H. Stuart Hughes’s article “Is the Intellectual Obsolete?” which appeared in our October 1956 number, inquired into the present role and status of the intellectual in American life. The editors of COMMENTARY invited a number of writers to comment on the ideas Professor Hughes advanced, and we print below the communications received from four of them. Russell Kirk is the author of several noted books and is considered a leading spokesman of American neo-conservatism. Harold Rosenberg is the well-known critic and poet whose writings have appeared in numerous magazines (including this one). Ralph G. Ross is chairman of the Humanities Program at the University of Minnesota, has contributed to many periodicals (including COMMENTARY) and is the author of Scepticism and Dogma. Morton White is chairman of the philosophy department at Harvard and author of Toward Reunion in Philosophy.—ED.
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Russell Kirk:
Mr. Hughes is the author of a phrase that I have appropriated shamelessly and which I repeat incessantly: “Conservatism is the negation of ideology.” In his article Mr. Hughes again expresses better than I could my own general views of the matter. And his earlier writings on ideology are in point here, when I venture to offer some supplement to his thesis.
If conservatism and ideology do not go well together, neither do free speculation and ideology. Those brief periods in modern times during which the “intellectual” (and here I must add that the concept of an “intellectual,” as it is generally employed, is a Marxist notion repugnant to me; I like the word “scholar” better) has achieved immediate political power have been periods in which fanatic ideology overmastered men’s minds. The time of the French Revolution and the time of the Russian Revolution saw the ideologue’s schemes realized—and realized, in short order, to the destruction of any tolerable order in society and to the destruction of the intellectual himself. Mr. Francis Graham Wilson distinguishes between the scholar (or intellectual, if you must) as sophist and the scholar as philosopher. The ideologue is the scholar as sophist; what he seeks is not wisdom, but power; and he betrays learning to tyranny or demagoguery. This is the intellectual “nibbling away at the foundations of society.” If only this sort of intellectual seemed to be obsolete, I do not think we would need to grieve.
“In politics,” Nietzsche writes, “the professor always plays the comic role.” It rarely can be otherwise: different casts of character and intellect, and different disciplines, generally are required for the mastery of books and the mastery of men. Only the man of genius can essay both roles; and even then, he risks falling between the stocls, as Goldsmith feared that Burke would give to party what he owed to mankind. The spectacle of Professor Walter Johnson and Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., trying to convince themselves and the universe that they were nominating and electing Mr. Stevenson—conscripting graduate students to serve as ward-heelers—scarcely was edifying. And Clio did not go to Washington, after all; she stopped at Springfield. Mr. Stevenson’s nomination and election, in any year, really depend upon gentlemen like Mr. Jake Arvey and Mr. Carmine de Sapio; such is the nature of this imperfectible world of ours. And it is hardly surprising that gentlemen like Messrs. Arvey and de Sapio, rather than Professors Johnson and Schlesinger, have a dominant voice in Washington if their candidate is successful.
Mr. Hughes is quite right in suggesting that neither party, in office or out of it, will pay much serious attention to men of real intellectual power. In our age especially, there is a great gulf fixed between the politician and the philosopher. So far as there is any difference between our parties in this respect, the Eisenhower administration has paid more attention to university presidents—of a certain kind—than did the Truman administration. But a certain kind of university president, without being aware of it, is more anti-intellectual than any populist Senator. I think, for instance, of Dr. Milton Eisenhower, who would like to supplant the instructor with the tape recorder, and “abolish the honors system” by means of the TV stoolie.
So I agree with Mr. Hughes that the scholar runs the risk of playing false to his calling, often, when he aspires to direct bureaus and give orders to armies. But there is another way in which the true scholar has a profound influence upon the course of society. Though Hawthorne wrote a campaign biography of his friend Franklin Pierce, it was not as a party manager that Hawthorne influenced the whole tone of American thought. Though Samuel Johnson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote political tracts for their times, it is through works of philosophy and criticism that they have achieved immortality—and have had a real, if subtle, influence upon society ever since. The scholar really can affect the destiny of nations more than any party leader; but he must be content to die long before the scope of his influence is perceived.
And we ought never to forget that the end of scholarship is not political power, primarily, or even the improvement of society at large. The real mission of the scholar is the improvement of the individual human reason, for the individual person’s own sake. If any “intellectual” does that, he may forgo cheerfully an assistant secretaryship of state. The question remains, however, whether the scholar nowadays will be thrown enough crusts to allow him any leisure for the cultivation of his own reason, let alone other people’s reason. Surely our swollen universities and colleges, where the rewards go to football coaches and professors of flycasting, are no Megaras.
