I cannot recall when I first heard or read the ornate term “public intellectual,” but I do recall disliking it straightaway. I felt like a man who has been used to buying the same solid shirt for years—white oxford cloth, button-down collar—and one day enters his favorite store only to discover that someone has gone and added epaulets to it. When I noted the people who were being identified as public intellectuals, I knew that to superfluity had been added gross imprecision. Here was a phrase, in short, that absorbed no truth whatsoever.
Yet “public intellectual” seems to have taken stronger and stronger hold, popping up in print with little or no explanation of what it means. The late Lionel Trilling, one reads, “was the public intellectual and mainstay of Partisan Review.” Edward Said, one learns, “is an American by default and a public intellectual by virtue of the mean accidents of political history.” Richard A. Posner and Ronald Dworkin are “two of the nation’s most admired public intellectuals,” while the late Noel Annan was “as pure an example of the public intellectual as [one] could summon up.” Best of all, I recently came across the news that at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton there is a full course of study designed to prepare you to become a public intellectual, providing a Ph.D. in whatever it is public intellectuals are supposed to do.
In Russell Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals (1987), the term gets a fairly good workout, and it may be that Jacoby first put it into circulation. In his own usage, a public intellectual “contributes to public discussion” and is also “an incorrigibly independent soul answering to no one,” committed “not simply to a professional or private domain but to a public world—and a public language, the vernacular.” This definition supplies a pair of pants baggy enough for both Walter Cronkite and Jackie Mason. In the usage of others, a public intellectual emerges as an academic specialist who can write the op-ed piece or do the political talk show. For still others, the public intellectual is someone vaguely intelligent who happens to appear before the public: Ted Koppel, say, or Frank Rich.
As for intellectual, plain and simple, that is, or was, something else altogether. I cannot recall when I first heard this term, either, but I do vividly recall my first experience of the phenomenon itself. In my third year as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, I discovered the periodical room at Harper library and what were then called little magazines. (“Our intellectual marines,” wrote W. H. Auden, “landing in little magazines.”) The year was 1957, and these magazines were still at high tide. I read as many as I could find, but particularly Partisan Review (now often described as, in those days, the house organ of American intellectuals), COMMENTARY, and Encounter. The last of these, which came out in England, was co-edited by the poet Stephen Spender and Irving Kristol (who had formerly been on the editorial staff of COMMENTARY), and had only recently begun publication.
I find it difficult to do justice to the deep pleasure I took in these magazines. Education, as everyone knows, is a disorderly business. It is chiefly available through four different means: schools, new and used bookstores, conversation with intelligent friends, and good magazines. For me, coming to them pretty much tabula rasa, these intellectual magazines were easily the key element. Although the University of Chicago had taught me who were the essential writers and which were the perennially important questions—no small thing, granted—I had had no great teachers or important educational experiences in its classrooms and lecture halls. Serious learning commenced in the periodical room at Harper library, and continued for a great many years afterward as I searched out back issues of the intellectual magazines and fell upon them with the combined ardor of a collector and a glutton. They made me want to be an intellectual, a term I then took as an unqualified honorific.
I was not wholly unprepared for the call. Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which I had recently read, had utterly dazzled me by the brilliance of Weber’s historical connections and the power of his formulations. But what the intellectual magazines showed me was that not all brilliance was in the past—that some very interesting minds were still at work.
Some of the names I came across in the pages of these magazines were European and already known to me from my general reading: André Malraux, Ignazio Silone, F. R. Leavis, Bertrand Russell. (These were the days when Americans still existed in a condition of cultural inferiority vis-à-vis Europe.) Others I discovered there for the first time: Lionel Trilling, Isaiah Berlin, Philip Rahv, Sidney Hook, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Richard Crossman, George Lichtheim, Harold Rosenberg, Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, Mary McCarthy, Goronwy Rees, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Leslie Fiedler, Clement Greenberg, Delmore Schwartz, James Baldwin, Irving Howe, William Barrett, Hilton Kramer, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman. These writers introduced me to still others—Alexander Herzen, François Mauriac, Paul Valéry, Max Beerbohm—and to scores of subjects of which I was still ignorant; and so the net of my intellectual acquaintance grew wider and wider.
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Although COMMENTARY, Partisan Review, and Encounter published fiction and poetry, some of it quite distinguished, at their heart was the discursive essay: ambitious in choice of subject, sometimes aggressively polemical in spirit, unhesitant in authority, often brilliant in execution. Looking back at representative American exemplars of the form, I would single out Robert Warshow and Dwight Macdonald. Warshow, an editor at COMMENTARY, died in 1955 at the age of thirty-seven, and I read him only later, when I began rummaging through back issues. Macdonald had been an editor of Partisan Review and then, after breaking with his colleagues over World War II, to which he claimed moral objections, veered off to edit his own magazine, politics.
