 Stevenson, Adlai, 7 Stewart, Potter, 4 Strauss, Leo, 5, 312, 317, 318– 19, 384 Strong, Tracy, 359 students academic community and, 337– 38, 339– 40, 343, 347 as audience of public intellectuals, 335, 345 career-oriented, 346 characteristic of undergraduate, 334 enrollment in humanities, 345 liberation of education and, 341, 342 narrow specialization, 340 – 43, 347 transformation of universities and, 347 Sullivan, Andrew, 245n76 Summers, Larry, 207 Sur (magazine), 133– 34, 138 Suri, Jeremi, 7, 10, 374 Tahtawi, Rifa‘at al-, 149, 154 Taiwanese February 28 Incident, 116 Talmon, Jacob, 304 Taney, Roger B., 328, 329 Tan Zuoren, 107 Tao Wenchao, 115 Teng Biao, 107, 109 Tetlock, Phillip, 12, 20

Index theology, 385 “Theory of the Three Represents” ( Jiang Zemin), 99– 100 Thibaudet, Albert, 270 Thomas Aquinas, 321, 384 Thompson, Dorothy, 89n57 Tie Ying, 94 Tito, Josip Broz, 84 Tizani, Tayyib, 150, 155– 56 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 302, 306, 395 Tolstoy, Leo, 353 Tombstone (Yang Jisheng), 112 Toward Total Peace manifesto, 72 Toward World Peace (Wallace), 74, 80 – 81, 82 Tragedy of Great Power Politics (Mearsheimer), 56 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 358 Tribe, Keith, 360 Trilling, Lionel, 4, 18, 67, 336 Trotsky, Leon, 197, 199, 203– 4 Trujillo, Rafael, 377 Truman, Harry, 73 Tunusi, Khair al-Din al-, 154 Tuo Zhen, 109 tyranny, 299, 300 Unamuno, Miguel, 133 undergraduates. See students United States academic public intellectualism, 15 aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, 57 as country founded by public intellectuals, 14 decline of intellectual quality, 26– 27 foreign policy, 56, 63, 81– 82, 311 historical thought, 41– 44 idealism, 44 – 45 idolization of American-style freedom, 89n57

Index intellectual life in postwar, 67 international commitments, 57 international role of, 47 journalism, 66 as manifestation of ancient republics, 39 modern university in, 16, 17 New Frontier, 7, 8 public intellectualism in, 16, 18, 27– 28, 39– 40, 58– 59, 374 relationship with Soviet Union, 63, 82– 83, 84 – 85, 89n53 state of science in, 251, 252 war on terror, 58 universities crisis of old, 341– 42 decline of the humanities in, 344 – 45 development of modern, 384 – 85 impact of narrow specialization on, 340 – 43, 345, 346, 384 – 85 intellectual division of labor, 17– 18, 341 interdisciplinary studies in, 338– 39 liberal education, 343 origin of academic “public intellectual,” 337– 40 public intellectualism and, 15– 18 transformation of, 16, 340 – 41, 342, 343, 346 transition from college to, 338– 39, 342, 348n11 Utopia (More), 387 Vallenilla Lanz, Laureano, 136 values political engagement and, 354 – 57 in research, 352– 54 value-neutrality of science, 350 – 52, 366

415 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 136, 139, 143, 144 Vasconcelos, José, 132– 33 Vassiliev, Alexander, 87n39 Vega, Lope de, 220 Vester, Frederic, 390 Vian, Boris, 164 Vidal, Gore, 117 Viénot, Pierre, 280 Vital Center, The (Schlesinger), 74 Voltaire, 321, 392 Vonnegut, Kurt, 345 Vuelta (magazine), 141, 142– 43 Wallace, Henry, 78– 80, 81– 82, 87n39, 88n40 Wang Meng, 94 Wan Yanhai, 99 Weber, Marianne, 354, 358, 361 Weber, Max career of, 359– 61 commitment to German national interest, 361– 62 on East Elbian problem, 361 on ethics, 356, 358, 366 on freedom, 361 on German political system, 364 on ideal politician, 355 lecture at University of Freiburg, 361 liberal views of, 357– 58, 364, 385 on limits of science, 354, 368n12 on link between values and politics, 354 – 55 participation in constitutional reform, 363– 64, 366 personality of, 359– 60 political engagement, 351, 358– 60, 363, 365– 66, 385– 86

416 Weber, Max (cont.) “Politics as a Vocation” essay, 355 research projects, 360 – 61 on Russian Revolution of 1905, 362 on scholarship and politics, 355– 57, 360, 369n42 “Science as a Vocation” lecture, 353, 356 on value-free social science, 352– 53, 354, 356– 57 during World War I, 362– 63, 366 Wechsler, James A., 79 Wei Chengsi, 101 Weinberg, Steven, 248 Weinstein, Allen, 87n39 Wen Yunchao, 99 West, Cornell, 176 Whately, Richard, 188 Where Is Britain Going (Trotsky), 197 White, Edmund, 19 White, Theodore, 4, 7 Wilentz, Sean, 238 Wilhelm II, 363– 64 Wilson, Edmund, 199 Wilson, James Q., 14, 24 Wilson, Woodrow, 7, 65, 375 Wohlstetter, Albert, 65, 375 Wolfowitz, Paul, 65, 375 Wolin, Sheldon, 22 Wood, Gordon, 6, 26 World War II, 82– 83 writing esoteric vs. exoteric, 394 impact on intellectual ethic, 222

Index Xia Yeliang, 106 Xie Tao, 112 Xie Zhiqiang, 115 Xi Jinping, 98, 109, 112, 115, 116 Xu Jilin, 91, 119 Yang Hengjun, 97 Yang Jisheng, 111, 112, 127n86 Yanhuang Chunqiu ( journal), 112 Yeshua of Nazareth, 204 Young Turks, 151 Your Inner Fish (Shubin), 260 Yu, Ying-Shih, 93, 96 Yu Haocheng, 107 Yu Jianrong, 102 Yu Jie, 99, 107 Yu Keping, 113 Zaghlul, Ahmad Fathi, 150 Zaglul, Sa‘ad, 150 Zaid, Gabriel, 130, 144 – 46, 376, 377 Zakaria, Fareed, 40 Zea, Leopoldo, 138 Zhang Baoshu, 101 Zhang Lifan, 102, 110 – 11 Zhang Youyu, 107 Zhan Tianxiang, 118 Zhao Ziyang, 95, 111, 113 Zheng Yongting, 118 Zhou Duo, 114 Zhou Yongkang, 109 Zhu Yongjia, 95 Zidar, Owen, 205, 208 Žižek, Slavoj, 166, 176 Zuckert, Michael, 5, 384

Michael C. Desch is professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame and Director of the Notre Dame International Security Center.