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Professor Etzioni-Halevy is not one of those inclined to idealize
intellectuals, although her critiques rest on relatively narrow and
specific grounds . What she objects to is the extravagant problem–
solving claims made by them, unmatched by their performance . As
she sees it, at times their advice has created new problems . They
have been "false prophets," "legitimiz[ing] their intellectual en–
deavour by its prophetic qualities . That is to say, they continue to
justify the creation of knowledge by its ostensible usefulness in
guiding society towards a better future .. .." They seek to legit–
imate their share of public funds by the alleged social benefits of the
theoretical knowledge they create and seek to apply to social prob–
lems . At the same time the problems of Western societies have inten–
sified during prec isely the same period when the involvement of
intellectuals with the problem-solving process has so spectacularl y
increased, when their "policy advi ce was becoming more pervasive
and influential. "
Intellectuals thus depicted - grasping for public funds to make
a living and to maintain a facade of professional identity - are hardly
the idealist-outsiders in pursuit of truth, knowledge and progress, as
perceived earlier. Rather, they are an interest group engaged in a
vast enterprise of self-promotion and self-legitimation , as Etzioni–
Halevy sees it. She is particularly irritated with the so-called postin–
dustrialists who claim powers of prediction and subscribe (or used
to) to an unreasonably rosy picture of the future but failed to predict
the turmoils of the sixties and seventies. Not surprisingly she is also
irked by social scientists of the applied persuasion who "continue to
be more adamant than ever in their belief in the fruitfulness of their
knowledge, in the soundness of the advice emanating from that
knowledge and the salutary effects on policy emanating from that
advice."
It is an interesting question (not pursued in this slim volume):
why have Western governments and private foundations been so
willing to fund so much research of such limited, questionable, or
nonexistent benefit? Presumably such generosity reflects the per–
sisting misidentification of the applicability (and scientific character)
of social as distinct from natural scientific knowledge and the leftover
rationalist hopes of the eighteenth and nineteenth century which
continue to benefit the "knowledge elite ."
The portrait of intellectuals here presented closely resembles
that of the "new class" but neglects their animating political values .
This study chronicles the failings of Western intellectuals as policy