In his brief career, Warshow wrote more about the movies than about any other subject, but neither he nor Macdonald—who also wrote about the movies—can be said to have had an intellectual specialty. Nor was either of them a scholar, though Macdonald’s best book, an anthology titled Parodies, contains much genuine scholarship. Neither man was remotely academic in either style or spirit; both were genuine freelances, writing about subjects they found interesting and attempting to draw out their widest implications.
Warshow’s “The Gangster As Tragic Hero” (1948) provides a perfect illustration of what I have in mind. In this essay, Warshow sets out to discover both the real meaning of American gangster movies and the source of their attraction. The distillation is highly concentrated; it takes him fewer than 3,000 words to make his case.
Inherent to our pleasure in gangster movies, Warshow asserts in “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” is the element of sadism: in watching them, “we gain the double satisfaction of participating vicariously in the gangster’s sadism and then seeing it turned against the gangster himself.” But the deeper significance of these movies lies in the way they encapsulate “the intolerable dilemma” we all feel about success. The gangster, in brief, is “what we want to be and what we are afraid we may become.” And so the effect of the gangster movie
is to embody this dilemma in the person of the gangster and resolve it by his death. The dilemma is resolved because it is his death, not ours. We are safe; for the moment, we can acquiesce in our failure, we can choose to fail.
Warshow’s essay is the act of an intellectual at its most characteristic. Here is an author who possesses no specialized knowledge, or even any extraordinary fund of personal experience. He does what he does with no other aid but the power of his mind. He has seen the same movies we have all seen. But he happens to have seen more in them than the rest of us recognized was there. “This interior need to penetrate beyond the screen of immediate concrete experience,” wrote the sociologist Edward Shils, “marks the existence of the intellectuals in every society.” A precise description, that, of Robert Warshow at work.
Very different from Warshow, Dwight Macdonald was dashing and slashing in his prose, more amusing than penetrating in his thought. In both culture and politics he assumed the stance of the immitigable highbrow. Whenever capitalism played a large part in any work of art or cultural production, he tended to attack it. He was death on middlebrow culture, writing rollicking blasts at Encyclopedia Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World (“The Book of the Millennium Club”) and the New English Bible. He could ambush a bestseller, and in the case of James Gould Cozzens (“By Cozzens Possessed”) dealt so devastating a blow to the novelist that, even now, nearly 45 years later, his literary reputation has yet to recover.
Macdonald’s opinions were, however, less than original; they were those of the herd of independent minds, in Harold Rosenberg’s withering phrase. Although Macdonald attempted a systematic formulation of his theory of culture in a lengthy essay, “Masscult & Midcult” (1960), it was riddled with contradictions and, theoretically, a mess. Late in life, at a symposium at Skidmore College, he acknowledged that he was at his best as a counter-puncher, writing against some work or idea. “Every time I say ‘Yes,’ ” he remarked, “I get in trouble.” His last big Yes was on behalf of the student rebellion at Columbia in 1968, where Yes was once again the wrong answer.
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It was from Dwight Macdonald—whom I can hardly read today but who once gave me so much pleasure—as well as from Robert Warshow and a few other marines in little magazines (including Irving Howe and Paul Goodman) that I took much of my own notion of what constituted an intellectual. This exotic creature, they taught me, was a species of grand amateur—an amateur of the mind. He was distinguished from other mind workers, or intelligentsia, by his want of specialization. He knew not one but many things.
Unlike the scholar, for example, the intellectual did not work with primary sources, did not feel himself responsible for presenting the most accurate and detailed knowledge of his subjects, did not feel the need to back up his assertions with footnotes, did not seek out new factual material that might change the shape of a subject. True, there were scholars, scientists, occasionally artists, jurists, or even politicians who had the widest intellectual interests, but when they were functioning in their specialties they were not, strictly speaking, intellectuals.
The natural penchant of the intellectual was not to go deeper but wider—to turn the criticism of literature or art or the movies or politics into broader statements about culture. His lucubrations might have all sorts of consequences, but insofar as he was operating purely as an intellectual, he was less concerned with influencing policy, effecting change, or doing anything other than seeing where his ideas—and the boldness of his formulations—took him.
