Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, With a New Preface and Epilogue [Paperback]

Posner gives several reasons for this decline. 1) Public intellectuals are now more than ever college academics. Their professional jargon and personal lives keep them out of touch with day to day affairs in America. 2) Public intellectuals make bold predictions that are almost always wrong. We were supposed to be poor and starving by 1975, according to some environmentalist intellectuals. We are still here, rich and full, but they won't admit they were wrong. 3) Public intellectuals usually get that title by publishing outside their sphere of expertise. Noam Chomsky, for example, is a linguist, but the media seek out his opinion in the area of foreign policy. Intellectuals are out of their league, and often don't understand even the most basic facts. 4) Intellectuals seek moral status, with very clear lines between right and wrong. Real life is not so clear, so the intellectual is not very helpful for the average person, or the average politician. Posner went to great lengths in another of his books, The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory, to address this last point in depth.

Overall, historians and sociologists interested in studying academics and commentators will find this book useful and enlightening. Average folk will find it long winded and rather boring. After all, we already know that commentators and media personalities are clueless windbags, right?

I think this is the biggest weakness of the book. Posner looks at the marketplace for ideas from the perspective of the producer: the media and the intellectuals. If he were serious about trying to understand the decline of intellectuals, he would have spent as much time looking at consumers of ideas. Mostly, he looks only at other intellectuals as consumers, perhaps because they're the only ones buying. As a major figure in economic analysis, I thought it appalling that Posner did not spend more time on day to day consumption of these ideas.

As mentioned briefly above, Posner takes a lot of time in this book rehashing themes from his other books. He looks at morality and public policy, the Clinton impeachment, and many other subjects on which he has written quite extensively. It is nice that his ideas all fit into a unified framework such as this, but that doesn't mean I wanted to hear about these other subjects at length.

What does it mean that a public intellectual like Posner would write a book criticizing public intellectuals? Could it be that his ideas are not getting the acclaim that he thinks they deserve?

Dogmatic? Well, Breaking the Deadlock (his last book) supports the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to end the Florida recount; An Affair of State (the book prior to Deadlock) is an all out attack of Clinton's personal failings...I'd say his political position is well established by the content of his popular press publications.

The Good Judge opines that Henry Kissinger is the number one public intellectual in the US today and then he follows that interesting observation with an attack on paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould stating that he is a "Marxist" who does not "take religion seriously". The dichotomy illustrates the tone and direction of this book.

There is nothing here but yet another screed about how "culture is in decline" . . . albeit only Judge Posner's idea of culture.

Every single issue in this book is soundly dealt with in the 1993 Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism & Culture by Robbins. Verso Books; ISBN: 0860914305.

If you like Rush with large words...you will love this book. Anybody wanting to know something about the subject: read Robbins.

The problem is that effective public intellectuals don't produce what Posner thinks they produce.

The public intellectual's publisher, and not the public intellectual, produces the commodity, that more or less corresponds to the activity of the public intellectual.

*Qua* public intellectual, George Orwell was an effective contributor to a conversation in which it was found that Stalinism and other forms of totalitarianism are dead ends. It was his publisher that took his writings and made them into a saleable product.

However, Posner has made it clear in other books that he believes we all participate in a hypostatized Market, and can and should be judged based on Market criteria. His Market replaces outdated ideologies like the dictatorship of the proletariat, while refusing to admit that it is indeed another ideology.

The problem is that if the "marketplace of ideas" is infinite in all directions, consisting of individual producers individually evaluated by atomized consumers, there is literally no way of telling whether the ideas, so marketed, are true or false.

The phenomenon is apparent on the Internet; for in place of a libertarian fantasy-land, in which truth appears because all contributors are equal, and none of them receives special consideration because he represents an institution or a public intellectual, we have an almost daemonic world in which falsity is given equal credence with truth.

Thus on the contemporary Internet, a 15-year-old kid who knows nothing about the law is prized as a legal authority because of the very structure of the Internet. This structure provides no way of mapping authorities such that their views are certified by linkage to an authority outside cyberspace.

Cass Sunstein has described this problem as that of the "discourse cascade" where entire zones of the Internet are dedicate to false propositions such as the importance of the Second Amendment.

Nonetheless, Posner would destroy the institution of the public intellectual by treating the public intellectual as an employee who is found wanting in terms of a hypostatized Productivity of true and verifiable (or not falsifiable, within a time frame Posner gets to specify) ideas.

This is deeply dishonest, for Posner is concerned with deconstructing a priesthood. The problem is that nature abhors a vacuum, and into the vacuum created by the absence of public intellectuals, rushes people like Posner who are public intellectuals, malgre lui.

What Posner misses is that public intellectuals are not entrepreneurs producing a mousetrap. Instead, they are participants in a conversation such that it is completely meaningless to rate their output.

And note that despite Posner's faith in the Market, he mistrusts the real market. For example, he probably thinks Adorno is nonsense, for Theodore Adorno was a Frankfurt School Marxist. Nonetheless, the real market, in the form of computers at Borders and Barnes and Noble, keeps on putting the gloomy Tedster on the shelves, to be pawed by the grubby hands of us ordinary slobs, who are unconvinced that we live in the best of all possible worlds under the market.

Here Posner replicates an intellectual's mistake, which is to find fault with the decisions of the real market, whether in the name of what the intellectual thinks Marx said, or, in the contemporary scene, what Milton Friedman and Sir Karl Popper said. For in a fashion reminiscent of Turing, and Godel, the real market keeps its own deconstruction in print.

Posner is mobilizing resentment against people perceived to be media figures and, since the ordinary educated person does not regard them as real, these public intellectuals can be targets of resentment. When I worked at Princeton, I would occasionally encounter the public intellectual Cornel West, walking down Prospect towards William Street on my lunch break.

Cornel was most engaging and approachable, and reading his output I view him less as a scientist making isolated predictions, than a man engaged in conversation with the past, and with issues of the present day.

It is to me therefore ill-spirited to REDUCE Cornel, or anyone else, to a set of verifiable or falsifiable tokens printed in books, and it is productive, in right-wing, mass media venues, of a new and very nasty phenomenon.

This is the public intellectual *maudit*, like Anne Coulter, who when bested in debate makes physical threats, which can neither be verified nor falsified, conveniently enough. In Coulter's case, this is recommending that we invade Islamic countries and convert their populations to Christianity at the point of a gun.

Note that IF we adopt Posner's programme, of submitting public intellectuals to a sort of performance evaluation (to which, I should note, tenured Federal judges are not subject) this will produce precisely that form of public intellectual we deserve; the public intellectual who games the system to win and is unconcerned with truth.

On the left, this produces Stalinists. On the right, this produces Fascists.

There is something Soviet, Latin American, or mediaeval, about a member of the Federal bench writing books about intellectuals, obstreperous priests, and felonious monks. One senses in Posner's position as a Federal judge something of the mailed fist.