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Harold Rosenberg:
Professor Hughes is mistaken. The intellectual is obsolete, both as a differentiated type and as a member of an elite. In the middle of the 20th century the long hair is worn not by W. C. Williams or T. S. Eliot but by Hollywood and TV.
The minute the modern intellectual attempts to take his place in society by declaring his caste interests he loses his character and is changed into one of Hughes’s “mental technicians.” This process does not exempt the clique of disengaged Ph.D.’s that Hughes seems to have in mind as the “true intellectuals.” What amazes me is that Hughes, so conscious of what happened when the intellectuals of the New Deal began to regard jobs and privilege “as their normal due,” should propose “corporative organization” as the means for preserving the status of “the freely speculative mind” and for convincing the public that original thinkers are important and serious people!
Hughes’s article is off-focus—I suspect because he approaches the intellectual from the point of view of his social function and the history thereof. For what are intellectuals useful, he asks. Answer: To defend existing institutions or to criticize them. Q: How many intellectuals will America normally use? A: “We are living in a society . . . where there is scope for comparatively few intellectuals.”
But the existence of intellectuals does not depend on whether or not society is willing to retain them, any more than does the existence of criminals or hermits. They are, in the most extreme sense, volunteers. They choose themselves, and what society makes of their activities is a historical accident.
Intellectuals come into being and multiply not out of the generosity of societies toward the freely speculative mind but through their efforts to get along without thinking. The intellectual is either the custodian of sealed-off ideas in an illiterate society, making it unnecessary for others to bother with them; or he is the new element in a society that has begun to break up after being frozen in tradition and thoughtlessness. “We are witnessing,” said Dostoevsky, “the degeneration of the whole former landowning class into something different, into an intelligentsia, since into what else in it degenerate?”
This genesis of the intellectual suggests that far from being a “freely speculative mind” he is, where he speculates at all (instead of ritualizing), a man speculating under duress. Perhaps in the Athens of the Sophists you might have met one of Hughes’s free speculators endowed with a “special set of privileges.” Since Socrates, thought has had an interest which puts a limit on its freedom “to speculate as fancy directed.”
Having become what he is through losing or discarding his “normal” social definition, the modern intellectual, while he may occupy a chair of speculative phlosophy, is anyone whose existence has been put into question and who is interested in the question. To pursue this interest, you don’t have to be in a position to demand the rights of free speculation and nobody can deny you the rights you do need. Being an intellectual does not consist in being connected with any profession, but it does involve finding it inconceivable, or at least another puzzle, that (men should practice their professions without bringing into them the question of themselves and their situation.
The intellectual represents the individual as in movement from the socially given and under stress to conceive himself. Hence in America, where this condition is common, anyone may become an intellectual—and when the question of existence takes on a physically pressing form, as in war or social or economic crisis, “everybody” does become one. I have recognized more intellectuals in Negro mothers interviewed in segregation fights than in twelve issues of well-known literary quarterlies.
With intellectuals becoming universal in our non-rigid society, the intellectual as a professional type has become a period piece; while in Europe and in colonial countries, where people are increasingly unable to live off their old social categories, the caste is growing to such dimensions and influence that even our State Department cannot help discovering it. In the long run Hughes is quite right when he says that “the intellectual situation in the United States presents a kind of paradigm for the whole of industrial society in the 20th century.” All the more reason why the intellectuals can no longer be conceived as a coterie of the chosen communicating with a ruling elite.
Hughes’s distinction between “intellectuals” and “mental technicians” is valuable, providing it be kept in mind that they are one and the same breed, the second being the first without the existential question. But since the intellectuals are concerned not only with the How but with the What, they in turn are divided, into “good” and “bad,” and are not simply the sum of heroically detached speculative minds. Hughes forgets, for instance, that the McCarthy conspiracy against the intellectuals also had the guidance or intellectuals, and that much of modern politics, both in democratic and totalitarian countries, consists of wars of intellectuals against each other in which that abstraction, the People, is used as a weapon.
