LexisNexis(TM) Academic - Document

The Chronicle of Higher Education
May 25, 2001

SECTION: THE CHRONICLE REVIEW; Pg. 20

LENGTH: 2355 words

HEADLINE:

The Calling of the Public Intellectual

BYLINE: ALAN WOLFE

BODY:
These days, the proposition that the university has stunted intellectual life in the United States has reached near dogma. In 1987, Russell Jacoby's book The Last Intellectuals created a stir by suggesting that the absorption of public intellectuals into the university in the 1950's and 1960's had produced a generation more preoccupied with methodological correctness and academic careerism than with the kind of fearless criticism once associated with non-academic intellectuals like Edmund Wilson, Mary McCarthy, and Dwight Macdonald. The full implications of that thesis are still being debated: Witness two much-publicized forums on the fate of public intellectuals -- one sponsored by Basic Books, the other by Lingua Franca and New York University -- this past winter.

I spoke at one of the forums, and what struck me was that we tend to approach the issue in the wrong way. It is not whether intellectuals work inside or outside the academy that is important, but whether -- in either sphere -- they have the courage to find their own voice.

There were reasons to both like and dislike the public intellectuals who clustered in New York after World War II: They were brilliant stylists throbbing with intellectual energy, but they also led irresponsible lives and made questionable political judgments. But love them or leave them -- they certainly loved and left each other -- what made the whole thing tick was the tension between their conservative views on culture and their radical views on politics. Politically, they all had qualms about capitalism -- even Irving Kristol gave it only two cheers. But instead of just urging political reforms that would spread the benefits of capitalism more equitably, they considered other options, led by their culturally conservative views: Hannah Arendt advocated returning to the Greek polis for ideas about participatory democracy, while the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought called for the study of great books.

Because their views on culture clashed with their views on politics, the New York intellectuals were forced to make their judgments one by one, especially when, as happens so often, it was impossible to tell where culture left off and politics began. That is why their views could be so unpredictable. Dwight Macdonald, something of a mandarin in his cultural views, was radicalized by the Vietnam War and marched on the Pentagon. Daniel Patrick Moynihan did not, as a senator, endorse all the positions he had supported as an intellectual, and not for reasons of political cowardice.

One found the same unpredictable attitude toward the institution with which Jacoby was concerned: the university. The New York intellectuals never wrote about academic life with the apology for professionalism of a Marjorie Garber; nor did they denounce it in the scathing words of a Roger Kimball. When the university was under attack by student radicals at Berkeley and Columbia, the New York intellectuals rushed to its defense. When the university became a home for postmodernism and affirmative action, they found much they disliked. In both cases, they saw the university in nuanced terms, as sandwiched between its links to the high culture of the pastand the democratic pressures of the contemporary world.

How the New York intellectuals understood their world was also shaped by their anti-Stalinism; if you considered yourself on the left but were a fervent enemy of communism, you had to explain yourself frequently, and at some length. It was that constant need to draw distinctions -- yes, I support socialism, one can still hear Irving Howe saying, but no, I do not support Cuba -- that helped give the New York intellectuals a predisposition to judge events one by one. Such a stance is harder to find today, if for no other reason than, outside of Cuba, socialism barely exists. The global triumph of capitalism is good for people who want to share the joys of consumption, but not for nurturing the questions of intellectuals, who thrive on opposition to what everyone else takes for granted.

I wish Jacoby had been right about the university's absorbing American intellectuals; the problem is that, if public intellectuals were willing to settle for academic jobs in the 1950's and 1960's, we do not see that happening much today. Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer used to teach sociology at Harvard, but the current department has only one person -- Orlando Patterson -- who can be called a public intellectual, someone who brings academic expertise to bear on important topics of the day in a language that can be understood by the public. What Jacoby saw as a significant trend turned into something of a blip.

That does not mean, however, that big thinkers, no longer seduced by the comforts of academe, are launching a slew of latter-day Partisan Reviews. The United States has more than its share of opinion magazines, think tanks, advocacy journalists, and television commentators. But most of the time, those who are conservative in their cultural views are also conservative in their politics -- and vice versa. On the right, a distrust of democracy informs commentary on both culture and elections, skeptical of a country capable of electing Bill Clinton and of considering Robert Mapplethorpe a serious artist. On the left, populism in politics and culture flows seamlessly together in opposition to those in power in either arena.