The intellectual, in the standard if unwritten job description, functioned best as a critic—be it stressed, an alienated critic—of his society. Guardian and gatekeeper, the intellectual had to be wary above all of the amorphous yet pervasive influence of Wall Street, Madison Avenue, the middle class, the middlebrow, the mainstream, the bourgeoisie, the big interests. In Dwight Macdonald’s world-view, writers and intellectuals were always in danger of selling out to the devil, with the devil usually envisioned as Henry Luce and hell as Time, Inc.—where Macdonald once worked.
Where politics was concerned—and politics was always concerned—anti-Communism was permitted as an ideological component in the intellectual’s makeup, or at least it was at the time my own intellectual aspirations took hold. (With the war in Vietnam, this, too, would become a contentious position.) But what was also assumed was a high reverence, theoretical and sentimental, for socialism. In those days—the late 1950’s, the early 1960’s—it did not seem possible to be an intellectual and not to be of the Left. This reverence for socialism was never entirely absent even in so otherwise independent-minded a figure as George Orwell.
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If Warshow and Macdonald were representative intellectuals, Orwell was in many ways the perfect type, both in his strengths and in his limitations. He wrote well about politics, literature, and popular culture. He was devoted to truth-telling, even when that meant, as in the case of the truths he told about Communist totalitarianism, being cut off from the bien-pensant crowd of his day and from the journals that provided much of his income. He was also large-minded enough to be hospitable to ideas that went against his own, writing favorably, for example, about Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Although neither right about everything nor entirely able to evade self-deception, Orwell probably had a higher truth quotient—especially when it came to difficult truths—than any other intellectual of the past century.
But if Orwell represented the type of the intellectual at his best, he also manifested a number of its limitations. He was clever, he was penetrating, he was even prophetic—and that is a lot—but no one could claim that he was deep. Like most modern intellectuals, he was insufficiently impressed with the mysteries of life, which is why his fiction so often seems stillborn. T. S. Eliot famously remarked of Henry James that “he had a mind so fine no idea could violate it.” Eliot meant by this not that James was ignorant of ideas but that he was after a different, a more elevated, form of knowledge than was available through mere ideas. Except at odd moments, Orwell never quite progressed beyond ideas: their stranglehold suffocates not only 1984 and Animal Farm but even his less directly political fiction.
Still, better to be in the grip of ideas that happen to be true—as Orwell, for the most part, was—than of ideas that are false and trivial, or odious and brutal. If the social and political speculations of intellectuals can lend charm to life—risky generalizations, especially those that sound cogent, are among the best stimulants to thought—the claim of the intellectual to be more than a high-order kibitzer often remains fairly thin. Like the kibitzer, the intellectual stands at the rim of the game, risking nothing by his assertions. An American intellectual once announced to my friend Edward Shils that, when it came to the politics of the state of Israel, he was of the war party. “Yes,” Shils said in reporting this conversation to me, “Israel will go to war, and he’ll go to the party.”
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But, then, intellectuals have never been known for their deep loyalty. This is a point underscored by the late Noel Annan in his recent book The Dons, in which he notes that intellectuals “vacillate and move gingerly to judgments about people, slide away at first hint of trouble, . . . and then decamp when their friend is in trouble, or worse, when he is in disgrace.” Herman Wouk made essentially this point, a long while ago, in The Caine Mutiny, whose one really shameless character is the intellectual—played perfectly by Fred MacMurray in the movie—who goads the executive officer into wrongful action and then backs away when the going gets tough. The larger point is that you probably do not want an intellectual in your foxhole.
The historian Richard Hofstadter, noting the “passion for justice” of intellectuals, wrote that “one thinks here of Voltaire defending the Calas family, of Zola speaking out for Dreyfus, of the American intellectuals outraged at the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti.” Yet such can be the fecklessness of many intellectuals that this same passion for justice has also surfaced as a penchant for mischief-making, and on a monumental scale. Next to alienation, one of the most enticing ideas to intellectuals has been revolution. This is no doubt partly because a number of actual intellectuals—Leon Trotsky, Zhou Enlai, Che Guevara—have played prominent (and in no way salubrious) roles in actual revolutions. As a young intellectual-in-training, I knew more about the Russian than about the American Revolution; after all, intellectuals had been much more conspicuous in the runup to the former. Most intellectuals have felt that when the revolution arrives, not the least of its important results will be a general recognition of the importance of you’ll never guess who.
