Daniel W. Drezner, a political economist at Tufts University and a veteran blogger, has posted a provocative essay about public intellectuals on his site. He argues that contrary to what has become the conventional wisdom, there has not been a decline in the quality of American intellectual life from the postwar glory days of Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, Mary McCarthy and others who constituted the circle now known as the New York Intellectuals. Drezner goes on to list a battalion of contemporary public intellectuals to prove his point, everyone from Barbara Ehrenreich to Tom Wolfe to Samuel Huntington.
For those who want to get the flavor of what this decline-or-not-decline debate is all about, I also recommend an article, “Big Brains, Small Impact,” by Russell Jacoby, one of the writers Drezner is going up against. It appeared in the Jan. 11 issue of The Chronicle Review. But for the moment, I want to focus on Drezner’s list, and more specifically on what we mean by the term “public intellectual.”
Drezner’s impulse is to be inclusive: if you’ve written a serious book that has attracted a modicum of general attention, you seem to qualify as a public intellectual. I would be more restrictive, and I’d go back to the original New York Intellectuals for guidance. Broadly, they viewed the public intellectual as someone deeply committed to the life of the mind and to its impact on the society at large. Irving Howe refers to the pursuit of “the idea of centrality” among the writers he knew, and the yearning “to embrace . . . the spirit of the age.” That is, public intellectuals were free-floating and unattached generalists speaking out on every topic that came their way (though most important for the New York Intellectuals was the intersection of literature and politics). They might be journalists or academics, but only because they had to eat. At the most fundamental level, ideas for them were not building blocks to a career. Rather, careers were the material foundation that allowed them to define and express their ideas.
It hardly needs to be said that this stance produced an inevitable tension between academic life, with its occupational demands for specialization, and opinionated public intellectuals refusing to be pigeon-holed. What do you specialize in?, Daniel Bell was once asked. Generalizations, he replied. William Barrett said in “The Truants,” his memoir of the New York Intellectuals (one of the earliest, and still one of the best books on the subject) that when he first met the Partisan Review crowd, “I felt a secret sense of shame that I was an ‘academic.’” From the other shore, Howe reports that his graduate students dismissed Edmund Wilson as a “mere journalist.”
The problem I have with Drezner’s list is that it fails to capture any of this tension, and therefore misses, I believe, something essential in the meaning of “public intellectual.” Drezner includes, for instance, Fareed Zakaria and Samantha Power. I yield to few in my admiration for these two writers, but for them to be considered public intellectuals in the old New York Intellectual sense — with its commitment to cultural “centrality” — I think they would have to demonstrate greater breadth than they have so far displayed. Zakaria would have to write, say, a thoughtful essay on the novels of Philip Roth and Power a book on the history of the blues.