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tend
to
think of themselves as being on holiday when they are writing
for the genera I pu bl ic." Posner a Iso zeroes in on the Clinton hearings,
to
point out intellectuals' irresponsible contradictions from one day to
the next, and the
reductio ad absurdum
of their open-letter writing.
Legal scholars, such as Bruce Ackerman, Ronald Dworkin, Sean
Wilentz, and Cass Sunstein, who were prominent in opposing Clinton's
impeachment, had no business denying their political partisanship and
then signing an advertisement that supported Al Gore's post-election
presidemial quest. Posner claims not to fault the signatories for their
wish
to
bring about a victory for the Democratic Party, but for breach–
ing acadelllic objectivity and declaring a "crisis."
Posner also focuses on the controversies between Martha Nussbaum
and Richard Rorty-both academicians "well to the left of the center of
the Delllocratic Party, ... Iwhol deplore the frivolity of the cultural
Left." But whereas ussbaum reaches back to Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca
and Kant to bolster her views of sexual harassment (and to oppose
Catharine MacKinnon), Rorty's quest for social justice tends to follow
John Rawls's search
to
"get rid of the conviction common to Plato and
Marx ... that there just Illust be a large theoretical way ...
to
end injus–
tice." Both Rorty and Nussbaum look to literature as a way out. But lit–
erary criticism (Posner's college major)
per se
has declined, and
approaches such as "new historicism, postcolonial studies, queer theory,
muiticulturalislll, radical feminism, deconstruction, reception theory,
and post-structuralism"-all of them outposts of the cultural Left–
have taken over. Political satire, such as Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four
and Huxley's
Braue New World,
Posner notes, could only be written in
a time of
independence-that
is, when intellectuals did not yet have
to
look over their shoulders to university colleagues and administrators.
But far from criticizing only "dumb left-wing ideas and their cultural
ma n iFesta tion," Posner a Iso goes a fter, for insta nce, Gertrude Himmel–
farb's conservatislll, which blames the "counterculture" of the
1960S
for
the decline in Illorals-advocacy of abortion, divorce, single mother–
hood, and the loss of an idealist past. And he chides Robert Bork's han–
dling of moral issues in his (aborted) confirmation hearings for a seat on
the Supreme Court. (Hilllmelfarb pays him back, point by point, in the
february
2002
issue of
Commentary.)
During times of real crisis, from the Depression through the Cold
War, Posner relllinds us, intellectuals were heeded. I should add, how–
ever, that there were many fewer of them, and they were consumed by
political and personal passions rather than by the wish to bask in the
limelight. William Phillips, one of the two founders of
Partisan Review,