The trouble with such elitism and populism is that it is reflexive: You want either to strengthen or to weaken authority. Yet neither in politics nor in culture does such a reflexive response work. Since so much of high culture was once low culture, including such staples of authoritative taste as Italian opera, critical cultural judgments cannot be made by reviewing the popularity of any particular cultural event, or its source of funds.

Much the same is true of politics. At the very moment conservatives discover that America has a moral majority, Americans refuse to force Bill Clinton out of office. Yet when conservatives say that Americans have no morality at all, those same people vote George W. Bush into office. Democracy is like that. If you start with the assumption that everything the people do is wrong, you will be wrong about half the time -- just about the same as if you begin with the proposition that the people are always right.

I do not know whether a new generation of think tanks or magazines will arise to support intellectuals who wish to think for themselves. If it happens, however, it is likely to occur outside the ideologically charged atmosphere of Washington. Nor do I know whether American universities, ever faddish, will once again discover a taste for independently minded intellectuals. Academic departments, as Jacoby pointed out, tend not to appreciate intellectual independence, but provosts and presidents, ever on the lookout for name recognition, tend to sympathize with those who pursue ideas in unorthodox fashion. Professional schools still look more favorably upon thinkers with broad interests than academics in the arts and sciences generally do. For reasons particular to their traditions, specific kinds of institutions, including liberal-arts colleges and religiously affiliated universities, like the prestige of having public intellectuals around. But if and when we do see the emergence of a new generation of intellectuals in the academy, they will then have to answer the question raised by Jacoby in 1987: Can they retain their critical voices while teaching students, serving on committees, and being mentors to graduate students?

I believe they can. But whether they work inside or outside the academy, they will have to have the confidence to find their own voice.

Intellectuals speak with authority, but what gives them the authority to speak? No one designated me an intellectual. I took on the role myself, found some people willing to publish me, and presumably drew some others willing to read me. If I have any authority, I developed it in the course of what I do. I am not saying that, on the matters of the day on which I have weighed in, I have always been right. But I have tried to convey that, when you get an opinion from me, it is my own. My authority for being an intellectual comes only from me, and to be true to that authority, I have to be true to myself.

I became an intellectual the day I decided that no one was looking over my shoulder as I sat down to write. Before that moment, I considered myself part of a political movement. My causes in the 1960's were the causes of the left: racial justice, opposition to capitalism, protest against the Vietnam War. Good causes all, but adherence to their demands was deadly. When I wrote opinion articles, I understood my role to be providing moral support to those on the side of all that was presumed good and true. Now, when I look back on my writings from that period, I do not see the fearless critic of the United States that I thought I had been at the time. Instead, I see someone simplifying the world's complexity to fit the formula for understanding the world developed by the left.

A few of the 60's radicals in my circle, like David Horowitz, chastened by the violence and hypocrisy of the movements they once supported, shifted their political views quite drastically to the right. I reaffirmed my status as an intellectual, when, having second thoughts of my own about the left, I opted not to join them. Reading those born-again conservatives, I feel as if I am reading ideology, stretched this way or that to fit whatever topic is under discussion. Their efforts, today, to prove how good things are under American capitalism strike me as remarkably similar to their efforts, yesterday, to emphasize how bad they were. I get the feeling that pleasing a movement (or a financial sponsor) explains much of what they write.

Because the role of public intellectual resembles so much what Max Weber called a vocation -- you have to have a calling for it, and it has to come from within -- institutions like universities, magazines, and think tanks are capable of putting pressure on intellectuals that can undermine their authority to speak: the need to obtain tenure and satisfy colleagues, the need to boost circulation, the need to win the support of politicians. Resisting those pressures requires an odd combination of self-confidence and humility, the former required to have something valuable to say, the latter necessary to steer clear of dogmatism.

There can be no guidebook on how to become a public intellectual. There can be only the desire to make sense out of the world one issue at a time.

Alan Wolfe is director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College.

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