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Ralph G. Ross:
The intellectual quarrel of the 1930’s is dead. Is it because we have solved our social and political problems or avoided them? (“Be philosophical,” the old lady said to her grieving friend, “don’t think about it.”) Both, I think. Socialist economics turns out to be either inefficient or else the same old economics in a different Social and political environment. Totalitarianism turns out not to be another way of realizing democracy but an anti-democratic monster to be crushed. Our economy, we know now, was not in its death throes in the depression, but temporarily sick, and it has revealed an almost unhoped for capacity. At the same time, we seem helpless in the face of the question why, with an unexampled prosperity and the greatest technical and material progress ever known, people are by no means happier than before, but tension-ridden and full of anxiety. Is the direction of American civilization toward a world in which everything is admirable except human life? Are we creating a society in which we cannot live?
These questions are more fundamental than the questions of the 30’s, and harder to answer. There is no Karl Marx to fall back on, no Locke or Jefferson. A new, large-scale theory might make the difference by giving us a start, formulating the problems, pointing to what is relevant and focal for thought. In the 30’s the intellectual offered Communism and fascism as possible solutions; in the 50’s the intellectual tends his own academic garden or deals with small issues of the social world.
H. Stuart Hughes has concluded that, because of the dearth of social issues and ideas, there is little scope for the intellectual. And it is true that there seems less stimulus to be an intellectual and less that the intellectual if asked to do.
The intellectual, as Mr. Hughes says, was once “the ideological bulwark of society” and later “its Utopian critic.” In our time, when the intellectual defends his society, he rarely uncovers its roots in order to justify them. More often he becomes an ad man for a group in power or seeking power, because there is no coherent audience of inquiring and cultivated minds interested in the presuppositions of their society and concerned with the conflicts of its parts. The audience that exists takes much for granted and is really devoted to the minutiae of their culture, the detail, the everyday conduct, which they call their “way of life.” And this they will defend, in war if they must. But cultural presuppositions and ideals—social roots—need not be embodied in any one way of Me. Democracy, free enterprise, individual liberty, the rights of man—what you will—may be our heritage, but most of our cultural detail is irrelevant to them. Television and movies, sports cars and champagne flights, our manners and much of our morals float on the surface and could be skimmed off or replaced without disturbing the sea beneath.
This is the theoretical nub of the issue: the non-intellectual defends the society because he loves its details, the intellectual because he loves its ideal goals. And the country they defend is not always understood as the same. Even when it is, different types of defense can lose one cause while aiding the other. The non-intellectual is in the service of stability: his very devotion to change—to faster motor cars and color television,—preserves the type of culture that he inherits. Indeed, the change he favors is part of that culture. Thus he is indispensable to the continuance of his society. As John Adams wrote: “Make all men New-tons, or, if you will, Jeffersons, or Taylors, or Randolphs, and they would all perish in a heap!”
Still, stability alone is a self-defeating virtue. When change is needed, when new conditions demand that a society alter or perish, the non-intellectual is a hazard. His implicit maxim is Fiat justitia pereat mundus, Let justice be done though the world perish. And “justice” means for him whatever is ordinarily done. But the intellectual is a hazard when conditions are stable. He wants to realize a set of ideas and he is willing to change all the cultural furniture to do so. He is a decorator never satisfied with other people’s homes, for he must live in them though he has not been consulted about the furniture or the color scheme, and can never quite feel that any home is his.
It is in crisis that the intellectual’s worth is evident. When there must be change, he should have proposals for the kind of change needed. He must preserve the essence of his society while altering its detail. The non-intellectual is rightly suspicious of him at other times; now he is the only salvation. His virtue is flexibility, and he preserves the society when it must bend or break.
Rationality and irrationality are the keys to this difference. Rational commitment to sheer means continues so long as they continue to be means, so long, that is, as they serve the ends. Rational commitment to ends depends on the means available to attain them. Lord knows the intellectual seems irrational enough, and at his worst he accepts the shibboleths of liberalism and progress, or conservatism and tradition, assuming without evidence that particular means will yield valued goals, or striving for goals whose own consequences he has not considered. But in his ideal form, the intellectual is the apostle of reason and he is committed to the ways, the artifacts, and the icons of his culture only insofar as they realize ideals. This may seem a sentimental characterization. But it is also material and self-seeking, as all qualified love is. One should not love one’s wife this way, or his children, or perhaps his homeland. But such is the way of rationality: one loves means because they are means and not in themselves. One need only ask the intellectual’s favorite question “Why?” of his love for anything, and if he can answer at all he has already qualified his love. If we love A only because it yields B, we will cease to love it when it no longer does so.