Even when they have not lent their energies to promoting schemes for human betterment that depend on the mass coercion of real human beings, the intellectuals’ overdependence on ideas, and their consequent detachment from reality, have often turned them into little demons of ignorant subtlety. During World War II, a number of left-wing British intellectuals were convinced that what really lay behind America’s entry into the war was the hope of stopping the spread of socialism in England—prompting George Orwell’s acid remark that “Only an intellectual could be so stupid.” When Barry Goldwater ran for President of the United States in 1964, Hannah Arendt, certain that America was on the edge of being taken over by fascists, sought an apartment in Switzerland. Susan Sontag, in 1982, announced to a New York audience her belated conclusion that Communism should no longer be the name of any thinking person’s desire but was rather to be regarded as “fascism with a human face.” To those who had troubled over the years to follow Sontag’s own public imprecations against Western democracy or against the “white race” as the “cancer of human history,” or her earnest championing of Communist North Vietnam as “a place which, in many respects, deserves to be idealized,” her public change of mind, however carefully qualified, must have offered a moment of grim amusement. But her audience—in 1982!—was nevertheless shocked by even so calibrated a defection, and she herself never again ventured to say anything remotely so out of line.
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Wrong or not, alienated or not, until the 1960’s American intellectuals seemed to live easily if not prosperously enough, enjoying some of the comforts of a coterie existence. Not least among those comforts was the feeling of being vastly superior to their countrymen, of being among Stendhal’s happy few. Unlike today’s so-called public intellectuals, they were not invited to offer their opinions on radio and television, and their names were not much known outside the readership of the intellectual magazines.
Yet even in the 1940’s and 50’s, their influence was not negligible—though it might take a while to be felt. Edmund Wilson, perhaps the literary intellectual par excellence, had been a crucial figure in importing and explaining modernism in literature to an American audience, especially in his book Axel’s Castle (1931), and in introducing readers to a vast international array of writers, living and dead. In the 1940’s and 50’s, Clement Greenberg had done something similar for Abstract Expressionism and the New York school in painting. Meanwhile, a number of men who wrote for the intellectual magazines—including James Agee, Irving Howe, and Louis Kronenberger—were also putting in time working for the devil himself at Time and Fortune; and so, in the sociological phrase, there was transmission of knowledge on this front, too. If one read both the intellectual magazines and that portion of the popular press that had intellectual pretensions, one saw how the ideas from the former began to percolate down to the latter.
By the early 1960’s, “percolate” would no longer accurately describe the quickness of this transaction. In those years Harold Rosenberg became the art critic of the New Yorker, and Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, and Mary McCarthy also published there. Dwight Macdonald not only became a New Yorker writer but signed on to write about movies for Esquire. In 1963 and ’64 respectively, Mary McCarthy’s The Group and Saul Bellow’s Herzog were best-sellers. In 1964, Susan Sontag wrote an essay in Partisan Review, “Notes on Camp,” that resulted within what seemed a matter of weeks in the spread of the word “camp” to just about everywhere, including Vogue. Intellectuals had suddenly gone public; they, or at any rate some of them, were on the Big Board.
At least as significant for the new integration of intellectuals into American life was another development, an early sign of which was the appointment of Philip Rahv, one of the founding editors of Partisan Review, and Irving Howe, then the editor of Dissent, to professorships at the newly founded Brandeis University. Neither Rahv nor Howe had a doctorate or anything resembling an academic specialty; what they had was intellectual authority, and that, apparently, was now deemed enough. The postwar expansion of the universities would soon siphon away a larger number of such people—until, in the end, American intellectual life was itself all but siphoned away by the universities.
Sometimes this was literally so, as when first Rutgers and then Boston University took over Partisan Review, with Rutgers installing a full-time academic, Richard Poirier, as one of the magazine’s editors. More generally, the acceptance of intellectuals into the American university dealt a serious blow to the freelance spirit. The successors to the older generation of American intellectuals—among them Richard Sennett, Marshall Berman, Morris Dickstein, and Louis Menand—now tended to operate with a net under them, the net known as academic tenure; and, though their pretensions might be intellectual, their style tended to be highly academic.
Still, apart from the absorption of intellectuals by the universities, it was really the decade of the 1960’s that finished off the old intellectual life. Before the 60’s, the issue that had most divided intellectuals was Stalinism. That rancorous and deadly quarrel was much on the minds of some participants in the political disputes that arose during the 1960’s over the war in Vietnam, the Black Power movement, the meaning of urban riots, and the nature of America itself. The effect was momentous. As Midge Decter has recently written in COMMENTARY, “The ‘partisan’ community would become unstuck in the 60’s, with several defections from among its ranks to the camp of the radical students, and would blow up even further in the 70’s with the onset of neoconservatism.”
