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PARTISAN REVIEW
out on as undergraduates, and how will reading and discussing essays
by the likes of Richard Rorty, bell hooks, Stanley Fish, and Henry Louis
Gates, Jr. help?
My hunch is that dogging the heels of celebrity super-profs will turn
out to be a waste of time, especially if primary works continue to go
unread. But in saying this, I realize full well that nobody will fund a
Ph.D. program in which lucky applicants are given time and hard cash
to spend reading at a library carrel or as they bask on a sunny Florida
beach. The people with deep pockets, as well as the administrators who
manage what their largesse funds, want to see syllabi, paper topics, and
the other accoutrements that come with the academic territory.
That, in short, is the rub in John Michael's earnest, largely unread–
able book. He puts a wide spectrum of public intellectuals under the
academic microscope and in the process, "interrogates" their work in
terms of the anxieties (presumably) bubbling just beneath the surface. I
hasten to point out that much of this study in anxious behavior will
strike the public intellectuals Michael cobbles together as so much fool–
ishness dressed up in the lingo and cast of mind currently on display at
our most prestigious universities. Still, Michael is, let us say, a persistent
fellow, and nowhere is he more tenacious than in framing "posers" that
he imagines will knock certain public intellectuals off their respective
chairs.
But first, as if to make it clear that he can aim touchy questions at him–
self, Michael asks this: "After all these books [his bulky footnote lists,
among others, Russell Jacoby's
The Last Intellectuals
(1987),
Todd
Gitlin's
The Twilight of Common Dreams
(1995),
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s
The Disuniting of America
(1992),
Andrew Ross's No
Respect
(1989),
and Alvin Goulner's
The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New
Class
(1979)]
what remains to be said on the topic?" A good question,
and one that surely points to an eminently commonsensical answer–
namely,
"Nothing."
But, of course, that can't be right in much the same
way that an action movie cannot kill off its hero in the first shots. What
"remains to be said" at the end of Michael's rhetorical question is noth–
ing less than his book. Why so? Because the others, for all their "dithyra–
mbs and diatribes," share a "fundamental confusion about the character
and role of intellectuals in contemporary society." Michael promises his
study will set them-and us-straight.
At this point, the interrogation begins in earnest:
Are intellectuals an empowered elite, or are they a vestigial organ
of modernity with no function in a commodity-driven social order