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The non-intellectual is irrational. His love is unqualified, and he loves the objects that surround him just because he finds them lovable, that is, for no reason. Reason is the end of innocence and as such it is the end of simple love. The intellectual sometimes aches for what he cannot have, but if he could choose he would, like Voltaire’s wise Brahmin, still prefer intelligence, for, once tasted, intelligence is an agonizing necessity. The non-intellectual suffers from lack of discrimination in has love, the intellectual from lack of love in his constant discriminations.
Perhaps the intellectual seems deprived of his function today because crisis has become stasis, because we are sick of explosions and alarms and have institutionalized the cold wars so that they look like peace. A quiescence, almost an apathy, has come on us. Where are the nationwide demonstrations, the meetings of protest, the money-raising, that would once have attended the butchery in Hungary? Under the shadow of the hydrogen bomb we yearn for the sun again and we manage to pretend it is still shining. So what do we want of the intellectual? Only that he leave us alone, that he offer no plans for dispelling the shadow or living decently in it, for we would have to admit that the warm sunlight is illusion.
Yet this only means that the intellectual misses the prestige that crisis brings him, not that he has no function. Let him do something that excites him, that makes a difference, and he will find the change reflected in the cave and the market place. I will cite two examples. Anthropology was tending its own garden when it worked a revolution in our minds. It struck a tremendous blow at parochialism and at intolerance of the values of others. But its great public effect came only with the rise of Hider, for few educated men could believe any longer in racism. The concept of culture had replaced it.
A much smaller movement was the New Criticism. A handful of literary critics, following the lead of T. S. Eliot and I. A. Richards, emphasized the literary work itself, not its history or its influences, and slowly a change came about in the teaching of English, the practice of criticism, and the very color of out minds. Perhaps—it is difficult to know—the principle became generalized, and reinforced an American tendency to judge people and work in their own terms, as what they are, not just in terms of where they came from or what surrounds them. If this was so, it also fit the new scheme of things that came from cultural anthropology. It was a second front.
So long as the intellectual is an intellectual, working at his craft in the interest, ultimately, of new perspectives and generalizations, he can accomplish what intellectuals have always accomplished. He will be a critic of society and he will affect it. Even when the intellectual was “the ideological bulwark of society,” he was at least an implicit critic of the details of the status quo on behalf of the claims of the ideal. So let him not blame society, mass media, or public unconcern if he will not perform his function now. The blame is his alone. For he is not forced to yield to the blandishments of the technicians, the increasing specialization of his colleagues, or the forced draught of the machine age. . . .
Nor need the intellectual think that his speculation must be confined to narrow limits if he is to have an audience. For the moment he may not have one, if he is bold and searching. But crises stretch the ordinary limits of consensus so that what will not even be considered while things are “normal” becomes sober possibility when the world totters. The Great Depression brought solutions that at one time could have caused civil war. And the Great War stood everyday values on their heads. In the recent Hungarian paroxysm, the members of the Hungarian League of Writers were “the true inspirers of the movement for freedom,” according to the editor of Preuves, François Bondy, who was in Budapest at the time. For the moment the technicians are needed and applauded; they bring maternal comfort and a sharper sword. In the next crisis, as ever, ideas will be needed too, and the intellectual will return, for the moment, to high estate.
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Morton White:
In the following reflections on Mr. H. Stuart Hughes’s article, I hope I do not reveal a gross incapacity to understand him, since I believe that his article suffers from (1) a failure to make certain important distinctions between different types of intellectual pursuits, which (2) vitiates some of his historical observations, and (3) leads one to question some of his remarks on the intellectual’s future in our society. I shall expand these critical remarks in correspondingly numbered sections below. In passing I shall be forced to say what I think some of Mr. Hughes’s main points are, so that if I have misunderstood him (as I don’t think I have), the reader will not have wasted his time altogether. . . .
(1) As I understand Mr. Hughes, a freely speculating intellectual is, among other things, one who seeks the truth and follows the argument wherever it may lead, whereas a mental technician is one who serves a leader, party, or government so slavishly that he surrenders his right to criticize the aims and methods of those whom he serves. Stated in this way, of course, the comparison is invidious and so we think of the mental technician as a servile figure in the Aristotelian sense: he may exercise ingenuity, intelligence, and skill in discovering ways of achieving the aims set for him by his employer or leader, but he is a kind of slave.