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In two of his memoirs, Breaking Ranks (1979) and Ex-Friends (1999), Norman Podhoretz has chronicled this sundering of the community of intellectuals he once dubbed the Family, as well as his own emergence as a neoconservative. Behind much of the anger that greeted at least the first of these books was the implicit charge that Podhoretz had betrayed the very essence of the intellectual vocation as it had come to be defined: that is, he had refused to consider it his first duty to be unrelentingly critical of his own country, to maintain his alienation, and to assert his disdain for middle-class life.
But Podhoretz was not entirely alone. Owing to the 60’s, others of us were coming to regard the so-called intellectual vocation, at least as now construed, as outmoded if not downright dangerous, both to the life of the mind and to the life of society. The word intellectual no longer seemed such a clear honorific, and the baggage that went with the job—the pose of alienation, the contempt for the social class of one’s origin, the pretense of distaste for the culture of one’s country—seemed false to our experience of life. When it came to the breakdown of the universities, the racial bullying of the Black Power movement, and the general destruction of standards in society, the intellectuals had by and large run with the pack. Later, having long deserted such convictions as they might once have had, most intellectuals chose to stand aside when culture itself came under attack by the philistine forces of political correctness and radical feminism.
There were, admittedly, other factors at work in this decline. For one thing, recent decades have not exactly provided a hardy diet of ideas of the kind once on the intellectual’s table. Consider Marxism in politics and modernism in the arts, the staples of the old Partisan Review. The former, with its prediction of ultimate revolution, is now a dead letter; party politics, once considered beneath the interest of an American intellectual, is now all that is left to him. Modernism, now more than a century old with many great discrete works to its credit, was always connected to an interest in the avant-garde; but the contemporary avant-garde, for the most part a melange of political yahooism, in-your-face nastiness, and sexual liberationism, can hardly hold the interest of anyone seriously devoted to art. As for other big-system ideas once the meat and drink of intellectuals—including Freudianism—they have taken a ferocious drubbing over the past quarter-century, while structuralism, deconstruction, and the rest of the theory stew have proved digestible only by academics.
Then, too, the very notion of the sell-out, once so dear to intellectual thought, has become murky in the extreme. Nowadays, if one is sufficiently antinomian, one is likely to find one’s art sponsored by Mobil Oil, one’s novel receiving a six-figure advance from a major publisher, or oneself put on the faculty at Princeton. The problem for the talented is no longer selling out, but deciding where—and when—to buy in.
Another factor working against the idea of the traditional intellectual is the greater degree of specialization that infects the social sciences, literary studies, and philosophy. As recently as the 1960’s, Lewis Mumford and Edmund Wilson, nonacademics both, could mount full-scale attacks on the heavily pedantic Modern Language Association editions of Emerson, Twain, and other American writers, inspiring sufficient discomfort among the officials in charge to make them feel the charges had to be answered. I am not sure there is an intellectual alive today who commands the authority to do anything similar.
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And so the traditional intellectual has been replaced by a new type, the public intellectual, a figure who as likely as not retains all or most of the political attitudes of the 60’s, suitably updated for the moment, and who has become adept at packaging them in fancy academic dressing. These are the Edward Saids and Ronald Dworkins of our time, the Richard Rortys and Cornel Wests, the Martha Nussbaums and Stanley Fishes, the Catharine MacKinnons and Peter Singers. Unlike the unattached intellectuals of earlier days, such people usually have university careers and arrangements at influential publications. Columnists, professors writing on subjects of putative contemporary relevance, soon, if Florida Atlantic University has its way, full-fledged Ph.D.’s in public intellectuality itself—they are the inheritors of a mantle for which one now qualifies not by any particular mental power but by going public with one’s intelligibility and one’s mere opinions.
Words change for a reason, generally to fit changes in the world. We thus now have the empty term public intellectual, because the real thing, the traditional intellectual, is on his way out. As for me, harshly though I have written about the traditional intellectual, I now find myself—like Norman Podhoretz at the close of Ex-Friends—rather sorrowful at his departure from the scene. What once distinguished him was a certain cast of mind, a style of thought, wide-ranging, curious, playful, genuinely excited by ideas for ideas’ sake. Unlike so many of today’s public intellectuals, he was not primarily a celebrity hound, a false philosopher-king with tenure, or a single-issue publicist. An elegantly plumed, often irritating bird, the traditional intellectual was always a minuscule minority, and now he is on the list of endangered species. Anyone who was around in his heyday to see him soar is unlikely to forget the spectacle.
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