BOOKS
Intellectuals or Pundits?
PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS: A STUDY
OF
DECLINE. By Richard A. Posner.
Harvard University Press.
$29.95.
UNTI LABOUT THIRTY YEARS AGO, sociology was a budding social science
discipline, which gradually lost its attraction and its way, whereas eco–
nomics then was rather peripheral and in the interim has turned into an
academic growth industry. Richard A. Posner, Judge of the U.S. Court
of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and Senior Lecturer at the University
of Chicago Law School, has enhanced the status of economics even fur–
ther, by stating that he pays more heed to the market forces underlying
his court cases than to legal precedent.
In
Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline,
Posner notes that "public
intellectuals" are also subject to the market. Unfortunately, he relies on
crude sociological methods as he argues that academics with narrow
expertise often opine on political and policy questions. Jean Bethke
Elshtain's quip, that "the problem with being a public intellectual is you
get more and more public and less and less intellectual," is apt. Posner
counts the number of "hits" on Lexis-Nexis's databases-along with
mentions in newspaper articles and scholarly journals-to rank the
importance of public figures, which most sociologists would dismiss as
garbage in, garbage out. This is not to say that ranking such an amor–
phous group is easy, or even possible. Posner's approach leads him to
include such dead writers as George Orwell, John Dewey, John Stuart
Mill, Bertrand Russell, Max Weber, Arthur Koestler, and Edmund Wil–
son, and leaves out many deserving living individuals. It also makes
questionable distinctions between scholarly and media personalities.
Julien Benda, in
The Treason of the intellectuals
(1928),
and Ray–
mond Aron, in
The Opium of Intellectuals
(1957),
had trouble differ–
entiating clearly among academics and political figures, journalists who
teach and writers who don't, even though Aron classified poets, novel–
ists, painters, sculptors, and philosophers as a higher species, an "inner
circle." In today's culture, of course, Posner could not get away with
such a qualitative, "elitist" judgment. Instead, he diagnoses, correctly,
their declining trustworthiness.