I have no doubt that there are many people who fit into one or the other of Mr. Hughes’s neatly carved categories, but it seems to me that there is a third kind of “brain worker” who is squeezed out of the picture by Mr. Hughes in an effort to simplify the past and future of the intellectual, and that this third man should be the most important figure in this kind of discussion. I mean the man who uses his wits in an effort to further practical aims of which he approves, which he periodically re-examines, and which he feels free to reject whenever experience, feeling, or reflection lead to such a conclusion. I think that Mr. Hughes’s failure to pay attention to this third type of individual—the nearest thing in the intellectual world to a free, rational, whole human being—is responsible for a number of serious shortcomings in his very stimulating essay. The forgotten man in Mr. Hughes’s piece is neither a metaphysician nor an apparatus-man. His interests fall between those of the speculative philosopher and those of the technician, but he is the closest thing to what most free human beings are or aspire to be. He will not be obsolete so long as the ideal of the free man survives. He differs from Mr. Hughes’s “freely speculating mind” in the degree to which he addresses himself to practical questions, and from Mr. Hughes’s mental technician because of his refusal to sell himself into intellectual slavery.
(2) When and where has the freely speculating intellectual, in Mr. Hughes’s sense, flourished? Such an intellectual, we gather, emerged in Europe in the modern period and his importance began to decline at some point in the recent past. One infers from Mr. Hughes’s article that freedom of speculation in his sense is dying out in Western Europe, that it is, of course, dead in the Soviet Union, and that it has never—“except perhaps briefly in the 1930’s and early 1940’s”—existed in the United States. Moreover, it is important to realize that Mr. Hughes is not denying the existence of isolated, free American spirits, for if he were, he would obviously be mistaken. After all, Emerson, Thoreau, Charles Peirce, Thorstein Veblen, and William James must be reckoned with. What Mr. Hughes says is that we do not find such free minds forming “a homogeneous class exerting a cumulative influence on a national scale” in America, and it is this that makes us want to look more closely at his conception of the freely speculating mind. Apparently he is thinking not of logicians, epistemologists, and metaphysicians who speculate in the traditional sense, for one defining characteristic of Mr. Hughes’s speculating intellectual is that he be part of a homogeneous class exerting a cumulative influence on a national scale. One infers therefore that Mr. Hughes is not thinking of Descartes saying “Cogito ergo sum,” or of Kant writing the Critique of Pure Reason. Is he, then, thinking of Hobbes and Locke in their political writings, of Rousseau, and of Bentham, respectively influencing kings, parliaments, French revolutionaries, and philosophic radicals? Is he thinking of the Webbs influencing Laborites? But insofar as these intellectuals had that national influence which plays so central a part in Mr. Hughes’s conception of the freely speculating intellectual, they were eminently practical, and not speculative, thinkers. And in that capacity they were not fundamentally different from Franklin, Jefferson, and John Quincy Adams, who are banished by Mr. Hughes from the category of “freely speculating minds” because, to use his words, “In the early days of the Republic, the life of the mind was still inextricably entangled with statesmanship.” True, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Bentham were not as active in politics as Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams were, but as thinkers all seven of them were concerned, in their political writing, with practical questions. The fact that Jefferson had political influence is surely not enough to remove him from the category of the “freely speculating mind” so long as you keep Locke the political theorist there. Jefferson was not as great a thinker as Locke, but in his political writing many of his concerns were the same. He had certain freely formed political aims and he wished to find out how to achieve them. The difference between a free practical thinker who is in a position to act out his thoughts and one who isn’t is important, but negligible in this context.
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My Conclusion is that Mr. Hughes’s own statements imply that he must make room for the third kind of intellectual mentioned earlier: the individual who works for a practical cause but who reserves the right to reject that cause when it no longer appeals to his feelings and convictions. If Mr. Hughes fails to recognize this middle class of intellectuals, as it were, he will be forced to call some of his “freely speculating minds” mental technicians, which is contrary to his intention, or call them metaphysicians, which is absurd.
The early modern thinker “did not write for a narrow coterie of intellectuals,” says Mr. Hughes, “he spoke to the princes and governing elite of Europe.” But if the thinker Mr. Hughes has in mind spoke to these princes in the manner of Bacon or Machiavelli, he spoke to them as an adviser, as someone who accepted their aims—at least provisionally. In this respect he was not a speculative thinker in the traditional sense: he was an eminently practical intellectual. That influence which he had, and which extended beyond the confines of a “narrow coterie of intellectuals,” was achieved by addressing himself to the problems of practical men.
This is no news, but Mr. Hughes’s analysis obscures its implications. The point is that intellectuals secure the kind of influence whose disappearance is lamented by Mr. Hughes, not by writing on Godel’s theorem, on the onto-logical argument, or on the synthetic a priori, but rather by dealing with questions of more immediate human concern. These are rarely “speculative questions” in the traditional sense. Looke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding was written by the man who wrote the Second Treatise of Civil Government in defense of the Whig cause. His national influence in Mr. Hughes’s sense arose from having defended that cause. Mill’s essay On Liberty was the main medium of his great influence as an “intellectual,” and not his Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, which was addressed to specialists in epistemology. It was Bentham on legal outrages, and not Bentham on the theory of fictions, who assumed a role so rarely assumed by philosophers today.
These reflections on the past, growing out of a refinement of Mr. Hughes’s categories, suggest a different approach to the present and future predicament of the intellectual. The lamentable fact of our intellectual life today is not the disappearance of the purely speculative thinker, for I think he continues to exist in profusion in universities throughout the United States. What we should be worried about is the disappearance of that in-between thinker who may be called the “free practical mind,” that is to say, the man who is interested in practical questions but who refuses to attach himself to a party or government so obsequiously and so blindly that he gives up every right to criticize the goals or the methods adopted by them. Our great problem arises from the difficulty intellectuals have today in preserving their dignity and integrity as citizens and human beings while they work for the government. This is one of the many profound issues raised by the Oppenheimer case.
(3) I cannot help feeling that Mr. Hughes might accept this emendation of his distinction and ibis history, but I fear that there are other differences between us concerning the future which are not easily composed. Having been kicked out of the government, having been prevented from riding on campaign trains, intellectuals, as I understand Mr. Hughes, are doomed to scholarship, to membership in the American Association of University Professors, and to convincing “their fellow citizens of the responsibility and seriousness of their calling.” How sober and how abject. Scholars will be scholars, of course, and the bomb has made it all too evident how serious the calling of some scholars can be. But what is the course advocated for the intellectual by Mr. Hughes, the course that avoids “dilettantism” and “the production of bright ideas for essentially practical purposes masking as intellectual activity,” both of which are dismissed by Hughes? And what is the influential course which is neither that of the “ideological bulwark of society” nor that of “its Utopian critic”? I confess that I can find no helpful answers to these questions in Mr. Hughes’s pages. Perhaps he doesn’t intend to describe any way for intellectuals to regain their social influence because he thinks this is a thing of the past, something which has been eliminated by the “vast impersonal forces” of history.
With this I cannot agree. In my opinion Mr. Hughes is engaged in the hopeless task of closing, by means of dubious argument, every avenue by which the intellectual can carry out his traditional functions, and then trying to find a way out for him. Precisely because the free practical intellectual is obliged to familiarize himself with the facts of social life, to defend a set of values, and to advance plausible solutions to social problems, he runs the risk of “dilettantism.” So does any human being in an effort to solve his personal problems. And why does Mr. Hughes speak so disparagingly of “the production of bright ideas for essentially practical purposes masking as intellectual activity”? Here, it seems to me, Mr. Hughes reveals his incapacity to understand the role of the free practical intellectual. Else why does he speak as though there were a contradiction between producing ideas for practical purposes and engaging in intellectual activity? Only, I suggest once again, because he has accepted the dichotomy between the yogi and the commissar, the metaphysician and the intellectual goon, as an exhaustive division of the life of the mind. And yet somewhere between the metaphysical journals and the gossip columns there is a place where an intellectual can still perform his traditional social functions—if he has ideas.
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Now I am not one to minimize the importance of pure scholarship. But if we are thinking of the intellectual as an effective force in politics, for example, we must acknowledge that pure scholarship, for all of its importance, is hardly the main medium through which intellectuals have made their practical impact on the political world. We can, of course, pursue scholarship in a mighty fortress defended by the American Civil Liberties Union, but this will not of itself win us the influence of an Erasmus or a Mill. We must regain those historic jobs of which we have been robbed in Mr. Hughes’s irreversible movie of the history of our times. We can still be the spiritual custodians of that which is good in our tradition and the implacable critics of that which is bad. Therefore the following tasks of the practical intellectual continue to be what they always have been: to pursue the truth, to expose sham and injustice, to seek ways of avoiding the destruction of the world, to help make it as happy and as sane as it can be. If such intellectuals are spurned by governments, by parties, by the public, or accepted only on impossible terms, they must go their own way, and they must protest. But they cannot protest effectively unless they have something to say, and they cannot say anything worth hearing unless they have ideas. Therefore, let some practical intellectual produce the 20th-century counterpart of Mills essay On Liberty, for example, and he will prove beyond doubt that the intellectual is not obsolete.
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